Christopher Allan and Gilles Fernandez also raised the point that the 509th may have felt a need to issue some sort of press release since the local media was aware, or might become aware, that several people had gone out to the ranch to retrieve a “crashed disc”. Unfortunately, the wording of the press release was unclear as to exactly what was recovered.

In order to reinforce the “drooling idiots” argument, it has also been stated that Colonel Blanchard could not be promoted to the rank of General because of the errant press release. This is a completely inaccurate portrayal of how the military would react to such a scenario. Other than a bit of embarrassment by jumping the gun on a press release, I see nothing seriously wrong that could jeopardize Blanchard’s career or change the opinion of his superiors about him. Nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged, and no regulations were broken. Compare that to what happened to these two famous officers:

Chester Nimitz grounded a destroyer as a young officer. A court-mar• tial found him guilty of “neglect of duty”. He was relieved of command and received a reprimand. 

Hap Arnold tried to petition congressmen to create a separate Air • Force in 1926. He was publicly reprimanded by General Patrick, the head of the Army Air Corps and left Washington DC in disgrace. 

Both of these men overcame these incidents (which were more severe than Blanchard’s minor mistake) to become the great Admirals/Generals that they were. To suggest that Blanchard, who was an officer that was probably earmarked for promotion prior to the incident, be removed from the promotion list because of a simple mistake in public relations is ludicrous. 

Contrary to what the crashologists state publicly, the skeptics do not consider the men of the 509th incompetent or stupid. Skeptics simply state that, in the excitement of the moment, Blanchard, Marcel, and the others involved thought they had recovered a “flying disc” since nobody had any idea what a “flying disc” was. It was an honest mistake that was probably treated as such by the upper chain of command with no repercussions. Those presenting the “drooling idiots” straw man argument are doing so in order to make their argument of a conspiracy involving a crashed alien spaceship sound more reasonable. If this is the kind of argument they are resorting to, they must not consider their evidence very convincing.

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Jesse Marcel Sr.

Mr. Randle enjoys promoting the testimony of Johnny Mann, who interviewed Marcel back in the 1980s. He stated that Marcel told him that the photographs don’t show him with the actual debris. This was not recorded, which makes it just as good as the Shandera interview with Dubose and Moore’s description of what Marcel had told him. Kevin Randle frequently points out how William Moore’s interview had presented several versions of the interview he published in The Roswell Incident.

What Randle is not very fond of acknowledging are the other statements I quoted in SUNlite 4-4.

Marcel was clear to Bob Pratt that he brought the debris to Fort Worth and gave it to General Ramey. •

Marcel was clear in the movie, • UFOs are real, that the newsmen saw some of the debris. This tends to confirm the statement by Moore that Marcel said he was photographed with the real debris.

Marcel was clear in his interview with Linda Corely that he had brought the debris into the office and that the debris was covered up BY HIM (under the orders of Ramey) with brown paper on the floor.

The later interview is important to examine because none of the photographs appear to show anything beneath the brown paper unless it was as flat as the floor. It is almost as if Marcel was trying to get himself out of the corner when the photographs showed that his memories of all of this were not accurate. More importantly, the last two statements completely invalidates the second hand testimony of Walter Haut, who told everybody that Marcel told him he went into the map room with Ramey and when they came back the real debris was gone and replaced with the balloon/reflector materials. Marcel never mentioned this in any of the interviews. Not surprisingly, Randle and Schmitt attempted to force fit statements by Dubose into this scenario.

Thomas Dubose

It is important to note that hypnosis was used on Dubose in their very first interview conducted by Randle and Schmitt. In his book, The abduction enigma, Randle cites the Royal College of Psychiatrists. According

to Randle, they stated using hypnosis to recover memories can introduce false memories. Randle also made a note that memories are not repeated the same way twice and are influenced by one’s beliefs. Did hypnosis play a role in influencing Dubose’ memories and how he recalled the event based on leading questions by those conducting the interview?

In the MUFON journal of April 1991, Randle and Schmitt presented the testimony from Dubose in their interviews. The main points from these interviews were:

Dubose stated the weather balloon explanation was a cover story to get the press off their backs.

