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- Tonight on "History's Greatest Mysteries": and may contain mature subject matter.
The Roswell investigation goes into uncharted territory.
Previously, a cryptic journal may hold vital clues
to what crashed near Roswell in 1947.
It belonged to an Army intelligence officer
who inspected the wreckage
and was sure it was extraterrestrial.
- It was not anything from this Earth.
That I'm quite sure of.
Fishburne: But the Army said
it was a routine weather balloon.
Decades later, that officer, Jesse Marcel,
said he was forced to lie.
- But all I could do was keep my mouth shut.
[flash bulb crackles]
Fishburne: His family hopes a former CIA investigator
will find the truth,
which might be hiding inside the mysterious journal.
- What I'm seeing throughout the document is consistent
with that time period.
Fishburne: It has been authenticated
by a forensic document expert,
but what does the strange writing mean?
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
As our mystery continues, a famed cryptologist
examines the journal for signs of a code.
Is there a message the writer
wanted the world to hear?
And can new technology read the words of a memo
from a photograph taken after the Roswell crash?
- If this document says "victims of the wreck,"
it negates the skeptical arguments
about the Roswell case.
Fishburne: And tracking down the family
of alleged eyewitnesses
who say they already know the truth.
- There were little people walking around,
and there were some dead and some alive.
What really happened at Roswell, New Mexico,
an event that has obsessed the world?
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[ominous music]
- It's difficult to determine whether or not
those are three numerical sevens
or whether they are meant to form a capital letter M.
♪ ♪
- What's the date of that page? - August 31, 1947.
- That's interesting.
Your grandpa would have been in Roswell at that point.
- He would have been in Roswell, yes.
Fishburne: Former CIA investigator Ben Smith
has returned to the office of Jennifer Naso,
one of America's top handwriting experts.
Joining Smith is Jesse Marcel's grandson,
who believes his grandfather was torn between his duty
as an intelligent officer to keep secrets
and a hunger to tell people what he really saw.
- I think my grandfather really wanted to tell
everything he knew about it.
I can't believe for a second
that he was gonna let the story die with him.
Fishburne: For more than a month,
Naso has been analyzing the puzzling journal
that Marcel kept among his most valuable papers.
She has determined that the journal was written
during the time period of the Roswell incident.
♪ ♪
- It's this great mystery.
Why did Jesse keep this journal?
What could it tell us about Roswell,
which he said was the defining event of his life?
- So what then have you learned about the handwriting?
- So I did a handwriting comparison with the journal
and the known specimens I had for Jesse Marcel.
So here is the lowercase P formation...
- Okay. - Where it starts going up,
comes down, forms a loop
and ends to create the hole of the P.
- Okay.
- Here is the known specimen writing I had of Jesse Marcel.
And here's a P in "Japanese." - Yeah.
- And it does not have that high approach,
coming around to loop and finishing with the P,
whereas that is seen throughout this document,
so it's a constructural significant difference
that I'm seeing.
- So this journal was not written
in Major Marcel's handwriting?
- Not based on the known writing I had for comparison.
Fishburne: It is astonishing news.
Jesse Marcel is not the author of the journal.
- There's no proof indicating a hoax or a forgery...
- Mm-hmm.
- Or that it's anything but an important document
to your grandfather in Roswell at the time.
- At the time. - Yeah.
- It actually raises more questions than answers, then.
- Yeah.
♪ ♪
This is intriguing.
The paper and ink are from the right period,
but Jesse is not the author of the journal,
so why did he keep it under lock and key
for so many years?
Fishburne: Unlocking the secrets of the journal
will take more investigating.
- If it's not my grandfather's handwriting, whose is it?
Fishburne: Who wrote it, and what does it mean?
Is it a code that can be deciphered?
To find out more,
Ben Smith heads to the photo archive of a major university.
He's hoping to find supporting evidence
to verify Marcel's story
that whatever crashed at Roswell was extraterrestrial.
♪ ♪
- I'm at the University of Texas Arlington,
where the keep the original negative
of the infamous Ramey photo.
Fishburne: That photo of the press conference
staged by General Roger Ramey
has long intrigued investigators.
His colleague General Thomas Dubose
is holding up a piece of a weather balloon,
which Ramey tells reporters is what really crashed
in Roswell, but look more closely.
In his hand, Ramey is holding a memo, too blurry to read,
that some believe could confirm Jesse Marcel's story
of a flying saucer.
♪ ♪
- I'm here to meet Kevin Randle
to learn about the history
of all the analyses conducted on this photo
and also to figure out, what more can we do
to decipher the message on that memo?
Kevin.
- Ben. - It's so nice to meet you.
- Good to meet you too. Grab a chair.
- Sure.
Fishburne: Kevin Randle has written
more than 80 books
and is a former intelligence officer
and lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard.
Among ufologists, he's considered
one of the preeminent experts on the Roswell crash.
- The Ramey memo is an interesting part
of the Roswell incident because it's a photo
of potential debris with Jesse Marcel.
- It's important because
we have a provenance for it. - Right.
- We can say, "This picture was taken on July 8, 1947,
in General Ramey's office."
We've got the time.
We know who the photographer was.
We know who all the participants were.
Fishburne: On July 7, 1947,
Jesse Marcel returned to Roswell Army Airfield
with what he thought was debris from a flying saucer
that crashed on a remote ranch 75 miles to the west.
After viewing the strange material,
the base commander for the 509th,
Colonel William Blanchard,
decided to issue a press release.
- The press release shows up--
newspapers all over the country, obviously.
"Fort Worth Star-Telegram" gets it.
They say,
"Head out to the base, to see what's going on.
They've got a flying saucer."
[dramatic music]
Fishburne: News of a flying saucer set off alarm bells
at 8th division headquarters,
so the next day, General Roger Ramey held
that famous press conference to set the record straight.
- General Ramey is the one who told the newsman
it was nothing more than a weather observation balloon.
Of course, we both knew differently.
♪ ♪
- The only reporter in the room
is J. Bond Johnson,
and he's communicating with the general,
and he poses Marcel with it
but apparently doesn't ask him any questions,
or if he does ask him questions,
Ramey would answer them.
- He told me not to say anything.
He says, "I'll handle it from now on,"
and that's exactly what he did.
It was definitely not a weather balloon.
What it could have been, I wouldn't know.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Jesse Marcel's grandchildren
believe he was completely blindsided
by General Ramey's press conference.
- I see my grandfather holding up something that he knew
that wasn't what he found.
- He was adamant that this was not what he saw
in the debris field.
Fishburne: The controversy over what crashed near Roswell
has made this photo the subject of intense scrutiny.
♪ ♪
- You know what we ought to do is take a look at the thing,
give you an idea of exactly what we're talking about
so that you can see what's been done.
- Yeah, let's do that.
- People have been looking at this document
for literally decades
trying to determine what this memo says.
The problem with the Ramey memo
is it's taken at a slight angle.
It's crunched in his hand, so it's got some folds in it,
so we're trying to interpret the negative in such a way
that we don't read into it what we want to read into it.
Right here by the thumb
is the words "Fort Worth, Texas."
- At Fort Worth, Texas, yeah.
- Very critical given the time of the photograph.
You move down here,
toward the very end of the--the memo,
toward the very end and to the right side,
you can see it says "weather balloons"...
- Oh, yeah. Look at that. - As well.
- You really can. Weather--weather balloons.
- So that gives us an idea what the document is about.
It's not the laundry list. It's not a grocery list.
It has to do with what's going on there in Roswell.
The other thing that is important is right down here,
we have one word.
Now, if we can determine what that word is,
that might tell us something.
If it's Ramey, then this is a document that was prepared
by General Ramey, and that provides us
with a little bit of information about it.
- Mm-hmm.
- Some people interpret it as "Temple."
Oddly, Temple was a codename of J. Edgar Hoover.
- No case ever ends for the Federal Bureau
of Investigation until it is solved
and closed with the conviction of the guilty
or the acquittal of the innocent.
Fishburne: It would not be surprising
if the memo referred to J. Edgar Hoover,
the legendary 37-year director of the FBI.
- No clue, no matter
how seemingly unimportant, can be overlooked.
