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a former CIA operative, matuBen Smith, mas,"r.
investigates what really crashed
near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
- I'm not sure I buy that whole balloon theory.
- Really? - Yeah.
Fishburne: The focus: a mysterious journal
found among the possessions of Jesse Marcel,
the first official to arrive at the scene.
- It was not anything from this Earth.
That, I'm quite sure of.
Fishburne: A top cryptologist believes
it may contain coded messages...
- To a cryptographer,
this indicates a certain kind of cipher.
Fishburne: Perhaps details on what Marcel really saw.
- He saw the spaceship.
- I'm laurence Fishburne and tonight,
the hunt for the mysterious journal's author continues.
Was it a fellow officer in Jesse Marcels tight knit group
who knew exactly what he knew?
Ben Smith is hot on the trail.
Was one of these men the author of the journal?
Was it written by a U.S. Army officer
with inside information on Roswell?
- There are some words and letter combinations
I do see in agreement.
- This man is at the nexus of all the secrets.
Fishburne: And what did Jesse Marcel
tell his own family
years before he ever went public?
- He told us that they had told him to change the story.
Fishburne: Did an extraterrestrial spacecraft
crash near Roswell?
The conclusion to our investigation begins now.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Former CIA investigator Ben Smith has traveled
to Louisiana's Gulf Coast to visit Houma,
the hometown of Jesse Marcel
where he spent the last 36 years of his life.
♪ ♪
At ease among his own people
in this quiet bayou community,
Smith believes Marcel may have divulged details
about the UFO crash to family and friends.
♪ ♪
- There are Mr. and Mrs. Marcel.
- They must have liked you.
They have smiles on their faces.
- I was in their book.
She says, "You could sell refrigerators to Eskimos,"
because I was so persuasive in making him talk about things.
And she could see that I was getting things.
And that's him and I together.
I have my Nicholls State University T-shirt on, and--
Oh, my gosh. Such a long time ago.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Linda Corley met Marcel in 1981
when she taped an interview with him
for her undergraduate psychology course
at Nicholls State University.
Marcel was retired and living with his wife, Vio.
♪ ♪
In 2007, she turned her interview with Jesse
into a book entitled "For The Sake Of My Country."
♪ ♪
- I had a little cassette-tape recorder,
and I asked him if it was all right.
He said, "Sure."
Okay. [clears throat]
Please don't break. Please don't break.
- I kept asking all through the interview,
"Can't you tell me something that's not in the book?"
- [laughs]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Linda is referring to the first book
to allege a government cover-up at Roswell,
called "The Roswell Incident."
It was written by Charles Berlitz
and William Moore in 1980.
It relied heavily on the testimony of Jesse Marcel.
- I asked him that a million times.
"Can't you tell me something that's not in the book?"
- Yeah. - And in the end, he did.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: What Marcel told Linda
was that his son, Jesse Jr.
had described the debris he'd handled inaccurately.
Jesse Jr., who was 11 at the time,
claimed he'd picked up small support struts,
which he called I-beams.
- The most unusual part of the debris that I saw
was the I-beam fragments,
or what I recall as being I-beam,
because they were very light and very strong,
and they had some writing
along the inside surface of this,
and that was the thing that really set this apart
from anything I'd ever seen before.
♪ ♪
- He was talking about the symbols
that he saw on the debris,
and Mrs. Marcel said,
"I think I have Jesse Jr.'s drawing of that,"
and he said, "Well, Jesse got all that wrong anyway."
- Huh. - I had a composition book,
and I'm like, "Well, here. Why don't you
draw me something?"
The clip I want you to hear
is of what he says as he's drawing.
[tape hissing]
- He didn't seem to have doubt
as to his memory of that. - Right.
- That's what he draw. That's the original.
- Huh. - I said,
"Now, will you sign it?" And he said, "Yeah."
I can't believe I had the wherewithal to even say that,
and then he signed it, and he drew the beam,
which you can see is not an I-beam.
- Yeah. It's not an I-beam. - Yeah.
