6.4 New Mexico Crash Retrieval and Landing Cases

Major E.R.T. Holmes, FLO, 1st Bombardment Squadron, to the Minister of Information 15, War Office, Whitehall, London, under date of October 24, 1943. (Mission No. 115 in the British records)47

Frank Edwards and others believed that an investigation into this phenomenon was initiated in Britain, although it was flatly denied by the British military. Further, no evidence for its existence, other than a few documents such as the Holmes report mentioned above, has been uncovered. The alleged report was known as the Massey Report, apparently named for a Lieutenant General Massey. But Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, the first Deputy Director of Air Intelligence to the Air Ministry in Britain, stated that there was no General Massey in the records of the British Army. However, a Hugh Massy was listed in the 1945 Who’s Who. Lieutenant General Hugh R. S. Massy was appointed eventually to the office of Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Was this Massy, who retired in 1942, the general who investigated the foo fighters? As with the nature and origin of these enigmatic flying objects, the report and its namesake remain a mystery to the present day. 48

6.4 New Mexico Crash Retrieval and Landing Cases

According to an article in the April 1, 1966 issue of Life magazine, between June 1947 and early 1966, 10,147 UFO sightings had been reported.49 The term "flying saucers" itself sprang from private pilot Kenneth Arnold’s experience on June 24, 1947 near Mount Rainier, Washington. He saw a formation of nine rapidly moving disc-shaped objects while flying in a small plane. In the wild publicity and wave of sightings that followed during the summer of 1947, the term "flying saucers" was coined by the popular press.

The Roswell Incident: On July 2, 1947, an object crashed into a remote field on rancher William "Mac" Brazel’s land. Mr. Brazel reported hearing a loud explosion during a severe thunderstorm. The next morning, he discovered debris scattered over an area which may have spanned fifty acres. Mr. Brazel notified the local sheriff’s office who in turn called the Army. The case created a stir when the 509th Bomb Group at the Army Air Force Base at Roswell Field, New Mexico, officially released to the press the astounding story that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell. The Public Information Officer at the base who released the story to the press was First Lieutenant Walter Haut, who still lives in Roswell. The Roswell Daily Record ran the story on the front page in bold headlines: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region." Two days later, the Army recanted, issuing a second press release claiming that only a weather balloon had crashed.

Major Jesse Marcel, a staff intelligence officer at Roswell Field, was assigned to the recovery operation. To bolster the “validity” of the second press release, a press conference was held in Fort Worth, Texas, where the debris was first taken, and a photograph of Major Marcel kneeling to examine remnants of a torn, silvery weather balloon was released. This balloon was eventually declared by the Air Force to be a "Mogul balloon" — balloons which carried top secret acoustical apparatus designed to “listen” for evidence of Soviet nuclear bomb testing. The Mogul was actually designed so that a string of much larger balloons kept it airborne. It bore little resemblance to a sole weather balloon. However, a major military retrieval effort resulted from this alleged “crash” of a balloon. Teams of Army personnel combed the site for days, clearing it

47 Edwards, Frank, Flying Saucers--Here and Now!, Lyle Stuart, New York, 1967, p.77. 48 Above Top Secret, p.28 49 “The Week of the Flying Saucers”, Bill Wise, Life magazine , April 1, 1966, 1966 Time Inc.

not only of the wreckage (and, reportedly, the bodies of extraterrestrial life forms), but of every shred or scrap. The recovered debris was flown under deep cover first to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas and ultimately to Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Ohio. It is difficult to imagine any sort of balloon configuration spreading debris over a fiftyacre area, or requiring a top-secret operation to retrieve the pieces.

During the early phase of the retrieval operation, Major Marcel showed some pieces of the debris to his family, admonishing them never to discuss it. The late Major Marcel’s son, Col. Jesse Marcel, Jr., M.D., is a witness who is part of Disclosure Project. Dr. Marcel clearly remembers his father calling the family around the kitchen table that night. Dr. Marcel, then twelve years old, was shown items from the crash site, particularly small beams of lightweight material, lavender to purple in color, with hieroglyphic-like markings along its length. Dr. Marcel had a model made to his specifications from his vivid recollections as a 12-year old boy when he held and examined the material.

