Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

There are numerous Roswell witness statements that mention what the ‘Roswell aliens’ (who I would instead call ‘test subjects’) found in the ‘capsule’ were wearing, but these are spread throughout the (already very diffuse) literature. Hence I thought it would be helpful to wrangle them all (unless you know of any others?) into a single place: so here they all are.

(As an aside, Jim Ragsdale’s account was just not credible enough to go on the list, in case you’re wondering.)

So, what do witnesses say that the ‘Roswell aliens’ were wearing?

• Joseph Montoya (Carey & Schmitt, “Witness to Roswell”, p.92)
  • “Each wore a silvery, tight-fitting, one-piece flight suit”

• Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox, quoted by Inez Wilcox, quoted by Barbara Dugger (1995)
  • “They wore suits like silk.”

• Captain Oliver Wendell “Pappy” Henderson, quoted by Sappho Henderson
  • “He said the material that their suits were made of was different than anything he had ever seen.”
  • “Clothing was of material unlike anything he had seen before.”

• “Cactus Jack”, quoted by Iris Foster, in Kevin Randle, “UFO Crash at Roswell” (p.115)
  • “Their blood, according to Cactus Jack, was like tar, thick and black, and stained their uniforms. Cactus Jack was positive that they had been wearing silver uniforms.”

• Anonymous archaeologist, speaking to Kevin Randle in 1990, “UFO Crash at Roswell” (p.116)
  • “It was wearing a silvery flight suit and had one arm bent at a strange angle, as if it had been broken.”

• Barney Barnett (in 1950), reported by Vern and Jean Maltais, in Berlitz “The Roswell Incident” p.55
  • “Their clothing seemed to be one-piece and gray in color. You couldn’t see any zippers, belts or buttons.”

• Mary Ann Gardner’s patient (1975), quoted in Tom Carey’s “The Continuing Search for the Roswell Archaeologists: Closing the Circle”, in IUR vol 19, No. 1 (1994):
  • She described them as being small in stature with “big heads and slanted eyes” and wearing silvery flight suits.

• Gerald Anderson (in “The Roswell Report: Case Closed”, Appendix C) [now thought to be unreliable]
  • They were wearing one piece suits. All of them were dressed exactly the same. It was sort of a real shiny silverish gray color.
  • Q: No zippers, buttons?
  • A: No, I saw no zippers, no buttons.
  • Q: Insignias?
  • A: No, no insignias. The only thing that was different, you know, and they all had this, but the only that was different from the silvery gray thing, the suit, was that down like a seam line, like there was a seam on his shoulder and around the collar it was trimmed in what appeared to be maroon, like cording.
  • Then the suits were continuous with their footwear. We could see right this area down, it seemed to be less pliable then it was up here, like this was a stiffer area, like they were boots or shoes or something. But they were all dressed exactly the same.

Update: add the “Guy Hottel” memo to the list, why not?

Thinking about it, I should perhaps also add the description given in the (in)famous Guy Hottel memo. Though this has been spun and re-spun a thousand or more times, it should really be here:

• Mr <redacted> informant, reported by Guy Hottel, head of the FBI’s Washington field office (1950)
  • “Each [flying saucer] was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”

On the surface, nothing links the two at all: the Roswell Incident happened at the start of July 1947, while the CIA was formed in September 1947. But… perhaps there’s something a bit deeper to be had here.

CIA Covert Operations

If – like me – you think that Roswell was entirely man-made (and not at all ‘alien’), then perhaps the historical pattern it matches will turn out to be where Agency X stumbles upon Agency Y’s black ops project. Regardless of whether you call this ‘interagency conflict‘, ‘compartmentalization failure‘, or a ‘rogue operation‘, this is something that happened many times during the second half of the 20th century:

• U-2 spy plane (1950s-1960s)
  • This was the CIA’s secret high-altitude reconaissance programme. The Agency withheld details from the public and some military authorities, and at times explained away reports as UFO sightings.
• MKULTRA / Operation Midnight Climax (1950s-1960s)
  • A CIA human-experimentation programme that used hospitals and other places without informed consent.
• Operation CHAOS/MHCHAOS (1967-1974)
  • The CIA’s covert domestic surveillance programme targeting US activists caused friction with the FBI and other agencies because the CIA concealed the programme’s scope and methods.
• Project Azorian / “Glomar Explorer” (1974)
  • The CIA’s covert project to retrieve Soviet submarine K-129 involved an elaborate cover story that kept the US Navy and its contractors largely in the dark.

Yes, these were all CIA covert operations. And I haven’t even mentioned the Church Committee (which revealed CIA plots/attempts to assassinate foreign leaders) or the Bay of Pigs (with its “plausible deniability”). And there were many others.

What I believe we see in the Roswell Incident – high-altitude science, human experimentation, elaborate cover stories, Cold War vibe, agency misdirection, etc – closely matched what the CIA did subsequently. So my argument is that, despite the timing difference, Roswell is most usefully viewed through a CIA ‘lens’.

But in the end, the CIA is just people – albeit scary people with a collectively broken moral compass who, viewed from the outside, have often proved hard to distinguish from terrorists. So: where did these people come from? What preceded the CIA?

1945-1947: After the war, but before the CIA

The US wartime body that most closely resembled the CIA was the Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945). This was a one-stop shop for sabotage, black propaganda, and guerilla operations, all carried out with ‘limited’ (i.e. sometimes entirely absent) ethical guardrails. There were similar intelligence apparatuses (apparati?) for the US Army (such as G-2 and Special Branch) and the US Navy (The Office of Naval Intelligence), but the OSS was arguably the biggest and baddest of them all. And, post-war, plenty in government were aware of its war-time excesses and really wanted it gone.

So, while the US government tried to work out how to transition from a hot war (OSS) to a Cold War (CIA), the period 1945-1947 ended up as something of an interregnum. I also believe, following Nick Redfern, that the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial (1946-1947) cast a heavy shadow over scientists’ ethical ‘footprint’ in this time. Yet Redfern’s readiness to blame ethical issues on ‘Paperclipped’ Nazi scientists seems a tad generous to me: American scientists of this period had no obvious oversupply of ethics.

Let’s Go Ethics Shopping

Two specific agencies I’ve been looking at that were active during 1945-1947 were the AEC (the Atomic Energy Commission, as famously lambasted by Tom Lehrer) and NEPA (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft). Both had no shortage of ethical challenges in this period.

“The Old AEC”

Though the AEC was legally established in 1946, it didn’t actually start work until 1st January 1947. Initially, many of its responsibilities overlapped with the Manhattan Engineer District, which was what remained of the Manhattan Project after WWII. The MED was run by General Leslie Groves, who initially thought his job there was simply to “hold the line”, but then quickly realised that he needed to do rather more to keep it all from actually collapsing.

One controversial topic at the MED was human-subject radiation experiments (I believe historian Barton Bernstein covered this). To get these experiments greenlighted, MED officials did what I would call ‘ethics shopping‘ between the Army Surgeon General, the Manhattan District’s health physics division, the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, and (later) the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine. This involved constantly reframing their shady experiments either as a military necessity, as an industrial safety study, or as a classified national-security matter, until they found an agency who would let them get away with it. Basically: approvals agency won’t approve your dodgy experiment? Try a different one! (And another, and another.)

