Estimate of the Situation
The Roswell UFO Crash is on the Fast Track to Disclosure
The crash at Roswell in 1947 remains the original sin of the UFO cover-up. After years of denial and ridicule, confirmation is coming soon.
July 2022 marked the 75th anniversary of the Roswell crash and retrieval operation.
After more than seven decades, with hundreds of witnesses all telling essentially the same story of wreckage and cover-up, it’s time to admit the Roswell case is more likely than not a true story about a crashed vehicle. The witnesses tell a powerfully consistent story that what came down violently in the New Mexico desert in 1947 was not made by the United States or any other foreign power. That doesn’t mean we can say exactly who we came in contact with that day, only that it wasn’t us.
The case has been heavily classified since it was stuffed away into secrecy immediately after a press release and global coverage of a recovered flying disk. That long-term cover-up has been protected by the twin pillars of denial and ridicule.
The people who are still actively allowing this secret to remain in force know that it’s time to tell the truth about Roswell or face the consequences of continuing this outrageous and undemocratic cover-up. What lies were told and crimes committed to maintain the secrecy?
The idea that crash wreckage exists is actively being talked about by former government insiders like Harry Reid, Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon; investigative journalists Leslie Kean, George Knapp, Ralph Blumenthal, Jacques Vallee, and Ross Coulthart; and many others. If the U.S. has multiple vehicles in its possession as is being openly stated by some, it’s not much of a stretch to think that Roswell will turn out to be the original sin of the cover-up.
Roswell is on a fast track to investigation and de-classification. Change won’t wait much longer.
Roswell as the Original Sin of the UFO Cover-up
In July 1947, rancher Mac Brazel discovered a collection of strange debris scattered across his employer’s land southeast of Corona, New Mexico. He drove some of it into town, primarily to complain to the local Army base, thinking they had crashed one of their secret planes.
One of the first to investigate was Major Jesse Marcel who, as an intelligence officer, knew immediately this was not military property but something stranger. The Roswell Army Air Force base outside of town responded vigorously, cleaning up the rancher’s site, and another one. In addition to debris, they apparently found a craft and bodies at a second site.
Meantime, Colonel William Blanchard, base commander, instructed Lieutenant Walter Haut to release a hastily drafted press release describing the wreckage as a “flying disk.” The local paper headlined their own story with “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” Here’s that front page:
That news ricocheted around the world at record speed. After all, this was not even two weeks after Kenneth Arnold started the flying saucer craze with his sighting of nine objects flying at unbelievable speed in formation up in Washington State.
High-ranking generals in the Pentagon realized immediately the high-profile they were getting was a problem. They had something so important that if they handled it right they could win the Cold War with the Soviet Union outright. So they turned to the tactic that had helped them win the war against Hitler only a few years before. They lied, and created disinformation.
The statement was quickly retracted. Major Marcel was ordered to pose for reporters next to some tin foil and balsa wood. It was, they now said, a misidentified weather balloon. Take a moment to appreciate what’s going on in this classic photo.
Marcel knows that something incredible has taken place outside of town because he has seen the crash site with his own eyes and touched the wreckage with his own hands. For almost a day, it’s been breathtaking for Marcel knowing that the world is going to change dramatically, something he knows because his military bosses seem to be trying to level with the American people.
Then, within mere hours, the door slams shut hard. The policy is now denial and ridicule, and it comes straight down from Washington, D.C. Worse, Marcel gets chosen to be the visual messenger that takes it all back, to say sorry, our mistake, just a weather balloon, nothing to see here. This is particularly galling given that Roswell Army Air Base is the only nuclear bomber base in the U.S. arsenal at the time. These people out in the New Mexico desert of 1947 are trusted with nukes.
In this photo, Marcel realizes that at this singular moment in human history his role is to play the joker who screwed up, someone so dumb he can’t tell the difference between a weather balloon from his own military base or a flying saucer from outer space.
That is exactly how Jesse Marcel got to wear the deer-in-the-headlights look on his face in this memorable photo. He is taking the most epic fall in human history. Shakespeare could not have written it better.
