But Eyewitness Jesse Marcel Says Debris Was Not Balloon
Kent Jeffrey
, an airline pilot who wrote and energetically promoted the Roswell
Declaration, an international petition calling for an end to government secrecy on UFOs, has decided that the Roswell UFO case does not involve an alien
spacecraft as he once assumed.
In an interview on KTVU-TV news (FOX Channel 2 in Oakland, California) on April 23, 1997, Jeffrey said that after four years of investigation, his conclusions about the Roswell case
are "a major disappointment for me.
I started out here in a quest for the truth
, he said. Unfortunately, that truth ended up to be different
than I thought it might be and hoped that it would be
.
Jeffrey was instrumental in getting Roswell witness Jesse Marcel, Jr., a Montana-based physician, to undergo some six
hours of hypnotic regression recently in an effort to reconstruct exactly what he saw when his father, Major Jesse Marcel Sr., showed him pieces of debris from the famous Brazel ranch crash site in July, 1947. Young Jesse was only eleven years old at the time.
Jeffrey told KTVU that, for him, the veracity of the flying saucer claim stands or falls
with Marcel's testimony. In a sense, you could say that the keys to the Roswell event lie in his [Marcel's] memory banks
, Jeffrey said.
Marcel's
regression session was conducted by FBI hypnotist Neil Hibbler in Washington, DC. Though videotapes of the sessions
have not been released, one person to whom Kent Jeffrey showed the videos told CNI News
that Marcel did not reveal anything that he has not said before.
But in Jeffrey's opinion, Marcel's
hypnotically recovered testimony supports the claim that the wreckage found on Brazel's ranch came, not from a flying saucer, but from a top secret Mogul balloon.
Also noted in the KTVU story is the fact that Walter Haut, former
press officer for the 509th Bomb Wing at Roswell AAF who issued the famous July 8, 1947 press release claiming
recovery of a flying disc, now says he had learned a few days after the announcement that it was a screwup
.
Though widely quoted in recent years as believing an unusual craft had been recovered, the FOX news story showed Haut saying he thinks it was just a balloon.
Haut was one of the original founders of the International UFO Museum
in Roswell, New Mexico, but has now cut all ties with the museum. Current museum director Deon Crosby told CNI
News that Haut has referred to the UFO claims as just a bunch
of hooey."
However, other researchers point out that Haut never claimed any direct access to wreckage or other evidence of the crash and was only following orders when he wrote the "flying disk" press release.
Marcel, on the other hand, did see something real from the crash, and
despite Kent Jeffrey's apparent change of heart, Marcel himself still thinks there was
more to Roswell than a balloon.
Reached by phone on April 29, Marcel told CNI News, The
[hypnosis] session was interesting, but it sure didn't change my mind. My recollections are the same.
Marcel said he is aware of several clear discrepancies between the material he saw as a child and the material said to come from the Mogul balloon.
I was just going over some pictures of the Mogul balloon device and trying to fit that into the pattern of the
debris I saw,
he told CNI News. Referring to controversial embossed symbols on a small I-beam
,
which researcher Karl Pflock identified as coming from a kind of
adhesive tape used in Mogul, Marcel stated: The figures that they used were on cellophane tape,
which is about an inch wide. This is far larger than what I saw
.
Marcel also commented on the strange symbols. I looked at some of
the drawings of the letters and flower-like images [from the Mogul tape] and I just don't recall anything close to
that
. What he saw wasn't flower-like, it was more geometric designs
, he said.
In the Mogul explanation, the I-beam
itself is described as
stick of balsawood. But Marcel says that's not what he saw and handled
in 1947.
It was very light, like balsawood, but I recall metal, not wood. I've built a lot of model airplanes out of
balsawood, and I think I would recognize the difference. I'm going to stick to my memory. I remember these beams as
metal and not balsawood.
He also noted that the foil they used on the [Mogul] radar target was paper-backed foil, and the foil I saw was
not paper-backed.
Marcel told CNI News that he considers Kent Jeffrey
a close friend, and he's not sure why Jeffrey has now done a 180-degree turnaround
on Roswell. Regardless, Marcel still thinks the debris he saw was stranger than anything from a Mogul balloon.