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JULY 1997
SECRETS
OF GREAT
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Popular
Mechanic
ROSWELL
Startling New Revelations About
The UFO Crash Coverup
50 Years Ago
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18
COVER STORY
ROSWELL
PLUS 50
Fifty years ago, something crashed in the desert.
New evidence points to two equally startling conclusions.
BY JIM WILSON, Science/Technology Editor
THE
ROSWELL
REPORT
FACT VS FICTION
IN THE
NEW MEXICO
DESERT
Aciated Press
Roswell Daily Record
RECORD PHONES
Business Office 2288
News Department
2287
Claims Amy RAAF Captures Flying Saucer
Courts Martial On Ranch in Roswell Region
Is Stacking
Semptor
Roswell Daily Record
WEW MASKO
velty Council
RECORD PHONES
Business Office 2288
News Department
2207
Gen.Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer
Lewis Pushes Sheriff Wilcox Takes Leading Role in
Advantage in
Exclement Over Repod S
Arrest 2.000
cts
In Economic Meet
The
Ruidoso Clubrooms
Ramey Says
Excitement Is
Not Justified
No Details of Ex-King Carol Weds Mme. Lupescu
Talks Flying Disk
ductions Are Revealed
Let The
Roswell Hardware
Man and Wile
Report Disk Seen
May & for
ofs and Me
you meant
MI
the Cover Fal
General Remay
Says Disk Is
Weather Balloon
You
Pro
INTERNATIONAL
Wh
and Operators Sign
Midory
PUTO
MUSEUM
AND
RESEARCH CENTER
ROSWELL NEW MEXICO
OTP
POPULAR MECHANICS JULY 1997
Pot, Hub Corn's 8-year-old border collie, leaps from
the back of the tool-packed pickup. She sniffs the cuffs
of my pants, begs to be scratched on her head and
then bolts across the dusty field. "She'll scare away
the snakes," Corn says as we follow Pot down a gentle
incline. Our objective is 100 yards ahead, at the bottom
of a 40-ft. cliff that rises from an arroyo.
Corn points to a small flag that is planted
halfway from the top. It marks the spot
where the U.S. Army once believed a
"flying disc" made its final, fatal contact
with planet Earth.
ROSWE
trial threat. And no one has done more to turn up the
speculative heat than retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman,
who held a slew of top intelligence posts, including
deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency
and deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In a Learning Channel documentary, Inman said-but
has since repeatedly and vigorously denied-
that the military is attempting to use technol-
ogy from unspecified "recovered vehicles."
The passage of time has also compli-
cated the task of ferreting out the truth
about Roswell. The three men who might
have known what actually happened
Ideas of what happened here during the
rancher Mac Brazel, who collected an
first week of July 1947 range from the
armload of wreckage from a crash site
simple a weather balloon crash to the
near Corona, 85 miles northwest of Roswell; intelli-
downright silly Earth was being scouted for an inter-
galactic invasion. The latest official government expla- gence officer Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, who identified it as
from a "flying disc"; and Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, who
nation there have been three thus far-for the so-
called Roswell Incident is that the recovered debris ordered Marcel to retract his claim-are dead. Time
came from a Project Mogul balloon that was carrying has also scattered the files of the U.S. Army Air Corps,
instruments to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Despite Atomic Energy Commission and other government
such claims, however, over the years a number of gov- agencies that may have investigated the episode into
the bureaucratic wind. For this reason, a General Ac
ernment officials have inadvertently fired imagina-
tions. As a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter counting Office (GAO) investigation performed at the
claimed to have seen a UFO As president, Ronald request of New Mexico Congressman Steven H.
Reagan mused openly on how petty differences among Schiff and released in July 1995 reported
nations might evaporate in the face of an extraterres-finding no official records of a crash,
#t
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OFFICIAL SCENIC HISTORIC MARKER
LOOKED LIKE
"PLASTIC DOU
INITIALLY
ROSWELL
Population 39,676 Elevation 3,612
Roswell was a watering place for
the Pecos Valley cattle drives of
the 1870s and 1880s. It was in
corporated in 1891 and is seat of
Chaves County, named for Col. J.
