Category Archives: Roswell Incident

Following my recent posts about how the 1947 Roswell Incident strongly fits the template for a cipher mystery, I’ve moved on to wondering how arch-Ufologist Nick Redfern’s profoundly non-Ufological theory (where, according to his “Black Widow” witness, the debris found in Roswell was actually caused by the crash of some kind of high-altitude balloon experiment using disabled Japanese people as live test subjects) fits into this. The challenge is how to temper Redfern’s effusive research enthusiasm with actual historical insight: can we build up a reliable picture of the things that might have contributed to his story?

I’ve therefore been reading books that try to build up solid factual accounts of the historical contexts into which Redfern would like his narrative inserted. Which is important because there remain many aspects of his books I’m still extraordinarily uncomfortable with.

Ross Coen’s “Fu–go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America”

Though written in a comfortably US-archive-centric popular history vein, Coen’s book is actually a nice, easy read that covers a lot of ground (all the way from Mexico to Alaska, in fact) in understanding how Japan’s war-time balloon bomb blitz was responded to in America.

Perhaps unwittingly, Coen works hard to pop a lot of the balloon-based conspiracy bubbles that Redfern notes floating around the edges of the discourse. For example, he says that:

• the Japanese top brass halted the balloon programme simply because – thanks to the US news blackout on balloon bomb explosions – the people running the programme couldn’t supply them with any solid proof that the 9,000 Fu-go balloons they had launched had militarily achieved anything;
• there was no plan for bigger, bolder, better balloon bombs – claims to that effect were in fact just part of internally-focused Japanese propaganda aimed at its own people
• despite American fears that the balloon bombs might be a precursor to a far more deadly Bacteriological Warfare attack from the skies, this simply wasn’t part of what was planned at all.
• it wasn’t direct & deliberate American attacks on Japanese hydrogen plants that made things logistically difficult for the Japanese balloon bomb makers, but instead ruptures to their train lines and widespread supply shortages

For me, the biggest takeaway from Coen’s book was simply how well the Americans came to understand (and indeed appreciate) the inner workings of the Japanese balloon bombs: their fuses, their internal wiring, their ‘wheel’, their battery, their antifreeze, etc. The Fu-go balloon bomb was in many ways a masterpiece of low-cost engineering and pragmatic ingenuity, coupled with solid meteorological understanding and actually quite daring thought.

Yet given that the US Military went on to build its own balloon bombs (though with a bacteriological warfare payload) from 1950 onwards, one of the broader questions I had before reading Coen’s book was to do with whether the Americans would have needed help from Japanese engineers to get them to 1950. But, perhaps surprisingly, the answer to that seems to be a resounding no: by the end of the War, the US Military had been able to reverse-engineer everything they needed to know about the Fu-go balloons.

Moreover, you finish Coen’s book somewhat reassured as to the idea that these balloons could have been used for waging Bacteriological Warfare: in his account, this seems to have been primarily a US Military defensive fear, that by 1950 was then redirected into an offensive (in both senses of the word) opportunity.

Amanda Kay McVety’s “The Rinderpest Campaigns”

Unfortunately for Coen, McVety’s book reports (p.73, footnote 86) the 1990 testimony of Noboru Kuba, who started work at the Noborito Research Institute in 1943 to create an “acute contagious disease” to infect cattle, and to use that toxin to bring America to its knees. Kuba reported carrying out tests on a group of cows in Busan (in Korea), all ten of which died ten days later, thus proving that it did what they hoped it would.

In Kuba’s recounting, the development of the toxin happened in parallel with the Fu-go balloon bombs, but it was clear to many in the Imperial Japanese Army that the two technologies were a good match for each other. And so the proposal was made in September 1944 to use 20 tons of rinderpest toxin as the payload for Fu-go balloon bombs. However, this was rejected by Hideki Tojo, a former prime minister (and by then general), on the grounds that the Americans would likely retaliate against Japan’s rice crop in the harvest season, causing enormous problems.

What this throws up is that Coen’s book relies heavily on the post-war Compton Report, which (as Mercado makes clear in “The Shadow Warriors of Nakano”, a fascinating read too) was weakened to the point of uselessness not only by the immediate burning of just about all the documentary evidence that could be burned, but also by the deception and lack of cooperation of the (now-suddenly-former) Noborito Research Institute members.

