The Randle Report
The Myth of Mogul
by Kevin D. Randle
Within three hours of the Army announcing it had recov-
ered a flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, a higher head-
quarters in Fort Worth said it
was just a weather balloon and
radar reflector. That was the
way things would remain until
the 1970s when Jesse Marcel,
Sr., who had been the air intel-
ligence officer at the Roswell
Army Air Field, told friends
and UFO researchers that he
had picked up the pieces of a
flying saucer long ago.
From that point on many of
us became interested in the
Roswell UFO crash. I contrib-
uted to that interest with both
magazine articles and books
detailing my research into the
case, often with the help of
Don Schmitt. We learned that
the balloon explanation just
didn't cover all the facts. We
all were loud and vocal about
these obvious failings.
In the mid-1990s the Air
Force apparently heard us and
launched their own investiga-
tion into the Roswell crash.
They, quite naturally, approached it from a different angle
than we did.
Instead of interviewing the living witnesses, the men and
a few women who had been involved with the retrieval,
they spent the majority of their time interviewing the men
who had worked on Project Mogul. Of all the witnesses they
could have interviewed, including retired Air Force Briga-
dier General Arthur Exon, they chose people like Charles
Moore, an engineer on the Mogul team and Sheridan Cavitt,
the counterintelligence officer at the base in 1947 who had
consistently said he didn't arrive until after the retrieval.
field, Weaver asked if Cavitt was familiar with balloons.
Cavitt then said, "I had seen them. I had seen them." And
then, in a bit of memory that
is incredible, Cavitt added,
"As I recall, I am really reach-
ing back. I think they were
equipped with a radio sonde or
something like that, that trans-
mitted data from, when it got
up to altitude (what altitude I
have no idea) [Cavitt's paren-
thetical statement], and some-
body on the ground received
it and that way they got some
information on what was hap-
pening up there."
Jesse Marcel, Jr. and the I-Beam.
But then, Cavitt admitted he had been there and told Air
Force investigator Colonel Richard Weaver exactly what
Weaver wanted to hear. This is evident during an exchange
in which Cavitt said that he recognized the material as that of
a balloon immediately. Weaver, instead of asking why Cavitt
had not mentioned this to Marcel, who was with him in the
14
Weaver said little and Cavitt,
having the ball, continued to
run with it. He said, "This is
all over my head. When I saw
it it was to [sic] flimsy to be
anything to carry people or
anything of that sort. It never
crossed my mind that it could
be anything but a radio sonde.
So while Marcel is amazed
about what he was seeing, de-
scribing it as something that
had come to earth but that had
not been made on earth, Cavitt was not. Cavitt didn't bother
to tell Marcel it was a balloon, nor did he mention that to
the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, nor any-
one else.
www
And when I talked to Cavitt, he told me quite specially that
he had never participated in the recovery of a balloon. He
was too busy with his important work.
Ignoring that flawed investigation, let's look at some of the
rumors that have spread about Mogul over the years. These
would be rumors designed to further the idea that Mogul
was so secret that not even those working on the project
knew the name and that it was something so special that the
men at Roswell wouldn't be able to identify it.
Charles Moore, one of the engineers on Mogul, has been
quoted, repeatedly, as saying this. He said that he didn't
know the name until 1992 when Robert Todd, a rather nas-
ty man, told him the name. The truth is that anyone who
UFO
Issue #156
Charles Moore studying microfilm
in New Mexico.
waded through the Mogul documentation included in the
Air Force's published account of their investigation-The
Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert
(U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), if you must know-
would have found Dr. Albert Crary's diary.
Crary was the leader of Mogul, and in his unclassified di-
ary he used the term "Mogul". For example, in the December
11, 1946 entry he wrote, "Equipment from Johns Hopkins
Unicersity [sic] transferred to MOGUL plane."
There was nothing about Mogul that was highly classified
except its ultimate purpose, which was to spy on the Soviet
Union's attempts to detonate an atomic bomb. The Mogul
equipment was off-the-shelf weather balloons, rawin radar
reflectors, and eventually sonobuoys or listening devices
from the Navy.
This leads to two points, one of which is that the equip-
ment was well known to the men in Roswell. They had all
seen weather balloons before. Remember Cavitt's comment?
They had also seen rawin radar reflectors which were made
from aluminum foil, balsa wood, and twine.
These had been used, for example, during the
unit's participation in Operation Crossroads,
the Bikini Atoll atomic tests in 1946.
The Mylar balloons which would eventually
be used by Mogul were not in New Mexico in
June and July 1947. Someone had suggested
that these Mylar balloons, of a new type of ma-
terial, might have fooled some of those men
in Roswell when they first encountered them.