Francisco Chaves, Civil War soldier
and delegate to the U.S. Congress
from the Territory of New Mexico.
In the 1930s. Dr. Robert Goddard.
conducted experiments in liquid
fuel rocket flights here.
BOOT PART OF
ONE-PIECE SUIT
9-4-
The most perplexing UFO
mystery of all began in the
desert north of Roswell. This
year, more than 150,000 tourists
are expected to check things out
for themselves.
G.A
AND DRAMA
POPULAR MECHANICS JULY 1997
ROSWELL PLUS 50
The weather balloon and 1-beam
shown at left and top have been
debunked as frauds. Harder to
explain is the mystery fragment
above Identified as Japanese.
NEW MEXICO
Los Alamos O
Santa Fe
Kirtland AFB Albuquerque
and Sandla
Military
Reservation
Corona
Debris
Socorro
Field
Trinity
Atomic
Test Site
Impact
Site
Radar
Station
Alamogordo
White Sands
Missile Test
Range
Las Cruces
ORoswell
Roswell
AAF
other than the Army Air Corps ac-
count of a crashed weather balloon
and an FBI memo that refers to it.
Suspecting there was more to the
Roswell story, POPULAR MECHANICS
undertook its own investigation to
learn if anything new had emerged in
this 50-year-old techno-mystery. Af-
ter interviewing witnesses who had
seen and handled crash-site debris,
and reviewing documents that were
still classified when the GAO under-
took its investigation, we have con-
cluded that there really was a crashed
disc, dead bodies and a secret that
could have been politically deadly to
presidents Harry S. Truman and
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The official story
In 1947, the Roswell Army Airfield
(RAAF) was home to America's most
elite air unit, the nuclear-weapon-
equipped 509th Bomb Group. And
during the first week of July, nearly
everyone on base and off was at a
heightened state of alert. Since mid-
May, America had been in the grips of
what historians would later call the
great UFO craze of 1947. By some
counts, as many as 800 sightings of
strange objects were reported. At the
bars, lunch counters and dinner tables
in Roswell, airmen retold stories of
mysterious "kraut balls" and "foo
fighters" that had played tag with
bombers and fighters as they flew
missions over Europe and the Pacific.
There is one more important, but of-
ten overlooked, historic fact to keep in
mind. In the years immediately after
the war, the term "flying disc" did not
necessarily mean a flying machine
from another planet.
50
Perhaps it was because of
this mindset that the remark-
able headline that appeared in the
July 8 edition of the Roswell Daily
Record was accepted with some sense
of inevitability. "RAAF Captures Fly-
ing Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Re-
gion," it read. The story beneath the
headline reported that intelligence of-
ficer Marcel had recovered pieces of a
flying disc from the range of an
unidentified rancher. Wire services
and radio stations eager for any news
about flying discs-the term UFO
had not yet been coined-jumped on
the story. "There was a tremendous
amount of excitement," Art McQuid-
day, a local editor, later recalled.
"Here I am, a little old country editor
talking to Paris and Rome."
It was a short-lived fame. The next
day's Daily Record reported that
Marcel had gotten it all wrong. Its
July 9 headline read "Ramey Empties
Roswell Saucer." Ramey, commander
of the Eighth Air Force at Forth
Worth, Texas, was quoted in the story
as saying that the debris recovered by
Marcel was simply the remains of a
crashed weather balloon. Lest there
be any doubt, the Army distributed a
photo showing a contrite Marcel
kneeling next to balloon remains.
Brazel also told his story on page
one, beneath the headline "Harassed
Rancher Who Located 'Saucer' Sorry
He Told About It." He said that he
and his son had actually found the
wreckage on June 14 and returned to
pick it up on the Fourth of July, after
hearing about the crashed "flying
disc." Brazel said he wondered if what
he had found might have been some
of the debris.