And yet at the same time, the US Military seems not to have known about any of this at the time. All the interesting Big Conspiracy Theories about this period tend to focus on the miserable Mengele-like atrocities inflicted by The Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 upon the people of the Japanese puppet state on mainland China, which perhaps suggest why Nick Redfern got so caught up with that side of the history.

It’s certainly true that a number of Unit 731 personnel were given something not entirely unlike an amnesty, and that it is likely that a good few were swooshed – Operation Paperclip-style – into America not long after the war. So it’s certainly possible that some of these awful, immoral, dehumanised Japanese ‘scientists’ from Unit 731 contributed to the US Military’s research in the post-war years. Having said that, perhaps more relevant to American Bacteriological Warfare research would have been the activities of Unit 100 (elsewhere on mainland China), which focused on anthrax, glanders, and red rust.

But all the same, I think the picture that emerges here about what was happening is quite unlike the one presented by Redfern in yet different ways from the one presented by Coen.

Tularosa Balloons

Speculative stuff aside, the account given by Nick Redfern’s “Black Widow” witness (who claims to have worked at Oak Ridge) is actually rather specific. The core of her story is a series of unethical high-altitude balloon tests carried out at night in May, June, and July 1947 at Tularosa on fifteen live (but anaesthetised) subjects, with horrific and fatal results.

It’s no secret that the Tularosa Basin was indeed used for American high-altitude balloon experiments from 1945 onwards, such as Project MANHIGH III. In his book “The Pre-Astronauts” (which I haven’t yet read, though I’ve ordered a copy), Craig Ryan notes (quoted here):

“One of the first postwar manned balloon flights sponsored by the military was launched from the Tularosa Basin in 1947 with the intent of crossing the Rockies and landing somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately, the entire flight’s supply of ballast was expended in the crossing of the Sacramento range to the east of Alamogordo and the balloon’s journey ended just short of Roswell.”

So it seems eminently clear that US Military balloon experiments – that is, ones specifically involving people, so not weather balloons or Project MOGUL – were not only launched from Tularosa in 1947, but were also in range of Roswell. Even if how these things mesh together isn’t yet clear, Tularosa is certainly not an entirely unreasonable launchpad.

“A Small Island in the Pacific”

Separately, Redfern’s Black Widow claims that these test subjects were “acquired […] in early 1945 after a battle between American and Japanese troops on a small island in the Pacific”, where the Americans discovered “a small medical laboratory where Japanese doctors and scientists were conducting all manner of atrocities on both physically and mentally handicapped people”.

Where could this have been? If we roll the clock back to 1944 (note the sentence says “in early 1945 after a battle”, so the battle itself could easily have been in 1944), the battles that fit the timeline are:

• Feb 1944: Battles of Kwajalein and Eniwetok
• Summer 1944: Marianas Islands – Guam, Saipan, Tinian
• Feb-Mar 1945: Iwo Jima
• Apr-Jun 1945: Okinawa

The timeline and size seems to rule out Okinawa, the volcanic Iwo Jima seems a highly unlikely location, and Kwajalein and Eniwetok seem to have been too small and too early. So it seems that we are being pointed towards the Marianas Islands: and because Guam had been taken from America by the Japanese in 1941, that too seems unlikely, while the third major Marianas island (Rota) remained under Japanese control.

All of which seems to leave us two specific islands to look at: Saipan and Tinian – you may recognise Tinian as being the island whose airstrip the B-29 Enola Gay famously took off from in August 1945. And so I’ve also ordered myself a copy of Gordon Rottman’s “Saipan & Tinian 1944: Piercing the Japanese Empire”, which should be an interesting read.

Pinning the Tail on the Axis Donkey?

I think it’s important to say that if there were unethical high-altitude balloon experiments going on in 1947, the issue of whether they involved “Japanese doctors and Nazi doctors” is entirely secondary. Unlike Unit 731’s shocking experiments on non-volunteered Chinese subjects carried out on the Chinese mainland, or Unit 100’s experiments on cattle on the Chinese mainland, or Noboru Kuba’s experiments on cattle in Korea, these would have been American tests on American soil, commissioned and carried out by the US military, making it impossible to ‘export’ any ethical failings of those tests. Furthermore, you don’t have to look much further forward along the military timeline to see the 1960s controversy over the US testing of Agent Orange in Okinawa, where all these themes would recur.