NEPA

Militarily, NEPA was a grand design to build high-altitude nuclear bombers able to stay airborne for long periods: the idea was to give the US an enduring edge in the emerging Cold War. This involved coordinating between the Manhattan District (and then the AEC), the Army and Navy Air Forces, plus various contractors (such as GE, Fairchild, Oak Ridge labs).

Historians of nuclear propulsion (e.g. Richard G. Hewlett & Francis Duncan) think that NEPA planners sometimes employed ‘bureaucratic maneuvering‘ to keep things moving despite ethical or framing difficulties. For example, when AEC reviewers had concerns about radiation-exposure protocols, officials rerouted those proposals to US AAF security. Similarly, when AEC-adjacent scientists proved to be stricter about ethical standards biological-effects studies, NEPA instead shifted them sideways to military medical labs. All of which is basically ethics shopping, of course.

Summary: Ethics is more than Brentwood

The CIA wasn’t just an agency (if not The Agency), it was also a state of mind, one that viewed ethics not as a project blocker but instead as merely a presentation issue. If you truly believed in the ideological Rightness and God-given Glory of the Perfect American State, even the pretence of justification was superfluous: your job was to do whatever it took. Which is, basically, the core recipe for unbridled terrorism that gave shape to the CIA.

These days, people like to deride the CIA for being filled with failsons, all eager to impress their surrogate abusive father-figure managers by unquestioningly doing whatever they are asked, however shady or wrong. However, in 1947 perhaps the reality was far, far worse: I can easily imagine the CIA initially filling its ranks with the ethics-free dregs of these interregnum years, with brutal, inhumane consequences.

So, my point here is not that Roswell was a CIA project (because it wasn’t): but rather that I think Roswell was planned and executed by exactly the same kind of ethics-lite state-obsessed zealots who before very long proudly slid their shoes under their shiny new CIA desks. My thesis: to understand Roswell, I think you should try to understand the CIA circa 1947, because both were dredged from the same toxic well. Feel free to disagree with this, of course. (But you’d be wrong.)

Some historical researchers like to track the known ownership of things, e.g. they follow the Voynich Manuscript’s ownership trail from Sinapius to Kircher all the way through to the Beinecke. For me, I couldn’t think of anything worse – I want to know about the prehistory of an artifact, its uneasy secret life long before it ever became shelfmarked, catalogued, pigeonholed, and memed.

Similarly, for the Roswell Incident, I want to know what did (and didn’t) happen right at the start, before people started weaving so many sophisticated stories around it. Anyway, I thought it would be helpful to post my reconstruction of the initial timeline of the Roswell Incident, because I think this differs in a number of places from other researchers. The sources I found particularly useful for doing this were:

• Carey and Schmitt’s 1999 IUR article “Mack Brazel RECONSIDERED“
• Schmitt and Randle’s “Roswell, July 9, 1947” in IUR Vol. 14 No. 6 (November/December 1989).
• Carey and Schmitt’s “Witness To Roswell” (revised edition 2009)

I’ve divided my account into three separate parts, because… well, you’ll see why.

Part 1: What ~Did~ Happen

30 June 1947 (Monday)

• Ranch foreman Mack Brazel is living in a shack without electricity or lighting on the J.B Foster ranch. His family live in Tularosa: they have not visited the ranch all month.
• Brazel rides out to a particular field to check on the sheep. He sees nothing unusual. (S&R p.4)

3 July 1947 (Thursday)

• Brazel, accompanied by 7-year-old neighbour Dee Proctor, returns to the same field. There he finds a load of thin metallic debris, lightweight beams, a circular burn mark and a big set of scrape marks.
• The sheep don’t like it, and won’t go through the debris, making Brazel’s life difficult
• Then, on another site a few miles to the east, Brazel finds “something” else (but nobody knows exactly what that was, even now).

6 July 1947 (Sunday)

• Mack Brazel goes into Roswell to visit Chaves County Sheriff Wilcox, specifically to complain about what he found in the field.
  • While Brazel was there, journalist Frank Joyce (of KGFL) happened to call Sheriff Wilcox for any news (Joyce used to do this regularly)
  • Wilcox gives Brazel the phone
  • According to Joyce, Brazel tells them both about the “debris”, the “stench” and the “dead bodies” (S&R)
  • Joyce: “Well, you know, the military is always firing rockets and experimenting with monkeys and things. So, maybe…“. Brazel: “God dammit! They’re not monkeys, and they’re not human!“
  • Wilcox doesn’t believe Brazel.
• Brazel asks Joyce for advice, and Joyce tells him to call the air base.
• Brazel phones the US Army Air Force base and tells them about it
• Capt. Sheridan Cavitt and Bill Ricketts get sent out: they follow Brazel back to the site
• Cavitt and Ricketts return to the US Army base with debris

7 July 1947 (Monday)

• Bill Ricketts and Maj. Jesse Marcel go to the debris site
  • They fill their respective vehicles with debris and go back to the US Army air base
  • Marcel is bemused by what he think is curious geometric writing on the stick-like debris
• Joyce tells radio station KGFL owner Walt Whitmore, Sr. about Brazel
• Whitmore drives to the Foster Ranch, picks up Brazel, and brings him back to his own house in Roswell. There he records an interview with Brazel. Brazel then spends Monday night there.

8 July 1947 (Tuesday) – first part

• At 11am Mountain Time (MT), Roswell Army Air Field commanding officer Colonel William Blanchard announced the recovery of a flying disk. (WTR, p.40)
• Roswell Daily Record, July 8 1947, p.1, col. 6
  • The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.
  • According to information released by the department, over authority of Maj. J. A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises.
  • Major Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated.
  • After the intelligence office here had inspected the instrument it was flown to “higher headquarters.”
  • The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer’s construction or its appearance had been revealed.
• p.1, col.1
  • Reactions [from a a number of local citizens] ran the gamut from scoffs at the whole idea to serious thoughts that they represented experiments by the government. No one interviewed thought they came from sources outside the United States.
• p.1, col 7
  • The Oregonian said today that Maj. Gen. Nathan F. Twining, chief of the AAF material command, told it flatly that the “flying saucers” are not the results of experiments by the armed services.
• Sacramento Bee, July 8 1947:
  • ROSWELL (N.M.. July 8. – (AP) – The army air forces here today announced a flying disc has been found a ranch near Roswell and is in possession of the army. Lieutenant Warren Haught [sic], public information officer of the Roswell Army Air Field, announced the find had bee[n] made “sometime last week” and had been turned over to the air field through cooperation of the sheriff’s office.
  • Higher Headquarters
  • “It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned” by Major Jess. A. Marcell [sic] of the 409th Bomb Group Intelligence office in Roswell “to higher headquarters.”
  • The army gave no other details.
  • Haught’s [sic] statement:
  • “The many rumors regarding the flying discs became a reality yesterday when the Intelligence office of the 409th (atomic) Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.
  • “The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell some time last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such timas he was able to contact the sheriff’s officem who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence office.
  • Inspected at Roswell
  • “Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.
  • The rancher’s name and the location of his place were withheld.
  • George Walsh of radio station KSWS which provided first news of the announcement said only Major Marcel, Colonel W. H. Blanchard, commanding officer at Roswell, and the rancher had seen the object here.
  • The sheriff, Walsh reported, upon receiving word from the rancher went immediately to the intelligence officer at Roswell Field.

