With the New York Times chasing crashed saucers and Trump talking on-the-record, Roswell remains the original sin of the UFO cover-up.

Major Jesse Marcel | A.D. After Disclosure

 

Take a moment to appreciate what’s going on in this photo. This is Major Jesse Marcel of the Roswell Army Air Base in July of 1947. He 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 breath-taking 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, the next day, 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.

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 the scene set, let’s get to the breaking news…

Roswell Today | Photo by Jared Zabel

The New York Times Running with Fox News?

There’s a rumor buzzing about in the increasingly sophisticated and informed UFO circles that the New York Times has reporters out making calls about actual crash retrievals of unidentified flying objects on American soil.

Take a moment and appreciate what this might mean if it turns out to be true. That would mean the nation’s most famous newspaper may be on the verge of stating that we have recovered materials from crashes, and that the technology is not ours (the U.S.) or theirs (China, Russia), and comes from another source. Do the math on that one.

New York Times

Why in the world would respectable journalists like Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, working in the bosom of respectability that the New York Times, want to chase that old canard of crashed saucers out in the desert?

For starters, because there’s always been lots of anecdotal evidence and witness testimony from some key people. Only it just hasn’t been the Smoking Wreckage that proof demands. That, plus you’d be so far out on a limb as a journalist that you might never crawl your way back. And that might have been true until just last year.

That’s when Luis Elizondo, who ran the government’s AATIP, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, said out loud what we knew he was thinking. While talking to Fox’s Tucker Carlson, he said that, yes, the U.S. had the goods, actual physical wreckage. Former military intelligence, Elizondo quit the government’s UFO program to live the activist’s life and advocate for new thinking and transparency out about this reality.

Carlson: Do you believe, based on your decade of serving in the U.S. government on this question, that the U.S. government has in its possession any material from one of these aircrafts?

Elizondo: I do, yes.

Carlson: You think the U.S. government has debris from a UFO in its possession right now?

Elizondo: Unfortunately, Tucker, I really have to be careful of my NDA. I really can’t go into a lot more detail than that, but simply put, yes.

The whole topic just oozes the possibility of rapid Disclosure and change waiting in the wings, just off the stage of transparency. Here’s a great refresher on who’s said what about crash wreckage.

It is possible that the new headlines from The New York Times will be the kick to the barn door of Disclosure that lets all the horses out.

While we wait to see, let’s check in with what the Donald Trumps have to say about Roswell.

Roswell is the Holy Grail

Donald Trump Jr. just asked his dad, repeatedly, about Roswell in a Father’s Day 2020 interview. Red or blue, it is still semi-astonishing to hear the sitting President of the United States admit his awareness of Roswell, and say, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.” Let’s do the math on that. If it was just a 73-year old mistken weather balloon or even crash dummies story, it wouldn’t be all that interesting, would it? But if Roswell was more than that, well, that would be… interesting.

The Question You Just Have to Ask

Quick review of Roswell 101 —

In early July of 1947, the military brass at the Roswell Army Air Base put out a press release that was so forthright that the local paper headlined with “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” Here’s the paper.

Roswell Daily Record

The next day the same people said that all these trained military people who the U.S. trusted with nuclear weapons got it all wrong and had just misidentified a weather balloon, something they dealt with every day. Here’s that headline:

Roswell Daily Record

What if the government accidentally told the truth that first day?

Why Do I Believe the Roswell Crash?

This is clearly a question to be answered cautiously. I start with what we know. We know the Roswell Army Air Base put out a 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.

We know over the years the U.S. military has variously announced that Roswell was a flying saucer, a weather balloon, crash dummies from a test flight, or a secret Mogul balloon to spy on the Soviets nuclear capability. Those are just the official attempts at explanation. Other interested parties have spun tales of Nazi Mengele-crewed saucers, Soviet saucers, and the work of the Devil. The subject has clearly been one open to interpretation for decades now.

Then, in shocking counterpoint to all of that, there’s a singular, other one. Roswell was exotic technology. We got wreckage and bodies. We don’t talk about Fight Club.

Roswell Today | Photo by Jared Zabel

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 dozens and dozens who attested to extremely tight security and transportation of material in the aftermath of what crashed at Roswell.

I know this because I worked with the top two researchers — Don Schmitt and the late Stanton Friedman — and I’ve spent dozens of hours going through their research. Stan was the man who found Jesse Marcel back in 1978 and Don was the energetic young researcher who competed with Stan in a bitter 1990s feud. At the end of their competition, though, they became friends. As Don has always asked:

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?

Those people 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 four dead. Bodies, craft and wreckage were moved, mostly to Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, and to other places, as ordered.

The testimony I’ve seen 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.”

I believe the Roswell history told by the vast majority of the first and second hand witnesses. 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, to me, the signal remains loud and clear.

Roswell Today | Photo by Jared Zabel

Roswell is Probably Off-Limts for a While Longer

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.

The full story of Roswell likely won’t be written for years. When it is, the story will gain the respect it deserves. Historians and readers of that age will wonder how it came to be that such a serious matter was swept under the rug for so long. It will seem insane.

It’s doubtful that any imminent New York Times reporting will dare to touch the Roswell story, so tainted by disinformation, abuse, witness intimidation, and the twin pillars of cover-up, denial and ridicule, that to many it appears shaky and unreliable. It’s better for them to go after a fresh target, maybe something more recent, less well known. 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.

So the Times will have a go at easier targets first. Editors will force reporters to source meticulously. The big game they’re hunting is just one piece of material from a UFO wreck, or a craft itself. They want to know who got it, what they did with it, what we’ve learned from it, and where it is today.

Once they establish it’s happened before, the story of Roswell is on a fast track to investigation and then de-classification. At that point, the game will continue with different rules.

People get ready.