Marcel family Roswell debris

Marcel family and the Roswell debris

Event	Recovery of debris from a ranch near Corona, New Mexico, July 1947
First generation	Maj. Jesse A. Marcel Sr. (1907–1986), intelligence officer, 509th Bomb Group, Roswell Army Air Field
Second generation	Dr. Jesse A. Marcel Jr. (1936–2013), physician; said he handled the debris as a boy
Third generation	Grandchildren including Jesse Marcel III and John Marcel
Television	Roswell: The First Witness (History), led by former CIA officer Ben Smith
Family position	The debris was "not of this earth" and the weather-balloon story a cover-up
Official explanation	Debris from a Project Mogul balloon train (Air Force reports of the 1990s)
Date	12 December 2020
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Jesse Marcel, Jesse Marcel Jr.
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 198
Year	2020 in UFO history
Timeline	2020 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	9

For three generations, the family of Major Jesse Marcel has maintained that the material he brought home from the desert in July 1947 was not of earthly origin. Marcel was the Roswell base intelligence officer who first went out to collect the debris.^[1][2] Marcel revived the Roswell story in 1978. His son, Jesse Marcel Jr., spent the rest of his life describing the debris he said he saw on the kitchen floor. Marcel's grandchildren took the story to television in the History series Roswell: The First Witness.^[1][3][6] The Air Force concluded in the 1990s that the material came from a classified Project Mogul balloon train. Researchers have also found that Marcel embellished parts of his own life story.^[1][8]

Jesse Marcel Sr.

• Early career. Jesse Antoine Marcel Sr. was born on 27 May 1907 in Bayou Blue, Louisiana. He worked as a draftsman and map-maker, including for Shell Oil, before being commissioned in the Army Air Forces in 1942.^[1]
• War service. He trained as a photo interpreter and intelligence officer and served in the Southwest Pacific as a squadron and group intelligence officer. He flew combat missions, received two Air Medals and the Bronze Star, and became a major in May 1945.^[1]
• Operation Crossroads. In 1946 he was attached to the 509th Composite Group for the Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini Atoll, and was commended for his work there.^[1]

In July 1947 he was the 509th Bomb Group's intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field. Ben Smith, the former CIA officer who led the television series, describes him as the chief counterintelligence officer responsible for base security.^[1][4]

• The recovery. On 7 July 1947 Sheriff George Wilcox told the base that rancher Mac Brazel had found a crashed "flying disc". Marcel and Lieutenant Colonel Sheridan Cavitt followed Brazel back to the ranch outside Corona and loaded debris into a jeep. Marcel reported to the base commander, William Blanchard.^[1]
• The press release. The base announced it had recovered a "flying disc", naming Marcel as the responsible officer.^[1][8]
• Fort Worth. Marcel flew with the debris to Fort Worth. There the Eighth Air Force identified it as a weather balloon, and he posed with the wreckage for newspaper photographs. He was quoted at the time as describing "a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber" and "tinfoil and broken wooden beams".^[1][5][8]
• Who ordered the photo. Smith says Blanchard asked Marcel to pose with the debris to put the previous day's announcement to rest.^[4]

The story was largely forgotten until February 1978, when the retired Marcel told ufologist Stanton Friedman that he believed the debris was extraterrestrial.^[1]

• National Enquirer. Bob Pratt interviewed him for the National Enquirer in December 1979; two encyclopedia accounts give the date as the 8th and the 19th respectively. The tabloid published the story in February 1980.^[1][8]
• In Search of... In a September 1980 interview for the programme, Marcel said that he and General Ramey both "knew differently" when Ramey told reporters the material was a weather balloon.^[1]
• Later life. He spent his final years as a television repairman and died in Houma, Louisiana, on 23 June 1986, aged 79.^[1]

Historian Robert Todd later questioned many of Marcel's unverifiable claims about himself, made in interviews from 1979 onward:

• Neither George Washington University nor Louisiana State University had any record of him attending.
• His service records show he flew as an intelligence officer, not a gunner, and earned his Air Medals for combat hours rather than for shooting down five planes.
• Air Force records said he had no flying experience, despite his claim to have flown thousands of hours since 1928.^[1]

Jesse Marcel Jr.

Marcel's only child, Jesse A. Marcel Jr., was born in 1936.^[1] He gave his account in a signed affidavit dated 6 March 1991:^[2]

• Age. In the affidavit he said he was eleven in July 1947, although other accounts, including his own later ones, say ten.^[2][3]
• The night. His father woke him in the middle of the night, excited about debris that had filled his 1942 Buick. They spread some of it on the kitchen floor.^[2]
• Three kinds of material. He described a thick, foil-like metallic grey substance; a brittle, brownish-black plastic like Bakelite; and fragments of what looked like I-beams.^[2]
• The symbols. On the inner surface of the beams was embossed "writing" in a purple-violet hue, made of curved geometric shapes. It resembled hieroglyphics but had no animal figures.^[2]
• His father's view. His father said it came from a crash site north-west of Roswell, may have used the words "flying saucer", and was sure it was not a weather balloon.^[2]

On Unsolved Mysteries he put the time at about two in the morning. He said the family had later concluded privately that the material was "not of earthly origin". His father, he said, had called the balloon story a cover-up but had to protect his security clearance.^[2]