Part 2: The US Army Takes Control (of the Narrative)

8 July 1947 (Tuesday) – second part

• Mack Brazel is brought in by the US Army, and interviewed at length
• Brazel (accompanied by MPs) gets marched round for a second interview with Frank Joyce.
• Brazel now tells Joyce a completely different story about what happened (S&R):
  • Joyce: “The story is different, especially about the little green men.” Brazel: “Only they weren’t green.“
• Brazel is detained by the US Army for several days, and given an Army physical (WTR p.41)
• The US Army takes possession of the tape recording made by Walt Whitmore
• At ~4.30pm Central Standard Time (CST), General Roger Ramey (the Eighth Air Force commander and Blanchard’s supervising officer) gives his own press release. (WTR pp.40-41)
  • This lays out the basic Roswell ‘narrative’ that the Army will use going forward

9 July 1947 (Wednesday)

• Roswell Daily Record, July 9 1947, “Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer”
  • Ramey Says Excitement is Not Justified
  • General Ramey Says Disk is Weather Balloon
  • Fort Worth, Texas, July 9 (AP) — An examination by the army revealed last night that mysterious objects found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was a harmless high-altitude weather balloon — not a grounded flying disk. Excitement was high until Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commander of the Eighth air forces with headquarters here cleared up the mystery.
  • The bundle of tinfoil, broken wood beams and rubber remnants of a balloon were sent here yesterday by army air transport in the wake of reports that it was a flying disk.
  • But the general said the objects were the crushed remains of a ray wind [sic, Rawin] target used to determine the direction and velocity of winds at high altitudes.
  • Warrant Officer Irving Newton, forecaster at the army air forces weather station here said, “we use them because they go much higher than the eye can see.”
  • The weather balloon was found several days ago near the center of New Mexico by Rancher W. W. Brazel. He said he didn’t think much about it until he went into Corona, N. M., last Saturday and heard the flying disk reports.
  • He returned to his ranch, 85 miles northwest of Roswell, and recovered the wreckage of the balloon, which he had placed under some brush.
  • Then Brazel hurried back to Roswell, where he reported his find to the sheriff’s office.
  • The sheriff called the Roswell air field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, 509th bomb group intelligence officer was assigned to the case.
  • Col. William H. Blanchard, commanding officer of the bomb group, reported the find to General Ramey and the object was flown immediately to the army air field here.
  • Ramey went on the air here last night to announce the New Mexico discovery was not a flying disk.
  • Newton said that when rigged up, the instrument “looks like a six-pointed star, is silvery in appearance and rises in the air like a kite.”
  • In Roswell, the discovery set off a flurry of excitement.
  • Sheriff George Wilcox’s telephone lines were jammed. Three calls came from England, one of them from The London Daily Mail, he said.
  • A public relations officer here said the balloon was in his office “and it’ll probably stay right there.”
  • Newton, who made the examination, said some 80 weather stations in the U.S. were using that type of balloon and that it could have come from any of them.
  • He said he had sent up identical balloons during the invasion of Okinawa to determine ballistics information for heavy guns.
    
• Roswell Daily Record Chronicle, July 9 1947
  • W.W. Brazel, 48, Lincoln county rancher living 30 miles south east of Corona, today told his story of finding what the army at first described as a flying disk, but the publicity which attended his find caused him to add that if he ever found anything short of a bomb he sure wasn’t going to say anything about it.
  • Brazel was brought here late yesterday by W.E. Whitmore, of radio station KGFL, had his picture taken and gave an interview to the Record and Jason Kellahin, sent here from the Albuquerque bureau of the Associated Press to cover the story. The picture he posed for was sent out over the AP telephoto wire sending machine specially set up in the Record office by R. D. Adair, AP wire chief sent here for the sole purpose of getting out the picture and that of sheriff George Wilcox, to whom Brazel originally gave the information of his find.
  • Brazel related that on June 14 he and 8-year-old son, Vernon were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up on rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.
  • At the time Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon, and a daughter Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris.
  • The next day he first heard about the flying disks, and he wondered if what he had found might be the remnants of one of these.
  • Monday he came to town to sell some wool and while here he went to see sheriff George Wilcox and “whispered kinda confidential like” that he might have found a flying disk.
  • Wilcox got in touch with the Roswell Army Air Field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel and a man in plain clothes accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the pieces of the “disk” and went to his home to try to reconstruct it.
  • According to Brazel they simply could not reconstruct it at all. They tried to make a kite out of it, but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.
  • Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell and that was the last he heard of it until the story broke that he had found a flying disk.
  • Brazel said that he did not see it fall from the sky and did not see it before it was torn up, so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he thought it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.
  • When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.
  • There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil.
  • There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction.
  • No strings or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.
  • Brazel said that he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these.
  • “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon,” he said. “But if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.”

Part 3: What ~Didn’t~ Happen

Schmitt and Randle‘s (1989) “Roswell, July 9, 1947” lays out numerous ways in which the US Army’s (Part 2) account was not only different from the (Part 1) account, but also manifestly false. They point out:

• The suggested date of the incident (14th June 1947) was wrong
• Brazel was alone at the ranch
• Brazel did not go to the site with his son Vernon
• The description of the debris changed
• The lettering on the debris did not look like English letters at all
• New details (such as the “flowered paper tape […] bearing the initials D.P.“) got added
• Brazel did not go to Roswell to sell wool on the Sunday
• Brazel did not try to make a kite from the debris

For an event which the US Army clearly wanted to downplay, it seems as though an awful lot of things they wanted people to think did happen didn’t happen.

In fact, I’d contend that S&R’s assessment that the US Army replaced the Part 1 narrative with its own (entirely false) Part 2 narrative has become an axiom of modern Roswell Incident research. And yet all subsequent US Army and US Air Force accounts rely completely on the Part 2 account.

One Event, Multiple Cover Stories

S&R think that “the [July 9th] article is the result of a cover story in the making. It is filled with lies that first hand testimony has recently exposed.” (p.23) And while I think this is essentially correct, I’d add that there actually appear to be not just one but multiple cover stories at play here.

Firstly, S&R describe (p.6) a superficially-similar story from Circleville OH: “On July 5, 1947, Sherman Campbell found a strange object on his farm in Circleville, Ohio. The local sheriff identified it immediately as a weather balloon, and on July 6 there were pictures printed in papers around the country of Mrs. Campbell holding the kitelike structure.” Here’s a picture from Patrick Gross’s useful site, printed in the The Columbus Citizen, Columbus, Ohio, USA, on July 6, 1947:

So, the first cover story would simply appear to be: ‘it was a kite-like weather balloon, like the ones in Circleville that had been in the news in the previous few days‘. (They didn’t mention Rawin at first, but that is what this first cover story seems to have evolved into.)

