ROSWELL: A TALE OF TWO MEMOS
The final Other Worlds Orbiter screening is coming October 23rd, and it’s a World Premiere! Read about THE MANDELA EFFECT film and get tickets here. As a hat-tip to film’s twisty, conspiracy-laden ideas, the OW programmers are seizing their chance to talk about their favorite conspiracy theories (or truths).
BEARS REBECCA:
Back in 1947, something completely unremarkable happened. Our tiny little insignificant planet was visited by an interstellar voyager. This has happened for years going back to Ezekiel’s Wheel, Hindu Vimana, or the Mayans’ very clear design of a seated astronaut operating his spacecraft found at Palenque. Let's not forget the Easter Island heads, the Nazca lines, and the innumerable stories that spanned cultures and generations that all lead back to the same indisputable truth. To quote Blink-182, “aliens exist.” There is no conspiracy about that.
In fact, a 2012 poll from National Geographic found that 77 percent of Americans think that aliens have visited Earth. So what happened in 1947? That's where the conspiracy comes in because an alien spacecraft with engine trouble crash-landed in the New Mexico desert on a private ranch outside Roswell New Mexico. I believe this to be a pure and simple fact. The government has been covering this up for over 70 years. Here are the facts of the case:
July 8th, 1947 front page
The debris discovered by rancher W.W. “Mack” Brazel was secretly and quickly gathered by the military from the Roswell Army Air Field under the direction of base intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel. On July 8, 1947, public information officer Lt. Walter Haut issued a press release under orders from base commander Col. William Blanchard, which said basically that we have in our possession a flying saucer. He gave copies to the two radio stations and both of the local newspapers. By 2:26 p.m., the story was on the Associated Press wire:
“The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disk had been found.”
As calls began to pour into the base from all over the world, Lt. Robert Shirkey watched as MPs carried loaded wreckage onto a C-54 from the First Transport Unit.
5 men of this B-29 crew assisted in the clean up
“Standing only three feet from the passing procession, we saw boxes full of aluminum-looking metal pieces being carried to the B-29. Major Marcel came along carrying an open box full of what seemed to be scrap metal. It obviously was not aluminum: it did not shine nor reflect like the aluminum on American military airplanes. And sticking up in one corner of the box being carried by Major Marcel was a small "I-beam" with hieroglyphic-like markings on the inner flange, in some kind of weird color, not black, not purple, but a close approximation of the two. Next, a man in civilian dress who was carrying a piece of metal under his left arm... This piece was about the size of a poster drawing board -- very smooth, almost glass-like, with torn edges.”
Robert Slusher, part of the crew that flew the debris out of Roswell has similar memories of the material, but also adds:
“Four armed MPs guarded the crate, which was approximately four feet high, five feet wide, and twelve feet long. We departed Roswell at approximately 4:00 PM for Fort Worth [later Carswell AFB]. ... On arrival at Fort Worth we were met by six people, including three MPs. They took possession of the crate. The crate was loaded on to a flatbed weapons carrier and hauled off. Their MPs accompanied the crate. One officer present was a major, the other a 1st lieutenant. The sixth person was an undertaker who had been a classmate of a crewman on our flight, Lt. Felix Martucci. ... After returning to Roswell, we realized that what was in the crate was classified.”
The next day another press release was issued, this time from Gen. Roger Ramey in Ft. Worth, stating that the officers at Roswell had been fooled by a weather balloon. Ramey also appears on Fort Worth-Dallas radio station WBAP. Photographs of the ‘UFO wreckage’ are supplied, looking very much like a weather balloon.
Is it possible that trained soldiers and high ranking military officers could really be fooled by a weather balloon? Shirkey and Slusher are only two of thirty plus accounts that describe questionable material from its discovery on the ranch to it seizure by the Air Force and subsequent quick and covert airlift to Fort Worth. Why would Major Marcel make all this fuss over a weather balloon?
Of course, the answer is that there was much more than wreckage. Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working at Ballard Funeral Home, received a curious call one afternoon from the RAAF morgue. The base’s mortuary officer was trying to get hold of some small, hermetically sealed coffins and also wanted to know how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for a few days and avoid contaminating the tissue. Later that evening Dennis drove to the base hospital, where he saw large pieces of wreckage with strange engravings on one of the pieces sticking out of the back of a military ambulance. He entered the hospital and was visiting with a nurse he knew when suddenly he was threatened by military police and forced to leave. The next day, Dennis met with the nurse, who told him about bodies discovered with the wreckage and drew pictures of them on a prescription pad.