Fishburne: He'd been pushing for the FBI to have access
to the Army's investigation of Roswell
but had been turned down.
In a note dated July 15, 1947,
just days after the crash, Hoover contemplated the idea
of creating a special FBI unit to investigate UFOs.
"I would consider it," Hoover wrote, adding that,
"We must insist on full access to the disc recovered."
♪ ♪
- But the important part of this
is this sentence right here.
It could be "victims of the wreck."
"Victims" take us in one direction, suggest something.
Could be "viewing of the wreck," totally different.
If there's victims, that implies a flight crew,
and a flight crew implies an alien spacecraft
because there's no flight crew in a weather balloon.
- The previous press release put out the day before
didn't mention anything about victims.
- If this document says "victims of the wreck,"
it negates an awful lot of the skeptical arguments
about the Roswell case.
- I think there's some new technology we can bring
to get down to the micron level
and really bring out the text
to decipher the meaning of the memo.
- Anything like that would be great
because what we need to know is what it says.
[suspenseful music]
Fishburne: The photo archive at the University of Texas
at Arlington holds 4.5 million negatives,
most of which are stored at 38 degrees Fahrenheit
to prevent them from deteriorating.
- So why does the Ramey photo negative
need to be stored in cold conditions?
- It's in that very vulnerable time period
from the 1930s to the 1950s or so.
Those acetate negatives in particular,
stored in regular room temperatures,
will deteriorate.
♪ ♪
All right.
♪ ♪
Here it is. Okay.
It has--it's identified as Brigadier General Roger Ramey,
left, and Colonel Thomas J. Dubose
looking over the wind forecasting device.
- Wind forecasting, aha. - Yes, yes.
There are also pictures of weather balloons
that are included
in this series of negatives... - Right.
- Because that's what they were saying it was.
- Fascinating. - Yeah.
♪ ♪
- Wow.
So the memo is just, what, 1/4 of an inch long?
- Abo that, and it's folded,
so you can't see the whole thing.
- Yeah. I'd like to actually bring in some analysts
with some new technology called GIGAmacro photography.
- Sure. - Using a microscope
to actually look at the sublevels of the negative.
Fishburne: It will be the most powerful microscope
ever used to read the words in the memo,
and if Ben Smith can bring into focus the word "victims,"
it could expose one of the greatest
cover-ups in history.
♪ ♪
Coming up...
- My grandfather went out,
and when he got there, he saw the spaceship.
- It was much more than just debris and strange wreckage.
There were also remains.
There were also bodies.
Fishburne: Was this the military secret
that forced Jesse Marcel into silence?
- Someone might choose him because he was
the fall guy for the incident.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Ben Smith has gotten exclusive permission
from the University of Texas photo archive
to analyze the negative of a 70-year-old image.
It was snapped at the Army press conference
where Jesse Marcel said he was forced
to go along with a cover story that a weather balloon,
not a flying saucer, crashed near Roswell.
- General Ramey is the one who told the newsman
it was nothing more than a weather observation balloon.
Of course, we both knew differently.
- How's it going? - Good.
Fishburne: Smith has traveled here with Gene Cooper,
an expert operator of the GIGAmacro,
a powerful microscope that will be used
to try to read the blurry memo in General Roger Ramey's hand.
- This Ramey photo is a piece of history
that you won't find anywhere else.
I'm excited I get to see it with my own eyes.
I don't get to touch it, but I do get to use
the latest technology to peer into it
at the molecular level to see if we can decipher
whatever message is in that memo.
[suspenseful music]
My goal is to read the memo in General Ramey's hands.
This will spark a lot of controversy,
but if we can figure out what it says,
we can perhaps solve the Roswell mystery.
- So what we're gonna do is we're gonna get down
into the grains of the emulsion.
We're gonna go up to 80,000 DPI
with the camera system that we have here.
♪ ♪
It's gonna take a series of focal stacks,
which is bringing all those depths of field into view.
We're gonna merge all those together.
We're gonna then do it over the entire area of that memo
and then see what we find.
- And nobody's done it to this photo yet.
No-- - No.
I believe that the last scan,
done in 2015, was around 1,000 DPI,
and what we'll be doing today
is in the neighborhood of 60,000 to 80,000 DPI.
- Wow. Wow.
So we really might be able to read this thing.
- That's what we're hopeful of, and I'm excited
to get in there and see what we can find.
- Oh, yeah. This is gonna be great.
Fishburne: To try and read the memo,
Gene Cooper will focus in
on hundreds of micro images
and then begin the painstaking job
of stitching them together into a mosaic.
♪ ♪
While Cooper works, Ben Smith travels back to Roswell
to follow up on an intriguing lead.
- Is there any other information to help me
in my investigation to get to that ground-level truth?
Fishburne: Local residents have been reluctant
to give Smith the names of acquaintances
that claim to know more details of the Roswell story
than Jesse Marcel ever divulged publicly.
- Why the hesitancy to share with me his name?
- It's privacy.
We're still protecting the people that--
who have been most affected.
- When the government says you don't talk about something,
you didn't talk about it.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Smith has located Barbara Duggar,
granddaughter of Sheriff George Wilcox,
the man who first alerted the military
that some strange wreckage had been found in the field.
- Sheriff Wilcox is the fourth person in that inner ring
of witnesses with firsthand knowledge
of what was on that debris field.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Wilcox got to see the debris himself
when rancher Mac Brazel
brought some to the sheriff's office.
Smith wants to find out what else
Wilcox might have told his family.
♪ ♪
- If you could, I'd like to hear about your connection
to Sheriff George Wilcox.
- I am Inez Wilcox and George Wilcox's granddaughter.
My grandfather, George Wilcox,
was a very kind and loving man.
He tried to help the people that didn't have anything
'cause, you know, Roswell
at that time wasn't a real prosperous city.
- And when did you first hear about his connection
to the events of July 1947?
- In 1969, I was at my grandmother's house,
Inez Wilcox,
and it was the same day that they had landed on the moon,
and that's when my grandmother
told me about the Roswell incident.
- And what did she say?
- My grandmother got up from her seat,
and she closed the door.
She locked it,
she put the blinds down, and I looked at her,
and that was not her behavior.
She was very positive,
very beautiful and wonderful, and she said,
"I have something that I must tell you,
"and you must promise me that you will never,
"ever, ever tell this story to anyone.
If you do, we will all be killed,"
and she started telling the story
to my sister Phyllis and I.
[tense music]
Fishburne: According to Barbara Duggar,
when her grandfather got to the crash site,
it was already surrounded by the military,
and they weren't happy to see him.
- My grandfather went out to see what had happened.
When he got there, he saw the spaceship.
The flying saucer had crashed outside of Roswell.
There were aliens.
And then she talked about the aliens
and how they were dressed.
Yes. - How--how were they dressed?
- Well, they had on a silk suit,
and they had the big eyes.
She said there were little people walking around,
and there were some dead and some alive.
♪ ♪
I mean, I just sat there
and leaned back in my chair and thought...
Fishburne: Barbara Duggar believed,
even more than the spaceship debris,
it was the arrival of aliens on Earth
that the military wanted to keep secret.
- Then the military came
and told him to go back to the office
because there would be a lot of interviewing.
♪ ♪
They surrounded the courthouse.
They came in.
They roughed George Wilcox up in front of Big Mom,
and she said a redheaded colonel came into the office
and told Granddaddy--
got him and told him, in no uncertain terms,
if they told the story of the Roswell incident,
that their family would be killed
and all their grandchildren.
I mean, they threatened him,
and I said to her, I said, "You really believe, Big Mom,
that the military is going to come and kill all of us?"
And she said, "Yes, and they will."
- It sounds like it really affected your grandmother.
- Yes.
She knew that they meant business.
My grandmother, Inez Wilcox, and George Wilcox
had been harassed,
they had been threatened,
and their lives had been changed.
My grandfather went crazy,
and my grandmother had to go through a lot of hell
because of that.
- How do you connect your grandfather's mental illness
to the events of Roswell?
What leads you to this conclusion?
- My grandfather was perfectly normal.
He wouldn't have been sheriff of Roswell if he weren't.