PM INSET PHOTOS BY STANTON T. FRIEDMAN (LEFT AND TOP).
JOHN PACE (MIDDLE)
The story went on
to say that he delivered the debris to
the local sheriff on July 7, who then
notified Marcel. The intelligence offi-
cer visited the Brazel home and re-
turned to the base with the wreckage.
The official story is that it consisted of
about 12 ft. of smoky gray rubber
from the balloon's gas bag; bits of foil,
paper and tape; and a 7- or 8-in.-thick
bundle of 3-ft.-long sticks. Notably
absent from the recovered materials
were an engine and propellers.
Ramey's press conference, Brazel's
statement and photos of what were
identified as the remains of a balloon
so thoroughly quashed the initial re-
port of a crashed flying disc that not
until 1978 would most UFO re-
searchers even count the Roswell inci-
dent as part of the 1947 UFO craze.
The idea that something more sig-
nificant than a balloon might have
crashed was raised in 1978. During a
television interview, intelligence offi-
cer Marcel revealed a startling undis-
closed fact about wisp-thin material
recovered from the debris field near
Corona: When placed near a match, it
did not burn. Writers descended on
Roswell, and some of them cajoled a
new generation of witnesses-most
of whom were children in 1947-into
telling a variety of tales. The new re-
ports told of I-beams with hierogly-
phic-like marks and death threats by
government agents. "There is no
question there was a coverup," said
UFO researcher Kevin Randle, who
wrote two books about Roswell. "The
question is, what were they hiding?"
A spy's tale
Randle's claims were largely based
on a series of interviews that he had
cond
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POPULAR MECHANICS JULY 1997
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e had
LY 1997
conduct-
ed with
a former
U.S. Army
counterin-
telligence
agent who at
various times
has been iden-
tified as either
Frank McKenzie
or Joseph Osborne. Now, as I
spoke with this former spy
in the back dining room of
Roswell's Sally Port Restaurant, I
wasn't quite sure he could be trusted.
People I do trust had vouched for him.
He showed me documents that con-
firmed he had been assigned to the
509th. At the time of the Roswell inci-
dent, he had been a civilian employee
assigned to intelligence duties. It was
a job that could have given him access
to the impact site.
Nevertheless, I felt something was
fishy when he said that in 1949 he at-
tended a technical briefing at which
engineers summarized what they had
learned from the wreckage found on
what is now Corn's 24-sq.-mile sheep
and cattle ranch. This simply didn't
sound right. The first rule of keeping
secrets is limiting information to those
with a "need to know." The men who
found the debris would not have been
told its secrets.
In my business, you don't call peo-
ple liars. You mentally cross them off
your list of credible sources and move
on. At that point, I decided to wrap up
the interview by asking the spy an in-
nocuous question: "What do you think
of the crash-site dioramas in the UFO
museums?"
"They got it wrong. It wasn't round.
POPULAR MECHANICS JULY 1997
The craft (above left) drawn by Kaufmann-which scattered
debris in Corona and crashed north of Roswell (top)-resembles
the X-38 and has stealth technology similar to the F-22.
It was heel-shaped," he
said, tracing a pattern with his finger.
With my curiosity rekindled, because
the city's two UFO museums both de-
picted circular craft, I slid my note-
book across the table and asked him
to sketch what he allegedly saw. The
spy then drew side, top and bottom
views of what I immediately recog-
nized as a wingless lifting-body air-
frame. It was a dead ringer for the
X-38, which NASA and the U.S. Air
Force are planning to use as a mini-
space plane. The only obvious differ-
ence was a crude pattern of cross-
hatched lines he was trying to draw
on the bottom view. I had seen some-
thing similar before. These lines cut
into the baby-smooth bottom of the
F-22, the fighter the Air Force hopes
to fly into the 21st century. The pur-
pose of the indentations is to scatter
radar energy to make the jet more
stealthy. Few know this. So, I decided
to give the spy one last test, and
asked, "Are these heatshield tiles?"
"No," he said, ignoring the bait.
