Art McQuiddy and the Roswell press release

Art McQuiddy and the Roswell press release

Witness	Arthur R. "Art" McQuiddy
Role in July 1947	Editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch
Event	Delivery of the Roswell Army Air Field "flying disc" press release and its retraction, early July 1947
Main statement	Affidavit signed 19 October 1993
Other statement	On camera in Secret History: The Roswell Incident (1995)
People named	Walter Haut, George Walsh, Col. William H. Blanchard
Later career	New Mexico Oil and Gas Association; U.S. Steel; International Harvester
Date	8 July 1947
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Art McQuiddy, Walter Haut, William Blanchard
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 38
Year	1947 in UFO history
Timeline	1947 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

Arthur R. "Art" McQuiddy was the editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch, one of the two newspapers in Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. Patrick Gross's witness file describes him as its managing editor.^[1] In an affidavit signed in 1993, McQuiddy described three things. Roswell Army Air Field's public information officer brought him the press release announcing that a "flying disc" had been recovered. A call from the base soon afterward said the release was wrong. And months later his friend, the base commander Colonel William Blanchard, made a private remark about the material.^[1][2] His account is one of the few that describe the Roswell announcement from inside a local newsroom. It was given more than 45 years after the events, and 27 years after Blanchard's death.^[1][7]

Background

In early July 1947 the rancher William "Mac" Brazel reported debris he had found on the ranch he managed to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). The base was home to the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, then the only unit able to deliver nuclear weapons. Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt went out with Brazel to collect material, and the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, informed the Eighth Air Force commander, Brigadier General Roger Ramey.^[3][5]

On 8 July 1947 the base's public information officer, First Lieutenant Walter Haut, issued a press release. It said the 509th's intelligence office had gained possession of a "flying disc" with the help of a local rancher and the sheriff's office. It also said the object had landed on a ranch near Roswell "sometime last week".^[3][6] Haut later said Blanchard had asked him to write and distribute it. Blanchard's own biography says Blanchard issued it.^[6][7] George Walsh broke the news on the Roswell radio station KSWS and passed it to the Associated Press (AP). The Roswell incident article calls Walsh the station director, while McQuiddy called him its program manager. Walsh later said his phone lines were overwhelmed and that media called him from all over the world.^[1][3] Within hours, Ramey's headquarters in Fort Worth said the object was a weather balloon with a radar target. Ramey, his chief of staff Colonel Thomas DuBose and the weather officer Irving Newton presented the material to the press.^[3][5] Air Force reports in the 1990s concluded that the debris came from Project Mogul, a classified program that used long trains of balloons to listen for Soviet nuclear tests.^[3][5]

The press release

McQuiddy signed his affidavit on 19 October 1993, and Charlotte Y. Gipson witnessed his signature. In it he said that one day in early July 1947, just before noon, Haut came to the Dispatch office with a press release. It said a crashed flying saucer had been found, taken to RAAF and sent on to another base.^[1]

Haut had already been to the town's two radio stations, KGFL and KSWS, and McQuiddy said he gave Haut a hard time about it. Haut replied that the base's policy was to rotate who received releases first so that everyone got a fair chance.^[1][4] The Dispatch was a morning paper, and that day's edition had long since gone out. What disappointed McQuiddy was missing the chance to put the story on the AP wire himself. By then Walsh had already sent it to AP.^[1]

The correction

According to the affidavit, a call came from RAAF not long after Haut left. The caller said the release was incorrect and that what had been taken for the wreckage of a flying saucer was really the remains of a radiosonde balloon. A radiosonde is a balloon-borne weather instrument, so the call amounted to the weather-balloon explanation.^[1] By then, he said, the AP story had caught the world's attention. He spent the rest of the afternoon taking long-distance calls from overseas news editors, and remembered calls from Rome, London, Paris and Hong Kong.^[1]

McQuiddy spoke on camera in 1995 for the television documentary Secret History: The Roswell Incident, directed by Tim Shawcross. There he described himself as "a little country editor in a small city in New Mexico" talking to foreign capitals all afternoon. This time he listed Paris, Rome, London and Tokyo, said he could not remember them all, and added that his counterparts at the other Roswell paper and the radio stations had probably been just as busy.^[1] The Roswell chronology on the NICAP website adds that McQuiddy said a military officer collected the copies of Haut's press release. That detail is not in his affidavit.^[1]