He told me that they were pink and purple,
and so I wrote that, that's my handwriting.
- Yeah.
- So these are some of my beginning sketches
from what he told me.
- Yeah. That's something I could never figure out.
Are we talking about wood, or are we talking about metal?
- He called it wood.
He was specific about that, but he said it wouldn't burn.
- How did he know it didn't burn?
- He tried to burn it with a cigarette lighter.
He said, "It felt like wood. It looked like wood,
"but it wouldn't burn, so it can't be wood.
"It has to be something I've never seen before
on this Earth," that kind of thing.
- Uh-huh. Yeah. Hmm.
♪ ♪
- I asked him, "Why didn't you save some of it?"
- Mm-hmm. - "Why didn't you do that?"
I would've saved a piece of it. - Right.
- His choice of words always stuck in my mind.
"I sat on this premium for 32 years.
I don't want any publicity. All I want is peace."
He said that more than once.
"I just want peace." Why don't you have peace?
He could've sat on it for another 32 years?
Why did he talk? Had to have been bothering him.
Had to have been something he wanted to get off his chest.
- Yeah. That's true.
- I have three tapes that last about four hours,
and during that time,
we had bonded so close together.
- Hmm. Yeah.
- He says, "You're welcome here anytime."
Fishburne: Linda says that when she went home,
she couldn't stop looking at the symbols Jesse had drawn.
- I had studied writing and codes and scripts
for other things, and I came home that night,
and I looked up some different ancient writings,
and it was exactly what he drew--
- Mm-hmm. - Exactly what he drew.
Fishburne: Linda says that what Jesse drew resembled
a kind of shorthand called Tironian notes
that were first used in Ancient Rome around 4 BC.
She says the symbols Jesse drew
signify travel and flight.
♪ ♪
- I went back the next day.
I was invited in cordially, again.
- Mm-hmm. - And I showed him
some of the writing.
♪ ♪
I mean, look. This one here, these slashes here--
- Mm-hmm. - This is almost exactly
what he drew, and there's-- - And what is Tironian?
- There's a decipher for that.
I went into detail about
where this writing could've come from.
- Yeah. I think I saw that, yeah.
- And they got pretty intense about the writing.
I left on good terms. "Come back anytime you want."
- Yeah. - And then the calls.
He said, "Do not use what I gave you.
Everything is a lie."
And the next call was, "Don't go to the media with it."
He was so irate on the phone. - Okay. Yeah.
- I can still see myself.
"I didn't do any-- I'm not gonna do that.
This is for school," you know?
- Uh-huh.
- "I'm not going to the media with this!"
So I never heard from him again.
I was crushed.
- What do you think caused that change?
- Well, I think the second visit,
what happened and transpired there
is why he called and said don't use it.
- Uh-huh.
- And the only thing that transpired in that second visit
were photos of the ancient writings.
- The ancient writings, yeah. Huh.
♪ ♪
- What if he was told that writing means something
to the government or whatever, and you shouldn't tell.
- Uh-huh. - You know, you shouldn't
have drawn it. - Right.
- You shouldn't have written it, you know?
What if it was something that was alien,
and he's too afraid to let it out?
So, you know, those are what-ifs because I don't know
what else to think about those phone calls.
What else can I think?
- Did he ever mention that he was close to anyone on base,
anyone who was especially important to him?
- He talked about Cavitt quite a bit.
He thought extremely highly of Colonel Blanchard.
Colonel Blanchard had refused to transfer him
three months later
and said he was more important and needed there,
but somebody else wanted him out.
- Huh. - And he didn't care
for General Ramey.
He said General Ramey knew it wasn't a weather balloon.
- So do you believe Jesse's story?
- Yeah. I believe Jesse believes.
I was always a believer that Jesse believed.
- Mm-hmm. - Nothing stood out as phony.
Nothing stood out as fake.
♪ ♪
- Did you ever feel like he had a secret
that he wasn't sharing with you?
- Well, he says that "I'm not telling you everything."