- Right. He was well-respected from what I've read.
- And after that, he was not normal ever again, ever again,
and if somebody from the government doesn't like it,
well, that's just too dang bad.
♪ ♪
It is real.
The Roswell incident is real.
♪ ♪
- It's a powerful story. - Thank you, Ben.
- And I will weigh it with the rest of my investigation,
and hopefully we can get to truth.
- People in America and the world need to know
that the Roswell incident is real
and the government can't say it's not true.
"It's an air balloon. It's a weather balloon."
It isn't. It was real.
Fishburne: Coming up...
- 40 miles north of Roswell.
That was the drum beat we were hearing for years.
Fishburne: Ben Smith travels to a new location
where some claim they saw incredible things
that the government decided to conceal.
- One body was shriveled up against the wall,
and when we got in close, we noticed that
there were three others inside the craft.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- So we are on our way to the second debris site.
- What we call the impact site.
- The impact site. - Yes.
Fishburne: After meeting with the granddaughter
of a key eyewitness...
- When he got there, he saw the spaceship.
Fishburne: Ben Smith wants to find physical evidence
from the crash in Roswell,
so he's linking up with UFO researcher
and author Don Schmitt,
who claims to have interviewed 600 eyewitnesses
connected to the event.
- So who are our primary witnesses
that identified this site?
- Initially it was the family of Sheriff Wilcox
when they were describing his coming out north of town.
Fishburne: It was Schmitt who first took Ben Smith
to the debris field west of Roswell,
the site where Major Jesse Marcel
collected pieces of what he saw.
♪ ♪
- This is where it all began back in 1947.
Fishburne: But today they are on their way
to a different location
referred to as the impact site,
which is north of Roswell.
- "40 miles, 40 miles north of Roswell,"
that was the drum beat we were hearing for years.
Fishburne: Schmitt believes that a spacecraft
initially hit the ground at the debris field,
where pieces broke off,
but then it skipped 25 miles to this impact site,
where it finally came to rest.
- They had the much more spectacular,
the much more sensitive impact site
just north of town,
and this is where it was much more than just debris
and strange wreckage.
There were also remains.
There were also bodies.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: The third member of the team is Frank Kimbler,
a veteran geologist
based at the New Mexico Military Institute.
- Well, I've been wanting to go out to this final impact site
for a couple of years.
Fishburne: Kimbler has combed every inch
of the debris field,
searching for pieces of wreckage,
but this is his first visit to the alleged impact site.
- I like science fiction, but I also like science fact.
I actually lived here for six months in Roswell
before I even visited the UFO museum.
Then I went down to the museum,
and I said, "You know what? There's no physical evidence,"
and that was the whole gist behind this.
Fishburne: If Kimbler can find traces
that a spaceship crashed here,
it would mean Jesse Marcel was right about
the source of the wreckage at the debris field.
♪ ♪
- I'm excited about this site because it feels fresh.
It's on private property. It's not known to the public.
It's not marked on any tourist map.
It's been protected all this time.
- The debris field was always conceded.
That was the one thing
that even the press release was based on.
Mac Brazel,
the strangeness of the debris,
the unusual characteristics,
the qualities of that wreckage.
- They've got the debris field.
It's scattered debris.
It's clearly, to them,
something that's not terrestrially oriented.
They don't know where it's from,
but they're looking for something else,
and it was on one of those flights
that they found the rest of the wreckage.
[unsettling music]
- At the very time that the rancher, Mac Brazel,
has led Major Jesse Marcel,
as well as Captain Sheridan Cavitt,
back to the debris field,
so while they are investigating that location,
the debris field,
the military is alerted to the additional site
just 40 miles north of town,
which we would learn was the impact site,
the remains of the craft and the bodies recovered.
♪ ♪
- Don, you know that story about the McKnights going over
to the Ball family ranch before the military came out...
- Yes, yes. - And basically said,
"Hey, do you want to come over and see the little people?"
- Right. That was the talk back then.
"The little people." - Little people. Yeah.
- The little people, the little men.
Fishburne: According to the alleged eyewitnesses,
several members of the alien crew
were badly injured or dead.
- Would this have been before they made
the press release or after?
- Before. - Yeah.
- Because given the crash happened--
this was the late evening of July 2nd,
so there's a full four to five days before the military
actually is able to seal off the areas,
come in and conduct the recovery operation.
[dramatic music]
Fishburne: The story of a man named Frank Kaufmann
has never been verified.
He claims he was a civilian attached to a military unit
assigned to recover alien bodies
and the spaceship at the impact site.
♪ ♪
Kaufmann gave this interview in 1995.
♪ ♪
- There was a lot of erratic movement on the radar screen.
♪ ♪
Then all of a sudden there was kind of a flash,
and it just disappeared.
Something just went down.
Fishburne: After spotting an unidentified aircraft,
they headed to the location
where it had disappeared from radar.
- We got to where it was,
and we learned right then and there it wasn't a plane.
It wasn't a missile.
It was kind of a strange-looking craft,
and it was open and-- kind of halfway.
- Witnesses not only observing the egg-shaped craft
about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle,
seeing a number of bodies.
- One body was shriveled up against the wall.
The other one was--was half in and half out of the craft,
and when we got in close, we noticed
that there were about three others inside the craft.
Fishburne: According to Kaufmann's story,
the convoy loaded up the ship
and the alien bodies into trucks
and headed back to the same base
where Jesse Marcel had brought his debris.
♪ ♪
Coming up, Ben Smith
finds clues that support witnesses
who claim that this is the site where the mysterious
Roswell UFO made its final impact.
- Oh, look at this.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- If there was the remains of a craft and bodies,
where would that be located?
Fishburne: If a flying saucer with alien bodies
was recovered at Roswell, Ben Smith
hopes that there still could be evidence at the site
where the object might have come to rest.
- The search for the Holy Grail,
as we would call it, continues.
- Yeah.
Fishburne: The debris field is where Jesse Marcel
found pieces of wreckage, but according to Don Schmitt,
it is not where the object finally came to rest.
He believes it hit the debris field
and skipped like a rock to land
at what he calls the final impact site.
- It's the only wooden windmill on this ranch,
40 miles north of Roswell.
Fishburne: Schmitt says eyewitnesses remembered
certain landmarks here,
including a windmill and a water tank.
- Piece of the windmill.
- Piece of the original windmill.
- Holy cow. - There it is.
- Wow.
I mean, this thing is a historical relic now.
- And we can see... it is a relic.
- Yeah. - I mean, you see
by the condition of the wood,
and that was the one crucial element
in the description of the witnesses,
that it was a wooden windmill.
- How tall would that windmill have been, you think?
- 15 feet. - Okay.
- So it wasn't where you would think, you know,
a towering structure,
because as you see what-- the prevailing wind,
it didn't take much to keep those blades going.
♪ ♪
You see the empty bed
where the metal water tank existed back in 1947,
so you see, by its circumference...
- Yeah. Yep. - It was about 8 feet high,
as it was when we were first out here.
- As I look around, I see the Capitan Mountains,
the same mountains we could see from the debris site
that Mac Brazel identified.
So coming about 25 miles
from that direction parallel to the Capitans almost,
coming towards Roswell.
- Yes. - Okay.
So if we have the windmill right here--
so let's walk back towards the Brazel debris site
100 feet, and we'll set you up to begin your survey.
- That'll work. - All right.
Sounds good. - Yeah.
- I can't wait to take out a metal detector
and see if we can find something out here.
It would be great.
Fishburne: For Kimbler, this is virgin ground.
He has never explored it before.
It's a fresh chance to uncover evidence.
[soft beeping]
♪ ♪
- Well, I don't know. Piece of old wire.
- See, that's the thing about this.
I think we're too close to the windmill,
and we're gonna end up with a lot of--
we're gonna end up with a lot of trash on the--
in that general vicinity.
If you've got the evidence,
if you have a piece of a UFO in your hand,
and you can prove that it's of extraterrestrial origin,
it's history making.
That is a quest like looking for the Holy Grail.
Oh, look at this.
That was right on the surface.
I wonder if that's it.
That's a bullet casing,
and that's a--that's a high-powered one too.