While that might be true, it is irrelevant here
because there were no Mylar balloons to be
found and confused with an alien spacecraft
at the time of the Roswell crash.
So, had it been Mogul that had fallen onto
the ranch managed by Mack Brazel, it would
have been neoprene balloons and possibly
rawin radar targets. Both items were well
known to the men at Roswell.
And I say possibly because, according to
Crary's diary, Flight Number 4, the culprit ac-
cording to the Air Force and the debunkers,
UFO
had been canceled. According to what Charles Moore told
me, they couldn't put the helium back in the bottles so
that when a flight was canceled, they stripped the equip-
ment and let the balloons go. If that was the case, the de-
bris would have been made up of neoprene balloons strung
together in an array, but nothing that would have been so
unusual that Marcel and others couldn't have easily identi-
fied what it was.
The second point is that the men of Roswell knew about
the Mogul arrays. Moore said that he and a colleague or two
had traveled to Roswell to enlist their help in retrieving the
balloons. Moore said that the soldiers were not inclined to
assist, but whether they helped or not, they knew about Mo-
gul because of this visit.
There was also a requirement by the Civil Aviation Author-
ity (CAA)-forerunner to the Federal Aviation Administra-
tion (FAA)--that each launch be proceeded by an announce-
ment in the NOTAMS. These were Notices to Air Men about
possible hazards to aerial navigation. In other words, they
weren't launching the balloons from a secret location with
no notice about them.
They were telling everyone who traveled the airways in
New Mexico for a living that these balloon arrays were out
there. So, the men at Roswell were familiar with the balloons
and radar reflectors and they knew about the array launches
because those were publicized by the CAA. This seems to
erase the notion that the launches were made in secret, using
equipment was secret.
But what about some of the other things being claimed
about the balloon flights? One of those issues was the strange
hieroglyphics seen by Jesse Marcel, Jr. which were explained
in the same undocumented way as much of the rest of Mo-
gul. According to the Air Force, among others, there were in
fact strange symbols on some of the tape used to strengthen
the radar reflectors.
continued on page 30
Vol. 24, No. 3
The debris field.
15
The Randle Report
continued from page 14
While the Air Force would push this theory without corrobo-
ration and the debunkers would latch onto it, there is no proof
it is true. The fact is that no one has ever produced a sample of
this novelty tape used on the balloons.
Mogul launch ladder.
Examination of the photographs of one of the radar reflec-
tors that was displayed on General Roger Ramey's office floor,
which allegedly is debris picked up outside of Roswell, does
not show them. Of course, if the symbols were lightly printed,
then they might not have been of sufficient density to be re-
vealed on those photographs:
This also does not take into account the descriptions of the
symbols provided by Jesse Marcel, Jr.; according to what he told
me, they were embossed on the thin I-beam-like structures that
he saw in 1947. Embossed, rather than printed.
The symbols claimed by the Air Force were floral designs
with a definite Japanese influence. Jesse Marcel said there were
a variety of symbols, and there was no hint of flowers. Marcel's
description is, of course, rejected as being a fifty-year-old mem-
ory while the Air Force descriptions are embraced even though
no samples have ever been presented.
30
The latest of the myths to circulate is that Mogul had been
successful and that it actually detected the first Soviet atomic
detonation on August 29, 1949. This proves the value of Mogul
and underscores the reason that it was so highly classified.
I have traced-well, David Rudiak pointed it out to me-this
rumor to an article printed in the New York Times on September
18, 1994 and written by William Broad. He suggested, "The So-
viets detonated their first nuclear bomb in August 1949. Mogul
detected it, most experts interviewed about the program said."
But there is no source for this quote other than Broad's claim
that most experts interviewed said Mogul worked. In all my
conversations with Charles Moore, he never made that claim.
In fact, the massive Air Force report that suggests Mogul as the
culprit does not validate the claim. All we know for certain is
that every source that I checked suggested the Soviet atomic
blast was detected by seismic readings and increased radiation
readings in the atmosphere. No one credits Mogul.
Not long after the Soviet detonation, Mogul was canceled. It
was said to cost too much and while they had succeeded, more
or less, in creating their constant-level balloons, they couldn't
be sure of where the winds would blow them. Once the bal-
loons lifted forty or fifty miles into the sky, the winds could be
blowing in a direction opposite to that on the ground. It was
just too unreliable to use balloons.
Mogul, at least the New Mexico balloon launches, was of no
real intelligence value. That means, simply, that even if the So-
viets had been interested in it, they would have not been able to
deduce the ultimate purpose of Mogul. They would just know
that scientists and engineers in New Mexico were launching
long arrays of balloons, some of which stayed aloft for hours
at a time.