- Yeah. - "There's still things
I can't tell you," and I'm like, "Why?"
And he says, "For the sake of my country."
- For the sake of his country. - And that's why I named
the book "For The Sake Of My Country."
Yeah. - Yeah.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up...
- What the [bleep] is that thing?
- Whoa, what is that, man?
Fishburne: what the Pentagon didn't want America
to know about UFOs but she revealed.
- The Pentagon had a secret program that started in 2007.
Fishburne: And Ben Smith gets some news he never expected.
- I don't see enough right now to exclude this person
as a candidate.
There's potential.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Ben Smith has just heard a taped interview
with Jesse Marcel...
Fishburne: In which Marcel says it was his duty
to stay quiet about Roswell.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Now Smith has come to New York City
to better understand why Marcel felt extreme pressure
to keep his secret long after he left the military.
♪ ♪
- Hi, Ben. - Hi, Leslie.
- Come in. - Thank you.
Fishburne: Leslie Kean,
author of the bestselling book
"UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials
Go on the Record,"
says it's risky for members of the military
to speak openly about UFOs.
- For people in the military, there is this taboo,
this stigma around the topic of UFOs.
They're afraid to talk about it, that it might somehow
affect their positions and their careers.
There's the respect they have of their colleagues.
They might-- somebody might think
there's something wrong with them.
Those attitudes are still there, unfortunately.
♪ ♪
- It sounds like you're convinced
there's a taboo about UFOs.
- That stigma is a big factor for sort of the individual
out there who has a sighting.
- Mm-hmm. - And it's also a big factor
as to why there isn't more research being done
by the scientific community
because there's no money to fund projects
that involve something that's taboo, basically.
- Yeah.
- But I think it's gotten a lot better.
I think the December 17th "New York Times" story--2017--
really shifted things.
Fishburne: In December 2017, Leslie Kean broke the story
that the Pentagon was running a secret program
to investigate UFOs, although officially,
the military claimed all UFO research
had stopped in the 1960s.
- The Pentagon had a secret program that started in 2007,
but sources have told me
that there were programs before that.
Fishburne: Kean uncovered not only a top-secret program
but actual proof that military pilots
reported sightings of UFOs more than once.
- The online version of the story,
which is the one that most people read,
included two official Department of Defense
videos taken of objects-- unidentified objects--
and they were cleared for public release.
- This is a [bleep] drone, bro.
- There's a whole fleet of them. Look on the SA.
- Those videos were spectacular,
and they drew a lot of attention to the article,
and as far as I'm aware, this is the first time
the actual government videos have been released of UFOs.
- Nickel six 110, roger. - Oh! Got it! Woo-hoo!
Fishburne: But Kean says that
before the videos were leaked,
the pilots felt intense pressure
not to reveal what they had witnessed.
- These are patriots.
These are people who are responsible
for the lives of American citizens,
highly trained, highly credible.
When they see something,
they're not supposed to talk about it.
There's nowhere for them to report it.
It just--for me, it borders on just
a kind of irrationality and disrespect.
They struggle with this,
and they feel that their own government
doesn't take them seriously.
That's the problem.
- Look at that thing, dude.
Fishburne: Ben Smith sees similarities
between these events
and what Jesse Marcel's family
says happened to him in 1947.
- Jesse Marcel Sr. told his grandchildren
that, Fort Worth, when it was the second press release
with General Ramey, Jesse was paraded into the room
because he was the first individual on the scene,
and he was in the flying saucer report the day before,
and they put out this debris,
and Jesse told his grandchildren
that that was not the debris that he recovered.
- But he had to pretend it was during the press conference?
- He was told to shut his mouth
and to just play along.
That was his claim.
- Back in the day, that was so common
that these high-level military people would,
you know, know a lot but feel they couldn't say it,
and then they'd just go to their graves, and that's it.
- Yeah.
- I have a lot of respect for the Marcels
and the Roswell witnesses, absolutely.
When you see them talking or you hear them,
they are as convincing as anything,
and I have no doubt that they believe 100%
in what they're saying.
