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The Roswell Incident [1947]

charliebrown said:
Wernher von Braun supposedly said the Roswell UFO craft was in his opinion an alive entity with very few controls.
Wernher von Braun said the occupants and ship became one ( Borg like ).
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Yes, the emphasis should be on 'supposedly'. In fact, von Braun never mentioned Roswell at all.
 
JahaRa said:
The one in Aztec that many claim was a hoax, was less clumsily hidden, but why did the military show up hours after the sheriff was told about it.
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Once again, there was no crash at Aztec, no sheriff, and no military. It was all a story made up by the two hoaxers.
 
JahaRa said:
That is a good question. I think we don't have all the information or any of the right information.
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Well, we certainly don't based on your post, which is mixing up three separate stories - all of which surfaced at different times and involved different sites.

JahaRa said:
Someone does but this was after the 1945 crash when the army was surprised and did not do anything to cover anything up until the whole thing had been cleaned up, and it was very close to the Trinity site a few weeks after the last test and before the drop on Japan. And that was visiting all the residents in the area and telling them to be quiet about it or they would be put in prison.
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The story of an avocado-shaped UFO that crashed in the vicinity of the Trinity site in 1945 didn't surface until 2021, in the book Trinity: The Best Kept Secret by Vallee and Leopizzi:

https://www.amazon.com/Trinity-Secret-Jacques-F-Vallée/dp/B09KDWDPZ1

JahaRa said:
After that they must have had a meeting to be sure everything was swept under the rug and the Roswell one was clumsy too. In fact so clumsy it could have been a hoax to keep the Russians distracted. And none of the stories after the newspaper claimed it was a weather balloon came out until a couple of decades later, when there were different stories, a secret Project to us special weather balloons to spy on Russia (but if that were true they would have crashed in Alaska) etc.
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The Project MOGUL documents were declassified and made public in the 1990s. No MOGUL flights were conducted over Alaska because they could have been conducted anywhere. The MOGUL instrument (essentially a recording barometer) was designed to record pressure waves propagating worldwide in the stratosphere - waves which had only recently been discovered to both accompany huge explosive events (including the US A-bombs) and travel all around the globe at high altitude. The single USAAF facility handling high-altitude balloon research was in New Mexico, so that's where the MOGUL balloon arrays were launched.

JahaRa said:
The one in Aztec that many claim was a hoax, was less clumsily hidden, but why did the military show up hours after the sheriff was told about it. And why would some of the Navajo have a story about it that has nothing to do with anything else? The problem is that all the people who actually were there are dead.
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There was nothing to hide, because Newton and Gebauer made the whole story up. They were the sole sources for the story, admitted it was a fraud, and were convicted of fraud in a court of law in 1953.
 
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EnolaGaia said:
Well, we certainly don't based on your post, which is mixing up three separate stories - all of which surfaced at different times and involved different sites.



The story of an avocado-shaped UFO that crashed in the vicinity of the Trinity site in 1945 didn't surface until 2021, in the book Trinity: The Best Kept Secret by Vallee and Leopizzi:

https://www.amazon.com/Trinity-Secret-Jacques-F-Vallée/dp/B09KDWDPZ1



The Project MOGUL documents were declassified and made public in the 1990s. No MOGUL flights were conducted over Alaska because they could have been conducted anywhere. The MOGUL instrument (essentially a recording barometer) was designed to record pressure waves propagating worldwide in the stratosphere - waves which had only recently been discovered to both accompany huge explosive events (including the US A-bombs) and travel all around the globe at high altitude. The single USAAF facility handling high-altitude balloon research was in New Mexico, so that's where the MOGUL balloon arrays were launched.



There was nothing to hide, because Newton and Gebauer made the whole story up. They were the sole sources for the story, admitted it was a fraud, and were convicted of fraud in a court of law in 1953.
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One small correction: the Trinity story first emerged into ufology more generally in 2007, when Timothy Good included it in one of his books: it had originated in a local newspaper feature a couple of years earlier.