It was considered of so little intelligence value that pictures
of the Mogul launches appeared in newspapers around the
country starting on July 10, 1947. One of the pictures showed
a man on a ladder holding onto a neoprene balloon. Charles
Moore told me that was the ladder that he had bought with
petty cash for use by the Mogul team once they had arrived ir
New Mexico.
The Mogul myth was created because it was impossible to
believe that military men would not be able to identify an or
dinary weather balloon when they saw it. Mogul added a nic
cloak of mystery to the balloons, suggesting something strang
enough that it would not have been readily identifiable. Bu
the truth is that Mogul was just a weather balloon and a rada
reflector. Or maybe I should say weather balloons and radar re
flectors. It certainly wasn't the sort of clandestine program tha
it has been made out to be.
Mogul does not answer the question of what fell near Ro
swell. All it does is divert attention away from the truth, and i
the end, I guess
that would make
Mogul a success.
Finally, it be-
comes worth the
cost. UFO
Kevin Randle
is a former
Army avia-
tor, Air Force
intelligence
officer and is a
retired lieuten-
ant colonel.
He has been
studying UFOs
for nearly
forty years
and is the
author of nu-
merous books
and magazine
articles on the
topic. His blog
A Different
Perspective
can be found
at www.
KevinRandle.
blogspot.com
Issue #156
Mogul balloons in flight.
UF
1
C
O
Killing Rosell
I never saw myr so scared!"
by Thomas J. Carey
*
Frank Joyce was driven out into the boon-
docks to the Hines House by his boss
Walter Whitmore and a strange military
man to meet Mack Brazel. This is the
Hines house in 2006-
"It's the biggest story since the part-Army Finds Air Saucer
ing of the Red Sea. You can't cover
it up!" So exclaimed newspaper re-
porter Ned Scott to Air Force cap-
tain Patrick Hendry as he pleaded
to be permitted to phone in the story
that the Air Force had discovered a
crashed flying saucer embedded in
the arctic ice near the North Pole.
Scott's outburst had been triggered
by Captain Hendry's refusal to allow
him to send out such an explosive
report without first securing author-
ity from his commanding officer at
the next higher headquarters at El-Army Knocks Down Disk-
mendorf AFB in
1951 Howard Hawkes's movie rendi-
tion of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s 1938
On Ranch in New Mexico short story "Who Goes There?" and
retitled The Thing From Another
World for the RKO/Winchester Pic-
tures production. Producer Hawkes
and the film's director Christian
Nyby, however, were apparently un-
aware that a similar scenario had ac-
tually occurred in real life only four
short years earlier in 1947 near the
not-so-sleepy town of Roswell, New
Mexico, with one huge difference.
Instead of an arctic UFO crash in-
volving sinister aliens vs. a benevo-
lent truth-telling and civilian-pro-
tecting U.S. Air Force, the real-life
version featured a role reversal in the
form of apparently benevolent aliens
vs. a sinister U.S. Air Force hell-bent
on killing the story at any cost, even
if it meant employing heavy-handed
civil-rights violations against its own
civilian population-against the very
people it
was sworn
to protect!
As read-
ers of UFO
Magazine
and followers of the Roswell story are aware, on July 8, 1947
the U.S. Army Air Forces located near Roswell announced that
it had captured a downed flying saucer on a ranch not far from
town. Later that same day, however, the next higher Air Force
command located in Fort Worth, Texas retracted that story by
convening a press conference to tell the world that it was all a
big mistake, that what had been found was not a flying saucer at
all but a common weather balloon made of rubber, tinfoil, and
balsa wood sticks.
to transmit the story.
No threats. No arrests. No brain-
washing. No sequestering of the re-
porter to keep him on ice and in the
dark until the all-clear was sounded.
Disk Goes
To High
Officers
In the meantime, he simply denied
Scott the use of government equip. IT'S A WEATHER BALLOON
ment-a mobile military telephone-
50
Flying disc'
turns up as
just hot air
Fort Worth, Tex, July (AP)-An examina
tion by the Army revealed last night a mysterious
nbject found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was
harmless high altitude weather, balloon
grounded flying dise
Device Is Only
A Wind Target
Object Found in N Mexico
identified at Fort Worth
In the end, after the flying saucer
and its thawed-out rampaging super
carrot with a penchant for human
blood had been destroyed by an arc
of electricity, the Air Force appeared
only too happy to have reporter
Scott tell all to an anxiously waiting world. The preliminary
warning then delivered by the prescient Scott at the very begin-
ning of his reportage, however, still reverberates today,
"To all those listening to my voice, I give you a warning. To ev-
eryone, ev-
Killing the Roswell UFO crash story in the press
was the first priority of the plan from Washington,
and the press was only too willing to comply.
erywhere,
watch the
skies! Keep
looking
keep watch-
ing
the
skies."
