Excerpted from
GOVERNMENT UFO LIES
An Illustrated Lecture
MUFON 2005
May 2005
by Stanton T. Friedman
LIES about the recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, in July, 1947, have gone on for fifty-eight years. Evening newspapers across the USA from Chicago west on July 8, 1947, carried front page headlines stating that the government had recovered a flying saucer on a ranch outside Roswell. That the cover-up went into effect quickly is shown by the full-width front page headlines later that same day in the Los Angeles Herald Express “Army Finds Flying Saucer.” In smaller print on the next line the LIE was in place: “General Believes it is Radar Weather Gadget.” Earlier, newspapers east of California only had the “finds saucer” story. Within just a few hours of the press release from Roswell announcing the find, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, then Commander of the Eighth Air Force based at Ft. Worth Air Field in Texas was LYING to the press and the public that it was just a radar reflector balloon combination. Pictures were taken in his office showing phony wreckage not matching at all the description given by Major Jesse Marcel who had retrieved a small part of the wreckage located by rancher Mack Brazel “last week” according to all the July 8 stories. Ramey really had chutzpah since he was holding a folded piece of paper in his hand with printing on it that Dr. David Rudiak has deciphered including such phrases as “victims of the wreck.”
The Army Air Force solidified the weather balloon radar gadget explanatory LIE with the launching of such a device for the press over at Alamogordo Army Air Field on July 9. The full-width July 10 front page headline of the Alamogordo News, with three related pictures, was “Fantasy of ‘Flying Disc’ Explained Here.” There was a 24-column-inch front page article. It was accepted, though it was perfectly obvious that the weather balloons could not explain all the sightings of high speed objects such as those observed by Kenneth Arnold on June 24.
It took until 1994 for the USAF to make a preemptive strike against the GAO, searching for Roswell information for congressman Steven Schiff, by finally admitting that they had LIED about the weather balloon explanation. They LIED again to do it, now falsely, in a two-inch-thick volume The Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (Ref. 2 ) by USAF Colonel Richard Weaver (he provided the fiction). He claimed that the Roswell wreckage had been a super secret Mogul balloon train found on June 14, 1947, by rancher Brazel. In the first place, June 14 is hardly “last week” from July 8. In the second place,
the characteristics of the wreckage described by witnesses don’t match Mogul balloons. For the latter the paper-backed foil could easily be torn, the balsa wood sticks were easily broken, cut, and burned. The I-beams described by Jesse Marcel could not be broken, cut or burned. In the third place, it was claimed that the unusual symbols described by people like Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. were from a toy manufacturer’s tape used to hold the radar targets together. Isn’t it amazing that the Air Force has not been able to show a picture of any such tape nor are such symbols visible in the high-resolution photos taken in Ramey’s office?
In the fourth place, USAF Colonel Richard Weaver, a disinformation specialist, in his huge, grossly misleading report (Ref. 2) carried
a LIE by Counter Intelligence officer Colonel Sheridan W. Cavitt claiming “The area of this debris was very small about 20 feet square and the material was spread on the ground, but there was no gouge or crater or other obvious sign of impact. I remember recognizing this material as being consistent with a weather balloon. We gathered up some of this material which would easily fit into one vehicle.” Cavitt
also LIED in saying that he had not met the rancher. The only way he and Jesse Marcel could have found the crash site would have been to follow the rancher out. Jesse indicated that Brazel had given them a can of beans and they stayed overnight in their sleeping bags. Considering that a Mogul balloon train consists of 20-25 standard neoprene weather balloons tied with string at twenty-foot intervals, with ballast packs, sonobuoys and radio transmitters, and stretched over 500 feet, it would have been impossible to fit such a pack in one vehicle. If Cavitt’s description had been accurate, there would have been absolutely no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to follow the rancher out, much of the trip cross country at that. The debris would all have fit in Brazel’s pick-up truck and would have all been left in town. The reason Marcel went out to the ranch was because there was nothing conventional in what Brazel brought in and because
Brazel had indicated that the wreckage had covered an area hundreds of feet wide and three quarters of a mile long, and his sheep wouldn’t cross the debris field. Remember that Brazel had recovered weather balloons before and also had first heard on July 5 in Corona about flying saucers and a reward for recovery of one. It is interesting indeed that Weaver also quoted heavily from the Roswell Daily Record of July 9 with the new story for Brazel (“Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It”), but left out the final comment “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”
Weaver also left out the comment in the article that
the debris covered an area 200 yards in diameter or 1000 times greater than that stated by Cavitt. Nobody mentioned that neoprene balloons left in the hot dry air of New Mexico turn to dust in a couple of weeks. In the fifth place, the many Air Force claims about how classified Mogul was were LIES. Results that showed they had picked up sound waves from a Soviet nuclear explosion with their constant altitude balloon train would indeed have been TOP SECRET. But the equipment was standard conventional balloons, sonobuoys, etc. Some launches were allowed to just come down in the desert, no chase planes, no ground crew following. The guys cleared to work on it were cleared through Confidential according to a June 1946 memo at the National Archives.
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