In short, if there was any unethical science going on in Tularosa in 1947, it would first and foremost have been American unethical science. So all in all, doesn’t it sound somewhat as if someone somewhere is trying to unpin the blame from themselves, and instead pin it on questionable Axis scientists (who may or may not exist)? Or if not on them, then on extra-terrestrials, hmmm?

I always find it fascinating when someone approaches a topic that I thought was a carcass stripped of every scrap of flesh, and yet from it manages to conjure up an entirely fresh-looking meat feast. Even though there is – of course – a danger that they simply dreamed it all up, there’s also the chance that they might have glimpsed (however imperfectly) something really big. So you always ask: is it smoke and mirrors, or behind the smoke is there some kind of fire?

In his (2005) “Body Snatchers in the Desert” and its (2017) sequel “The Roswell UFO Conspiracy: Exposing a Shocking and Sinister Secret”, long-time researcher/writer Nick Redfern took a hugely sideways look at the 1947 Roswell Incident (along with the often lurid crash site stories of oddly-deformed bodies) and found an entirely new story to tell.

Given that Redfern is an avowed Ufologist, what’s immediately unexpected about these two books is that they set out to tell a story about the 1947 Roswell Incident that was anything but extraterrestrial. Unsurprisingly, many (if not most) of his Ufological buddies and correspondents believe that he has drunk too deeply from the PsyOps poisoned well of UFO nonsense, and become befuddled by the many layers of cover stories laid down over the years.

All the same, the big question is: how on Earth (if you’ll excuse the phrase) did a Ufologist end up writing arguably the most anti-Ufological book ever? And might even a small bit of what he found hidden under that rock actually be true?

“Who Cares Where They Come Down?”

Historically, Redfern’s story pivots on the US Military’s actions in the years just after WWII, across a period bounded on the one hand by Operation Paperclip (and its Japanese analogue), and on the other hand by the Nuremberg Trials.

As is well-documented (even in Wikipedia), Operation Paperclip was a secret operation whereby “more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians” got spirited away from the bombed desolation of post-war Germany to start fresh new lives in the US. This programme was authorised by President Truman on 3rd September 1946, and led to an influx to the States of such famous rocketeers as Wernher von Braun. As Tom Lehrer memorably wrote (to a tune which I now inevitably can’t get out of my head):

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,”
Says Wernher von Braun.

Note that Redfern also stresses the other side of the political equation: that it was not just that the US was anxious to gain the services of these brilliant (if perhaps morally damaged) individuals, it was also that the US wanted to avoid the scenario where those same people were swooshed up by the Russians. (Did they ever have an Operation Paperclipski?)

So: the picture that Redfern paints is that from the start of 1946, technologists from the defeated Axis countries along with their technology (and documentation) resurfaced in America, influencing not only the type of science that was being done there, but also the way it was being done. They were, after all, domain experts, so why not bring ’em in?

The Nuremberg Trials

The reason that the Nuremberg Trials form a terminus ante quem for Redfern is – though I don’t think he says it explicitly – what happened in the IG Farben trial, which ran from 27th August 1947 through to 30th July 1948.

The directors of German chemical conglomerate IG Farben were in court not only because they had manufactured Zyklon B (the poison gas used in the Nazi extermination camps), but also because they had used slave labour. Though the single thing that seems to have tipped the balance for the judges was the fact that IG Farben had built a Zyklon B manufacturing plant right next door to Auschwitz, with the clear intention of using slave labour to manufacture the same poison that was then used to kill the same slaves.

(Personally, I find this extraordinary and awful, as though the only way someone could be convicted of murder is if they had shot someone with a gun they had previously forced the dead person to build for them.)

Five months later, one of the judges (Judge Hebert) filed a witheringly dissenting opinion, where he wrote (though possibly more for the benefit of his conscience than for its usefulness to later historians):

“Willing cooperation with the slave labor utilization of the Third Reich was a matter of corporate policy that permeated the whole Farben organization […] For this reason, criminal responsibility goes beyond the actual immediate participants at Auschwitz. It includes other Farben Vorstand plant-managers and embraces all who knowingly participated in the shaping of the corporate policy”

For Redfern’s narrative, this specific part of the Nuremberg trials is centrally important because the third group of crimes that the IG Farben directors were indicted was (again, as per Wikipedia):

“3. War crimes and crimes against humanity through participation in the enslavement and deportation to slave labor on a gigantic scale of concentration camp inmates and civilians in occupied countries, and of prisoners of war, and the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons.”