Fishburne: Today, Kimbler is looking
for metallic debris.
Alleged eyewitnesses say
that when the military first came to this site,
they tried to clean up any evidence of what crashed.
[soft beeping]
- You find something? - Yeah.
We need to dig this one up.
So it's right there.
Right there. X marks the spot.
- Deeper than I thought it'd be.
[soft beeping]
♪ ♪
Oh, here we go. - Did you find it?
- What's that?
♪ ♪
It's a little sharp.
Feels--looks corroded.
- It's--I don't know what that is.
It's heavy. - It is a little green,
so maybe a little copper in there.
- Copper, it's been buried for a little while.
Let's just bag it up. So mark the waypoint.
Now we got the exact location.
We can plot this on Google Earth.
- Uh-huh. - We'll know exactly
where we are and where the piece was found.
♪ ♪
- Had this site not existed, if witnesses had not described
this location with bodies and a spaceship,
then we might not have the Roswell conspiracy
that exists today.
I don't know what to make of it just yet,
but there are supporting details
that suggest something bigger happened here.
Fishburne: Ben Smith will have this piece of metal tested
to see if it could be a bullet casing from the 1940s
or possibly a kind of material
mankind hadn't yet manufactured.
♪ ♪
Meanwhile, progress has been made
on another important test.
At the University of Texas,
Gene Cooper has been taking history's closest look
at the negative from the famous photo
using a GIGAmacro microscope to focus on the memo held
by General Roger Ramey.
♪ ♪
- Gentlemen.
Hey. - Hey.
- Hello. - How's it going?
- Good. - How's the analysis going?
- We've been busy here.
Fishburne: Gene Cooper's goal is to create
the most high-resolution image possible.
The GIGAmacro's lens is so powerful,
it can capture the grains of a negative
at 80,000 dots per square inch.
♪ ♪
- We shot probably around 3,000,
4,000 images total. - Wow.
- It's a combination of focal stacking
and then image mosaic stitching to put it all together.
♪ ♪
- Nobody's ever tried this before.
We will have created the clearest resolution
in the history of this iconic photo.
The question is, will we be able to read it?
And will we find the smoking gun
that proves the eyewitnesses right?
- So in this case, we're looking at the very top
of the acetate base of the negative.
- Mm-hmm. - And on there,
you'll see different scratches and different artifacts,
so this one that's right next to a key point,
a letter there...
- This little dot here?
- That little dot there. You can see it there.
You'd normally see it on a regular scan,
but when I actually focus down
into the negative, it disappears.
- Oh, perfect. - And not by any, you know,
cloning or copying material from one location to the other
or anything like that digitally, purely optically.
We can start enhancing it
to bring out and take a closer look
at each of the individual letters and phrases.
- The memo is one of the most controversial parts
of the Roswell story.
A lot of ufologists believe
that it contains a reference to victims.
So the question is, can the GIGAmacro
identify that word?
I mean, right away, I notice our word "victims"
looks like it starts with a P.
Is that--are you-- do you see that too?
- Yeah, I-- when he first brought it up,
I thought the word became "pending."
Fishburne: This extraordinary high-resolution version
produced by the GIGAmacro
shows the photo in greater detail
than anyone has ever seen before.
♪ ♪
- What about, yeah, the signature?
Can we see the signature line?
- This is the signature line.
- R-A-M-E-Y.
- The Y is way separated from the word.
- Could that be, like,
a slight rise in the paper or something,
like an option illusion? I don't know, like a...
- It could, in fact, be an optical illusion,
based on the way the camera was held
and the lens of the camera
and the lighting conceals things from us.
- Right, right.
So do we have any samples
of actual teletype or fonts from the age?
- Yeah, we did look up-- there was a font case
that did match,
and it actually looks something like this.
- Actually, that's really fascinating because
I, for some reason in my mind,
expected the letters to be of varying widths
and sizes a bit like they are in modern fonts.
So go back to that Ramey photo.
Yeah, the uniform size of each letter
really makes for more possibilities, actually.
We're getting closer now to clarity.
We can start to feel, but it still feels fuzzy,
like we're groping for the answer that we want.
- Is this about as far as you can go with magnification
without just losing everything?
- You are, at this point, seeing the grains
of the emulsion layer of the silver halides,
and there's nothing more to see beyond that.
- I was a little disappointed there wasn't perfect clarity
in that image, but using those new details,
I think there's enough there to continue pushing forward
to identify the different letters in that memo.
Fishburne: They have come closer than anyone ever has
to reading the words in the infamous Ramey memo,
but if it does say "victims in the wreck,"
Ben Smith will have to find another way to prove it.
Coming up...
- Think motive too.
Who would give that to him?
Fishburne: Does the journal contain the story
the government was trying to hide?
- To a cryptographer,
this indicates a certain kind of cipher.
- It does? - Yes.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Ben Smith believes Jesse Marcel knew far more
than he ever admitted in public.
- I was familiar with all materials used in aircraft.
This was nothing like that.
Fishburne: As an intelligence officer,
Marcel knew that he was duty-bound
to keep classified secrets for life.
♪ ♪
- It's curious.
Jesse said the wreckage he found was extraterrestrial,
but if he thought it was an alien spacecraft,
why didn't he mention its crew?
Fishburne: Does the journal
Marcel kept close his whole life
contain the rest of the story,
including details of a cover-up?
What Smith knows so far is that Marcel
didn't write it himself and it is a jumble
of disconnected phrases that might be code.
- "When down in the mouth, remember Jonah.
He came out all right."
If this journal is related to the events of Roswell
and you're writing it to conceal your thoughts,
it's an interesting quote to start off your code.
♪ ♪
- How did it go out there?
- It's been interesting.
Fishburne: To discuss how to push
the journal investigation forward,
Ben Smith is meeting with Joe Pappalardo,
an aviation expert and author of "Spaceport Earth:
The Reinvention of Space Flight."
Pappalardo is well-versed in the Roswell story.
- I went to a former Secret Service authenticator.
- Uh-huh. - She cut her teeth
tracking threats from crazy people
and nefarious people.
- To link the letter to the person writing it
to build a criminal case or...
- Yeah, basically.
- That had to hold up in court,
so she's the real deal.
- Yeah.
- The first question we started out with was,
"Is this an authentic document?"
The paper itself dates to prior to 1950.
- Okay.
- So she actually looked at the ink,
which suggests that it was written before there were
ballpoint pens, so again, before 1950.
Another feature she identified was this watermark.
This watermark belongs to a paper mill
located in Juniata, Pennsylvania, Juniata County,
which is actually next to Harrisburg,
where Jesse went to intelligence school.
Now, I don't know yet whether that's just a coincidence,
but it's pretty exciting
that at least the journal itself
and the ink and the paper are all legitimate.
- No matter what else this says--
this journal could say anything or nothing,
but at this point, it has told you something important,
which is the Marcel family is acting in good faith.
If you had found that the paper and the ink
didn't match chronologically,
you'd have to doubt every other part of this story,
so this is the foundation by which the rest
of the investigation into this piece of evidence is grounded.
- Yeah.
Now, the sample size of Jesse's handwriting
is actually pretty small, but she felt fairly confident
that the handwriting in this journal
did not match Jesse Marcel's.
- Hmm. That's even more intriguing.
If it's not his, why did he keep it?
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Jesse Marcel stayed silent for more than 30 years,
working as an ordinary TV repairman
in his hometown of Houma, Louisiana.
- We left Roswell perhaps around 3:30 or 4:00
in the afternoon.
It is very difficult.
In fact, with just verbal directions,
we never would have found it.
Fishburne: In 1980, he returned to Roswell
and gave that bombshell TV interview
in which he claimed before the world
that he'd been forced to lie
about what he'd found in the debris field.
- I had never seen anything like that before.
As of right--as of now, I don't know what it was.
Fishburne: After Marcel went public,
several retired officers from the 509th
spoke up to support his story of a cover-up
and added the extraordinary claim
that the Army had recovered a spaceship
and the bodies of aliens.
Some of that testimony was recorded by ufologist
in a 1991 document called "Recollections of Roswell."
- I had learned first
that the sergeant of the guard with a series of airmen
went out, and they surrounded the site.
