Major Jesse A. Marcel, intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947. He went out to the Foster ranch with rancher William Brazel, collected debris, and was photographed the same week in Roger Ramey’s office at Fort Worth kneeling beside balloon and radar-target material, the photographs that carried the weather balloon explanation to the public.
In 1978 he told Stanton Friedman that the material he had recovered was not what he was photographed with, describing foil that would not stay creased and beams marked with symbols. That interview restarted the case after three decades of silence and is the origin of the modern Roswell literature. It is also testimony recorded thirty-one years after the event, by a witness whose account of his own war record was later shown to be inflated, and both facts belong in any assessment of it.
Connections
Roswell Incident 1947 · Roswell Army Air Field · Roger Ramey · Walter Haut · Project Mogul · Kevin Randle