That is to say, the world now had the concept of war crimes, for which culpable individuals could be held accountable.

A Narrow Ethical Window

From this, you could say that Nick Redfern’s narrative (reconstructed from different witness accounts) falls within a narrow ‘ethical window’. This time period commenced with Operation Paperclip’s influx of scientists who brought with them a radically different experimental ethics – what we would now disparagingly call “Nazi science” – but then finished with the Nuremberg Trial judges’ clear signal to the world that the cruelty, terror and indeed murder carried out in the name of that so-called “science” was a war crime – what we would now call “crimes against humanity”.

For Redfern, key American military scientists seem to have been utterly seduced by the whole idea of carrying out inhumane experiments against “volunteer” (but utterly misinformed) prisoners, the mentally or physically handicapped, or even infant corpses in the pursuit of ‘scientific knowledge’. By way of support, he offers a large number of grotesquely shameful instances in post-war America (and indeed Britain) where exactly this kind of thing happened.

Even today, Josef Mengele’s chillingly inhumane experiments at Auschwitz (where he performed grotesque ‘operations’ on inmates, while also cheerfully selecting those to die of Zyklon B) remain utterly shocking. But the atrocities carried out during WWII by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army in their development of bacteriological warfare seem every bit as morally repugnant. As Wikipedia notes:

The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip. Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the west as communist propaganda.

It should be noted that Unit 731 was located on mainland China (where Japan had occupied a sizeable region before WWII), and so the majority of its ‘test subjects” were Chinese. These “included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, the homeless and mentally handicapped, and also people rounded up by the Kempeitai military police for alleged ‘suspicious activities’.“

So when thousands of these morally-compromised Axis scientists (as Tom Lehrer jeered, were they “apolitical” or just plain “hypocritical”?) were absorbed into the post-WWII American military R&D complex, what was the cultural effect? Did everything run the same as before, or did their horribly dehumanised attitudes towards test subjects – people in Unit 731 referred to them as “logs”, or “long-tailed Manchurian monkeys” – also get integrated along with their science?

Fu-Go Balloon Bombs

Nick Redfern’s story hinges on a relatively little-known side of WWII: Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs. Over 9,000 of these mulberry-paper balloon bombs were launched from Japan, flying at a relatively constant altitude (thanks to an ingenious bit of engineering trickery) all the way to America’s West Coast. These were launched from late 1944 until April 1945, because they were carried by a seasonal higher altitude wind that consistently blows across the Pacific during those months (though less than 10% of them actually reached their destination).

Though these balloon bombs caused hardly any casualties (a single family was blown up when they went to investigate a downed balloon up close), this wasn’t the whole story. According to Redfern, the Japanese actually had a much bigger Fu-Go attack planned for 22nd September 1945, with the intention of dropping toxins on San Diego. However, that particular attack never happened, thanks to Japan’s surrender a month earlier, following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Redfern also has a story about a manned Japanese balloon attack on California, observed late in the war by three witnesses. He also talks about further plans for a larger balloon being sent across from Japan carrying a bomb-filled glider beneath it, for a Kamikaze pilot to steer to its final (high-value) target.

A quick Wikipedia search reveals that these balloons were designed and built by the Imperial Japanese Army’s Number Nine Research Laboratory (Noborito Laboratory) under Major General Kusaba. According to a 2007 review of a 2001 posthumous memoir by former insider Ban Shigeo (“Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu [The Truth About the Army Noborito Research Institute]“): “the US Army” – to nobody’s great surprise – “quietly enlisted certain members of Noborito in its efforts against the communist camp in the early years of the Cold War.” I for one would gladly pay to read an English translation of Ban Shigeo’s book, wouldn’t you?

Actually, it should be noted that there’s also a long discussion of this in Amanda Kay McVety’s (2018) “The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century”. McVety notes that the rinderpest toxin was developed not by Unit 731, but by the Noborito Lab itself: and that their big plan was to use a wave of balloon bombs to drop 20 tons of the stuff over the US to kill American cattle en masse. According to McVety, the plan was nixed not by the end of the war, but by a senior General fearing American reprisals against Japan’s rice harvest.