With their cover story intact, and a fall guy on the job, new headlines were written to tamp down the hysteria. Here’s the Roswell Daily Record from the very next day:
Not many people focused on the fact that all these trained military people who the U.S. trusted with nuclear weapons out at the base got it all wrong and they just misidentified a weather balloon, something they dealt with every day. Farmers and ranchers found them frequently. Most everyone shrugged and moved on. It did, however, allow one nagging question to remain buried, ready to be dug up another time. Maybe even now.
What if the government accidentally told the truth that first day?
Lost Voices from Roswell
Many people have spoken out about the reality of Roswell over the years, including Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Apollo astronauts, etc. Here is a quick sampling:
“I am absolutely certain that the United States government has recovered non-human technology that is not of this world and that technology includes craft. I’m in a position now to be reasonably sure from my sources that’s the case.” Ross Coulthart, award-winning Australian investigative journalist (Walkley Award, Logie), Sydney Morning Herald, ABC Four Corners, 60 Minutes
“I’ve been told by multiple people who have scientific and military credentials and access that they believe this [Roswell as an off-world crash] is true.” Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; former Staff Director of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
“Make no mistake, Roswell happened. I’ve seen secret files which show the government knew about it — but decided not to tell the public.” Edgar Mitchell, PhD, Apollo 14 Astronaut
“I am completely convinced that the object that crashed near Roswell was composed of materials not common on Earth.” Major General Kenner Hertford, Deputy Commander, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project; Research and Development Division in Army General Staff
“They knew that they had something new in their hands. The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to… The overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.” Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, U.S.A.F. (ret.), former base commander Wright Patterson AFB
“There is not much we can do about Roswell. I tried diligently to get them [files] from General LeMay and it was the only cussing out he ever gave me.” Major General Barry Goldwater, Arizona Senator; 1964 Republican Presidential nominee
“It [Roswell] was the biggest lie I ever had to tell… [It was] out of this world.” Major General Roger Ramey, U.S.A.F. (ret.)
“If I ever told you the truth of what happened at Roswell, you would never see life in the same way again.” General Robert Broussard Landry, U.S.A.F., personal aide to President Harry Truman
“Roswell is true. The problem — It’s buried deep within the black budget, and government funds have been spent since 1947 to keep the truth from coming out.” Dick D’ Amato, Navy Reserve Captain (ret.); Senior Senatorial Counsel to Senator Robert C. Byrd
“At least this effort [GAO report on Roswell] caused the Air Force to acknowledge that the crashed vehicle was no weather balloon.” Steven Schiff, former New Mexico congressman representing Roswell
“It was a cover story, the balloon part… we were told to give to the public.” Brigadier General Thomas J. DuBose, U.S.A.F. (ret.)
“The [Roswell] craft was extraterrestrial…and at one time may have been at Wright Patterson [Air Force Base] in an off-limits area.” Brigadier General Harry Cordes, U.S.A.F. (ret.)
The Government’s Changing Explanation
For 31 years, the Roswell story remained just another buried artifact of the flying saucer age of hysteria. Then, in 1978, a sick, retired Jesse Marcel told his story, the true one, to researcher Stanton Friedman. “It was not an aircraft of any kind, that I am sure of,” he told Friedman. “We didn’t know what it was. It was nothing made on this Earth.”
Friedman took it public, books were written, witnesses tracked down, movies made, TV series named after it, and the public demanded more from the government. Since 1978, the government has offered two new explanations for what happened. For the record, they are:
- A flying disc.
- A Rawin weather ballon.
- Crash Dummies from Project Highjump.
- A Mogul balloon to spy on Soviet nuclear capabilities.
That’s correct. We have come full circle. The government’s explanation is back to a weather balloon, only a double-secret one, a Mogul.
As Mark Hammons noted in his powerful essay, “Start the UAP Report with Roswell,” there are really only two alternatives. “Either a crashed disk recovery happened at Roswell and everything that brings up is therefore on the table,” he wrote, “or the accumulated historical indication that one did is a complexly wrought masterpiece of deception in its own right.”