They're not lying or anything.
They had an experience. They found something.
They believe that it is what they say it is,
and they are extremely convincing.
You absolutely have to take it seriously,
and I just wish
there was more information to prove them right.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: That proof could lie hidden in the journal
that Jesse Marcel kept among his most prized possessions.
So far, Smith's investigation has proven
that the journal is authentic,
dates from the time of the Roswell incident,
and that Marcel is not its author.
♪ ♪
Smith wants to find out who wrote the journal,
why and what it means.
♪ ♪
- Without intuition to find the information,
you're useless in journalism or intelligence, right?
So you gotta follow your gut 'cause that's where
you find the best gold.
If it was easy to find,
someone would've found it by now.
- Right.
Fishburne: To plot his next steps,
Smith meets with Joe Pappalardo,
a veteran aviation journalist with a deep understanding
of American military history and the Roswell story.
- So Craig, the cryptographer, has some interesting insights
that I did not pick up on,
and right away, actually, he picked up on some things
that could actually indicate code.
Craig. - Oh, hi.
You must be Ben. - That's right.
- Good to meet you. - You, too.
Fishburne: When Smith took the journal to Craig Bauer,
one of the nation's top code breakers,
Bauer thought it could be written in a home-brew code,
a pattern of letters or words invented by the writer.
- To create something just between friends,
it's not that hard to make it really hard to break.
- This potential home-brew code started just after Roswell.
In August 1947, we get this weird kind of writing,
so whatever it is,
it's correlated to that strange date.
Now, we still don't have the author,
so we can't quite tell what it is.
- I don't know. Zodiac was like that,
and they broke that code, didn't they?
As long as it says something,
you should be able to be break it.
- If someone in the 509th wrote the journal,
and we can identify who,
it might lead us to other documents
that allow us to interpret its meaning,
sort of like a broken locket where you have one half
and I have the other.
We put them together, and it's a treasure map.
- So who, in your estimation, would be someone
that we'd be interested in hearing from at the time
who would give him this journal?
- Well, as I understand, the Roswell Army Air Force Base
had almost 8,000 personnel in 1947.
It's a huge base.
But I think it would be helpful
to focus my search on the 509th group
and then his counterintelligence group.
- That would be the kind of person
that would have information
that would be worth safeguarding,
and they give it to the point man
for the whole Roswell incident.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: As the intelligence officer
in Roswell, Marcel was trusted
with the military's most protected secrets,
and according to his grandson,
he stayed silent about what he saw in 1947
to protect his family.
♪ ♪
- When my grandfather started talking about his experience
with the Roswell UFO,
he was careful about what he told us.
He didn't want to tell us something
that we could tell somebody that might lead us
into a position where we could've felt threatened.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Part of Marcel's job
was to share valuable intelligence
with an inner circle of officers
at the 509th bomber group.
Smith thinks whoever wrote the journal might have been
sharing something valuable with Marcel.
♪ ♪
- I'm hoping 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.
- I would suggest if they're in the 509th
and if they were officers,
they may have actually served in World War II.
They handwrote a lot of after-action reports.
If they were officers, there may be handwriting samples
that are in old World War II bombing records and archives,
where they flew in from, the bombing assessments.
There's a lot of information.
You might actually hit a little trove there.
You might not,
but, hey, at least it's a rock to kick over.
- Yeah. That's an interesting point.
I hadn't considered that.
- Cracking this part of your mystery
is only one good search away.
If you find out who through a handwriting analysis,
then you could find out
a little bit more of the motive why.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up, Smith uncovers
the circle of officers in the 509th
who could've shared Marcel's secret,
but will one of them
match the handwriting in the journal?
♪ ♪
matic music]
♪ ♪
- I'm on my way to meet Jennifer Naso,
the handwriting expert.
I have with me a number of handwriting samples
belonging to the people closest to Jesse Marcel
during the time of the Roswell incident.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Ben Smith has been researching Jesse Marcel's
fellow officers in the 509th.
