If you’re a little late to the party, a “cipher mystery” is a piece of old writing that we unexpectedly can’t make sense of. But the tricky thing is this: as with many historical objects, an early opinion on a cipher mystery given with sufficient gravitas or authority can hugely skew people’s subsequent perception of not only what it is they’re looking at, but also the entire category of thing it is at all.

Viewed through this kind of lens, I want to discuss the idea that the 1947 Roswell Incident was primarily a cipher mystery.

Influential Opinions on Famous Cipher Mysteries

When you look at long-standing (i.e. still unsolved) cipher mysteries, it’s easy to see how early influential opinions have not only steered subsequent research, but also caused many researchers to only consider certain ways of looking at a puzzling artifact.

For the Voynich Manuscript, the story (reported in a 1665 letter) attributing it to Roger Bacon seems to have completely taken over its eponymous owner Wilfrid Voynich’s mind. The notion that Bacon was its author continued to be argued for throughout the 20th century, with a 2005 book (“The Friar and the Cipher”) by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone being effectively its last hurrah. Yet we have both scientific (radiocarbon dating) and Art History dating evidence (its zodiac roundel illustrations) placing its construction no earlier than 1420, more than a century after Bacon’s death: so whatever ‘the Voynich’ actually is, it’s certainly not Roger Bacon’s baby in any useful sense.

Similarly, the Beale Papers – relating a tangled story about buried treasure – were first brought to public attention via an 1885 pamphlet containing three ciphers (only one of which was solved). Yet it now seems that even though the three Beale Ciphers are likely genuine, the story wrapped around those ciphers was almost entirely spurious. Despite that, it seems that 95% of the Beale research you’ll ever see is to do with the (fake) pamphlet rather than the (probably real) ciphers.

And again, the attribution of a particular pigpen-alphabet cryptogram to the French pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur by the – normally stone cold sober – French maritime historian and archivist Charles de la Ronciere seems to have cemented a perceived link between the two that nobody can split asunder. The key problem is that it requires extraordinary mental gymnastics to construct any kind of mapping between its “two pigeon hearts”-style love-potion recipe plaintext and the Golden Age of Piracy. Yet there seems to be a stream of treasure hunters willing to attempt those contortions, all getting the same inevitably disappointing results.

My point here isn’t so much about cipher theories (please don’t start me on them) but about how early authoritative-sounding opinions on cipher mysteries can sharply narrow the subsequent discourse. I find it hard to see how Wilfrid Voynich’s advocacy of Roger Bacon, the Beale Pamphlet’s made-up frontier history, and de la Ronciere’s footnote-free “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” did anything except get in the way of understanding these three difficult objects.

Of course, in the field of historical research, this is an old story: as a general rule, if you find an area of History dominated by a single framework or founding notion first proposed by a single early voice, it’s often a sign that there’s huge room for modern improvement (if not outright revolution).

But was this also the case for the 1947 Roswell Incident?

Initial Reports: An Alien Alphabet?

Reading through the testimony given (e.g. in Berlitz and Moore’s (1980) “The Roswell Incident”) to do with the initial Roswell incident, there seems little doubt that the “beams” did have some kind of unusual (and unreadable) writing on them. (There’s a big collection of quotations on the subject here.):