Fishburne: Robert Shirkey was assistant operations officer
for the 509th bomber group.
- Then they swept the area and picked up
everything they could.
The bodies were brought in,
and everything was laid out in hangar 84.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Hangar 84 has figured prominently
in the stories of alleged eyewitnesses
who say it's where the secrets
of this extraterrestrial crash were hidden.
- I received a telephone call from the mortuary officer
out at the Army Airfield Base.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Glenn Dennis was the mortician
at the Ballard Funeral Home,
which provided services for the Roswell Army base.
- He was inquiring about, what would be
the smallest possible casket
that we could get that would be hermetically sealed?
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Dennis says he assumed
there'd been some kind of deadly accident
involving children,
so he delivered three small coffins to the air base.
- And I had this friend, this lieutenant nurse
that I knew quite well.
She said, "How did you get in here?
What are you doing in here?"
And she said, "You're gonna get in a lot of trouble."
She said, "Would you please leave?
And get out of here in a hurry."
By the time I had turned around,
there was another officer said,
"Hey, wait a minute," and I said,
"Looks like you had a crash.
Where was the crash?"
And he said, "You get the hell out of here,
and you didn't see anything, and you don't talk to anybody."
Fishburne: Like Marcel, Walter Haut,
also with the 509th,
felt intimidated to stay silent.
- This is censorship, pure and simple.
♪ ♪
I don't like it.
Fishburne: For many years, Walter Haut,
the 509th's public information officer,
claimed he simply did as he was told
and issued that famous press release, but later,
Haut told ufologists that what Marcel said was true
and only a fraction of the story.
He had personally seen the alien bodies
inside Hangar 84.
♪ ♪
- Some type of craft from outer space.
From where, I do not know.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Before he died,
a pilot named Oliver "Pappy" Henderson,
who was stationed at Roswell Army Air Base,
in July 1947,
made a shocking claim to his wife and daughter.
[foreboding music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: According to their testimony,
Henderson told them that he was the one
who flew the small coffins
from Roswell to Wright-Patterson,
even glimpsing the alien bodies inside.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Could these stories be validated in the journal
that belonged to Jesse Marcel?
There is no way of knowing until it is deciphered.
- One question that I'm considering was,
was this handed to him for safekeeping?
I'm hoping that I can get more handwriting samples
of other people in the 509th group
to see if this might have been passed to him
by somebody else within the bomber group.
It's written by the same person,
and for me, that raises another question:
why the marked shift?
There could be stress involved, but could stress also mean
there could be a distress signal?
I don't know if you remember Vietnam vets
blinking into the camera with Morse code
to relay a message while they're talking.
The order of these quotes is nonsensical.
It's not clear why they held meaning for the writer.
Maybe there's no meaning at all,
but it was just a mnemonic device,
a particular quote recalls a memory or a detail.
- Think motive too. Who would give that to him?
You can understand that if you're a tight-knit group,
and you're in the middle of nowhere,
and you work in an air wing with nukes,
it's a pressure cooker.
They know that they could trust each other with secrets.
Someone might choose him
because he was the fall guy for the incident,
so if you're gonna give your encoded journal
or what have you to one figure from the whole
Roswell thing, you would likely trust him to do it.
- Right.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up...
- That's kind of strange
and could indicate something hidden here.
Fishburne: Can one of America's top code breakers
unlock the secrets of this mystifying journal?
- So wait a minute. You're telling me the 777
means the angels are providing abundance,
and then immediately in the next paragraph,
we have a total shift
and something that could be coded.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: To further investigate
Marcel's baffling journal,
former CIA investigator Ben Smith is meeting
with one of the nation's top cryptologists, Craig Bauer,
professor of mathematics at York University.
- Craig. - Oh, hi.
You must be Ben. - That's right.
- Good to meet you. - You too.
I brought by the document that we discussed on the phone.
- Mm-hmm. - Um...
I can't remember how much I told you,
but I have with me a journal that belonged to a man
by the name of Major Jesse Marcel Sr.
He was an Army intelligence officer
and was at the center of the Roswell incident in 1947,
the alleged UFO crash out in the desert of New Mexico.
The family, after his death,
finds this journal hidden with his military records,
but it's not in his handwriting.
Now, I've flipped through this a little bit.
There are a lot of quotes, a lot of musings.
It's not addressed to anybody.
There aren't any names that I can pick out.
- It doesn't appear to be autobiographical?
- No. - Okay.
- From what I can tell. - Yeah.
- With my background in intelligence,
I'm curious if this is perhaps encoded,
if whoever owned this journal had sensitive information
they wanted to pass on without actually revealing it,
but I need your help.
I can't make sense of it.
You know, I'll let you look through it.
- Okay.
There are a lot of ways
that you can hide a message in a journal.
I'm a mathematician focused on cryptology,
making and breaking codes and ciphers.
Ciphers are the coolest,
sexiest form of writing that there can be.
If you're reading somebody's diary,
you're flipping through page after page
and all of a sudden you see something in a cipher,
you know that's the best part of the whole diary, right?
This is--this is what you want to get at.
We don't use ciphers for our laundry list,
for our grocery list, right?
We use ciphers to protect things
that are extremely important or sensitive,
so that's the stuff we most want to read
when we're trying to unravel history.
♪ ♪
Yeah, the text is a little odd.
We have uppercase letters in the middle of a word.
- Mm-hmm. - This is, you know,
obviously a unique item. - Mm-hmm.
- I mean, do you have it in a digital form that,
you know, we could really... - I do, yeah.
- Let me see the digital copy.
I love when I have a cipher to myself,
when I'm the first to have eyes on something
and get a stab at deciphering it,
so it's very exciting to be able
to look at the this journal
because I'm the first person with the skills
to ferret out what might be hidden there.
♪ ♪
- We have 122 pages of cursive writing,
and then on page 123...
- 1-2-3. - After Roswell,
August 31, 1947,
it shifts to this block letter format.
Now, the military has had the debris now for six weeks.
What have they learned in that time?
And guys like Jesse Marcel
were told to be quiet about what they found.
So this shift, to me, looks like
it could be the start of something interesting.
- Yeah, I see a number of things
we could look at here.
I think this might be intended to be an M,
but it kind of looks like 777.
- Yeah, the document expert pointed that out to me
that that was a typical way he wrote Ms,
but it's more separated here.
- I mean, if it is an M,
we have some dashes after that.
Is that the number of letters?
Fishburne: Craig Bauer agrees that the capital Ms
may be the telltale sign
that a code is embedded in the journal.
- The writing that's intriguing in the journal,
the kind of writing that seems like it
could be hiding a secret message,
follows after whatever happened near Roswell happened
in the summer of 1947,
so the timing is kind of interesting.
I'm sure you know 666.
- Yeah, I'm familiar. The--the devil, right?
- The number of the beast. - The beast, yeah.
- But also, in some systems of belief,
777 is a special number, the perfect being.
Some people equate that with Jesus.
- Interesting. - So maybe it's just an M,
but that's something.
- Says here that 777 is the number of abundance
and that when angels start sending you this message,
it means that the abundance you have been waiting for
is just there waiting to be unlocked.
[dramatic music]
- There is something interesting
right in that first line.
We have "when" with a lowercase N.
- Mm-hmm.
- But then the next word, "down,"
ends with an uppercase N.
- Ah.
- And then "in" with a lowercase N again.
- Okay.
- Why would he suddenly capitalize
the last letter in a word?
That's kind of strange and could indicate
something hidden here.
- So wait a minute, you're telling me that 777
means angels are providing abundance,
and then immediately in the next paragraph,
we have a total shift.
It's something that could be coded.
♪ ♪
That is almost too crazy to believe.
Fishburne: Coming up, first Roswell was a flying saucer.
Then they said a weather balloon, and now this.
- In 1947, it was the misidentification
of these radar reflectors
that is most likely the famous flying disc.
Fishburne: Why do some people find it hard to believe them?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- Well, let me go ahead and look at a couple
more pages, see what else we have here.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Ben Smith is certain he's brought
the journal that belonged to Jesse Marcel
to the right place.
- Okay, here we're one page further along.