But if you accept that, there must also have been a second cover story, one consistent with sliding the date backwards by more than a fortnight, and with the “flowered paper tape” that was added to the narrative. Neither of these was consistent with the first cover story, so why complicate things?

My own belief is that one of the first things the US Army people did was check to see if the debris in the field found by Mack Brazel might have been from (their own) Project Mogul. And then when they found it wasn’t, I believe that they planted details to make it look as though it might have been. Either way, I think it’s clear that they spoke with someone on the Project Mogul team (perhaps even Charlie Moore, why not?), and that was where the flowered paper tape and the earlier date came from.

If that’s right, then the second cover story in the US Army’s evolving smorgasbord of cover stories was: ‘it was a Project Mogul high-altitude balloon‘. Of course, it wasn’t that at all, but here we are.

So, years later, when Charlie Moore is looking at the US Army’s Part 2 version of events, he can say – hand on heart – that it looks like a Project Mogul balloon (because of the planted flower tape detail) and the timing is kind of consistent with one of the missing Project Mogul balloons (because of the planted date shift). But this is, of course, fake logic, because the whole lot is built not on the (real) Part 1 narrative but instead on the (fake) Part 2 narrative.

When airship-obsessive Vice Admiral Charles Rosendahl retired in November 1946, the US Navy looked around for a suitable successor to run NAS Lakehurst, the Navy’s top airship (and airship R&D) site. yet the person they appointed was perhaps a surprise to some. This was T. G. W. ‘Tex’ Settle, who – despite his obvious qualifications for the job – had left the airship side of the Navy some years before, complaining loudly about political infighting. The top role Settle now took on at Lakehurst was known as CNATE, and his immediate boss at the Office of Naval Research was Commander George Hoover. [Image from here, p.18, 1976]

Why is George Hoover relevant? Well… given that the capsule reportedly found at Roswell site #2 would have needed a huge balloon to lift, and that the only organisation that had made metalclad LTA (“Lighter Than Air”) in the preceding 25 years was the US Navy, I’ve been looking veeeerrrrry carefully at what Tex Settle was doing as CNATE in the first half of 1947. (Bad news: Settle hated paperwork, so the archives don’t have even 1% as much for him as for Charles Rosendahl, who kept it all, bless him.) This especially includes all the meetings relating to Jean Piccard’s Project Helios as it slowly fell apart during that period.

So, as a corollary, I was obviously also very interested in what Settle’s boss George Hoover was doing back then, and what he had to say or think about what was going on. (Though I wasn’t able to get a copy of the memoirs that he was composing when he retired, sadly). And so I was fascinated when I found a 2010 page on Anthony Bragalia’s website that describes what Hoover reportedly told researcher William J. Birnes about the Roswell Incident.

What Did He Say, What Did He Say?

Look, I’ll just cut [to the chase] and paste Bragalia’s bullet-points summarising what George Hoover told Birnes (and Hoover’s opinions on the subject, needless to say, are not mine, not at all):

• UFOs are not the “biggest secret” – it is the entities behind them that was of most concern
• Roswell was in fact a crash event of “visitors from somewhere else”
• The entities were “not so much interplanetary as much as they were literally also time travelers.” They are extra-temporal.
• The visitors are clearly “from the future.” There is reason to believe that they may even be “us” from a future Earth.
• These “future humans” have the ability to “manipulate reality around us”
• The government feared the intentions and abilities of the “visitors”
• These visitors are able to use the power of consciousness in extraordinary ways to morph reality
• We human beings are far more powerful in potential than we ever dreamed that we are. We don’t yet comprehend our extraordinary future capabilities.
• The visitors remain at essence, though “corporeal” and “physical” – and secret attempts at reverse-engineering the visitor’s crash material were made
• Incredibly, Hoover admitted that he himself was engaged in such technology transfer as a Naval Intelligence Officer with Top Secret clearances

What Does It Mean, What Does It Mean?

Now, if you are – like Bragalia – an avid UFOlogist, I’m sure this is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear coming from the mouth of someone well-respected & high-up in the US military. From the above, it would appear that at least some people in the US military absolutely believe the Roswell wreckage is wildly-advanced alien stuff, and that it has been trying to reverse engineer it. This is essentially Bragalia’s entire thesis, his entire research programme: for decades, he has particularly focused on the “memory metal”-like aspects of the thin metallic debris. (There’s a good summary of Bragalia’s thoughts on this in Appendix IV of “Witness to Roswell” (2009), pp. 275-284.)

If, however, you are like me, trying to understand the dynamics within NAS Lakehurst in 1947 (and also not believing a single word about Roswell if it’s adjacent to the word ‘alien’), it has an entirely different set of meanings.

So… What Do You Think This Actually Means, Nick?

For me, the second most interesting thing here is that Commander George Hoover seems to have got himself absolutely tangled trying to reconcile all the different things about Roswell.

This can only mean (I’m pretty sure) that, when looking at the Roswell Incident from the inside of the military ‘bubble’, it would appear that the physical evidence they have access to (but we don’t) suggests that it’s both very human and very alien all at the same time.

But how can both be true at the same time? Hoover fast-forwards past the mere mundanities of the present-day, and speculates whether the (much-too-human-like) so-called ‘aliens’ might in fact be humans from the future. It appears that Hoover believed this cleverly resolved some of the (otherwise intractable) internal contradictions with the evidence, or else he wouldn’t have said it. But to be absolutely clear, the technical modern description of this is, of course, a crock of <insert word here>.

To be fair, I would agree with Hoover that there are definitely players involved in the Roswell Incident who have the ability to “manipulate reality around us“. But these are not LGM in Basement Level 27 of Area 51 using their telepathy to beat Bob Lazar at poker, but the plucky Army PsyOps people, messing with everyone’s minds since 1947, bless ’em all.

But for me, the most interesting thing of all here is simply that if someone had used US Navy metalclad test balloons in the first half of 1947, the ONR’s Commander George Hoover didn’t have the faintest idea about it. Because it would appear that he absolutely bought into the US Army’s whole wobbly ‘crashed alien craft‘ story, hook, line and s[t]inker. It seems that if something secretive was going on in Lakehurst during that period, details of it never really wafted upwards of Tex Settle’s desk.

Finally, I should add: people often have this romantic view about the military, that it’s somehow a giant Borg mind with pure top-down lines of command, and that there are therefore no secrets. Well… sorry, but no. Back then, once you got to a certain level, it was pure political shenanigans, with everyone carving out little empires of control and doing deals with what limited power and control that they had. Settle certainly knew this (his 1939 memo on the US Navy LTA makes it clear): but perhaps, when push came to shove and the right opportunity came in front of him, he wasn’t actually above doing exactly that himself.

Witness accounts indicate that the 1947 Roswell Incident was spread across three separate sites:

• #1: The debris field site – lots of thin metallic debris
• #2: The crashed craft site – a Volkswagen Beetle-sized ‘alien’ capsule + dying little people
• #3: The Dee Proctor site – ummmmm, Mack Brazel found “something” here

Sites #1 & #3 were fairly close together on the J. B. Foster ranch (where Mack Brazel worked as the ranch supervisor), while site #2 was several miles east-southeast of them. I have seen no indication whatsoever that Mack Brazel went to site #2 (several sources say explicitly that he never went there).