They were told to forget everything else.•

Two or three days prior to the Marcel showing up, the only debris that came from Roswell that Dubose ever saw was flown from • Roswell to Fort Worth in a B-25. It was in a sealed bag, which he gave to Colonel Clark so he could take it to Washington in a B-26.

Dubose never actually saw any of the debris from Roswell other than the sealed bag.•

Dubose had no idea where the debris in Ramey’s office came from. •

Dubose stated the debris in the office did not come from Roswell.•

Dubose stated the debris from Roswell was a bunch of garbage.•

According to Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, Dubose had also stated that the debris in the office "couldn't have come from Fort Worth. We didn't launch balloons!" 1

There was never any statement that he switched the debris or Ramey ordered a switch of the debris. If Ramey was going to order a switch, he would have turned to somebody he trusted to accomplish it in a secretive manner with no loose ends. His chief of staff, Thomas Dubose, would have been that person. Since he did not know where the debris came from, how can he state it never came from Roswell or that it had been switched? If the only time the “real debris” ever came to Fort Worth was on July 6th, what was on the plane that Marcel flew into Fort Worth? Is Randle actually suggesting that an empty plane came to Fort Worth or that there was some alien debris on it that Dubose was unaware of? When compared to what Marcel Sr. stated, Thomas Dubose statements in this interview are inconsistent.

However, the interview of Dubose with Shandera is consistent with most of Marcel’s testimony. I must point out that Randle has implied that Shandera either made this all up or severely distorted what Dubose told him in order to make it fit Marcel’s testimony. This is why I sttated, in SUNlite 4-4, that the interview was controversial. Despite this caveat, one must still read the interview to see what was stated. The basic content of this interview revealed the following:

There never was a switch and that neither he or Ramey would ever do something like this.•

The photographs show the debris that Marcel brought from Roswell.•

The weather balloon explanation was a cover story to get the press off their backs.•

He took the debris in Ramey’s office, put it into a container, gave it to Colonel Clark, who flew the debris to Washington in a B-25.

The debris in the office was not from a weather balloon because it did not have weather balloon markings. However, he described the debris as garbage.

The debris from Roswell came in a B-29 and he had met the plane. He took the debris from that plane and brought it to Ramey’s • office.

He could not remember if Marcel was on this plane or not but does remember Marcel being present at the press conference.•

Shandera’s track record regarding accuracy is not the best so one has to consider this when evaluating his version of events since he did not record it. However, Randle and Schmitt have also had problems with being accurate about what they wrote about Roswell. So their interpretation of what Dubose meant should also be considered as I pointed out above. What I found important about the Shandera interview was that Dubose was asked, point blank, if he or Ramey had switched the debris. Meanwhile, Randle and Schmitt seemed to dance around this or Dubose did not ever directly answer the question when asked.

Others interviewed Dubose but it is not clear what was stated. Randle points out that Don Ecker received two different stories from Dubose. The first was what he told Randle/Schmitt. The second came after Shandera called Dubose and “refreshed” his memory. Ecker then heard Dubose tell the story he told Shandera.

I have a CD-ROM called The UFO Anthology, which contains part of a Dubose interview that seemed to contradict what Randle and Schmitt have stated about the debris:

Well, Butch sent this fella you mentioned his name… (Interviewer says “Marcel”)…yeah…out to look at it and he scooped it up and put it in this bag and brought it back to Roswell…that went direct to Blanchard and from Blanchard into Fort Worth and then to Washington…that took less than 48 hours.2

I am not sure of the interview’s provenance but it clearly is Dubose talking. The description appears to confirm what Dubose told Shandera and contradict what he told Schmitt/Randle about the debris from Roswell that went to Washington. He is stating that this debris was the debris that Marcel had picked up and not something that came a few days before.