Fishburne: Top codebreaker Craig Bauer
is starting to see patterns in the lettering,
a clear signal that a message may be hidden in code.
- Here, again, you can see some different forms.
In the second line, "in" doesn't have a dot on the I.
In the next line, it looks like a foreign word,
perhaps--does have the dot.
I mean, you can sometimes forget to dot an I,
but if we're seeing two versions of many letters,
there could be more to it than just forgetfulness.
There could be a method to the madness.
- Yeah.
- It's not like we just have a small passage.
It continues over several pages,
so there's a potential for, you know,
a little greater depth of information
being conveyed here.
♪ ♪
This is jumping out at me.
Again, we have the phenomena
where a word ends with an uppercase letter:
"short" with a capital T.
I mean, he uses lowercase Ts elsewhere.
It's not like the whole thing is in uppercase, you know,
somebody shouting at you in an e-mail.
- Oh, right, so while the words themselves are innocuous,
the actual cases of the letters
might indicate some kind of code.
- Yes, there's several ways to do that with a cipher.
It just doesn't seem natural.
That's one of the giveaways you're trying to hide something
is the handwriting doesn't look natural
or the characters don't look right.
It's just--anything that looks, like, a little hinky
and off from normal writing can indicate that the author
is trying to do something else at the same time,
and so it's a sign
that this should bear closer examination.
- Yeah.
Fishburne: After spending less than an hour
looking at the journal, Bauer sees telltale signs
that a code might be embedded in the text.
To his trained eye,
having two forms of a single letter suggests
what is called a biliteral code
where the alternate form represents a different letter
altogether in what is known as the B alphabet.
♪ ♪
- We already identified two versions of I,
two versions of T, two versions of N.
- Mm-hmm. - So we want to keep rolling
with that and build a little catalog
of what's going on on these few pages.
- Once you've separated the letters, then what?
- Well, we just investigate different schemes.
We had G like this and G like this.
- Right. - So in some cases,
it was a lowercase versus an uppercase,
but which of these is A, and which of these is B?
It's unclear. - Right.
- So we have a lot of possibilities to check.
Any given letter, we'd have two possibilities:
that this form is A or that this form is B.
- Mm-hmm. - So two choices
for each letter, well, 26 letters.
- Oh, wow.
- We'd have that many possibilities to consider.
- That grows pretty fast.
- That's 67,108,864.
- Over 67 million possibilities in that journal.
Wow.
- Well, fortunately, we're not looking at
the journal in 1947.
Okay, with the computing power we have now,
we can test all of those
and figure out which one looks the most like English.
- Yeah. Do you have a program already that can do that?
- No. This is a custom job.
- Oh, really? - But exciting.
- I expected it to be hard,
but I didn't think it would take custom code to do it,
but that's impressive.
That means I came to the right guys.
- Yeah, it should be fun. - Yeah.
- We'll be in touch. - Cool. Thanks, guys.
- Have a good trip back.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: If Craig Bauer can decipher it,
the journal could be the missing link,
the key to unlocking what happened at Roswell.
♪ ♪
From the moment he broke his silence,
millions of Americans have believed that Jesse Marcel
was telling the truth.
♪ ♪
His story struck a chord in the 1970s
when unrest over the Vietnam War
coupled with scandals like Watergate
made many distrustful of big government.
♪ ♪
After Marcel, other members of the 509th
elaborated on what happened at Roswell.
- What do you think it was?
- Some type of craft from outer space.
From where, I do not know.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: By 1990, a Gallup poll
reported that nearly 70 million Americans
believed alien spaceships had visited the Earth,
yet the government stayed silent about Roswell,
which it officially considered a non-event.
Decades after the crash and the press conference
that claimed it was a weather balloon,
people still asked questions.
♪ ♪
- The issue is providing to the public
whatever records may still exist, if any.
There may not be any,
but if any on the Roswell incident,
so people can make their own determination.
That is the mission
that I discussed with the general accounting office.
Fishburne: Then in 1993,
Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico
began pressing hard for answers.
Following his request, the U.S. Air Force
undertook a fresh investigation of Roswell.
It examined the records of half a dozen agencies
and even interviewed those still alive
who claimed they'd been witnesses.
♪ ♪
The result was a nearly 1,000 page report
made public in 1995.
Colonel Richard Weaver supervised the investigation
and was one of the report's authors.
- We just didn't go to a giant master file that said "Roswell"
and open up a file folder.
We started to methodically look at all the things
that were taking place in the Air Force in 1947
at Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico,
and so we searched a multitude of records
in a multitude of locations because, of course,
the base has been closed for a long time.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: The report does not dispute that something crashed
in the ranch lands west of Roswell,
but in a stunning twist,
it reveals that it was not a weather balloon.
♪ ♪
- If you will read this book, and I'm sure you're gonna
take it home tonight and read it,
quite frankly,
you're gonna find some very interesting
and quite fascinating pieces of information
about Air Force research.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: The Air Force claimed that what crashed
was almost certainly a type of balloon called a Mogul.
- I don't know what they saw in '47,
but I'm quite sure it probably was Project Mogul.
Fishburne: In 1947, the United States launched
32 Mogul balloons over the course of 7 months.
They were part of a top-secret project
in the growing Cold War with the Soviet Union.
♪ ♪
Each Mogul balloon was essentially
a listening device
equipped to detect the sound waves
that would be produced by a Soviet atomic bomb test.
The U.S. was the only nuclear power in the world,
and keeping track of the Soviets
was the highest priority.
The Mogul balloons were launched
from the Alamogordo Air Base,
just 70 miles from Roswell.
- In 1947, it was
the misidentification of these radar reflectors
that is most likely the famous flying disc.
Whether you accept that as the Roswell information,
I quite frankly don't know, but we do
because it overlays so well with this period of time.
Fishburne: For many, the explanation seemed plausible,
but for others, it was deeply unsatisfying,
but the Air Force investigation
has been criticized
for not having full access to U.S. Army records,
which in 1974,
still oversaw the nation's growing air forces.
For Don Schmitt and others, it didn't wash.
- They were quickly trying to put together
their third explanation.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we lied about Roswell in 1947.
"We lied about the balloon explanation,
but here's our new theory,"
and they presented Project Mogul.
- So why do you think people in Roswell
still are not convinced no matter what you say?
- I'm sorry, but I just can't answer that question for them.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: To this day, the family of Jesse Marcel
is definitely not convinced it was a Mogul balloon.
- In 1995, the government came out with a story
to explain what the crash at Roswell was.
Looking at that information,
based upon what my grandfather and my father told me,
they just don't match up.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up, this former FAA inspector
has investigated hundreds of aviation crash sites.
He doubts this one was what the government says it was.
- Not sure I buy that whole balloon drag theory.
- Really? - Something's wrong with it.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- So far, there has never been a researcher
with your experience and credibility on the site
to examine the potential of a crash.
- Okay.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: The argument over what crashed at Roswell
has always been missing physical evidence.
Ben Smith is returning to the debris field,
where in 1947, Jesse Marcel,
a 40-year-old Army intelligence officer,
was certain he'd picked up pieces of wreckage
that were extraterrestrial.
♪ ♪
On this visit, Smith has brought with him
one of America's leading experts on aviation crashes.
- So a lot of my investigative work on accidents
is post-accident.
Fishburne: David Soucie is a former
FAA accident inspector
and the author of "Malaysia Airlines Flight 370,"
the commercial airliner
that mysteriously disappeared without a trace.
♪ ♪
Smith hopes that Soucie's expert eye
will find something that others have missed.
- My hope, originally, with the tech survey,
was that we could bring out all this equipment
that didn't exist, and all this software
and find evidence of debris
or an impact zone or a large-scale cover-up,
and so far, we haven't been able to find anything.
What I'd love from you is your perspective
on entry angles and speeds
and something that could explain
the witness accounts at the debris field.
- Okay.
Fishburne: Even 70 years after the Roswell crash,
David Soucie knows that some things
won't have changed much at the debris field,
like the topography or landscape features.
♪ ♪
- What is intriguing to me about this
is the witness credibility aspect of it.
Even when I go on an accident site
just days after the accident,
there's credibility issues there.