Sometime soon, in the next five years or less, the other shoe is going to drop in this UFO disclosure dance. Physical debris from a crash. It’s the ultimate game changer.
Why Believe the Roswell Crash?
This is clearly a question to be answered cautiously. We must start with what we know.
We know the Roswell Army Air Base put out that press release saying they had captured a flying saucer and the next day took it all back and said they had only found a weather balloon. That’s shady behavior, but it’s not proof of anything.
We also know over the years the U.S. military has variously announced their own collection of stories that colorfully include spy balloons and crash test dummies. Those are just the official attempts at explanation. Other interested parties have spun tales of Nazi Mengele-crewed saucers, Soviet saucers, V-2 rockets with monkeys on board, and the evil work of the Devil. The subject has clearly been one open to interpretation for decades now.
In shocking counterpoint to all of that, however, there’s a singular, other story that has been more or less consistently told from the beginning.
Roswell was exotic technology. We got wreckage and bodies. We don’t talk about Fight Club.
That storyline has hundreds of witnesses testifying to roughly the same fact trail. Some were first hand witnesses to debris and even the recovery of bodies, and several accounts came from death bed confessions. Many more witnesses were family members who learned of the secret their fathers and husbands had kept inside them for decades. There were many dozens who attested to extremely tight security and transportation of material in the aftermath of what crashed at Roswell.
The testimony that’s been taken comes from men and women who were there, at the base, in the field, in the hospitals and funeral homes, and flying cargo and guarding it with care at a level you’d never experienced. There are so many of them.
Not one witness has come forward to say, “well, you know, I never wanted to talk about it in all these years but it really was a weather balloon.”
It’s a great point, one that is all about common sense and logic, something all of us can really understand. Here’s another one. We know for a fact about an extraordinary clean-up campaign in the desert and about air flights scheduled and secrecy imposed. Ask yourself this:
Would hundreds of people be enlisted in such an immense effort to guard the scraps of a mere weather balloon that would be shown later in a news conference?
Many of these accounts amount to deathbed confessions. In a court of law, such testimony would be allowed and is considered of the quality which could convict an accused of the worst kind of felony.
Those witnesses, of course, do not agree on each and every detail, nor were they all direct witnesses. But taken together, they tell a very compelling story about essentially the same thing.
It involves a crash in a thunderstorm, a rescue effort to assess and move the intact part of the craft, and a clean-up effort both literally and figuratively that probably yielded one survivor and three dead. Bodies, craft, and wreckage were moved, mostly to Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, and to other places, as ordered.
Yes, some of the details may feel slippery as would be normal based on memory in a case of this magnitude. Especially one that’s been undermined for years by experts in psychological operations, both in government and out.
There may be an uncomfortable amount of noise in this one but, for most people who have reviewed the evidence and the testimony, the signal remains loud and clear. The big picture is crash recovery of exotic technology.
Roswell Rising
If the Roswell case were a stock, its value would be skyrocketing to the top of the Dow-Jones, based on the events that have largely transpired over the past three years, reached a crescendo in the annus horribilis of 2020, and seem to be achieving a momentum of their own in 2021.
The media has done a very poor job on the story over the years, preferring to cover people in alien cosplay costumes at the Roswell UFO Festival over actually digging in and doing research and interviewing witnesses.
Get ready for that to change. Even as we speak, at least a dozen investigative reporters with resources and motivation are digging away at the story of their lifetimes — the idea that the U.S. government has retrieved multiple off-world vehicles and has been trying to reverse engineer them for decades. If they are looking into that, then you know they are looking into Roswell.
Roswell, it turns out, has hardly been the only crash. These wingless craft are not regularly falling out of the skies, but there have been a few, here and around the world.
The story will soon gain the respect it deserves. Historians and readers will wonder how it came to be that such a serious matter was swept under the rug for so long. It will seem insane.