As has been extensively described in the literature, site #1 contained nothing more than a large scattering of curious metallic debris, a burned section of land, and a scraped trail. (For decades, it was widely presumed / believed that the supposedly alien craft ‘skipped’ off the ground at site #1, before supposedly crashing at site #2, which is why you may occasionally still see this referred to as the “skip site“.)

Honestly, there was nothing much physically on site #1 that might cause anyone to lose a great deal of sleep, except possibly a cipher mysteries blogger trying to cross-reference all the stories of alien writing on the debris found there. So I find it hard to believe that site #1 was the cause of Mack Brazel’s belief.

Take away sites #1 and #2, then, and you’re left with site #3. Even today, nobody wants to talk about site #3, but in many ways this is the most intriguing of the three. What on earth did Mack Brazel see at site #3 that caused him and his family decades of anguish?

The Obviously Missing Next Paragraph

This is the point where an AI would insert a load of eye-pleasingly plausible nonsense, because there’s such a gigantic hole in every single account here that it simply begs to be filled. But the simple truth is: nobody knows what was at site #3.

Pretty much all UFO researchers have had a shot at filling this gap. One of the most well-used attempts asserts that Brazel was so traumatised by his encounters with the military (Brazel’s family was living in Tularosa at the time, and he spent several days detained on the Army camp in what must have felt like a prison) that he somehow ended up convinced that the whole thing was some alien craft phenomenon.

But read that back again: none of it is an actual explanation: rather, it explains away what happened, and without proof or evidence. And I’d add that I think most other attempts people have made here quickly cross the line into Explain-Away-Land, somewhere I try to avoid where possible.

The only non-explain-away account I can see here is to wonder whether it was in fact the “something” that Brazel found at site #3 (as Dee Proctor told his mother) that convinced him that aliens were involved. And that’s still far more of a question than an answer.

Having said that, when Brazel went back (with a military escort) to talk with Frank Joyce at KGFL, at the end of the interview the journalist light-heartedly referred to “little green men”. As the famous story goes, Brazel angrily muttered “They weren’t green!”

So riddle me this: why did Brazel say that if he hadn’t been to the crash site (site #2)?

It’s easy to explain away a heap of lightweight debris in a scraggy field in the middle of nowhere as, oh, it’s just a weather balloon (as the US Army tried in 1947) or possibly as oh, it’s just a Project Mogul balloon (as they also tried, decades later), even if the resemblance was only superficial at best. But, as Walter Haut’s affidavit makes clear (Witness To Roswell (2009), p.285), the task was to explain away that, rather than draw attention to the other thing:

“Gen. Ramey proposed a plan which I believe originated with his bosses at the pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location.”

To be honest, General Ramey’s diversionary plan has been doggedly followed for decades, to what looks like resounding success. Moreover, the ‘alien capsule’ crash site side of the whole Roswell narrative has been so comprehensively rubbished and yet so inflated with unattributed / confabulated accounts all at the same time that onlookers can’t figure out which mad extreme to believe; and so typically end up believing neither. Tongue only slightly in cheek, it would be easy to trace the roots of corrosive modern political discourse back to this metallic capsule.

The Cheese and the Worms

Was the Roswell Incident a real thing, or is it no more than a story that people with nothing better to do with their time (*cough*) like to garnish a historical nothingburger with? It seems that half of the academic papers on the Roswell Incident now treat it simply as a ‘modern American folk fable’, rather than a bitterly contentious event wrapped by a hundred layers of partisan spin and misinformation. One might argue that the one thing that definitely died that day in 1947 was any kind of respect for the truth.

As an aside, Carlo Ginzburg’s fascinating book “The Cheese and the Worms” (1976) lays out how a sixteenth century Friuli miller called Domenico Scandella went on trial for his heretical belief:

I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.

But frankly, the notion that an otherwise-empty rounded-end aluminium cylinder with a bunch of dying tiny ‘aliens’ in it – modern-day ‘angels’ who appeared ex nihilo, like worms in Scandello’s cheese – just appeared North of Roswell NM surely seems every bit as ludicrous here in the 21st century. And yet people have been feasting on this whole poisoned cheese ball for decades now. But… I digress.

The Problems with the Roswell ‘Capsule’

Anyhoo, if you accept the witness statements on the ‘alien’ capsule to any degree, it seems hard not to at least accept that something ended up in the scrubby ranchland outside Roswell. But if you think a balloon carried the (non-alien) capsule there, then you rapidly run into a whole load of issues… with the capsule itself, that is:

• No CO2 scrubbing (e.g. soda-lime), no heating (e.g. cold management)

Given that the sealed capsule had no CO2 scrubbing, the CO2 levels inside would have quickly climbed, causing dizziness, loss of consciousness, and death. If the capsule was (as asserted) roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, my back-of-envelope calculations imply the occupants could have had no more than five hours at most (and highly unpleasant ones at that) before they started dying. Your mileage may vary.

• No life support, no water, no food

Even if some of the occupants did manage to live (and there was talk of most of them ending up dead), there was no reported sign that their lives were really being supported in any way. Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to conclude that their survival was a priority in any way to those behind it all.

• No engine, no energy, no motive power, no controls, no anything

It was a “vessel” only in the sense that a flimsy plastic flower pot is a vessel, just strong enough for you to get your pansies home from the garden centre. Bear in mind that the few previous stratospheric gondolas all had complicated mechanisms to allow the balloonist inside the gondola to interact with the balloon above: but I believe there was no obvious sign of that here. As a corollary, it would seem that if there was a balloonist / pilot involved in this, they were outside this capsule, not inside it.

• No parachute, no cushioning, no heat shields, and dropped from a low height

The capsule was dinged, but it wasn’t so wrecked that its basic shape was unrecognisable. So: my best guess is that it was dropped from a low height (say, ten to twenty feet?), but not really any higher.

• If the capsule was lifted by a balloon, that would have needed to be a sizeable balloon

Project Mogul used trains of helium balloons, before moving to Helios-style clusters of helium balloons: and that was for a relatively small payload. (Trying to achieve constant-altitude flights, which was the point of that missions.) If this capsule had been intended to get to any height at all, it would have needed to be carried by a sizeable balloon: and that was something way beyond Project Mogul’s paygrade.

• Not a civilian balloon

In 1947, there wasn’t any civilian ballooning in America. Don Piccard had (famously) taken his balloon pilot’s licence in Feb 1947 using a captured Japanese Fu-Go balloon held at NAS Lakehurst, but the wave of non-military ballooning he later inspired and drove was still many years away. And even Charles Moore’s improvised balloon trip under a polyethylene balloon still hadn’t happened yet.

Nick’s Thoughts On All This

In some ways, using a sizeable, metalclad, US Navy balloon as the core of explaining what happened here might seem to be problematic, because that would imply that this inhumanity was deliberate. Had a truly horrible suspension of ethics happened here? Were the people (Americans, surely?) behind all this no better than the Nazi physicians who were (as of mid-1947) being tried at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial?