They train us as inspectors to vet those witness accounts
because they really believe that they saw something happen
that we know for a fact didn't happen.
♪ ♪
As far as the physical evidence piece,
I'm hoping to find something that could say,
"Here's what is here," but at that very least,
we might be able to determine what is not there.
♪ ♪
- Doesn't look like much, but it's the birthplace
of ufology in the United States.
- Yeah.
Fishburne: Just by measuring
the patterns and velocity of the wind,
Soucie is confident he can gather enough data
to test the government's claim
that what crashed here was a Mogul balloon.
♪ ♪
- Mogul was an attempt to acoustically detect
Soviet nuclear blast
and ballistic missile launches.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: A Mogul balloon was actually
a series of weather balloons
linked together in a 650-foot-high chain,
100 feet taller than the Washington Monument.
♪ ♪
Each balloon chain carried a crude acoustic censor
called a sonobuoy.
- In 1947, it was the misidentification
of these radar reflectors
that is most likely the famous flying disk.
Fishburne: The 1995 Air Force report theorized
that Mogul balloon number four,
which had been launched on June 4, 1947,
was the one that crashed near Roswell.
- These flights were all meticulously logged,
when they were launched
and what the weather was and all these things,
and they tried to recover the material if they could,
but the material in and of itself wasn't important.
The purpose was important.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: It was slightly more than 3 weeks
between the time Mogul balloon four was reported lost
and the Roswell wreckage was found.
♪ ♪
- So let me show you exactly what
the witnesses describe as a furrow.
- Furrow. - Or a gouge
beginning here heading in that direction,
cut across the landscape for 200 to 300 feet
in this direction.
- And how wide?
- 10 feet. - 10 feet wide.
Interesting.
- And from this location,
we also start the fan of the debris field.
Jesse Marcel Sr. claimed that the debris looks scattered
as if something exploded from the sky.
- There was so much of it.
It was scattered over such a vast area.
Fishburne: Ufologist and author Kevin Randle
is an expert on the Roswell crash.
Randle is certain that Jesse Marcel
would have recognized the wreckage of a balloon.
- Jesse Marcel examined that debris.
Had it been a weather balloon and a ray wind target,
he would have recognized it,
and that would be the end of the story,
and you and I would not be here today.
- Weather balloons have been used
to take soundingss of the atmosphere.
They're launched around the world twice a day,
and that's been the case
from before 1947 right up to now.
Eventually they do pop and come down to Earth
and are retrieved.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: But Richard Weaver says
that only officers directly involved in project Mogul
would have known about it.
- They classified Mogul top secret,
which means only a few people have the need to know.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: The project's lead engineer
was Professor Charles Moore of New York University.
He agreed with the government
that the eyewitnesses' descriptions of debris
matched one of his Mogul balloons.
- The rancher who picked up the debris
noted that it contained brass eyelets
at the corners of these radar targets.
They were also on the targets we flew.
Fishburne: Moore said that the instant news broke
that the Army had recovered a flying disc,
he knew it was his lost Mogul balloon number four.
- When Moore and his Mogul team learned of the flap
over the Roswell incident, he said they laughed,
but they kept quiet about their project.
♪ ♪
- So they're saying it went this direction,
which is almost east, right?
- Right.
- What I'd like to do is get documentation of the site.
I'll take the angle of every photo...
[camera shutter clicks]
And then we'll be able to map that against
what I expect the airflow would have been.
Then what I like to do at every accident site
is get some pictures of what would be the approach path
to the impact point.
So from every location,
we take pictures coming in and going out.
♪ ♪
Not sure I buy that whole balloon drag theory...
- Really? - Down through there.
Fishburne: It's only his first visit to the debris field,
but already, this seasoned former FAA crash inspector
has doubts that a Mogul balloon
could have crashed here.
- Something's wrong with it, with that whole theory
of the fact that it drug and it strayed,
and there was debris straight off to the east.
Not really buying that.
To think of a balloon going this way,
if it were a Mogul balloon
that was settling as the balloon approaches the ground,
It picks up the ground flow, so it'd be highly irregular
to see a "balloon accident" go across this valley
and continue in that direction the way it was described.
We got wind readings up there, wind readings on the west side
and then wind readings at the bottom...
- Yeah. - And you can see
that it changed direction throughout that.
- So we can rule out a Mogul balloon
making contact with the Earth at the furrow,
dragging across the ground,
laying to rest across that debris field.
- It's not the way it works. Just not the way it works.
- Ugh, I don't know if you've removed a piece of the puzzle
or added a new one.
I'm not sure at this point.
- "Just the facts, ma'am."
[both laughing]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: David Soucie will put his readings
into a computer program
designed to analyze crash sites.
If he determines a Mogul balloon
could not have gone down here,
the investigation will be one step closer to discovering
whether Jesse Marcel was telling the truth.
♪ ♪
Coming up, she can spot a liar in the smallest gesture.
- We're looking for things like fidgeting
or diverting attention.
Fishburne: So does this body language expert
think Jesse Marcel was telling the truth?
- We have two forms of every letter
that appears more than once.
Fishburne: A top cryptologist is sure
the journal is hiding a message.
- To a cryptographer, this indicates
a certain kind of cipher.
- It does? - Yes.
Fishburne: But will he crack the code?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Because so much of his investigation
hinges on Jesse Marcel's testimony,
Ben Smith has come to New York City
to see Tonya Reiman, an expert in body language
and what are called microexpressions.
♪ ♪
- This is a photo
of the primary subject of my investigation,
an intelligence officer by the name of Jesse Marcel.
Here he is in a press release on July 8, 1947.
He was ordered to pose with this tinfoil here
and say what earlier had been reported as a flying saucer
was a weather balloon.
It's not until 1980 that he comes out publicly
and starts speaking to the cameras
about what he really saw.
He was of the impression
that these materials were not from this planet.
- Right. - So that led to the idea
that there was a government cover-up to hide a UFO crash
and bodies and many other extraordinary claims,
but it all comes back to the integrity
and the testimony of this man here.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Smith has brought with him
footage of some of Jesse Marcel's interviews.
Reiman will watch them closely, looking for any sign
that Jesse Marcel may not be telling the truth.
- He told me not to say anything.
He said, "I'll handle it from now on,"
and that's exactly what he did.
When he came out, he said--he told the press that was there,
he said, "That was nothing but a weather balloon,
crashed weather balloon."
It was definitely not a weather balloon,
and it was an aircraft, so what it could have been,
I wouldn't know.
I still don't know.
- Is there anything we can take away from these clips here
about whether he's being deceptive or not?
- We're looking for a few different things.
Is he moving around too much? Is he fidgeting?
He held eye contact,
he smiled at appropriate times,
and he actually shook his head up and down
when he was saying something in the affirmative,
and he shook his head side to side when he was saying,
like, you know, "I couldn't say anything,"
so those are signals of truth.
Those are signals of congruency.
- So that tells you he believed in what he was saying, right?
- Right, he believed what he was saying,
but at the same time, he's not really
saying anything specific.
At the end, he says,
"I don't even know what I saw,"
which makes it easy for him to be congruent.
- Of course.
♪ ♪
So Jesse has become a bit of a lightning rod
for the whole controversy around the Roswell incident.
- Right. - His family says
he was an honest man,
a man of duty, and he's telling the truth.
- Right. - The government says
they don't know why he's making these claims.
He's not telling the truth.
[foreboding music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: In its 1995 report, the Air Force
cited a sworn affidavit from Sheridan Cavitt.
Cavitt was the special agent for counterintelligence
who accompanied Marcel to investigate the debris.
- As a CIC agent, he was in a different chain of command,
but they were friends, because nobody likes you
if you're a counterintelligence officer,
and nobody likes you if you're an intelligence officer.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: As the other official on site,
Cavitt could have backed Marcel's story
about strange wreckage that littered a field
with nearly a mile of debris, but he didn't.
♪ ♪
- Cavitt, who was there with him,
said there was not much material there at all,
which they recovered most of it.
He said it was obvious to him at the time
that the stuff they were picking up was just crap,
just, you know, for lack of a better term.
