Was the 1947 Roswell Incident a cipher mystery?

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!