Even if you disagree with many of Nick Redfern’s “Body Snatchers in the Desert” details, this is essentially the dark heart of his argument: that the whole point of the Roswell ‘alien’ story was to divert everyone’s attention towards the curious metallic balloon debris in the New Mexico scrubland, and away from the inhumanity and (what you’d have to say looks a lot like) human experimentation going on in the capsule.

My current opinion – which may change, of course – is that I suspect the experiments were constructed aiming more for deniability than for deliberate mythopoiesis. If the capsule were to be discovered (as indeed it was), I think the basic plan was for it to be an unlabelled mystery (i.e. one without any external reference points), and perhaps even a mystery that in the end vaguely pointed more towards Japan than, say, Oak Ridge. But the US Army wasn’t in on that whole insider gag, and the idea that this was in fact an “alien spaceship” took hold, with grotesque (and far-reaching) consequences. Such as the Netflix series.

In many ways, ‘aliens‘ was the one story pretty much everyone wanted to be true here. Don’t you think?

Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt’s “Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-up” (2009) is, as you’d expect from the title, a curated collection of the many, many statements they and others have elicited from people who were, in one way or another, witness to the Roswell Incident.

Today I thought I’d bring all those witness fragments that relate to the (widely believed to be) ‘alien’ capsule together in one place, because jumping between them all in my notes was becoming quite tiresome. I’ve also tried to arrange them in a kind of logical sequence, following the capsule as it was taken from the ‘crash site’ just north of Roswell NM to the Army base on the south side of town.

Rolland Menagh, as reported by Rolland Menagh Jr in 2005 – Witness to Roswell, p.106

My father was an MP who guarded the UFO crash site north of Roswell. He saw the ship, which he described as being round or egg-shaped and seamless.

Edward Harrison – Witness to Roswell, p.103

“And I say, “How come they have an 18-wheeler out there haulin’ a balloon around?””

James W. Storm – Witness to Roswell, p.107

After a few minutes, a “snub-nosed tractor and lowboy flat trailer showed up.” On the back of the lowboy was a tarp that was covering “a saucer part so big (that) it was covered.” The lowboy continued towards Highway #285, which runs north to south through the centre of Roswell, where it becomes Main Street.

Richard Talbert – Witness to Roswell, pp. 105

“The low-boy had a tarp on it, and there was something under the tarp. I don’t recall now how I did it, but I was able to get a quick look under the tarp. I think it must not have been securely tied down on one end, or it just came loose, and it flapped up briefly as it went past me. Anyway, I saw a silver, oval-shaped something that was approximately 4 to 5 feet wide by about 12 feet long and 5 to 7 feet high. It had a dome on it, but it was damaged because it was cut off at one end.”

Paul McFerrin – Witness to Roswell, p. 105

“We were walking down Main Street when we saw this big, military flatbed transporting an egg-shaped object through town, obviously heading for the base. The flatbed trailer had a tarp over the object but you could pretty much tell what shape the object underneath was.”

Jobie MacPherson – Witness to Roswell, pp. 105-106

“It was coming from the north heading toward the base and went right past me. Jeeps and a flatbed truck. I could see mangled metal sticking out on the flatbed and something else that had a conical shape to it, like a pod.”

Earl V. Fulford – Witness to Roswell, pp. 110-111

When the rig got close enough, Fulford could see that it was pulling a lowboy trailer, and that the lowboy was carrying something under a tarp that was “about the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle”

Walter G. Haut (affidavit) – Witness to Roswell, p.286

“It was approx. 12-15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section or landing gear was visible.”

Julie Shuster

“At one point I asked [Haut] about the size, and he said the craft was about 25 feet in diameter.”

Tom Carey

“The ship which [Haut] described was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, more of an egg-shaped object […] And when asked point blank what he believed it was that he had seen, without hesitation he’d say, ‘It was not from this Earth, it was something manufactured off this Earth.’”

George Newling – Witness to Roswell, pp.118-119

“It was shaped like a ‘tear-drop’ and slightly damaged, but still intact. It appeared to be metallic and grayish in color, about 4 to 6 feet high and 10 to 12 feet long, and it had what appeared to be small, hexagonal cells or plates running the length of it on what I assumed was its underside.”

Bill Ennis – Witness to Roswell, p. 118

“It was a spaceship. After all these years, I still don’t know how that ship flew. There was no engine! Before I go, I’d like to know.”

Seeing an advert on the side of a bus for the film “Nuremberg” yesterday reminded me of an aspect of Nick Redfern’s “Body Snatchers in the Desert”. There, Redfern put forward an (occasionally) sketchy but (definitely) alien-free account of the Roswell Incident. In 2017, he described his book as “the Roswell-themed story that UFOlogy hates and which, back in 2005, made [him] public enemy number one“.

For Redfern, 1947 was a key moment in history, not so much because of the main Nuremberg trials (which had finished in late 1946), but because of the Doctors’ Trial, which ran from December 1946 to August 1947. Twenty physicians and three SS officials were charged for their involvement in:

• Aktion T4 – ‘involuntary euthanasia’ [i.e. mass murder] of disabled and mentally handicapped people
• Nazi human experimentation – 15,000 documented victims, though the real total was much higher

Seven were hanged, five got life imprisonment, four got prison sentences, and seven were acquitted.

Redfern, thanks to his informant “The Black Widow”, built up an account of Roswell where the ‘little aliens‘ in the aluminium capsule were in fact handicapped Japanese people (with progeria, etc). And so in mid-1947, the shadow of Nuremberg’s Doctors’ Trial hung heavily (he believed) over all the people involved in these human experiments that were all too similar to that which those Nazi doctors were very publicly on trial for.

Radiation Exposure and Cosmic Rays

The obvious question: what on earth was so important about balloon experiments circa 1947 that American biophysics researchers would even consider Nazi-style human experimentation as an option, let alone actually doing it? For the Black Widow, this was all about Oak Ridge’s “research into understanding high-altitude flight and exposure on the human body for the military [and] how that tied into plans NEPA would have to one day build nuclear aircraft that would be able to fly at [very] high altitudes […] for long periods.” (Body Snatchers, p.7)

One of the US military’s key strategic fears 1945-1950 was to do with cosmic rays: the concern (which we now know to be hugely exaggerated) was that people working in the stratosphere for extended periods might just suddently die from exposure to (what were thought to be) violently powerful cosmic rays. And so – the argument runs – there were medical committees in 1946-1947 who were trying to get an answer to this problem by any means possible. And if that involved what we would consider unethical means? They apparently didn’t care. Until the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial forced them to care.

Redfern (and indeed the Black Widow) frames this in terms of Operation Paperclip, i.e. that it was all the fault of those nasty German and Japanese scientists swooshed into America in the post-WWII mayhem, bringing their unethical research values in with them. But to be fair, I’m currently looking at the lists of people on medical committees (e.g. the AEC’s ABRC), and I’m honestly not seeing any Paperclippers there. The uncomfortable truth? Back then, it wasn’t necessary to be a Nazi or a member of Unit 731 to have extraordinarily suspect ethical values, if you thought that would ‘get the job done‘.

David DeVorkin and Project Helios

With this whole highly politicised (I nearly typed “highly charged“) cosmic ray situation in mind, I’m now re-reading David DeVorkin’s “The Race to the Stratosphere”: this covers high-altitude scientific ballooning either side of WWII, and (archivally) is exceptionally strong on the bodies and committees that collectively defined what science would get funded (and so what Science would become) post-WWII.