UFO Crashes Are Already in the News
The New York Times dipped its toe in the water on this issue in the summer of 2020 and is continuing its investigation into crash wreckage. Roswell is, quite simply, the biggest journalistic prize out there.
The Witnesses Are On the Record
Over the years, a handful of researchers have methodically tracked down, interviewed, and put on audio or video tape the statements of hundreds of people who were there. After Stanton Friedman found Jesse Marcel, men like Donald Schmitt, Kevin Randle and others have spent years driving around New Mexico and other states, building data bases of witnesses, showing their work.
How This Might Go Down
Behind the curtain, many of the players already know Roswell is real. They know that some day soon it will move to center stage. The power structure — quite possibly the same one that is allowing a UAP Task Force to exist and write reports for congress — will have a choice then.
Option One — Stonewall It
This involves hanging in there the way they always have. Deny, deny, deny. Nothing to see here, just weather balloons and crash dummies. Ridicule. If you believe in flying saucers, you must be one of those people.
That’s Old School thinking in the 2020s. If crash wreckage starts getting talked about regularly in our media, then Roswell will become fair game. Any investigative reporter with a computer can get up to speed fast. The witnesses may be gone now, but their testimony remains.
Option Two — Big “D” Disclosure
This is full-on, big “D” Disclosure where reporters get hard drives with gigabytes of photos, films, reports. Journalists are shown the wreckage that we picked up and the saucer itself if it’s intact. Access could be granted so that news organizations could DNA test some of those preserved bodies.
Yeah. That’s never going to happen.
That leaves the final choice, the only one available to the managers of this powerful secret history.
Option Three — Modified Limited Hang-Out
The intelligence community talks about using the “limited hangout” strategy when their veil of secrecy shreds. The idea is to admit some of the truth while still keeping damaging facts to yourself. The portion that’s revealed has to be so intriguing that it distracts attention from the key parts of the story that are missing. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.
The example in this situation is that the bright, shiny object you give the public is Roswell. It feels like ancient history. You don’t give them all the rest of it — the more recent crashes, our sense of this on-going interaction with The Phenomenon and what it means.
Maybe the Managers manipulate a high-level admission. Instead of doing it themselves, a top retired General, or someone in Intelligence. Then, whoever’s officially in office can respond, “We’ll take a new look at it.”
The next step after that would be to say we have found preliminary evidence that this may be true. They could then say something like this —
“We have definitive evidence it is true, we’re examining how it became so deeply classified. After our review is done, we will transparently share the nation’s knowledge with its people. If certain details still need to be classified, the three branches of U.S. government will need to work together in a way that the American people can believe in.”
Leaks and a reading of the literature will confirm the basics of the story. The first thing we’ll see is some of that wreckage and memory metal will be a big hit at a news conference. Next comes the craft or crafts, banged up as they may be. Finally comes the bodies.
This will not happen all at once. It will be a process, but it is probably inevitable.
The Ghosts of Roswell
After seven decades, the race with the undertaker to put witnesses on the record has largely ended. These metaphoric ghosts of Roswell have told their story to us. They tell us, from beyond the grave now, that this really happened.
We must finally tell this story fully, allowing today’s citizens to understand that what happened there may go down as the most important turning point in human history. To do this, we have to put an end to the lies and secrecy.
Since the vast majority of the men and women who tell these stories were members of the U.S. military and their families, it is long past time to honor their service to their country by now admitting to the nation that they were silenced for reasons that made sense at the time but which now must be abandoned.
The event that was hushed up by one generation, turned into an object of derision by another, now deserves to be heard straight up in ours.
Bryce Zabel has written extensively about the Roswell crash and retrieval story. He first dramatized the case in his NBC drama series Dark Skies, then later wrote about it in his book A.D. After Disclosure. He currently has developed a feature film inspired by the books Witness to Roswell by Donald Schmitt and Thomas Carey, and Top Secret/Majic by Stanton Friedman. For Trail of the Saucers, he wrote our publication’s most popular article, “Yes, We Have UFO Crash Wreckage” and conducted an in-depth interview with Don Schmitt.
Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer Bryce Zabel and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.