  • Maj. Jesse Marcel: “There was all kinds of stuff – small beams about three eighths or a half inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. […] It had little numbers with symbols that we had to call hieroglyphics because I could not understand them. They could not be read, they were just like symbols, something that meant something, and they were not all the same, but the same general pattern, I would say. They were pink and purple. They looked like they were painted on.”
  • Jesse Marcel Jr: “Imprinted along the edge of some of the beam remnants there were hieroglyphic-type characters.”
  • Jesse Marcel Jr: “…there were fragments of what appeared to be I-beams. On the inner surface of the I-beam, there appeared to be a type of writing. This writing was a purple-violet hue, and it had an embossed appearance. The figures were composed of curved geometric shapes. It had no resemblance to Russian, Japanese or any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics, but it had no animal-like characters.”
  • Jesse Marcel Jr: “I do recall one symbol for sure that was on the beam and that was like a truncated pyramid with a ball on top of it. It was the only symbol I can know for sure was on this beam. The rest of it, you know, was just various geometric designs.”
  • Mac Brazel’s son: “But Dad did say one time that there were what he called “figures” on some of the pieces he found. He often referred to the petroglyphs the ancient Indians drew on rocks around here as “figures” too, and I think that’s what he meant to compare them with.”
  • Floyd Proctor: “He said whatever the junk was, it had designs on it that reminded him of Chinese and Japanese designs. […] He said the designs looked like the kind of stuff you would find on firecracker wrappers… some sort of figures all done up in pastels, but not writing like we would do it.”
  • Mac Brazel’s elder sister, Lorraine Ferguson: “Whatever he found it was all in pieces and some of it had some kind of unusual writing on it – Mac said it was like the kind of stuff you find all over Japanese or Chinese firecrackers; not really writing, just wiggles and such. Of course, he couldn’t read it and neither could anybody else as far as I ever heard.”
  • Mac Brazel’s daughter, Bessie Brazel Schreiber: “Some of these pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but there were no words that we were able to make out. […] It looked like numbers mostly, at least I assumed them to be numbers. They were written out like you would write numbers in columns to do an addition problem. But they didn’t look like the numbers we use at all. What gave me the idea they were numbers, I guess, was the way they were all ranged out in columns.”
  • Walt Whitmore, Jr.: “Some of this material had a sort of writing on it which looked like numbers that had been either added or multiplied.”
  • Lt. Jack Trowbridge: “It was aluminum in appearance.  There were fragments of aircraft skin, or whatever the thing was, and also some girders with pictures of hieroglyphic-like things on it.  I took them to be owls (?), but who knows?
  • 1st Lt. Robert Shirkey: “I could see the hieroglyphs clearly, the signs were in relief and stood out.” […] “…sticking up in one corner of the box carried by Major Marcel was a small ‘I-beam’ with hieroglyphic-like markings on the inner flange, in some kind of weird color, not black, not purple, but a close approximation of the two.”

If you put all the above reports together, there seems little doubt that beams with columns of a pastelly-weathered-pink-lavender-purple alien-looking alphabet was one of the key features of the debris found specifically at Roswell.

My point here is that had a load of odd debris without any writing on been found, I don’t think that the whole thing would have been treated as a (capital-I) “Incident“. That is, I think the mysterious ‘alien’ writing was the key feature that turned this from an unknown military-looking device crashing into scrubland outside Roswell into something that was much more intriguing.

And this is why I think the Roswell Incident can sensibly be looked at – when you look at the initial reports – as a cipher mystery.

Note that this isn’t to downplay the (separate) testimony to do with flexible, superstrong metal sheets etc found at the same time. Rather, it’s to point out that from the point of view of what Mac Brazel found at Roswell, what set it apart from other similar events was the mysterious writing on the beam fragments.

Irving Newton on Jesse Marcel

Warrant Officer Irving Newton’s testimony changed over the years in regard to Major Jesse Marcel’s behaviour at the time.

  • 1979: “I was later told that the major from Roswell had identified the stuff as a flying saucer, but that the general [Ramey] had been suspicious of this identification from the beginning…”
  • 1994: “…while I was examining the debris, Major Marcel was picking up pieces of the target sticks and trying to convince me that some notations on the sticks were alien writings. There were figures on the sticks, lavender or pink in color, appeared to be weather faded markings, with no rhyme or reason (sic). He did not convince me that these were alien writings.”
  • 1995: “I remember Marcel chased me all around that room. He kept saying thinks like, ‘Look at how tough the metal is,’ ‘Look at the strange markings on it.’ He wouldn’t have made such a big effort to convince me the thing was extraterrestrial if he thought we were looking at a weather balloon.”
  • 1997: “While we were in the office, he kept following me around with those sticks, those sticks had some hieroglyphic-looking things on there. He said ‘Have you ever see this?’ Well, I had never seen that, I had never seen that on any target that I had seen before; but it was on there. But this strongly indicated to me that he was trying to convince me that he had picked up this flying disc and this was an alien source and that I hadn’t seen that; but all the rest I had seen.”

Regardless, I think it is fairly certain that the first person to consider that the writing found on the beams might be an alien-like alphabet was Major Jesse Marcel (or perhaps his wife Viaud, as per the account in Linda Corley’s book). Though to be fair to Marcel, he seems to have formed his opinion based not only on the strangeness of the writing, but also on the physical strangeness of the materials recovered at the Roswell site.

All the same, it seems that we can trace the idea that Roswell may well have been an alien “Incident” right back to Jesse Marcel’s initial response. Had he not formed that hypothesis and discussed it, would Roswell have been a “thing” at all?

(Again, I’m talking specifically about Roswell here, and not about the claims of a crashed flying saucer at Corona etc.)

Images of the Roswell Writing

Probably the best known image is the one mocked up for the Roswell UFO Museum, based (as I understand it) on a drawing made by Jesse Marcel Jr:

Another one (this time drawn and signed by Major Jesse Marcel) appears on p.42 of Linda Corley’s book “For the Sake of my Country”, where the strokes appear more like this (note that this doesn’t seem to be on the Internet):

/ \ / - ( )

If there are other images of the Roswell Writing out there, I haven’t been able to find them. Please let me know if you stumble upon any others!