To my mind, these committees had perceived Project Helios as the knight in shining armour that would help get the stratospheric data they needed to resolve their issues and strategic fears. So it was extremely awkward for them all when that project stumbled, faltered, and got cancelled in the first few months of 1947. Jean Piccard had proved to be a terrible project principal, and his Great Big Plan to get people (to be honest, mainly him and his wife) to the stratosphere using his plastic balloon clusters had been exposed as just a little bit too hopeful for the ONR. So the US Navy kicked Piccard out, and subsequently split Project Helios into an unmanned half (Skyhook) and a manned half (Project Manhigh with Otto Winzen).

More generally, DeVorkin’s big idea is that manned scientific ballooning in the 1930s was a lot like manned rocket flight in the 1960s: and I think there’s a lot to like about this conceptual framework. But… to be honest, I’m now far from sure that the situation in the 1930s (for example, with cosmic rays) is an accurate guide to the situation in the later 1940s. Which is why I’m now going to re-read his book really carefully, and then move onto his “Science with a Vengeance” (which I only found out about a few days ago).

To move this whole research thread forward, The Only Way Is Ethics…

As has probably been abundantly clear for some time, I’m in the (dwindlingly small, possibly even only one member strong) group of people who suspect that the metallic debris in the Roswell Incident debris field (site 1) that looked like exploded metallic balloon envelope debris was in fact exploded metallic balloon envelope debris. I know, I know, it sounds crazy but that’s how it looks from here.

To be clear, the only people making metallic floaty envelopes at all was the US Navy. Its ZMC-2 metal-clad airship flew 752 flights between its launch in 1929 and retirement in 1941. So by 1947, the Navy hadn’t actually built or commissioned a metal-clad airship in nearly twenty years. Hence, viewing the Roswell debris as a metal-clad balloon blowing up might possibly seem a little stretched.

However, people had been calling for more metalclads for many years. Even after WWII, airship-obsessed Vice Admiral Charles “Rosy” Rosendahl was again calling for metalclad airships (SNAFU p.173 “The third phase should be revival of investigation into the very promising “metalclad” design […]”). Others still had proposed building even bigger metalclads, operating more like flying aircraft carriers than airships. All the same, without grinding through the (immense) Rosendahl archive, it’s hard to know exactly what was going on back then (he retired on 1st November 1946). A nice piece of Rosendahl trivia is that he was a member of ye Anciente and Secret Order of Quiet Birdmen.

If the exploding metallic balloon at Roswell was a US Navy exploding metallic balloon, then what happened to the US Navy balloonist? That is a question I’ve tackled in several other posts here, and there willI be more in posts to come. But today’s related question is: what was the balloonist wearing?

My belief is that the balloon was originally intended to fly high up, though this plan was scuppered by a series of miscalculations of the kind people make when they’re trying to do stuff covertly (and so don’t check their workings with people who would be able to point out the obvious errors).

As such, I believe the US Navy balloonist would have needed to be wearing some kind of pressure suit. But what was the state of the art in pressure suits back then?

WWII full-pressure suits

Between 1941 and 1943, John D. Akerman at the Strato Equipment Company of Minneapolis made a series of pressure suits for the US Army (remember that the Air Force was still part of the US Army then). However, early models were unpromising (“[…] suits were cumbersome to don and doff, it was nearly impossible to bend at the waist when the suits were inflated, and the helmets were uncomfortable to wear for long periods.” (“Dressing for Altitude“, pp. 46-47). Other suits were submitted by Goodyear and US Rubber as part of the same project.

One of the more promising ones was the Goodrich XH-5: “The suit was made of laminated rubberized fabric, and ball-bearing joints facilitated mobility at the elbows and knees. A Goodrich-designed self-sealing zipper ran from the crotch to the neck ring. Large, rounded bellows formed the arms and legs to improve mobility, leading to it being called the tomato-worm suit.” (DfA, p.56).

Interestingly, “[d]uring the summer of 1943, the U.S. Navy tested several of the Army pressure suits at the Naval Air Crew Equipment Laboratory in Philadelphia. LCDR Donald W. Gressly was the flight surgeon in charge, assisted by mechanical engineer L.W. Meakin ” (DfA p.60). One of these was an Akerman BABM suit, which seems to have been the BABM-18 (DfA p.62):

The suit was made of two layers of rubberized fabric, operated at 1.5 psi, and consisted of five pieces: an upper torso, trousers, a pair of gloves, and a helmet. Metal connecting rings at the neck, waist, and wrists secured the pieces together. There were leather straps running from the waist ring over the shoulders to
prevent rising and from the waist to the crotch to prevent elongation. A pocket under each armpit creased by thin wire aided mobility for the arms. Straps across the stomach and thighs provide breaking points in the inflated fabric for forward bending and sitting. Three clamps attached the gloves to a rubber gasket, and a standard Army harness and parachute was worn over the suit. There were five zippers on each suit: one 11-inch zipper on each side, one 11-inch zipper on the trouser at the waistline, one 11-inch zipper on the chest of the torso, and one 11-inch zipper on the back of the torso. In theory, flaps on the inner side of each zipper provided an airtight seal.

Ultimately, the US Army didn’t think that any of the suits that had been submitted were good enough to use. Similarly, the US Navy researchers concluded that they were “too heavy, uncomfortable, and not sufficiently ventilated to remove perspiration. Seemingly ignoring the state of the art in airtight fabrics, the Navy researchers believed any pressure suit should be made of a lightweight fabric, although they noted that the General Electric and Akerman suits, which used such fabric, tore too easily under pressure.” (DfA, pp. 67-68).

Note: DfA gives two references that I’ll need to track down:

• James V. Correale, “The Lightweight Full-Pressure Suit System of the U.S. Navy”, Air Crew Equipment Branch, Naval Air Material Center Philadelphia, 1959.
• “Navy’s Space Suit” Naval Aviation News, NavAer No. 00-75R-3, April 1953; “Developmental History of the Aviator’s Full-Pressure Suit in the U.S. Navy.”

The Strato Model 7

In 1947, the only US Navy full-pressure suit was the Strato Model 7, commissioned in 1946 from John D. Akerman under contract NOa(s)-8192. (DfA p.179) “The one-piece, tight-fitting garment covered the entire body except the face, which was covered by a detachable “goggle-mask.” [..] Two layers of nylon cloth provided protection for the neoprene sandwiched between them against local abrasions.” (DfA pp.179-180)

Five-finger gloves (as opposed to mittens) had zippers along the top to permit donning and doffing. The Model 7 glove used a custom zipper that was “tedious to close,” [..]. There was a neoprene diaphragm at the intersection of the glove and sleeve that allowed the suit to remain pressurized when the glove was removed. The gloves had separate ventilation and pressurization channels to provide comfort even when the suit was not pressurized.

The narrow-neck, close-fitting helmet covered the entire head and ears and was fabricated of the same material as the suit. Ventilation and pressurization of the helmet was through three flat, noncollapsible conduits that discharged air just above the ears and into the goggles. “Donuts” made of soft sponge rubber and chamois cloth protected the ears. The goggle-mask consisted of standard Navy goggles and
a pressure-breathing mask integrated into a single unit.