• Career. He became a physician; his letterhead identifies him as a fellow of the American Academy of Otolaryngology. In the affidavit he said he had served in the National Guard since 1978 and was a certified crash investigator and helicopter pilot.^[2]
• Response to Mogul. In a spring 1997 email circulated among researchers he admitted that Mogul debris came "close" to what he had seen. He listed differences: the foil he saw was metal on both sides, not paper-backed; the beams were metal, not balsa; the symbols were geometric, not flowers on Scotch tape, and no more than 3/8 inch tall.^[2]
• Clarification to Bob Shell. When others took that email to mean he had accepted the Air Force view, he wrote to Bob Shell that he still believed the debris was "a portion of an extraterrestrial probe". He also complained about James McAndrew, the Air Force declassification officer who promoted the Mogul explanation.^[2]
• Drawing. In a letter he sketched the symbols and said his mother, who had also been present, agreed with his description.^[2]

Wikipedia's Roswell article notes that the symbols he described matched those on the adhesive tape that Project Mogul bought from a New York toy manufacturer.^[8] He died at his home in Helena, Montana, in August 2013, aged 76, less than two months after his last visit to Roswell. His daughter said he had wanted people to know the incident was real and that the cover-up needed to stop.^[3]

The grandchildren and Roswell: The First Witness

In Roswell: The First Witness, Marcel's grandchildren, including Jesse Marcel III, worked with Ben Smith to investigate the major's private journal. The family believes Marcel was pressured by the government to retract what he had seen.^[4][6]

• The journal. Smith says the journal passed from Marcel to his son and then to the grandchildren, along with military records and household deeds. It looks like a military pocket notebook. Its handwriting style changes markedly around August 1947, which Smith says could indicate duress or writing in code.^[4]
• Testing the journal. The series brought in document examiner Jennifer Naso to authenticate the handwriting and codebreaker Professor Craig Bauer to look for hidden messages. Smith said a codebreaker saw "clear signs of code".^[4][6]
• At the crash site. Archaeologists and geophysicists examined the debris site. Aviation-crash expert David Soucie took readings there, and a body-language expert studied video interviews with Marcel. Smith said the series ended with scientific data suggesting "something buried still under the soil".^[4][6]
• Smith's view of Mogul. Smith said he was "not convinced" by the Mogul explanation but had no "smoking gun" for an extraterrestrial origin.^[4]
• The "fall guy". Jesse Marcel III has called his grandfather a "fall guy" told to deny seeing material "not made by human hands". He says the journal contains cryptic writing that "doesn't really fit with who our grandfather was".^[5]
• Testing the debris. According to family accounts, Marcel tried in vain to drill into a piece of the wreckage and to burn it with a cigarette lighter.^[5]
• Fibres. Grandson John Marcel recalls him suggesting that glass-like fibres and optical cables in the debris might have come from a ship's computer.^[5]

Sky History's UK episode guide lists the episodes in February and March, without giving the year. The earlier version of this article dated the series' first showing to December 2020.^[6]

In a 2022 interview reported by IBTimes India from The Sun, Marcel III went further and said alien bodies had been found at the crash site. He acknowledged that his grandfather "didn't directly see any alien bodies" but had told the family they could believe what other responders said. He added that his grandfather had been careful what he told them, for fear someone "would come and hassle us".^[7] That report wrongly calls Marcel's son "Jesse Marcel II".

The claim of family-held debris

The earlier version of this article reported that in December 2020 a member of the family said the Marcels had held unusual Roswell debris. The source cited for it, a December 2020 Mysterious Universe article about the journal, is behind a sign-up wall and could not be read.^[9] No such material has been produced publicly. The series, as its own guides describe it, presented the journal, documents and site surveys, not debris.^[4][6]

Assessment

• The official explanation. The Air Force's 1994 report, written in response to a congressional inquiry, concluded that the material Marcel recovered was probably from Project Mogul. Mogul was a then-classified programme that flew long trains of balloons carrying sensors to detect Soviet nuclear tests. One such train was launched from Alamogordo on 4 June 1947 and lost within 17 miles of the Brazel ranch.^[1][8]
• The cover story. The Air Force later called the 1947 weather-balloon story "an attempt to deflect attention from the top secret Mogul project". In 1991 retired Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who had posed with the debris in 1947, also acknowledged that the weather-balloon explanation was a cover story.^[1][8]
• Brazel's description. At the time, Brazel described the debris as rubber strips, "tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks".^[8]
• Marcel as a witness. The UFO media treated Marcel as a whistleblower, but researchers found embellishment in his accounts.^[8]

The Marcels' accounts, given decades after the event, remain among the most influential testimony in the Roswell story.^[1][8]

People and topics

• Jesse Marcel — Intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group who recovered the Roswell debris in 1947.
• Roswell — The New Mexico town at the center of the 1947 crash story.
• 509th Bomb Group — The nuclear-armed bomber group based at Roswell in 1947.
• Jesse Marcel Jr. — Physician who said his father showed him Roswell debris in 1947.
• Project Mogul — A secret Army Air Forces program using balloon trains to detect Soviet nuclear tests, blamed by the Air Force for the Roswell debris.

On the Timeline

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See every 2020 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Jesse Marcel”, “Roswell incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.