"They made it invisible to radar." I
signaled the waitress for another
PM INSET PHOTOS BY JIM WILSON (RIGHT), NASA (LEFT)
round of drinks, sat back and listened
as the spy-his real name is Frank J.
Kaufmann told me how he helped to
engineer the "great Roswell coverup."
Kaufmann says the Roswell inci-
dent really began on July 1, 1947,
when he was ordered to bring a group
of radar experts to Alamogordo,
about 100 miles southwest of Roswell.
For nearly a day, radar aimed at the
nearby White Sands Missile Range
had been detecting unexplainable
blips. Kaufmann was assigned to a
radar screen. While he was watching,
just before midnight on July 3, he saw
a brilliant glare envelop the display.
The source of the disturbance came
from somewhere north of Roswell.
Moments later, in Roswell, the air-
field's switchboard began ringing as
residents on the north end of town
called to report a glow in the desert.
"They thought one of our plane's had
crashed," Kaufmann said. "It was
something that had happened be-
fore." Acting on what he said were or-
ders from Brig. Gen. Martin Scanlan
of the Army's Air Defense Command,
Kaufmann told me he returned to
51
ROSWELL PLUS 50
Roswell. Here, he roused the base
commander Col. William Blanchard
and intelligence officer Marcel. With a
small contingent of men, they drove
north through the sleeping city and
onto what is now Route 285 north.
Near mile marker 132, they turned off
the road and began driving across the
desert, stopping from time to time to
cut the barbed-wire fencing. Around 3
am, they found a heel-shaped craft
measuring about 25 ft. long and 12 ft?
wide embedded in a cliff.
It was split open. One of its four
small-passengers was thrown clear.
Another was partially out of the craft.
Two more were inside. All were dead,
their bodies intact and unburned.
Kaufmann said he watched as a crew
from the airfield worked feverishly be-
neath searchlights to load the frac-
tured craft and bodies aboard a flatbed
truck before dawn. Meanwhile, a sec-
ond team hastily created two diver-
sionary sites to confuse the curious.
As the Sun boiled up from the east,
the tarpaulin-covered Army truck
rolled slowly south through downtown
Roswell. Unnoticed by residents who
had long ago grown used to the sight
of military traffic, it made its way past
the base gates and into a hangar,
which was promptly surrounded by
armed guards. Before evening, the
wreckage and bodies were loaded
aboard a military transport and flown
first to Fort Worth, Texas, and then
on to Wright Field in Ohio. "The
beauty of the recovery operation was
that it was so simple," says Kauf-
mann. "We didn't have to involve any-
one from the outside."
The German
connection
כלכל כגנל (כחור ות.
I was all but ready to trash Kauf-
mann's story when a nearly foot-thick
package of documents obtained via
Freedom of Information Act requests
arrived on my desk. As I read their
badly photocopied pages, I came to
realize that my judgment of Kauf-
mann's story might have been overly
hasty? The more I read, the more
credible Kaufmann's tale-except
for his conclusion about extraterres-
trials-became.
The most surprising information was
gecontained in a declassified Air Force
briefing paper titled "Report On Proj-
ect Silver Bug." It was prepared by the
Joint Air Technical Intelligence Center
at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in
1955. It had two purposes. The first
was to update civilian and military in-
telligence experts on technical issues
related to so-called flying saucers. Its
It is a compelling story, spiced with
some verifiable information, but upon
closer examination, the former spy's
tale is fraught with inconsistencies.
The most obvious of these being a lack
of burned wreckage or charred bodies
at a crash that allegedly produced suf-
ficient illumination to alert residents
miles away. It is also filled with factual
errors, says Stanton T. Friedman. A
University of Chicago-trained nuclear
physicist, he was the first civilian to
investigate the Roswell incident. He
looked into Kaufmann's claims in the
course of researching his recently
published book Top Secret/Majic.
"Majic" refers to a secret organization
that Friedman believes President
Truman created to investigate UFO2
crashes and keep the public ignorant
about extraterrestrial incursions.