Vallee suggests the Trinity craft, entities and crash were all a symbolic message from a powerful intelligence to Earth scientists. I agree that these all-quite-similar crash stories probably do have great symbolic significance at some level, but I don't think you necessarily need to postulate anything more than the human imagination for their creation.
 
eburacum said:
Once again, there was no crash at Aztec, no sheriff, and no military. It was all a story made up by the two hoaxers.
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Once again, If that makes you feel better fine, but I grew up in that area and I have been to the site. Let it go and I will let it go.
 
EnolaGaia said:
If by "Roswell" you mean the Brazel / Marcel debris (etc.) storyline from July 1947 the answer is a firm "No."

The first claims of alien bodies didn't emerge (in the New Mexico context of the time) until the Newton / Gebauer / Aztec hoax in 1948. The Aztec story's elements were patched onto the basic Roswell story in the 1950s to yield a narrative that appeared here and there in UFO / paranormal literature at the time.

There was a resurgence of claims about a New Mexico crash with alien bodies when the Barney Barnett story (Plains of San Agustin) surfaced 3 decades later. As happened with the Aztec story in the 1950s, the Barnett story (and / or its derivative variants) was blended into the basic Roswell story to produce multiple "two sites" theories alleging the final crash site was (e.g.) somewhere in the Corona area.
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There are actually a huge (well, maybe that's exaggeration; relatively large) number of crash stories sharing similar elements, or combinations of elements. It is difficult to work out what is inspired by what.

Len Stringfield coined the appropriate term "crash/retrieval syndrome" for it. It's doubly appropriate as Stringfield more than anyone else was responsible for making the 'crash/retrieval' mythos part of ufology (Moore's book on Roswell aside) largely by collecting many of the stories in the first place.

The question is do these accounts point to a series of real events; a series of hoaxes and misunderstandings; or do the similar patterns and details suggest perhaps one 'real' event hiding behind them. Or perhaps crash stories pick up similar patterns in the same way folk tales pick up similar patterns - that's my own thought on it.
 
BS3 said:
There are actually a huge (well, maybe that's exaggeration; relatively large) number of crash stories sharing similar elements, or combinations of elements. It is difficult to work out what is inspired by what.

Len Stringfield coined the appropriate term "crash/retrieval syndrome" for it. It's doubly appropriate as Stringfield more than anyone else was responsible for making the 'crash/retrieval' mythos part of ufology (Moore's book on Roswell aside) largely by collecting many of the stories in the first place.

The question is do these accounts point to a series of real events; a series of hoaxes and misunderstandings; or do the similar patterns and details suggest perhaps one 'real' event hiding behind them. Or perhaps crash stories pick up similar patterns in the same way folk tales pick up similar patterns - that's my own thought on it.
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Rather like the universal 'great flood' mythology running through human pre-history (Noah's ark etc...)

Will someone create a 'crash/retrieval' syndrome religion in the future? Perhaps from within the smouldering ruins of a post-apocalyptic world?
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Rather like the universal 'great flood' mythology running through human pre-history (Noah's ark etc...)

Will someone create a 'crash/retrieval' syndrome religion in the future? Perhaps from within the smouldering ruins of a post-apocalyptic world?
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I could see it happening.

Digging into the Vallee thing again a bit, I suppose the idea is that symbolically the occupants aren't godlike figures, but rather they are supposed to be us - the childlike 'entities' crashing to earth, struck down by their own technology and hubris. It is interesting that (for whatever reason) the bulk of these stories seem to point to the immediate post-war period of atomic testing rather than, say, dating from the actual period of space flight some years later.
 
BS3 said:
I could see it happening.

Digging into the Vallee thing again a bit, I suppose the idea is that symbolically the occupants aren't godlike figures, but rather they are supposed to be us - the childlike 'entities' crashing to earth, struck down by their own technology and hubris. It is interesting that (for whatever reason) the bulk of these stories seem to point to the immediate post-war period of atomic testing rather than, say, dating from the actual period of space flight some years later.
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Interesting.

I feel that as we look back from 2022 we should never lose sight of the huge impact the advent of space flight and the atomic bomb had on the human psyche, which we now see reflected in the science-fiction of the time
 
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Paul_Exeter said:
Interesting.