The above
scenario,
of course,
was happily
played out
in one of the
greatest sci-
ence-fiction
thrillers of
all time, the
***
The men of the 509th Bomb Group, the only atomic strike force
in the world who ended World War II by dropping atomic de-
vices on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been fooled and had acted
precipitously with their ill-advised press release. Just the kind of
people you would want with their fingers on the atomic trigger!
End of story. Well, at least for the time being... say, for the
next thirty years.
Ever since I teamed up with Don Schmitt in 1998 to continue
a proactive investigation of the 1947 Roswell events, we have
uncovered a number of startling things not previously known.
One of these involves the killing of the original flying-saucer
story by the Air Force.
Evidence has been steadily mounting regarding the extent
and the ex-
treme mea-
sures the
Air Force
employed
to institute
a cover-up
of the en-
Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox be-
came a henchman for the Air Force by de-
livery of death threats to Roswell citizen-
witnesses if they talked about the UFO
crash. Wilcox family members said it de-
stroyed him.
Issue #156
UFO
re Roswell event-the crash and retrieval of a bona fide UFO
nd its unfortunate crew from another world-by attempting to
force the silence of everyone, military and civilian alike, who
ad been involved in its discovery or recovery, especially those
ho had seen the bodies.
As we recounted in our book Witness to Roswell: Unmasking
e 60-Year Cover-Up (New Page Books, 2007), we now know
om the posthumous release of the sealed statement of Walter
aut, the former Roswell Air Base public information officer in
947 who issued the infamous flying-saucer press release, that
e Air Force had decided upon a cover-up strategy on the very
ame day that it had issued the crashed-saucer story and that
he strategy as well as the initial press release had been orches-
rated from Washington.
This ends the decades-old debate of whether the initial flying-
aucer press release had been the result of a local faux pas by
oswell base commander Colonel William Blanchard or his
ntelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel. The plan's implementa-
on was communicated to Colonel Blanchard through his boss,
General Roger Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force
hat was headquartered at Fort Worth Army Air Field, to which
Blanchard's 509th Bomb Group in Roswell was attached.
It would ultimately involve the use of security personnel not
nly from Roswell Army Air Force but from Alamogordo AAF,
irtland AAF in Albuquerque, Fort Bliss in El Paso, as well as
nits from White Sands and dark suits from Washington, D.C.
tself. And whenever there was especially dirty business to con-
uct, there was a go-to guy already in place on the ground at the
09th who was up to the task. And then for good measure, if his
work needed punctuating, there
was another fellow at the ready
who could be flown in at a mo-
ment's notice from Wright Field in
Dayton, Ohio to do just that.
As planned, the July 9, 1947
newspaper headlines blared out
he new cover story: "Gen. Ramey
Empties Roswell Saucer" and "It's
ust a Weather Balloon!" Most ac-
counts also prominently featured
photo of General Ramey or Ma-
or Marcel kneeling beside a de-
raded rubber weather balloon on
the floor of the general's office,
accompanied by a brand new tin-
oil radar target that someone had
attempted to tear apart. Close-up
computer enhancements of the
photos of General Ramey reveal a
severely torn left thumbnail of ob-
vious recent origin.
July 10 and 11 saw public dem-
onstrations of weather-balloon
aunches all over the country put
on by the Army Air Forces and the
Army Signal Corps to attempt to
explain away not only Roswell but
all UFO sightings that had occurred
over the previous two weeks. These
aunches were duly covered in
UFO
most major newspapers, and a caption headline in the Arizona
Republic said it all: "Mystery of the flying discs solved."
As far as press interest was concerned, by the weekend of July
12 the Roswell story was a dead issue. But what about all the
other people-military and civilian-who knew better? What
about them?
It should be pointed out that in 1947 our government and
military establishments were held in the highest regard, per-
haps their highest in our nation's history, by just about all of
its citizens. It had just vanquished the Axis powers in a terrible
and costly war, and in doing so it had emerged as the world's
preeminent superpower, and unlike the other victors, with its
homeland unscathed.
Thus, in the victorious, pre-TV world of 1947, our country
was much more unified in nearly every aspect of its daily life
and outlook than it is today. When our government and espe-
cially our military spoke to us, we chose to unquestioningly
believe them by nodding our heads in agreement.
The Cold War with the Communist Bloc nations of Eastern
Europe and Asia was just beginning, and anxious Americans
looked to their government and the military to protect them.