"There were no Air Defense Com-
Retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman of the
Defense Intelligence Agency once
claimed the military used technology
from "recovered vehicles."
second goal was to enlist the help of
the FBI, CIA and intelligence units
within the State Department in deter-
mining if the Soviets were pursuing
similar aircraft designs.
To provide the intelligence commu-
nity with technical background, the
report described several ongoing U.S.
saucer projects. (Sketches of two ve-
hicles described in the report appear
on this page and page 53.) Configured
as classic UFOs, these craft exhibited
flight specifications that were nothing
short of phenomenal, even by today's
standards. The largest weighed 26,000
pounds and was powered by jet en-
gines that could lift it to an altitude of
36,900 ft.-as high as today's airliners
fly-in about 1 minute 45 seconds. The
operating ceiling of these amazing
mand radars in New Mexico in 1947, raft was 80,600 ft. Their cruise speed
Friedman told POPULAR MECHANICS.
"Radar experts tell me the only way
to flood a screen with glare is for
something to explode very close to the
antenna. The supposed site was more
than 100 miles away."
52
was an astounding Mach 3.48.
Using key words and technical de-
scriptions in the Silver Bug report, PM
was able to trace the origin of these
remarkable aircraft to Germany. And
AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTO: DRAWINGS: JOINT AIR TECHNICAL
INTELLIGENCE CENTER (TOP). ALL OTHERS U.S. PATENT OFFICE
here, in half-
century-old intelligence files stamped
"secret," we learned that the U.S.
government had mounted a massive
search for engineers and scientists who
had worked on the so-called German
saucer project.
Contrary to UFO literature, which
claims the Germans were attempting
to reverse-engineer a crashed alien
vehicle of their own, these documents
show a more practical reason for in-
terest in saucers: They could take off
without runways. Months of around-
the-clock bombing by the allies had
reduced German runways to rubble.
The Third Reich's only hope of using
its newly perfected jet-engine propul-
sion system to regain air superiority
would be to install it in a vertical-take-
off-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft.
The documents also tell of Army in-
telligence officers combing Europe
for two brothers, Walter and Reimar
Horten. Trained as pilots and engi-
neers, they had close connections to
the Reich's high command. The infor-
mation provided to Army intelligence
said they were believed to have per-
suaded German leaders to construct a
fleet of saucer-shaped bombers. U.S.
military historians acknowledge that
the Horten brothers built and flew
prototypes of circular and flying-wing
aircraft. But they dismiss these craft
as aeronautical curiosities with no mil-
itary value. Initially, PM discounted a
possible connection between the
Horten brothers and Roswell.
We began to think differently after
we obtained a copy of a long-secret
field report from an American intelli-
gence officer stationed in Germany. In
response for a service-wide request for
information about the Horten brothers,
he had apparently looked into the most
secret military files. There he discov-
ered, and duly reported to his superi-
ors, that the Horten brothers already
had been found. "Paperclip records fur-
ther show that the men were released
by the U.K. for exploitation and allocat-
ed to the U.S. [on] 15 November 1946,"
the officer's report said.
"Operation Paperclip" was the code
name for one of the Second World
War's most secret and ethically con-
troversial projects. Its mission was to
put former Nazi scientists and engi-
neers on the U.S. payroll. The Ameri-
can public knew the secret of Los
Alamos weeks after the first atomic
bomb exploded. They would not be told
of Paperclip until after men landed on
the Moon, an event made possible by
Paperclip rocket scientists. The reason
for keeping Paperclip secret was that
the laboratories at which many of the
former German scientists had worked
were also Nazi slave-labor and death
POPULAR MECHANICS⚫ JULY 1997
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message for a nation that had
war for a higher moral purpose.
Probing further into the fate of the
Horten brothers, PM learned that just
prior to their capture they had been
working on the design for a new gen-
eration of circular-shaped vertical-
takeoff aircraft, with specifications
much like those described
in the Silver Bug re-
port. Other records
indicate that after the war, models of
the Horten's designs-possibly con-
structed by the brothers themselves-
were tested in the wind tunnel at
Wright Field, now Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base. This is the same base
to which the wreckage of the Roswell
crash was finally transported.