I feel that as we look back from 2022 we should never lose sight of the huge impact the advent of space flight and the atomic bomb had on the human psyche, which we now see selected in the science-fiction of the time
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Absolutely, and the 'discs' were a huge part of that in some way. Returning to the whole idea of Jungian symbolism - maybe Bequette's slip in describing the objects seen by Kenneth Arnold as 'saucers' wasn't actually a slip, given how primed everyone clearly was to see saucers. The saucers were already there waiting to come out (via Bequette and all the subsequent witnesses).

So...I don't know, maybe the crashing craft, the occupants, the cover-up, the recurring figures like the archaeologists or the threatening, red-haired officer in the Roswell narratives - maybe they all have some meaning over and above just being a satisfying story. Though they make a good story too.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Rather like the universal 'great flood' mythology running through human pre-history (Noah's ark etc...)

Will someone create a 'crash/retrieval' syndrome religion in the future? Perhaps from within the smouldering ruins of a post-apocalyptic world?
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I thought there was already a couple of religioins based on UFOs, one from a guy in California and that Raelian guy.
 
There's some good material on the genesis of the Aetherians in Clarke and Roberts' book Flying Saucerers. The general consensus seems to be that however George King came up with his ideas, his followers were/are a pretty harmless bunch.
 
Back onto those nuclear linked sort of Roswell-oid crashes, a typical example is the 1953 Kingman crash / retrieval, unearthed by Raymond Fowler in the 1970s, and characterised by Kevin Randle as a load of old rubbish here.

I think Stringfield documented 80-odd individual crash stories in total.

Thinking about it I may start a separate thread for miscellaneous (non Roswell or Aztec) 'crash/retrievals' to save cluttering this one up.
 
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BS3 said:
... Thinking about it I may start a separate thread for miscellaneous (non Roswell or Aztec) 'crash/retrievals' to save cluttering this one up.
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That's a good idea.
 
A fact that has escaped me all these years is in 1947 the Roswell 509 Army Airforce Bomber Group was the only air force group that dealt with atomic bombs in the whole U.S.


Being atomic, this was an open invitation for UFOs to come the Roswell to investigate, but something the UFOs were not counting was an electrical storm in the area and the rest is history.

I don’t think the son, Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., who was a doctor in the military for 40 years would had lied about the Roswell UFO Crash and before he died said “ we are all related in this universe and we have a lot of cousins up there “.
 
As part of looking up a few other UFO crash tales, I've been reading some of Len Stringfield's articles on the subject. One gives a very interesting 'snapshot' of the Roswell story as it stood in the late 1970s:

In 1978 Stringfield conducted a phone interview with a "Major J. M" in Houma (no prizes for guessing who that is). "J. M " reported he had found "many unusual metal fragments" and "parchment" strewn over the site. He repeated the story that the fragments were of tin foil thickness but could not be bent or broken, and thought they were not part of any known military aerial device.

The material was all packed up and sent off to W-P, then "J. M" told the press it was a weather balloon to "get them off his back".

...and that's it, really.
 
Just when you think you are done with the Roswell crash, this mystery pulls you back in.

The History Channel TV show called History Mysteries shows the grownup grandchildren of Jesse Marcel, Sr. watching a 1980 video of Jesse describing the cover up that he was forced into by the government.

Again Jesse says what happened was not from this earth.

The grandchildren all agreed that their grandfather, Jesse, would always tell the truth.

The History Channel paid for experts to examine Jesse’s personal journal he obtained while he was military intelligence school claimed authentic but no mention of Roswell.

But odd with no explanation is that supposedly after the Roswell Crash date passes in the journal, Jesse’s handwriting and sentence structure becomes oddly messy.

This could be interpreted as personal stress.
 
charliebrown said:
Just when you think you are done with the Roswell crash, this mystery pulls you back in.

The History Channel TV show called History Mysteries shows the grownup grandchildren of Jesse Marcel, Sr. watching a 1980 video of Jesse describing the cover up that he was forced into by the government.

Again Jesse says what happened was not from this earth.

The grandchildren all agreed that their grandfather, Jesse, would always tell the truth.