Blanchard's remark

McQuiddy said Colonel William H. "Butch" Blanchard, commander of RAAF and the 509th Bomb Group, was a good friend. The two often met for a drink and off-the-record talks about relations between the base and the town.^[1] After the incident McQuiddy tried several times to get the real story from Blanchard, who kept refusing to talk about it.^[1]

About three or four months later, on a more relaxed evening, McQuiddy tried again. As McQuiddy remembered it, Blanchard reluctantly admitted that he had authorized the press release. He then said that he would say this and nothing more: the material he had seen was unlike anything he had seen anywhere else in his life. McQuiddy said Blanchard never told him anything further.^[1]

Blanchard went on to a senior career. He became director of operations at Eighth Air Force headquarters in 1948, later Inspector General of the Air Force, and Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force with four-star rank on 19 February 1965. He died of a heart attack at the Pentagon on 31 May 1966, while still on active duty.^[7] None of the sources used here records any public statement by Blanchard about Roswell that could confirm or contradict McQuiddy's account.

Later life

McQuiddy left the Dispatch in 1948 to become public relations director of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. He later joined U.S. Steel as director of media relations. He retired as senior vice president for corporate relations at International Harvester and returned to Roswell about eleven years before the affidavit, so around 1982. In the affidavit he stated that he had not been paid or given anything of value for the statement, and that it was true to the best of his memory.^[1]

Timing questions

McQuiddy's "just before noon" does not fit easily with the national wire record. Commenters on Kevin Randle's July 8 timeline put the press release going out on the national wires at about 3:26 p.m. Central Standard Time.^[2] Other accounts point later too. Walsh's affidavit has him broadcasting a bulletin and then phoning Kellahin in Albuquerque, which one commenter put a little after noon. Frank Joyce recalled reading the story off the wire as a bulletin, which would have been after 2:41 p.m. Legends of America says the release was issued "the next afternoon" after the debris was brought in.^[2][5] One commenter suggested the "missing time" in the media accounts might come from people merging two similar events in memory: Haut's phone call and Haut's visit.^[2]

The same discussion notes that Randle and the researcher Karl Pflock read a United Press wire note, "ARMY GAVE VERBAL ANNCMENT. NO TEXT", as meaning Haut did not hand out a printed release. Another commenter argued it only meant the Santa Fe office had no printed copy.^[2] If Randle and Pflock are right, it is hard to square with McQuiddy's memory of Haut bringing a written release to the Dispatch.

Assessment

McQuiddy's account is useful because it describes the flying-disc announcement and its quick reversal from the newsroom's side. It matches Walsh's memory of an afternoon flooded with calls.^[1][3] The timeline headline's claim that the base "asked him to call it a weather balloon" simplifies what he said. He described a phone call correcting the story, not a request to rewrite it.^[1][2]

Like the other Roswell affidavits from the early 1990s, his statement came long after the events. It came after the Roswell story had been revived by Marcel's 1978 interview and the 1980 book The Roswell Incident.^[3] Haut signed his own affidavit in May 1993, five months before McQuiddy's. Haut was later among the founders of Roswell's International UFO Museum and Research Center.^[6] McQuiddy's description of Blanchard's remark rests on his memory alone. The Air Force's official explanation remains that the debris came from a Project Mogul balloon train.^[1][3]

People and topics

• Roswell — The New Mexico town at the center of the 1947 crash story.
• Art McQuiddy — Editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch in July 1947 who later described receiving the base's "flying disc" press release.
• Walter Haut — Public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field who wrote the July 1947 "flying disc" press release and left a disputed sealed affidavit.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• William Blanchard — Roswell base commander in 1947 who later became Air Force vice chief of staff.

On the Timeline

• Walter Haut sealed affidavit (8 July 1947) — Roswell press officer Walter Haut's affidavit says his commander told him the base had recovered crash debris from a disc.
• Thomas DuBose affidavit on the Roswell debris (8 July 1947) — Col. Thomas DuBose's affidavit says the Roswell debris went via Fort Worth to Wright Field and the balloon photos were a cover story.

See every 1947 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Roswell incident”, “Walter Haut”, “William H. Blanchard”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.