Another interview that was conducted came from Billy Cox. He got Dubose to say that they dropped a balloon from several hundred feet and that was the debris that is in the office. Dubose also told Cox that he did not think the debris came from an alien spaceship. An examination of the materials in the photographs indicate that this was something dropped from a few hundred feet is not accurate. The ML-307 would not shatter into hundreds of pieces and fragment. Additionally, the balloon material would not 

turn this black even if the balloon had been left out for a few hours in the sun (see my balloon testing articles in SUNlite 4-4 and 4-5).Of course, how could Dubose know that the material had been dropped from a few hundred feet when he told Randle and Schmitt that he had no idea where that debris had come from!

Brazel’s interview

There is no reason to repeat Mack Brazel’s interview but it is important to note that his description involved rubber, sticks and paper

backed tin foil. The photographs at Fort Worth show some of the same type of debris except he described larger quantities of it. This indicates the photographs shows some of the debris Brazel and Marcel had recovered. As a result, crashologists invoke the conspiracy theory, where Brazel was forced to give this description. This argument ignores what I have I stated in my SUNlite 4-4 time line.

Bessie Brazel described the same types of debris in her 1993 affidavit.•

The early news wires described the disc as a small tin foil target.•

The FBI teletype suggests that the debris was a RAWIN target.•

Jesse Marcel is reported to have stated, in the 1947 media, that the debris consisted of tin foil and rubber.•

Other than a lot of speculation and hearsay evidence, there is really no evidence that Brazel was forced to give this testimony. Brazel’s

testimony, supported by the other statements made in 1947, indicates the debris in the photographs came from the Foster ranch and was never switched.

Making sense of it all

Thomas Dubose and Jesse Marcel may have been describing events as best they could recall at the time they were interviewed. However, personal beliefs, the ravages of time, and the power of suggestion may have influenced those interviews. Dubose believed in most of the interviews that:

The weather balloon explanation was a cover story for the press.•

The debris in the office was just a bunch of garbage.•

At some point he gave Colonel Clark some debris that was flown to Washington.•

Assuming that Marcel was being accurate when he stated he had brought the actual debris into Ramey’s office, the statements by Dubose about the debris in the office not being from Roswell or that the only debris from Roswell was the flight on the 6th must be inaccurate or a jumbled memory from the events that transpired on July 8th. The interview from The UFO anthology appears to confirm this point of view.

This is why I drew my conclusion that the debris retrieved by Brazel on the fourth was what was given to Colonel Clark for transport to Washington DC/Wright Field. Meanwhile, the debris Marcel had picked up off the ground on Monday evening was what came into Ramey’s office. Dubose seems to have gotten confused about which debris was which. He knew the debris he gave to Clark was the “real stuff” but seems to have forgotten where the debris in the office came from in his interview with Schmitt/Randle. Shandera

may have jogged some of those details loose by asking direct questions instead of letting Dubose ramble on.

Ignored or never mentioned by Randle in his complaints about this are the conclusions that Schmitt and Carey drew regarding the interviews with Dubose. In the Summer 2000 issue of the International UFO Report, they wrote the following:

In the interviews that he (Dubose) gave to researchers over the years several themes in his testimony were clear: (1) he never saw any debris other than weather balloon debris; (2) the debris was not switched (because all he ever saw was the balloon); and (3) the weather-balloon debris came from Roswell on the flight with Marcel.3

If it were so clear that Dubose stated there was a switch in his interviews, as Randle claims, how could Schmitt/Carey draw the conclusion there was no switch? Is it because, as I have stated, they never really asked the question or received an answer to such a question? It appears that what Dubose stated was open to interpretation, which makes Shandera’s interview important. I only mentioned this interview because it was the only one published where somebody asked him that question directly.

My conclusion in the time line I published was not based solely on what Shandera says Dubose told him. It is a conclusion based on looking at the statements that were least likely to be contaminated by the popular Roswell legend and it does not require a complex conspiracy for which there is little, or no, supporting evidence.

Notes and references

Carey, Thomas J. and Donald R. Schmitt. 1. Witness to Roswell. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2007. p. 94

The UFO anthology2. Vol.#1 1998 Dreamland interactive.

Carey, Thomas J. and Donald R. Schmitt. “From complicity to cover-up”. 3. International UFO Reporter. Summer 2000 P. 9-10.

Quelle: SUNlite 6/2012