The History Channel paid for experts to examine Jesse’s personal journal he obtained while he was military intelligence school claimed authentic but no mention of Roswell.

But odd with no explanation is that supposedly after the Roswell Crash date passes in the journal, Jesse’s handwriting and sentence structure becomes oddly messy.

This could be interpreted as personal stress.
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I saw that also.
As you said, Jessie Marcel, Sr. is on video stating that the Roswell crash 'was not from this earth', and one has to give him credit for speaking out when he got older, that was courageous.
And he's not the only person to come forward, which makes the case all the more compelling.
 
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I'm sure that when the United States sent rockets to the Moon and Mars, that they left behind some bits of debris -
Which might be puzzled over by anyone visiting those planets in thousands of years?
 
The Annual Roswell UFO festival this past July brought in 40,000 people and 2 billion tourist’s dollars into the town of Roswell.

The city fathers have given the OK for a second UFO Crash celebration this March 10-12 hoping to make two festivals a year a constant situation..

Is this greed ?
 
charliebrown said:
The Annual Roswell UFO festival this past July brought in 40,000 people and 2 billion tourist’s dollars into the town of Roswell.

The city fathers have given the OK for a second UFO Crash celebration this March 10-12 hoping to make two festivals a year a constant situation..

Is this greed ?
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I've long since given up believing these sort of statistics. On the basis of those figures each tourist spent or "brought in " $50000 - I find that hard to believe,
 
Perhaps the two billion figure was the total value of the UFO industry to the town. The Roswell tourist industry was bringing in a quarter of a million visitors annually before the pandemic; that's more like eight thousand dollars a head, which is high, but not completely impossible. Depends how much junk they bought.

Also, some tourists might come just to visit the town itself, although that seems unlikely. Do other small US cities get large numbers of tourists?
 
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Ronnie Jersey said:
I saw that also.
As you said, Jessie Marcel, Sr. is on video stating that the Roswell crash 'was not from this earth', and one has to give him credit for speaking out when he got older, that was courageous.
And he's not the only person to come forward, which makes the case all the more compelling.
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I think the "alien" theory was just to cover up a black project crash -- I can't really believe that aliens would travel around in a craft made of foil. The single most convincing bit of evidence for this is the claim that the air force phoned the local undertaker to ask for several child-sized coffins. The only possible reason for doing this would be to seed the idea of "small alien bodies." Is there any reason why they wouldn't have their own crates and boxes, or why small bodies wouldn't have fitted inside an adult coffin? All these alleged alien crashes occurred in the period after the end of the war when they were testing out a lot of experimental devices acquired from the Nazi research, under a deal that Kammler, the head of that research, worked out with the US even before the end of the conflict.
 
Carl Grove said:
I think the "alien" theory was just to cover up a black project crash -- I can't really believe that aliens would travel around in a craft made of foil.
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Well...
Apollo16LM.jpg
 
The flying vehicle / craft I saw 25 years ago was some type of anti-gravity device, judging by the the way it moved, and who knows what the fabrication of this thing was?
The mere fact that Marcel came forward and stated that he was ordered to pose for photos with nondescript debris is something that cannot be denied.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
The flying vehicle / craft I saw 25 years ago was some type of anti-gravity device, judging by the the way it moved, and who knows what the fabrication of this thing was?
The mere fact that Marcel came forward and stated that he was ordered to pose for photos with nondescript debris is something that cannot be denied.
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Marcel probably had no idea what he had got into, he just did what he was ordered to do. If they were promoting the alien idea they would have had no need to inform him of the truth, he had no "need to know." It was a neat way of covering up what they were really doing, given that there were plenty of what seem like genuine unknowns around at that time. Would beings with a science possibly thousands of years ahead of us start crashing their devices all over the south west US, near known US research facilities, in that period?
 
I apologize to everyone, the Roswell Festival generated 2 million dollars and not 2 billion dollars.

Obviously this was a “ senior moment “ for me !

As far as Roswell, something very dramatic did take place.

I remind people no one would have known anything about the Roswell Crash if the Army had not announced to the world that they recovered a flying disc,

The Army is responsible for staring it all !
 
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