Yet even though the US Military developed its own range of – it has to be said extremely similar – balloon bombs (e.g. its E77 was developed in 1950) not that long after, I was unable to find any official military history charting how these Noborito balloon bomb researchers affected American thinking and balloon development. This sounds like a fascinating slice of secret history that military historians seem to have largely overlooked to date. Let’s hope that particular lacuna gets filled before very long.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

And so, from the normal historical fog, we can start to see the broad shape of Redfern’s account of the 1947 Roswell Incident starting to emerge. He presents the Roswell Incident as the crash not of an extraterrestrial spaceship, but instead of an unfamiliar balloon technology brought in via the Japanese equivalent of Operation Paperclip. And the oddly deformed bodies? For him, these were not X-Files “grays”, but instead handicapped Japanese test subjects, similar to the ones upon whom Unit 731 performed ghastly experiments. And the whole UFO story? According to Redfern, this was to cover up the “Nazi science”-style atrocities being carried out to gain high-altitude physiological (or possibly radioactive) scientific knowledge.

Admittedly, Redfern’s conspiratorial excitement then somewhat gets the better of him, to the point that he confuses Unit 731 with Noborito Laboratory, and then somewhat oddly throws a whole load of Nazi flying machine tech into the mix. I’m also far from convinced by his attempts to stitch the glider-beneath-the-balloon account into his own narrative. Even so, I thought he was doing perfectly well with just the actual history, so it’s not all bad, not at all. :-/

Finally, the “Bamboo” Bit Teased in the Title…

All in all, does Nick Redfern’s account really explain everything about the Roswell Incident? I think it’s fair to say that in its current form, probably not quite. But all the same, the idea that the incident revolved around a balloon built according to unfamiliar principles ‘acquired’ (Operation Paperclip-style) by the US Military from Japanese balloon bomb builders does strike me as entirely plausible (in a good way).

And moreover, his suggestion that the people involved were actually ‘involuntary volunteer’ test subjects whose deaths in that balloon crash subsequently got hushed up is also far from unreasonable. There was definitely an experimental moral laxity in that period, though the notion that the victims’ various deformities were due to specific genetically-linked conditions may well be a bit too… intense for some. Still, full marks for trying to cover all the bases, regardless.

For me, though, I can’t help but wonder whether the whole Roswell Incident was nothing more complex than a crashed balloon that used unfamiliar techniques and materials brought to America by the Noborito ‘acquirees’. Even though the US Military knew a fair bit about balloons, it may well not have developed suitable gondolas: so might the gondola in the Roswell crash (for if there were people on the balloon, it surely had a gondola, right?) have actually been a Noborito Lab-developed gondola quietly swooshed out of post-war Japan’s backdoor by the Americans?

As an aside: one of the unexplained things about the initial Roswell Incident crash site was the inwardly curved I-beams that so bemused Jesse Marcel, and which had some kind of strange writing imprinted on them (the ones that various witnesses remarked upon). This is, after all, why I’ve been treating the Roswell Incident as primarily a cipher mystery.

So here’s Nick’s thought for the day: might these inwardly-curved “I-beams” have actually been bamboo from the crashed gondola frame? And might the writing on those “I-beams” actually have been Japanese (e.g. assembly instructions)? In which case, might the real reason that no images of this writing have ever been made public is that it would be obviously Japanese, thereby opening up a whole world of awkward (and clearly non-extraterrestrial) questions about the roles Noborito Lab researchers were playing in post-war US Military R&D?

Jesse Marcel was certain that what he was looking at wasn’t any kind of American balloon he’d seen before: and, not knowing America’s (presumably still highly Top Secret) connection to Japanese bomb-balloon-makers, he (wrongly, I think) concluded that he could only be looking at debris from a crashed flying saucer. And so it could well be that Marcel’s quick rationalisation was inadvertently the well-spring from which all modern UFOlogy eventually flowed.

Regardless, if your job was to cover up a Top Secret US Military collaboration with Japanese balloon-bomb builders in 1947, how would you try to explain it away? It would be a bit of a tricky challenge, that’s for sure. Hmmm…

Anyway, paraphrasing Tom Lehrer slightly:

“Once the balloons are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department”

Given that many different witness accounts mentioned that the ‘beams’ found initially at the Roswell debris site had unreadable writing on them, this would surely seem to be a sensible starting-point for further cipher mystery research.