Efforts to Decrypt the Roswell Writing

Had this been where the record stopped, we would have very little to go on. The suggestion that the whole Roswell Incident was no more than a downed Project Mogul balloon (designed to listen for Russian atomic bomb tests) that perhaps got hit by lightning in a huge storm is plausible, though still somewhat icky.

If the military knew that what was collected from the debris field was solely fragments from a Project Mogul balloon, this whole line of investigation would surely have stopped dead here. Yet, in Linda Corley’s interview with Jesse Marcel, he said: “They tried to decipher that stuff. But as far as I know, they never did.”

So this is where things start to get murky, because there are other – though admittedly not many – testimonies relating to what the US Military subsequently did to try to decrypt the Roswell writing.

  • Brigadier General Steven Lovekin (talking about a meeting in 1959): “Colonel Hollobard [perhaps Hollogard or Holabird?] brought out a piece of what appeared to be metallic — it was a metallic piece of — it looked like a yardstick. It had deciphering–it had encryption on it. He did describe them as being symbols of instruction. And that’s as far as he would go. But he did infer that the instructions, whatever they might have been, were something that was important enough for the military to keep working on [on] a constant basis.”
  • “It seemed giant-like when I saw it because it was the first time I had ever seen anything like this before. And all eyes were just peeled on that particular thing. And when he told us what it was, it was frightening, it was eery there. You could have heard a pin drop in the room when it was first mentioned.”
  • “He said it had been taken from one of the craft that had crashed in New Mexico. It had been taken from a box of materials that the military was working on. They didn’t use the word reverse engineering at that time, but it was something similar to the reverse engineering they felt like they needed to work on and that it was going to take years to this.”
  • Steve Lytle: “Not all the analysis was done by men assigned to Wright Field. Some of the analysis was made by scientists outside the base.” [Steve Lytle reported that his father, during his long career, had worked with Robert Oppenheimer on a number of occasions and projects. Lytle’s father was a mathematician and, according to Lytle, had been given one of the I-beams recovered at the Roswell site, with an eye to deciphering the symbols.]

But that’s the end of it. As far as I know, what I present here is as much as the (probably) tens of thousands of books on UFOs out there have on decrypting the Roswell Writing. If there’s more… I’m all ears.

What’s Missing From This Picture?

Apart from Jesse Marcel himself (“They tried to decipher that stuff“), we only appear to have two sources that talk about actually trying to decrypt the Roswell Writing, and no report (fleeting or otherwise) whatsoever. (As I understand it, all the copies of the report on 1948 Project Sign were destroyed.)

But if what these two sources say is even partially true, the Roswell Writing must have had some kind of military designation attached to it. So what was its codeword? And in which ‘Indiana Jones warehouse’ are all the collected beams stored?

All the same, what is so scary about the evidence that not one photographic image of this writing has seen the light of day in more than seventy years?

Personally, I have no interest in stories about crashed flying saucers and X-Files-style “grays”, etc – basically, there’s no shortage of people out there who “want to believe”, and I have no desire to be added to that list.

But as for a 1947 cipher mystery that seems in some way to have spawned the whole modern UFO era, count me in on that, 100%. I want to see the primary evidence, and I want to see it now!

16 thoughts on “Was the 1947 Roswell Incident a cipher mystery?

  1. D.N.O'Donovan on November 15, 2021 at 3:20 am said:

    Nick,
    I admire your ability to condense. Your sentence beginning “But the tricky thing is this…” contains in less than 50 words what it took me thousands to say about the history of another study.

    PS – I’d love to find a short guide to ‘How to approach a possible cipher-text’. Is there one you’d recommend? Would you be willing to put up a post here or, if you’d like, as a guest-post to my blog?

  2. D.N.O'Donovan on November 15, 2021 at 3:35 am said:

    PS – not to start a fight, but I’d suggest re-thinking your assertion that “Art History dating evidence (its zodiac roundel illustrations) [places] its construction no earlier than 1420”. I agree that it was made about that time, but not that the date can be argued from the form of the central emblems in the month-diagrams. The critical detail, among those emblems, is the form given the Scales. What has been adduced as ‘evidence’ in this case has largely been a serpent-in-mouth argument, where nothing other than western European manuscripts of 1420 or later have been in included in the initial data set. But, as I say, I’m not trying to start a fight about it.

