Sheriff George Wilcox did not run for reelection and his family considered the saucer incident to have gravely affected his health and outlook. Wilcox passed away before the renewed interest in the saucer crash; but family members, including his wife, Inez, came forward with tales of death threats from the military.
The daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, Frankie Rowe, told of the strange debris, scraps of which she had handled, and claimed that her father (part of a fire department crew called to the crash site) had described “aliens” being loaded into body bags. She also tearfully recounted death threats to her father and herself by sinister figures from the government.
The resurgence of Roswell interest caused the Air Force to do something remarkable: they contradicted their previous explanation of the debris found on the Foster ranch with a thick official report in 1994, admitting the weather balloon story had been a cover-up for Project Mogul-which in 1947 had been classified Top Secret A-1. This-the third official explanation (first a flying disk, then a weather balloon, now Project Mogul)-was the intelligence-gathering balloon train described to me by Frank Wilson in 1949. An experimental attempt to acoustically detect suspected Soviet atomic explosions and missile launchings, Mogul utilized acoustical sensors, radar reflecting targets and other gizmos, all of which were attached to a train of weather balloons over six hundred feet long.
The flaw in this explanation-which I’ve never heard anybody point out, including the “UFOlogists”-is that Project Mogul would be the very device gathering information for Major Jesse Marcel at SAC in 1948 and ’49. Unless Marcel was part of a decades-spanning disinformation campaign-which seems very unlikely, considering his burst of UFO TV fame in his elderly years-this indicates Marcel, in the new job he’d been transferred to from Roswell, would have likely discovered that the strange debris he’d found in ’47 was from one of the devices gathering information for him in ’48. And he would not have spoken to me in 1949, nor a horde of Roswell researchers in the late seventies and early eighties, from the point of view of a man still bewildered by what he’d found on the Foster ranch.
The Project Mogul explanation, of course, didn’t speak to the many witnesses-Frank Kaufmann, Glenn Dennis and a number of others who came out of the woodwork in the eighties and thereafter-who spoke of the second crash site, the wedge-like aircraft and the alien crew.
So the Air Force rolled up its sleeves for a fourth official explanation. In 1997, in perhaps the most tortuous piece of logic to arise out of Roswell yet, the Air Force explained that the alien bodies that had been seen by witnesses in 1947 were crash-test dummies dropped by the USAF starting around 1952. Seems the residents of Roswell were simply confused about the time frame.
The Air Force insisted that “Maria Selff,” the nurse Glenn Dennis claimed to have known (and of whom others had memories), never existed; memories of aliens were probably confused recollections of Captain Dan Fulgham’s injury in a 1959 balloon gondola accident, from which the captain’s face became swollen; and furthermore the mortician’s claim that he’d been bullied by a black MP was impossible, because no black sergeants were stationed at the air base during that time period.
Majestic Twelve reared its head in 1984 when documents similar to the ones Pearson had received (I never actually saw them) were delivered anonymously to a UFO researcher, Jamie Shandera. On a roll of 35mm black- and-white film were copies of the letter from Truman to Forrestal, and a “briefing document” supposedly prepared for President-elect Eisenhower. Tops and bottoms of pages were stamped TOP SECRET/MAJIC EYES ONLY. The list of Majic-12 members included Forrestal, with mention that, after his death, he had been replaced (he was MJ-3) by General Walter Bedell Smith.
Majestic Twelve (or Majic-12), according to these documents, was “a TOP SECRET Research and Development/Intelligence operation responsible directly and only to the President of the United States,” and the briefing papers described the crash of a saucer-like craft near Roswell and the recovery of “four small human-like beings.”
To true believers, the Majic-12 papers were the Holy Grail found; for professional UFO debunkers, the material was an obvious hoax. Both sides mounted impressive arguments, but those in the know recognized the extensive inside knowledge and expertise in military documents that would have had to go into such an elaborate fabrication. A few small voices cried, “Disinformation,” largely unheeded. The Majestic Twelve files remain a hotly debated topic among believers and debunkers alike.
Perhaps because my inquiry into Roswell had taken place almost two years after the various events that composed the “incident,” none of the researchers or documentary film-makers sought me out, at least not until the pending fiftieth anniversary of the crash in 1997 raised interest to a fever pitch. A freelance journalist from Davenport, Iowa-Matthew Clemens-had run across a mention of me in a Roswell-related FBI memo unearthed by the Freedom of Information Act, and tracked me down (by phone) at my Coral Springs condo.
“You talked to the eyewitnesses,” Clemens said over the phone, sounding young and eager, “in a contemporary time frame-everyone else who interviewed them did so thirty years after the fact, or more.”
“Yeah,” I said, sounding like the cranky old man that I was. “So?”
“So, did you uncover anything, back then, when memories were fresh, that the latter-day researchers haven’t?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read any of the ‘latter-day researchers.’”
“Mr. Heller, I’m going down my own path, here, and I need to talk to somebody knowledgeable, somebody who was there, but who doesn’t have an agenda.”
“What do you mean, an agenda?”
“Well, guys like Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, they’re caught up in it, now. Haut’s a longtime Roswell Chamber of Commerce guy, and both of ’em are involved with running a UFO museum there! I mean, it’s become the town industry.”
“So what road are you going down, Mr. Clemens?”
“I’ve been digging for information on the Nazi presence at White Sands, which was nearby. You know about Operation Paperclip, don’t you?”
“Putting Nazi scientists on the U.S. payroll. Got us to the moon.”
“Yeah, it did. We had … let me check my notes … seven hundred and sixty-five of ’em working for us, scientists, doctors, technicians; at least half, maybe as many as eighty percent of ’em, were Nazi party members and/or SS men. Of course those guys claim they only joined the party and SS because they couldn’t get research grants, otherwise.”
“And you think this has something to do with Roswell, Mr. Clemens?”
“Yeah, at first I thought the ‘saucer’ was one of these refurbished V-2s … you know, maybe the ‘aliens’ were monkeys; von Braun was obsessed with manned flight, you know. But I’m onto something better, something bigger. You ever hear of the Fugo incendiary bomb?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“The Japs launched unmanned high-altitude balloons, with bombs on ’em, hoping to explode them in our Pacific Northwest.”
“I’m impressed, Mr. Heller. The hope was to ignite forest fires, and deny lumber to the war effort. And of course, the effort was a bust. But new evidence indicates the Japanese may have been working on a second- generation Fugo, with kamikaze pilots to target them. That never got off the drawing board.”
“So you think the Roswell crash was a Fugo balloon?”
“No. I think it was a VTOL.”
“And what would that be, Mr. Clemens?”
“A vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. These German brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten, designed them- first for the Nazis, then for us, after the war. See, the German runways were shot to hell, and something that could lift off without a runway might have won the thing for them, and Hitler and his crowd would be carved on Mount Rushmore, right now. Also, the VTOL was the Reich’s only shot at trying out their new jet-engine propulsion system.”
“So was the Roswell crash a balloon or a, what? Vertical-takeoff whatever?”
“I think it was a combination of both, a hybrid craft utilizing Fugo lifting technology and a Horten-designed lifting body.”
He had just explained the balloon debris found on the Brazel ranch, and the aircraft discovered north of Roswell.