However, only a single Strato Model 7 was ever delivered to the US Navy, to fit “a very large man”.

It’s possible that the US Navy’s (single) Strato Model 7 was used, but all the same, I’d have to concede that the timing was extremely tight for this to have been used in July 1947. I’ll have to dig up the report from Akerman dated November 1947 and read more:

• Vernon G. Townsend, Vice President and John D. Akerman, Consultant, “Report on U.S. Navy Pressure Suit, Model 7, on Contract NOa(s) 8192,” November 15, 1947.

Note also that NARA has a record in Record Group 342 called “Flying Clothing – Strato Equipment Co.“, which I believe probably covers 1946-1947 US Navy correspondence with Strato (even though that’s an Air Force archival reference). I also suspect that David Clark Company may have more details.

Everyone and their alien dog has heard of the first Roswell site, the ‘thin metallic debris’ field. Many have also heard of the second Roswell site, the ‘metallic alien craft’ / ‘tiny dead aliens’ site. But who knows about the alleged third Roswell site, the “Dee Proctor site”? What evidence is there that this third site was a genuine thing, and not just something concocted by mad-eyed alien conspiracy theorists to sell books?

Timothy “Dee” Proctor

I’ve recently been reading “The Children of Roswell” (2016) by Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt, two prolific (and non-mad-eyed) Roswell researchers who frequently focus on witness testimony. The book’s Chapter One (“This Is Where Mack Found Something“) focuses on the young boy who accompanied Mack Brazel on his rounds of the J. B. Foster Ranch early on 3rd July 1947. This boy was not (as is often reported) Brazel’s 8-year-old son Vernon, but was instead 7-year-old Timothy “Dee” Proctor, the third son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel’s nearest neighbours. (Carey and Schmitt say that “the little Proctor boy eagerly worked for a mere 25 cents per day“, basically living the ‘cowboy dream’ while school was out for the summer.)

For decades (Carey and Schmitt say), Dee refused to talk about what he had seen that day, until finally in 1994 he took his mother Loretta to show her something… interesting. Initially, Dee drove her towards the Foster Ranch along the old Hines Draw Road, roughly three miles from the famous first site. But Dee then carried on past the road that led to the old windmill (by the first ‘Roswell Incident’ site): and, at the fork at the end where the left road leads off to the ranch, he instead turned right towards the “twin (wind)mills”.

Carey and Schmitt: “Dee headed towards the sheep pen, stepped from the truck, unwrapped the chain securing the gate […]. After proceeding on seldom-used trails almost too faint to see, and 10 minutes more […], they came to another gate. From there, they drove into the next pasture and past the first of two bluffs, before swinging around and up and over before coming to a stop above the second bluff.“

This was the location where Dee Proctor reportedly said: “Mom, this is where Mack found something else.” (Carey and Schmitt’s italics). C&S continue: “Peering off to the west along the horizon, they both could see the single windmill on the eastern edge of the debris field, a couple of miles away.”

Juanita Sultemeier, other ranchers and Jeff Wells

Even though they call this site “The Dee Proctor site”, Carey and Schmitt tell how it was already known to them from their interview with Juanita Sultemeier, who had described bright-headlighted army trucks driving down the “twin mills” trail back in 1947. Other ranchers described having gone through the same two gates, and how Mack Brazel had discovered some kind of crash remains there. Jeff Wells, who had been the ranch supervisor back then, had additionally taken C&S to the same location.

Subsequently, when filming a BBC documentary with producer John Purdy in 1994, they also asked Loretta Proctor to direct them to the location she had previously described having gone to with Dee, and it was indeed the same place. Its location? “[Two and a half] miles east-southeast from the original site […]“, they say. C&S’s Chapter Fourteen mentions that other “little ranchers” visited this site with Dee Proctor: Mack Brazel’s son Vernon, and “boys with the last name of Edington and Wright”.

So, where exactly is it? Is the above enough information to help us do something sensible, you know, like actually find it on a map?

The location of the first site (the debris field)

Wikipedia gives the coordinates of the Roswell Incident debris field (site 1) as 33°57’01.0″N 105°18’51.0″W. On July 5th 2003, the Sci Fi Channel placed a stone marker on the site to commemorate the Roswell Incident (photo by Tom Carey): “In July of the year 1947 a craft of unknown origin spread debris over this site / Witnesses would report materials of an unearthly nature […]“

According to Reddit poster samarkhannor, the stone marker is located here, at 33°57’05.8″N 105°19’08.8″W. Additionally, the Bureau of Land Management gives the site coordinates as 33.952189, -105.331214, and says:

To visit the alleged UFO skip site, park at the Bureau of Land Management’s parking lot off Lincoln County Road B007, or Transwestern Road. The parking lot is about 78 miles from the BLM Roswell Field Office at 2909 W. 2nd St., Roswell. From the parking lot, hike about a mile to the east on BLM land. There is no signage to mark the site, but BLM personnel plan to install signs this fiscal year. There are no plans to make a road to the site, and visitors will have to hike. There is a road to the site, but private land blocks both the northern and southern entrances.

(They also offer a downloadable hiking map to help you get there, which I think is pretty cool.) To be fair, the BLM coordinates seem to be right beside the B007 road running North-South (so perhaps these are the coordinates of the Bureau’s “parking lot”?), and the other stone marker coordinates point to a location about a mile to the east from there, so I guess everything ties together pretty well here.

The location of the third site

Note that the Hines Draw Rd that appears on modern maps (e.g. for Richards Ranch LLC at 951 Hines Draw Rd, outside Capitan NM) seems somewhat shorter than “the old Hines Draw Road”. There’s a short section here, where the road running from East to West is the B024, which quickly turns into the B012:

And I also stumbled across a road section labelled “Hines Draw Rd” further west of there, at the other end of the B012:

From this, my best guess is that the old Hines Draw Road basically ran where the modern B012 road is, from just around Richards Ranch LLC to the bottom right of that sort-of four-way junction, before continuing North along the modern B014.

At the same time, given that that the third site is described as being roughly two and a half miles east-southeast from the debris field, we now have a reasonably good (though inexact) idea of where it is: 33.9365 N, 105.2744 W (or thereabouts). And even from this, we can see the B010 running less than a kilometre away:

And no, I don’t know what the thing on the left is, but it’s about 100m lengthways:

If all of this is basically correct, then I believe that Dee Proctor was (in modern terms) initially driving South along the B014 (there’s a small set of buildings along there marked “627”, was that where they lived?) towards the four-way junction. He then could have taken the first right onto the B001 to go East towards the first crash site (in a roundabout way); or he could have taken the first left to go towards (what is now the Richards) ranch; but he instead took the second right onto the B010, heading South. Go three miles along the B010 and you’re almost certainly fairly close to the site, though where the two bluffs and the two old mills are, I have no idea.

So this is by no means the last word on the matter, because there’s still plenty of guesswork in there, and I might easily have got some (or indeed all) of the above wrong. Please feel free to take the baton and see how far you can run with it!