The Air Force acknowledges the
Germans were working on a flying-
dise craft, but says it was inherently
unstable. Officials point to the failed
Avro flying car built for the Army and
a deteriorating plywood Horten wing,
both on display in museums.
Declassified records obtained by
PM in the course of its investigation
suggest that these marginally per-
forming craft were, in fact, shills
intended to disguise the existence of
more formidable flying machines. One
of the most potent of these flying discs
was developed under a secret pro-
gram called Project Pye Wacket. Its
objective was to design a 5-ft.-dia.
liquid-fueled missile launch platform
to protect U.S. bombers penetrating
Soviet airspace.
In the end, the military would se-
lect conventionally shaped planes and
missiles. As for the Horten flying disc
POPULAR MECHANICS JULY 1997
Lockheed was assigned
patent rights for a passenger
UFO. Its design was among several
developed by the military and aerospace companies.
that the Reich had hoped
would turn the tide of battle,
patent rights to a remarkably similar
craft configured to carry "passen-
gers" would be assigned to the Lock-
heed aircraft company. A cutaway
diagram of this unusual craft appears
on the top of this page.
Despite this information, the
possibility that the
object that crashed at
Roswell was in fact one of the Horten
brothers' creations misses the mark
on two important details. The craft
that Kaufmann claims to have helped
recover was not round, but as his
sketches showed, a lifting body. Also,
he claims there was no fire damage, a
virtual impossibility in the crash of a
jet-powered aircraft.
A Japanese UFO
As our investigation neared its close,
PM was alerted to a forthcoming re-
lease of documents that may fill in
these two missing pieces of the
Roswell puzzle. They may also explain
two other curiosities: the presence of
the crisscrossed radar-deflecting pat-
tern on the bottom of the Roswell
craft, and to the consternation of
those who seek an unearthly explana
tion for Roswell-the origin of the
"dead aliens" who have so often been
described as having Oriental features.
PM has been told that the docu-
ments scheduled for future release
will tell of a Japanese counterpart to
Operation Paperclip. One of its pur-
poses was to determine if the Japan-
ese had constructed a suicide-piloted
version of the Fugo incendiary bomb.
PM ILLUSTRATION (TOP) BY JOHN BATCHELOR
DRAWINGS: JOINT AIR TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE CENTER (MIDDLE).
U.S. PATENT OFFICE (BOTTOM)
no
During the Second World War, the
Japanese launched these unmanned
high-altitude balloons in the hope that
they would land in the Pacific North-
west, explode, ignite forest fires and
thereby deprive the war effort of
needed lumber. The effort was an ob-
vious failure. The Japanese may have
attempted to build a second genera-
tion of Fugos that could be guided to
targets by suicidal pilots.
PM suspects the craft that crashed
at Roswell will eventually be identi-
fied as either a U.S. attempt to re-en-
gineer a second-generation Fugo, or a
hybrid craft which uses both Fugo
lifting technology and a Horten-
inspired lifting body. In either case,
Japanese engineers and pilots brought
to the U.S. after the war to work on
the project could have been the dead
"alien" bodies recovered at the crash
site. Also, equipped with a rudimen-
tary radar-deflecting underside, such
a balloon could have reached stratos-
pheric altitudes as it traveled over
Western Europe and been well above
the range of then-existing MiG fight-
ers and missiles even if it had been de- 14
tected. It could have carried out both
photo reconnaissance and air sam-
pling experiments-similar to those
of the Mogul balloon-before gliding
back to Earth in friendly territory.
Fifty years after the fact, the ques-
tions about Roswell still ring loud and
clear. Our investigation leads us to be-
lieve the explanations that require an
extraterrestrial presence, while possi-
ble, are nevertheless highly implausi-
ble. We're putting our money on a fly-
ing disc labeled "Made In Japan." PM
53