The fact was the material that's depicted in the photos
was identified by Cavitt, still alive in 1994,
as material he and Marcel physically picked up
in the desert on the farm in July of 1947.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: In his affidavit, Sheridan Cavitt wrote,
"The amount of debris was very small, about 20 square feet.
"I remember recognizing the material as consistent
"with a weather balloon,
which would easily fit into one vehicle."
- One thing I was certain of, it was not a weather balloon
nor an aircraft nor a missile.
It was something else,
which we didn't know what it was.
There were just fragments strewn all over the area,
an area about 3/4 of a mile long
and several hundred feet wide.
So we proceeded to pick up the parts.
Fishburne: So which intelligence officer
was telling the truth:
Sheridan Cavitt or Jesse Marcel?
♪ ♪
- We're looking for things like fidgeting
or diverting attention.
I didn't see that with this, and once again,
when he did make a fumble, a verbal fumble,
he would autocorrect.
He did it consistently and comfortably.
- Uh-huh.
In this next clip,
he's going to describe the materials that he discovered,
and this is a key part of the investigation.
Can we trust his eyewitness account
about the actual debris that he found?
- Okay.
♪ ♪
- The thing about it that got me is
that you couldn't even bend it.
You couldn't ben--dent it.
Even with a sledgehammer, it would bounce off it,
so I knew that I had never seen anything like that
before, and as of right--as of now,
I don't know what it was.
It was not anything from this Earth,
that I'm quite sure of,
because I was-- being an intelligence officer,
I was familiar with just about every--
all materials used in aircraft and in air travel.
This was nothing like that. It could not be.
It could not have been.
- Do you see any signs of deception?
- I don't see any signs of deception in him,
in his own self-belief.
- So he's not being willingly deceptive to trick us all
into believing something that isn't true.
He truly believes what he's saying.
- I got the impression
that he truly believes what he's saying.
Fishburne: Coming up, they swore an oath to keep secrets,
but could the journal be the biggest secret they shared,
the story of Roswell written in code?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: After analyzing Marcel's body language
with expert Tonya Reiman,
who sees no indication of deceit...
- He truly believes what he's saying.
Fishburne: Ben Smith heads to York College
in Pennsylvania to see if cryptologist Craig Bauer
has made progress deciphering the journal.
With Smith is Jesse Marcel's grandson,
who is just as eager to know
what the writing in the journal means.
♪ ♪
- Do you think that there would have been any reason
why another intelligence officer on base
would have wanted to give him information
that would have been somewhat coded in some way?
- I think if your grandfather is making claims
that someone else believes... - Yes.
- Or someone else had the same experience
but for whatever reason,
they feel afraid of openly speaking out...
- Sure. - They might capture that
in--in a code and give it to your grandfather.
- I would like to believe that what we find in there
is going to be something significant enough
that it makes it irrefutable
that what my father and grandfather believed in
was something that wasn't--was truly not made by human hands.
Fishburne: Craig Bauer has devised a customized program
to try and crack whatever code
might be hiding in the journal.
♪ ♪
- Knock, knock.
♪ ♪
- Hey, Ben. Good to see you again.
- Yeah, you too. How are you? - Good.
You must be Jesse. - Jesse Marcel.
I'm Craig. - Craig, nice to meet you.
- Jack is one of our best math and computer science majors.
- Oh, great. - Nice to see you again.
- Yeah.
- So we've been studying
your grandfather's journal.
The first really interesting thing we noticed...
- Okay. - Was, you know,
sort of weird ways of writing letters.
Like, he has a capital L in the middle of a word.
- Okay. - And it's not like
the whole thing is in uppercase.
It's just randomly a capital L.
You can see in the line above, he's using lowercase Ls
in "little girl."
- I can see your point.
- We started to see these different forms,
so I asked Jack to prepare this table,
and I was thrilled with this result.
- Uh-huh. - We have two forms
of every letter that appears more than once.
You can see a K where it's two separate pieces and together.
- Oh, wow. Yeah. - Up at the top right,
you can see an O and an O
that's filled in like a solid circle,
a P with a loop,
a P without a loop.
So this really intrigued us.
To a cryptographer,
this indicates a certain kind of cipher.
- It does? - Yes.
If you have two different versions of a letter,
you know, we can call them and say, zero and one.
- Sure.
- So you have an apparent message,
but really it's spelling something out in binary.
- Binary, it's-- okay, it's that simple.
- Yeah, yeah.
There's a system that uses that kind of approach.
- Okay.
- This made us very hopeful, and we--
- You got my heart going, I'll say that much.
- But there is some bad news.
♪ ♪
If somebody is implementing a biliteral cipher,
that person has to be very careful to stick to one
or the other form and make it clear which it is.
- That makes sense. - Go ahead and show 'em.
- Oh, okay. - This is the real result.
We found, in many instances, three forms of a letter,
and this is a big problem.
- This would throw everything off.
- Yeah, so this was kind of frustrating,
and the result was that we had to run our program again
and again and again
with different assumptions, with different assignments
for some of these third characters, these third forms.
Our government has poured
so much money into the development of computers
because it needed them for code breaking.
This is why computers were developed.
You could go through a lot of combinations by hand.
67 million, no, okay?
But we have computers because of this need to break ciphers,
and this is how we're going to apply them in this journal.
We had to write a computer program
to just test all the possibilities.
We tested our program on little pieces,
little sections of the journal.
Why don't we show them a typical result?
Maybe just the very first passage that was printed,
about Jonah.
♪ ♪
Here's the original quote.
"When down in the mouth, remember Jonah.
He came out all right." - Okay, sure.
♪ ♪
- The program just takes a few minutes.
We get things like this. "A web."
- Okay. - And then the asterisk means
we got a string of As and Bs
that does not correspond to a letter.
That's a bad sign,
to get one that doesn't even map to a letter.
- Okay. - Every so often,
you can pick out a word here or there.
I think you got McArthur at one point,
so we were kind of checking the timing.
Would he have been writing about McArthur?
But on run after run,
we're just periodically getting words
but never a complete sentence, never anything
that looks like it couldn't have arisen by chance.
- Okay. Sure.
- Nothing meaningful. - Right. Right.
♪ ♪
- I mean, I guess there's a ray of hope.
We can't conclude that there's not something hidden there.
- Okay. - We can conclude
that there's not something hidden there
with a straightforward biliteral cipher.
- Okay. - But there are many ways
to hide a message.
We still don't have a good explanation
for why you would have an uppercase L
in the middle of a word
or, you know, these strange different forms.
- Yeah.
- So there could well be something there.
- You know, the 509th bomb group where Jesse worked
was a pretty unique place.
They had a lot of need
to communicate sensitive information to each other.
Is it possible that a group like the 509th
could communicate in a cipher that only they knew about?
- Oh, yeah, I think they could do that pretty easily.
There are a lot of homebrew systems.
You know, to make up a little cipher system
that you're just gonna exchange a few messages,
it's not that hard to make it really hard to break.
- Uh-huh.
I have a lot of faith that there's something here.
♪ ♪
My grandfather would have wanted to leave some kind
of message behind, something.
He always said that you could
always believe that there were people that were involved,
so maybe this is one of the other people that was involved
and some way of getting him a message.
We need to go find out who wrote this.
- Yeah.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Next on "Roswell: The First Witness"...
- He told me,
"Don't believe everything the government tells you."
Fishburne: What did Jesse Marcel say in private
that he never said in public?
- He said there are things
that this world is not ready for.
Fishburne: He confessed to her there was more,
so much more he could have said.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Did Marcel hide a piece
of what he found at home?
- Jesse said he had proof.
- There could be some debris left around.
Fishburne: Is the proof still buried in the ground?
- Right there.
It's something that doesn't make sense to me.
- Have you ever seen that in a--in a wreck?
- No. There's something under the ground there.
Fishburne: She says her father staged a cover-up...
- And he also destroyed files. - Or changed them.
Fishburne: Even though he knew Jesse Marcel was right.
- He said that the world wasn't ready to know
the truth about what happened at Roswell.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: He didn't write the journal,
but did he share its secrets with this man who could have?
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
Thanks for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries".
Next time, our conclusion to "Roswell: The First Witness".