  3. john sanders on November 15, 2021 at 9:11 am said:

    Nick: most descriptions of the RAAF ‘writing’ reminds me very much of squiggle forms that Gordon refers to in glowing terms as micro code; larger of course but no more identifiable as possible means of communication, cryptic or otherwise.

  4. Jackie Speel on November 15, 2021 at 12:53 pm said:

    Bear in mind we use a number of ‘systems of symbols’ (clothes, recycling, road signs etc) – so some such may be in use here.

    Possibly each person involved in a project had a design-stamp and they decided to ‘sign off’ at the end.

    Alternatively – it could be merely some form of decoration (even if being military).

  5. Neale Hutcheson on November 15, 2021 at 10:04 pm said:

    Great post. What was Steve Lytle’s father’s name? Was it Chester Lytle, who was a Manhattan Project/AEC engineer (mentioned in “UFOs and Nukes” by Robert Hastings)?

  6. Neale Hutcheson: I wondered the same thing myself. Chester W. Lytle – inventor of the hydrofoil and co-director of the Manhattan Project – does sound like he could be the man.

  7. Fred Brandes on November 15, 2021 at 10:39 pm said:

    I would be very interested in learning just what the cryptographic chops were of the people who examined the beams with the goal of making sense of the symbols as well as any reports or notes on how they went about the task. Was the material just passed around among a group of acquaintances or was there an attempt to involve trained folk (like the Friedmans)?

  8. Fred Brandes: now you’re starting to ask the right kind of questions. 😉

    It feels to me like there’s going to be a whole seam of secret history lodged not too far below the surface here.

  9. Of topic, I know, but I’m about to quote a passage from your book, Nick, and realised I’m not clear about whether by Milan’s ‘cipher ledgers’ you mean enciphered commercial ledgers, or ledgers only keeping track of ciphers used in diplomatic [and/or commercial?] correspondence.
    The quote is being taken from p.177 of Curse.

  10. Somewhat bizarrely, the purplish flowers noted by the rancher who discovered the Roswell wreckage, and later referred to by others more luridly as “alien hieroglyphics”, turned out to be decorations by the New York toy manufacturer who had supplied the tape used in assembling the arrays.

    Project Mogul : https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/M/Mogul.html

  11. Anon: well, yes and no. The short version: the story of the tape and the reliability of Charles Moore’s evidence are quite separate matters.

    But I’m guessing you already knew that.

  12. Diane: there are two Milanese cipher ledgers from the second half of the fifteenth century, one is an ambassadorial ledger and the other is more of a local cipher ledger. So the story is a mix of both.

  13. john sanders on December 3, 2021 at 9:35 am said:

    After a good deal of poking around the local dump I’ve finally come across my keenly sought after, very special Roswell AAF replica ‘H’ beam in an authentic looking matt silver grey metalic shade and dimensions 5/8″ x 3/8″ x 3″. In fact I managed to snag three pieces, though sadly none have writing or other marks of identification. Actually they mostly resemble rail lines with the inner concave section well rounded as is the top load bearing slightly convex surface and in a former life they appear to have been kitchen draw handles. What I really want to point out is that the square end sections look similat to the code symbols or at least two of them with not too much imagination needed. I’d send photos but that wonderous on line magic still alludes my best efforts for transmission.

  14. john sanders on December 3, 2021 at 10:52 pm said:

    My uneducated guess formulated from scrutiny of the scaledown H beam diagram is that it closely resembles an exemplar replica of a steel extrusion comany’s product shape possibilities. Seems to be reminiscent of Japanese standard promotion style from between the wars used as a means of getting their wares known to potential customers. The particular one might have been used as a desk paper weight with had a pencil rest along it’s length. Possibly picked up at Mitsubish’s showroom in post war Nagasaki by a souvineer seeking American serviceman truth be known…Hey, pure guesswork on my part, coulda come from Krypton in Superbub’s suitcase just as easy.

  15. john sanders on December 4, 2021 at 2:18 am said:

    Who’s to know whether Marcel was my souvenir hunter at Mitsubish or not, stands to reason that he would certainly have been sent by 509th Comp. Grp. for intelligence gathering on the aftermath of their Nagasaki handywork . With this in mind, his possession of the otherwise unearthly object, there having been none similar reported is a no brainer. Likewise nil disclosure out of Japan in after years is to be expected due to their manufacturing and sales methods having ceased in 1945, then on resumotion in the 50’s, underwent radical changes to those employed pre war in a local consumer market.

  16. argentino on September 7, 2022 at 1:24 am said:

    What if this beam comes from the past? what if UFOs are something/someone travelling thru time? i can continue…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Post navigation