We then, as I posted before, have three separate reports suggesting that the US Military took control of the beams (and hence the writing with it).

So what happened to those beams? I decided to have a look at a few (of the many tens of thousands of) UFO books out there. And it didn’t take me long to find Philip Corso…

Corso & Birnes (1998) – “The Day After Roswell”

This is presented as a tell-all book, written by a key military insider (Philip Corso) on the Foreign Technology Desk, who sat between the US military, the Pentagon, and US government. Written at the peak of X-Files mania (before it all got a bit silly with Series 6), it tells you pretty much everything you ever hoped or feared to hear about aliens. Basically, its central claim is that American technological ascendancy came from reverse-engineering alien space tech taken from a crashed flying saucer, all thanks to the personal brilliance of – you guessed it – Philip Corso. Unsurprisingly, the book was a huge bestseller (though it was later claimed that Corso, who died not long after, got bilked out of his royalties).

In many ways, I suspect that this is THE central book of modern Ufology, in that your attitude to it squarely defines what you think about the US and UFOs. It’s extraordinarily hard to read it in a “halfway-house” evidence-cherry-picking kind of way: you pretty much have to either accept it all or reject it all.

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that Corso did genuinely hold the positions he claims to have held (or at least very close to them). And there’s no shortage of people who want to defend his account against the numerous UFO researchers who don’t believe a word of it – perhaps one of the best-presented defences is Michael Salla’s two-part article (here and here, or perhaps here and here).

Note that Salla flags that the FBI thought poorly of Corso (“shifty-eyed”, “rat”, “a parasite”), but that this was because Corso had been told by someone in the CIA that Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant, but wouldn’t tell the FBI who had told him. Also, I’m a bit dubious about Salla’s claim about General Trudeau: the book I have on Dulles (“The Devil’s Chessboard”, p.278) says that Trudeau was ejected for trampling on political toes by meeting with Konrad Adenauer in 1954 to talk about paranoid German spy chief Reinhard Gehlen.

On the other hand, Brad Sparks’ debunking is typical of the criticism the book received from the UFO research community (if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you). In 2001, The Guardian newspaper famously included “The Day After Roswell” in its Top Ten list of literary hoaxes, right up there with the Donation of Constantine, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Hitler Diaries. (Personally, I’d have included the Priory of Sion and the Rosicrucian Manifestos, but each to their own, eh?)

For me, I can’t help but notice that Corso talks explicitly (and at length) about Majestic 12 (MJ-12), which became known through thin bundles of extraordinarily fake-looking photocopied documents (with badly-copied fake signatures) that first started surfacing in 1984. If you think MJ-12 is an outright fake (as I do), then I really think you can only sensibly conclude that Corso’s account in “The Day After Roswell” is no less fake.

Conversely, if you think MJ-12 is real, why not believe Corso’s account too? Go ahead, knock yourself out.

The Fork in the Road

In the historiography of Ufology, then, “The Day After Roswell” marks a sharp fork in the road. Here, one path leads to an “X-Files” vision where just about everything short of The Cigarette-Smoking Man’s Ultimate Conspiracy is confirmed as True-As-Hell; while the other path leads you to a world where you have almost nothing direct to work with.

Hence UFO researchers seem utterly trapped between this Scylla (of believing everything) and Charybdis (of believing nothing). Even an assiduous writer like Timothy Good (who works hard to collect and collate information) is only able to do what he does by suspending disbelief on an almost industrial scale.

More broadly, the ‘normal’ approach to writing UFO books seems to be completely believe some ‘new’ witness source you have uncovered, while supporting that source by selectively quoting pieces from wherever suits your new source best. But the reality seems to be that Corso either gives you everything at once (i.e. the whole Big Kahuna Conspiracy) or takes everything away from you.

From my perspective, the key thing that differentiates these books from proper historical research seems to be that belief and disbelief are the starting points for inquiry rather then the endpoints – inputs rather than outputs. Moreover, if you don’t like Testimony X, it’s easy as pie to weave a story about how it was obviously misinformation to cover up Secret Project Y. And so the merry-go-round continues to spin.

So: Back To Roswell, Then?