Korea, Cuba. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were just names
on a map somewhere else in the world, and the deep divisions
their mere mention would foster in our country were still years.
if not decades, in the future.
If the cover-up were to succeed, the Air Force knew it had
several distinct target groups to silence, with the first being the
national and international press corps. As we saw above, this
was achieved with remarkable ease and little effort via General
Gilding the lily. In the days following the newspaper headlines
denying the original crashed saucer story, the Air Force and
Signal Corps conducted mobile balloon launches to try to
explain away Roswell as well as all other UFO reports.
Vol. 24, No. 3
Ramey's phony makeshift press conference of
July 8. 1947, plus a few balloon launches in
the days following.
The sole demurring voice was an editorial
in the July 9, 1947 Roswell Daily Record that
wondered if the Army [Air Force] was guilty
of still keeping its secrets. Other than that, the
compliant press appeared eager to close the
book on Roswell and by extension, a subject
it didn't understand and didn't like reporting
on: flying saucers.
The local Roswell media was another matter
since there were people within its ranks who
knew what really happened out in the desert
north of town. Radio station KSWS reporter
Johnny McBoyle, after a chance meeting with
Mack Brazel, the Corona, New Mexico ranch-
er who first found and reported the UFO crash
to authorities in Roswell, somehow made it
out to the crash site on his own only to be
taken into custody by the military but not be-
fore he had seen enough to know that what
had crashed was not of this earth.
51
McBoyle was then taken back to the base, and while the Air
Force was deciding what to do with him, he quickly tried to
phone in the story to his sister station KOAT in Albuquerque to
get it on the Associated Press news wire. The attempt was short-
circuited, however, when the teletype wire was jammed by the
FBI so that nothing more could be transmitted, and McBoyle
himself was restrained from further reporting the story.
Apparently convinced by his captors that it was a matter of
national security, McBoyle later denied that it ever happened.
left Roswell, and moved to an Idaho farm for the remainder of his
life. He passed away in 1991 within weeks of his wife's passing.
In 2001 I interviewed McBoyle's son and daughter-in-law,
only to learn that they were unable to ever get their father to
speak about what happened at Roswell in 1947. Try as they
might, for years and even while on his deathbed he would not
speak about it and, according to them, not even to his wife!
What could have caused a person to behave that way?
Those who question that a incident such as the Roswell UFO
crash could not have been kept secret for very long should look to
Johnny McBoyle for their answer. As an aside, the person to whom
McBoyle was speaking on the telephone in his aborted attempt to
report the story, a woman at KOAT
radio in Albuquerque by the name
of Lydia Sleppy, in 1972 became the
first person to ever speak publicly
about Roswell after 1947.
Walter Whitmore, Sr. was, majority owner of Roswell radio
station KGFL in 1947. He became a government accomplice in
suppressing the burgeoning UFO crash story in the press
under threat of losing his broadcast licence if he did not
cooperate.
Frank Joyce was an announcer for
Roswell radio station KGFL in 1947.
By chance, he was the first media
person to interview rancher Mack
Brazel soon after the latter came into town to report his find.
During that telephone interview Brazel told Joyce of finding
strange wreckage on his ranch and that "maybe it was one of
them flying saucer things people have been talking about." He
also told Joyce about finding "little people" someplace else not
too far from the main site.
Joyce did not believe the story at first, but he nevertheless
now knew that there had been a crash of something out in the
desert that possibly involved small bodies. When the Air Force
learned of this conversation from Brazel during his week-long
incarceration at the Roswell base "guest house." Joyce became
a target for silencing.
But, how to do it? As everyone knows, it's only during times
of war or Martial law in extreme emergencies that the mili-
tary has direct authority over civilians, and neither obtained
at Roswell in 1947. The answer was to first cajole and then to
threaten a few well-placed town leaders in Roswell to do the
military's dirty work for them.
It worked. Faced with the potential loss of his broadcasting
license if he didn't cooperate, KGFL radio station majority own-
er Walter Whitmore, who had been sequestering Mack Brazel
at his home while obtaining Brazel's exclusive story-which
Whitmore's station planned to air as a scoop-handed Brazel
over to the military without a fight.
Along with the presence of a military guard, he also helped
to escort Brazel around town to the major media outlets to lend
an air of credibility to Brazel's new weather-balloon story that
the military wanted him to tell. It was during this Magical Mys-
tery Tour that Brazel confided to Frank Joyce at KGFL: "They
weren't green!"