Recreation of Nurse X’s description
“She drew me a diagram of the bodies, including an arm with a hand that had only four fingers; the doctors noted that on the end of the fingers were little pads resembling suction cups. She said the head was disproportionately large for the body; the eyes were deeply set; the skulls were flexible; the nose was concave with only two orifices; the mouth was a fine slit, and the doctors said there was heavy cartilage instead of teeth. The ears were only small orifices with flaps. They had no hair, and the skin was black--perhaps due to exposure in the sun. She gave me the drawings. There were three bodies; two were very mangled and dismembered, as if destroyed by predators; one was fairly intact.”
Within a few days she was transferred to England; her whereabouts remain unknown. Later, one of the nurses at the base said the rumor was that she and five other nurses had been on a training mission and had been killed in a plane crash. Dennis went on to found the Roswell UFO Museum. His stories have his detractors (like he never produced the name of the Nurse, and his story about her changed. However, supporting his story is the fact that he never sought to tell it. He was found. Researcher Stan Friedman first interviewed him because Friedman had reasoned that the Roswell undertaker may have heard something about the incident. Only later did Dennis become public on the matter. A Roswell Army Air Field serviceman in 1947, Sgt. Milton Sprouse (it’s he and his crew pictured above with the B-29) remembers distinctly Dennis speaking of the event decades ago. Sprouse says that a few years after the crash he had seen Glenn at a mutual friend’s funeral. Glenn brought up in conversation the base’s strange call inquiring about the mysterious child caskets. And a few possibilities have pop up on who Nurse X may be.
But Dennis was not alone. There were several other accounts of bodies from witnesses, some revealed many years after the incident but who were afraid to speak out earlier due to fear.
Lt. Walter Haut, former Roswell base public information officer who issued the initial press release confessed, in a "deathbed" sealed affidavit, to seeing the spacecraft and bodies in base Hangar 84/P-3 and tells us the mysterious press release was Gen. Ramey's idea to divert press and public attention away from the closer and more important craft/body site.
Sgt. Frederick Benthal, an army photographer flown in from Washington D.C., said he photographed alien bodies in a tent at crash site and saw large quantities of crash debris being hauled away in trucks.
PFC Elias Benjamin, Roswell MP, said he escorted the alien bodies from the heavily guarded base Hangar P-3 to the base hospital, and saw a live one being worked on by doctors; He was threatened afterwards if he didn't keep quiet. “I could see well enough to make out that a very small person with an egg-shaped head that was oversized for its body was lying on the gurney. The only facial features that stick out in my mind now are that it had slanted eyes, two holes where its nose should have been, and a small slit where its mouth should have been. I think it was alive. The medical people were mostly just staring at it...”
Steven Lovekin, although not a direct participant, served in the White House Army Signal Corp during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He said he received 1959 Pentagon briefings and recall being shown a metallic beam with symbols from a 1947 N.M. crash (presumably Roswell), plus being told of either 3 or 5 aliens being recovered, one initially alive. He also said he was shown very compelling photographic and radar evidence of UFOs. He also testified of the threats against military personnel given this information if they were to publicly reveal it. Finally, he believed Eisenhower's concern over the military industrial complex was about the debris seized from the UFO crash and power falling into the hands of private corporations given access to the materials.
Possibly there is no better proof of the government conspiracy than the initial coverup. Look closely at the photo in which General Roger Ramey and Colonel Thomas Dubois look at the weather balloon Ramey claimed was mistaken for a flying saucer in Roswell in 1947. Barely noticeable in one of the 1947 photos and clutched in Gen. Ramey's left hand is a slip of paper which, when blown up and analyzed, tells a curiously different story. Using modern technology to zoom in and enhance the image, in 2001, David Rudiak was able to decipher what 80% of the letters are. He says it is clear that there is a reference to a disc, and believes he can also make out a portion of a sentence that reads: “and the victims of the wreck,” corroborating the claims of extraterrestrial bodies recovered from that wreck. Rudiak’s website is a fantastic source for all things Roswell.
Also, if you have the opportunity, visit the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico to read some of the sources firsthand. Admittedly I walked in predisposed, but I left utterly convinced. That same trip I drove by Area 51, but that's a story for another time.