In my opinion, this probably explains why there is now more interest in the original Roswell “debris field” incident than in Corso’s claims, or the stories of saucer crashes / alien bodies in Corona or the Plains of St Augustine or wherever. This is simply because you don’t have to drink Corso’s Kool-Aid or believe every line of “The Roswell Incident” to believe that something probably did crash at the ranch outside Roswell in 1947.

In the end, whether that was a Project Mogul balloon or an alien whatnot is perhaps less important than the fact it marks a place we can all agree to start from.

Is it any wonder I want to see what the symbols on the beams looked like?

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!

Though not remotely a Ufologist myself, I’ve just watched “Roswell: First Witness” on the Blaze Freeview channel (top tip: record these and 32x fast forward through the loooong ad breaks and the almost-as-long recaps, otherwise it’ll take you all day), which threw up a couple of interesting cipher-related tidbits I thought I’d share with you.

1. Jesse A. Marcel’s Alien Alphabet

Though Jesse Marcel was neither the first to reach the Roswell debris site in July 1947 (that was actually W.W. “Mac” Brazel) nor the second (that was probably Timothy D. Proctor), he was certainly one of the first five witnesses. But I can quite see how “Roswell: Fourth Witness” probably didn’t have the required punch.

In the programme, one woman (Linda Corley) brought out a piece of paper apparently signed by Marcel, which she said Marcel had drawn to depict the alien lettering he had seen on a piece of wood-like (but not actually wood) beam-like debris. The signs reportedly resembled a series of simple curves and strokes:

( ) – / \

She then went away and looked these up, finding as a match our old friends Tironian notes. (Romans in Space! Am I the only person who remembers “The Tomorrow People: A Rift In Time” (1974) episode? Probably.) At which point Marcel allegedly span round 180 degrees and strongly asked her never to mention the lettering again etc.

To be fair, I’d say these simple curves and slashes resemble a minimalist tachygraphic alphabet, i.e. an alphabet pared down for speed and clarity rather than for expressiveness. Which is quite interesting in itself, though without necessarily being Tironian.

My question here is this: are there any UFO books out there that claim to give more examples of writing or markings in this same alphabet? I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere else, but given that my personal library contains not even a single book on UFOs, that’s perhaps not hugely surprising.

2. Jesse A. Marcel’s Journal / Diary / Memorandum Book

Arguably the central focus of the TV programme is a notebook owned by Marcel’s descendants. Though this is mostly full of normal cursive writing, at one point in mid-1947 this halts and gets replaced by lots of curious mixed-case block-letter quotations (many now dated and sexist, *sigh*). Here are a couple screen-grabbed from the programme:

The question then arose as to whether these might have been using some kind of Baconian biliteral cipher. To try to answer this, the film-makers gave scans of the diary to Professor Craig Bauer, a mathematician who Cipher Mysteries readers will hopefully remember for his “Unsolved” (a chunky recent book on unsolved historical ciphers, with a particular authorial focus on Americana) rather than for the somewhat lame (and now totally disproven) speculations he contributed to a high(ish)-profile TV documentary series on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers.

Bauer (and presumably grad student Jack Anderson) then went away and wrote biliteral cipher decryption code to try to work out what was going on. The kinds of Baconian letter-form pairs they found looked like this:

Unfortunately their decryption attempts didn’t come up with anything worthwhile, i.e. their results were inconclusive.

However, from my own unsolved historical cipher perspective, it seems to me that Bauer et al. properly failed to test the statistical validity of their hypothesis before launching into writing code to exhaustively search the biliteral space. In other words, they didn’t look before they leaped. For example, if the ratio of each biliteral A:B letter-pair is 4:1 or worse, and moreover many of the capital forms appear word-initial (as you’d expect), something has probably already gone badly wrong with your assumptions before you even started.

In my experience, hand ciphers are primarily not about mathematics but about steganography – distracting the eye so the core of the actual cipher trundles past unnoticed. Hence you need to be sure you have cracked a cipher’s steganographic wrapper properly before you start writing any code, and I’m not sure that this preliminary sanity-checking stage happened here to the degree it should have.

Even so, though I’d be extraordinarily surprised if these quotations were concealing a message written in biliteral cipher, that’s not at all to say that they might not be concealing a message in a quite different way.

Has anyone got scans of the “Memorandum” book? I wouldn’t mind casting an independent eye on this section, see if there’s anything there to be found.