52
Apparently not satisfied with Joyce, who had earlier in the
day told an officer who was trying to silence him where he
could go, the military ordered Whitmore to take Joyce "for a
ride" somewhere for further "enlightenment." That somewhere
turned out to be none other than the Hines House on the Bra-
zel-Foster Ranch, the same ramshackle bunkhouse that Brazel,
Jesse Marcel, and Sheridan Cavitt had spent the night at a few
days prior before heading to the debris field.
After alighting from Whitmore's car, Whitmore told a per-
plexed Joyce to enter the bunkhouse. Once inside, Joyce stood
around wondering what was going to happen next when the
door opened and in strode Mack Brazel. "I was just wonder-
ing," Brazel addressed Joyce. "You weren't planning on saying
anything about what I told you the other day, were you?"
"Not if you don't want me to," replied Joyce. "Good, because
if you do, it will go hard on me. And you." With that, Brazel
started to leave, but stopped at the door and turned around to
face Joyce. "You know, don't you, that our lives will never be
the same?"
With that, Brazel left, and Joyce never laid eyes on him again.
Joyce then rejoined his boss outside and noticed that the mili-
tary man who been in the back seat of the car on the trip out
to the ranch was now gone. Whitmore and Joyce drove back to
Roswell in silence.
Apparently still not satisfied that they had truly silenced
Joyce to their liking, Joyce maintained that he was then hauled
off against his will to a hospital in Texas and basically "put on
ice" for a year without so much as a diagnosis being offered.
When they let him out, he was told not to return to Roswell,
which he didn't.
Issue #156
UFO
Instead, he went to Albuquerque to start a new life and be-
came a well-known newsman and features reporter at KOB ra-
dio and television there, retiring in 1997. According to Joyce,
he never spoke of Roswell for decades after the UFO crash, and
it wasn't until after he had retired from KOB that he revealed
the rest of the story about Mack Brazel finding bodies in addi-
tion to wreckage to Don Schmitt and me in 1998. Frank Joyce
passed away in 2008.
For obvious reasons, the military personnel who knew the
truth of what really happened at Roswell and were involved in
the UFO recovery operations, either directly or indirectly, were
the easiest people for the military authorities to silence. With
direct authority and control over their lives through the chan-
nels of command, it was relatively obvious.
The Roswell airbase went in a lockdown mode to control en-
trance and exit soon after authorities realized what they were
dealing with, and the base remained in lockdown, from what
we have been told, for a period of about a week. Even airmen
on the base who were not involved in the UFO recovery could
sense that something big was taking place.
But with Roswell Army Air field being our country's first SAC
base whose mission it was to drop the atomic bomb in time
of war, they knew not to ask too many questions nor to dis-
cuss their activities on the base with their families when they
went home. Although we have received anecdotal accounts of
at least three suicides taking place on the base at the time of the
incident as well as several off-base hunting accidents occurring
soon thereafter, we have so far been unable to verify these.
Officers were briefed separately, but the bulk of the airmen on
the base-the enlisted men, including NCOS-were herded into
the large hangars at the south and east end of the base, squadron
by squadron, and unceremoniously read the riot act. As one
squadron commander put it to his assembled troops: "What-
ever you've been hearing lately, it's not true. There's no flying
saucer. Noth-
ing has hap-
pened! But if
you think you
want to keep
talking about
it or learning
more about it,
you can read
all about it in
Leavenworth!"
Faced with
the choices of a
stiff prison sen-
tence at hard
labor, a transfer
to an undesir-
able duty loca-
tion, a reduc-
tion in rank or
NY
UFO
The architect of the Roswell cover-up
was most likely General Hoyt S. Vanden-
berg in Washington, D.C. and not General
Roger M. Ramey in Fort Worth, TX.
a dishonorable discharge which in those days would forever
remain a stain on one's record-the message got through loud
and clear. Combined with a natural sense of honor, duty, and
love of country all wrapped up in a blanket of national security,
most of the men and women of the 509, members of America's
Greatest Generation, remained silent for the rest of their lives
and took what they knew with them to their graves.
What we have found interesting in attempting to interview mil-
itary witnesses to the 1947 events, however, is how they break
out as to who is most likely and least likely to talk to us. From
the hundreds and hundreds of interviews we have conducted
over the years, some general comments can be made. With a few
exceptions, those least likely to talk have been the officers, in-
cluding NCOs, and the higher the rank, the less the chance.
Brigadier General Arthur Exon and Lieutenant Colonel Philip
Corso are two exceptions from this group who have gone on
the public record. Among the enlisted ranks, an interesting di-
chotomy became apparent when it came to who was likely to
talk to us and who would not-that had nothing at all to do
with rank.