Another witness who was on President Eisenhower’s staff recounts being shown two sections of the small I-beams and a piece of foil-like material when he was in cryptography training in a basement office in the Pentagon in 1960-61. He was told that the material “came from the crash of a UFO;” he was not told from where and was not allowed to handle the material. He recalls being told that the metal foil could not be pierced, cut or burned. Our witness also clearly recalls hieroglyphic markings along the length of one of the small beams. 50

Roswell dwelled in the realm of rumor until 1978 when the late Major Jesse Marcel appeared on an NBC radio program and talked about the official debris retrieval at the crash site near Roswell. Major Marcel stated the following in an interview by nuclear physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman:

“... that afternoon, we loaded everything into a B-29 on orders from Colonel Blanchard and flew it all to Ft. Worth. I was scheduled to fly it all the way to Wright Field in Ohio, but when we got to Carswell at Ft. Worth, the general nixed it. He took control at this point, and ordered me not to talk to the press under any circumstances. I was pulled off the flight and someone else was assigned to fly the stuff up to Wright Field...”51

Why Roswell? Quite simply, because the 509th was the only military facility in the country, and most likely in the world, holding nuclear warheads.

Other Crash Sites: Whether the Roswell crash actually occurred near Roswell, or at another location in New Mexico, particularly Magdalena or Socorro (the Plains of San Agustin), Corona, or Aztec, remains in dispute, and whether there was only one or more than one crash of a possible extraterrestrial spacecraft in New Mexico has yet to be proven. In 1997, some of the best-known investigators of the Roswell crash reversed their opinions and claimed they no longer believed an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in Roswell but rather it was either a balloon-tethered device or a highly classified atomic-powered military prototype craft. However, witness testimony as outlined above, as well as statements given to the Disclosure Project by other former military witnesses, confirm that there were several crashes in the southwestern United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. These witnesses and evidence uncovered over the years by several UFO researchers point to crashes of extraterrestrial space craft at these sites, along with Roswell: in or

50 Disclosure Project transcripts of closed witness meetings; June 1995 and April 1997. 51 Berlitz and Moore, The Roswell Incident, Granada, London 1980.

near Aztec, New Mexico; Kingman, Arizona; the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado, inside the Mexican border near Laredo, Texas; and Paradise Valley (near what is now Carefree), Arizona. There is also a report by researchers Tommy Blann and Leonard Stringfield of a crash in Northern New Mexico in 1962. This pair of researchers also reported on a UFO on the ground at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base the same year, 1962, under heavy guard in a hangar.52

Regardless of the precise location of any of possible crashes, there is a significant body of evidence, including documents obtained from the U.S. government through the Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") which clearly indicate that secret retrieval operations occurred. It stretches the credulity to imagine that such closely-guarded operations would be necessary for a weather balloon, if we are to believe the second press release out of Roswell in July of 1947.

But an effort to obtain those documents spearheaded by Rep. Steven Schiff (R-NM) culminated in a disappointing dead end. Rep. Schiff sent requests through the GAO (Government Accounting Office) for any and all documentation regarding the crash of an airborne object in New Mexico in 1947. The GAO representatives performed a search and were unable to provide Rep. Schiff with any documentation.

However, other requests through the CIA and FOIA produced a memorandum dated March 22, 1950 from the Director of the FBI stating that three flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico (REF TO LETTER). Also two memoranda from October and November of 1947 state that a study was underway at Wright Field of flying saucers recently sighted over the United States, and that models were being constructed to be tested in a wind tunnel.

The New Mexico crash investigations have yielded persistent stories of extraterrestrial biological entities ("EBEs") who perished in or shortly after the crashes and whose bodies have been shuttled from one secret military base to another since the late 1940s. When we add into the equation the testimony of multiple living witnesses, or whose close family members confessed on their death beds, that small nonhuman life forms were found at the crash sites, one or more of which may have been still alive at the time they were found, we have at minimum cases which cry for thorough scientific investigation with all of the documents released for review.

The Socorro Landing Case - 1964: Lonnie Zamora, a police sergeant in Socorro, New Mexico, reported the sighting of a UFO on the ground — complete with landing traces and small humanoid life forms. The incident occurred on April 24, 1964 and was the subject of official investigations by the Air Force, the FBI, and private investigations by other researchers, among them Dr. J. Allen Hynek. This incident is the first reported in the official Air Force UFO records involving landing traces and the sighting of humanoid life forms. 53

During daylight hours while on duty that day, Sgt. Zamora was in hot pursuit of a black Chevrolet which he first saw speeding past the Socorro courthouse. He pursued the vehicle north along US Highway 85 outside of town. He was suddenly distracted by what he thought was the roar of an explosion. Seeing blue-orange flames, he gave up the car chase for this greater emergency and headed towards a dynamite shack he knew to be in the area. Driving was difficult on the steep gravel and dirt road. He approached the area where he’d seen the flames, reached the crest and slowly drove westward. A shiny object came into sight about 150-200 yards off the

52 Stringfield, Leonard H., UFO Status Reports II and III, 1982. 53 Emenegger, Robert, UFO's Past, Present & Future, Ballentine, New York, 1974.