We found that those who remained in service long enough to
retire on a military or government pension have by and large
refused to talk. Even when told of Air Force Secretary Sheila
Widnall's 1994 amnesty for Roswell veterans, most still refuse
to budge: "I'm retired, and I like it that way."
The most common response we receive from members of this
group, however, is simply, "I don't remember anything."
Air Force Lt. Arthur Philbin of the soath Bomb Group
at Roswell Army Air Field was employed by the Air
Force to apply the hammer to local civilians when
Sheriff Wilcox refused.
Vol. 24, No. 3
53
"Anything?"
"That's right."
Two notable exceptions are former Air Force Sergeants Earl
Fulford, who was part of the clean-up crew, and Elias Benjamin
who went public under a pseudonym in our 2007 book when
he told of accompanying the alien bodies to the base hospital.
And after telling his story for the TV cameras in an episode of
the SyFy Channel's SciFi Investigates show in 2006, his first
words to us were, "Do you think I will lose my pension?"
By far, the most fertile field that we have mined in our Ro-
swell investigation has been that of the enlisted men and wom-
en who were stationed at Roswell at the time of the UFO crash
but who did not make military or government service a career.
When we interviewed them years later, they were not living on
a government pension.
It is from this group that the most numerous Roswell witness
es-too many to name are derived. To underscore the point
being made here, I would point out that two of the most im-
portant witnesses to Roswell were former Major Jesse Marcel,
the RAAF base intelligence officer who broke his silence about
Roswell in 1978, thereby kick-starting the civilian investigation
of the 1947 events, and former First Lieutenant Walter Haut,
the Roswell base public information officer who issued the in-
famous press release and who later told all posthumously in a
scaled statement that was featured in our Witness to Roswell.
Both men were officers, but neither was a retired career officer
living on a government pension.
By far the biggest challenge for the military authorities was
how to silence the civilians who had direct knowledge of the
UFO crash, especially those who had seen or knew about the
bodies. Like most airplane crashes out in the desert, it's civil-
ians in the form of the outlying ranchers and their family mem-
bers who reach the crash sites first.
And in the case of the Roswell UFO crash, it was no different.
It was Mack Brazel, the foreman of the J. B. Foster Ranch near
the town of
Corona in Lin-
coln County,
who was the
first to visit
the
debris
54
ancient pickup to report it. In the meantime, as word of the
crash got around to the other ranchers, many of them hopped
in their buckboards and pickups to see for themselves and per-
haps grab a souvenir or two as well.
Meanwhile back in Roswell, although Brazel had come into
town on Sunday July 6 to report his find to the local sheriff
George Wilcox, nothing was generally known about a crash in-
volving a flying saucer until the following day when a second
crash site was discovered with little bodies-just north of
town. According to local Roswell book store owner Patri-
cia Rice, "Word of the crash traveled around town in about
twenty minutes!"
Like the first site, the second site had been discovered by ci-
vilians who then phoned it into the sheriff and fire department
in Roswell, both of which preceded the military's knowledge of
and arrival at the second crash site. And, prior to the arrival of
the military, they got to see everything firsthand, up close, and
personal. Without direct authority over civilians, how could
these civilians be silenced by those sworn to protect us from
foreign enemies?
We know that Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox never ran
for public off again. According to his surviving family mem-
bers, "Roswell [the UFO incident] destroyed him." As we dis-
cuss in our just-released new paperback edition of Witness to
Roswell, we now know why.
The Air Force co-opted and used sheriff Wilcox as its silencer
of Roswell civilians who knew too much, especially those who
knew about the bodies. In this role, Wilcox became a messenger
of death by threatening those witnesses and their families with
death if they ever talked. Not a good platform upon which to
run for reelection!
In those cases where Wilcox knew a targeted witness too well,
for example Roswell fireman Dan Dwyer and his family, and
perhaps refused to make the delivery, the Air Force called upon
one of its own security personnel in the 509th at Roswell, First
Lieutenant Arthur "The Hammer" Philbin, to do the deed.
Philbin had been a New York police officer and a tough guy
from Brooklyn in a former life. His threatening of Dan Dw-
yer's wife and daughter Frankie Rowe with a billy club is well
known. He later died a broken, drunken recluse.
Philbin's activities also included visits to the ranchers out-
field crash site side of town. We have first-hand accounts of the military basi-
on the morn-cally ransacking ranches in its desperate search to uncover
ing of July 4, souvenirs from the crash. Floor boards were turned over. Bags
1947 accom- of cattle feed were slashed open, and water tanks drained in
panied by a the madness.
neighbor boy.
seven year-old
Dee Proctor.
And of course, lives were threatened into silence. Just to
make sure, a few days, weeks, or months later-we are not re-
ally sure the Air Force uncorked perhaps its top thug, a wor-
thy by the name of Hunter Penn, and sent him to Roswell to
interview the outlying ranchers to encourage their continued
silence. Penn's daughter related that her stepfather, whom she
called a brutal person, "had a fascination with ice picks" and
thinks he might have used one at Roswell.
In 2008, my coauthor Don Schmitt interviewed a fellow by
the name of Bert Schulz during a speaking engagement at a
conference in Nevada. Schultz had been
a B-29 electrician assigned to the 393rd
Bomb Squadron at the Roswell airbase
just a few months after the UFO incident.
It would be
two days be
fore Brazel
would make
the long dusty
drive to Ro-
swell in his
Sue Farnsworth today.
Issue #156
UFO
Aside from the occasional scuttlebutt regarding the incident a
few months previous, Schulz told Schmitt about a much more
disturbing element, something that soured him on the military
as a potential career. "There was still a lot of talk about the MPs
harassing civilians over the affair. The MPs got pretty rough
with some of the ranchers out there, and they were bragging
about it!"
Arthur Farnsworth ran the original Ford dealership in Ro-
swell in 1947. He was the head of a family-owned business that
dated back to the early part of the twentieth century to Henry
Ford himself. A pillar of the Roswell business community, he
was a well-known and well-respected businessman throughout
the area.
Arthur and Vera Farnsworth had three daughters; two teenag-
ers as well as one preteen, Sue, age seven. In addition to a home
in Roswell, the family also owned a ranch northwest of town.
Besides running the Ford dealership, Arthur was known to visit
the ranch several times a week to check on things there.
Soon after the publication of Witness in 2007, I received an
email from a gentleman living in Roswell who said that at a
recent Roswell High School class reunion, he ran into a former
classmate who told him that her father had been threatened by
the military at the time of the Roswell incident. That's all the
information he had, so I asked for the contact number of his
former classmate if she would talk to me.
A few days later, I found myself talking to the 67-year-old Sue
Farnsworth, now a successful businesswoman of her own. She
related the following account to me.
Even though she was the youngest of the three Farnsworth
daughters, she was best buddies with her dad because both of
her older sisters had had bouts of polio and were incapacitated
to some extent. Therefore, it was Sue who was the one who
helped her father with
the chores at home and
out at the ranch. She
also shared those special
father-daughter times
with her father when she
needed his counsel.
As Sue recalls it, "At
one point in the sum-
mer of 1947, I noticed a
real somber look cross
my father's face, and it
didn't go away. In fact, it
changed more and more
into a look of fear after a
day or two."
Unable to contain her
concern for her father
any longer, Sue asked
him what was wrong one
day when they were at
the ranch. Without say-
Roswell Auto. Co. was the original Roswell masking the the coauthor of Witness to Roswell: Un-
Ford
Government's Biggest Cover-Up (Career
Sworth's family since the time of Henry Ford.
UFO
Ford
VERCURY
ing a word, he motioned to her to follow him on horseback,
and they rode out to a remote and secluded part of the ranch,
whereupon he dismounted, as did she.
***
"Whenever we wanted to discuss something without anyone
else hearing, we would go to this spot." Like so many times.
before, Sue and her father sat down on their favorite rock and
stared out at the peaceful desert landscape before them. Like
many of her friends in town, Sue had heard the rumors of the
flying-saucer crash, but she was not prepared for what her fa-
ther was about to confide to her now.
"Your father was threatened by the military a few days ago,"
Arthur Farnsworth told his daughter. Looking around carefully
even though they were way out in the middle of nowhere, Ar-
thur Farnsworth continued in a low voice. "What I tell you now
you must promise never to tell anyone.
"A flying saucer crashed on another ranch not far from here
a few days ago, and the military told us that if we ever said
anything to anyone about it, they would kill all of us." He then
told his daughter that he had gone out with other neighboring
ranchers when word of the crash got around.
"We saw some things we weren't supposed to see." He did not
go into any detail with his young daughter and ended the dis-
cussion with, "Remember, not a word-to anyone!" That was
all he would ever reveal to her.
The two then saddled up and rode back to the ranch house,
never to speak of it again. Speaking to me some sixty years later.
Sue Farnsworth exclaimed, "He was a strong man who wasn't
afraid of anything, but in my entire life, I never saw my father
so scared!" Arthur Farnsworth's near-death experience sounds
to me like the handiwork of Arthur Philbin or Hunter Penn do-
ing what they did best: scaring people to death. And all this
over a balloon? Think about it. FD
Press/New Page books, 2009).
Vol. 24, No. 3
i
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