He's gotten writing samples for six individuals,
an inner circle that must have known details
about what really crashed at Roswell.
♪ ♪
- If it didn't belong to Jesse and he kept it
in his most prized possessions,
it had to have belonged to somebody important to him.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Now the question is,
does anybody's writing match the journal?
♪ ♪
- Hey. Come on in.
- I'm back with more work for you.
- Tell me what you have.
- I took the journal to a code breaking expert.
First of all, he took a look at the journal,
and to his eyes, a few things immediately popped up
that suggested there might be some kind of code.
Now, he ran the numbers
and was not able to find any coherent message.
- That does not correspond to a letter.
- So his next best guess was that maybe there was
some kind of encryption system that only the author knew of.
So that gets back to the question, well, who wrote it?
- Who is the author? - Who is the author?
So I have brought a number of handwriting samples...
- Oh. - From key individuals
at the Roswell Army Air Force Base.
Let me start with Colonel Blanchard,
who was Jesse Marcel's direct commanding officer
and the head of the 509th bomber group.
Fishburne: In 1947, Colonel William "Butch" Blanchard
was commander of the 509th bomber group
based at Roswell.
A highly decorated World War II hero
who had helped plan the Enola Gay's bombing of Hiroshima,
Blanchard was in charge
of America's only nuclear attack force.
It was a job in which he would certainly know
about any top-secret operation
involving his air base.
The officer he might have been closest to
was Jesse Marcel.
The Blanchards and the Marcels
were regular bridge partners.
♪ ♪
- We have Walter Haut, the press corps officer
who organized the press releases
and wrote the infamous flying-saucer press release.
Fishburne: As the base public information officer,
Lieutenant Walter Haut was ordered by Blanchard
to draft that famous press release
that a flying disc had been recovered.
In his later years, Haut came forward to say
he believed Marcel had been telling the truth
and went so far as to say
that he himself had glimpsed bodies of aliens.
♪ ♪
- We have Bob Shirkey.
Fishburne: Lieutenant Robert Shirkey
was assistant group operations officer
for the 509th.
If the debris was extraterrestrial,
Shirkey would've been in charge
of arranging its transport
to the Army's top-secret research facility,
Wright-Patterson.
After retiring from the military, Shirkey later
claimed that Jesse Marcel was telling the truth.
- And over here we have Edwin Easley.
Edwin Easley was the provost marshal
at the 509th bomber group.
Fishburne: Major Edwin Easley
was in charge of base security.
He would've been responsible for safeguarding the debris
and controlling which personnel
had access to it.
In this capacity, it's not unreasonable
to assume he knew what the crates contained.
♪ ♪
- He would've been responsible for organizing
the cleanup effort to pull in,
to collect the debris.
We also have Patrick Saunders.
Patrick Saunders was the office administrator
for Colonel Blanchard,
so he would've been involved in all the record keeping
and issuing the orders.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Patrick Saunders
was Colonel Blanchard's top deputy.
He had flown 37 combat missions
in World War II
and had just as many medals as his boss.
As Colonel Blanchard's number two,
he would've been in the room
when Jesse Marcel returned from the debris field
and debriefed the colonel.
- If there's anybody at the 509th bomber group
who knows everything, it's this guy, Patrick Saunders.
So if this handwriting matched,
it would mean everything to the journal
because here is a man who had access to all kinds of secrets
who may have wanted to confide something in Jesse Marcel.
- Okay, so we'll compare these writings to the journal.
So what I notice right off the bat
with the Blanchard signature,
that's all the writing that we have, correct?
- Right.
- Just having the one signature to compare to a extended body
of text writing poses a big limitation to the examination.
From what I see in the Patrick Saunders writing...
- Mm-hmm. - While there's a bit more
than just one signature,
it's really just the one sentence,
and so the limitation is still
the lack of quantity of known writing.
- Right. Right. - It's a bit of a blurry copy,
and so it's hard to tell the pen movements,
and some of the fine and subtle features
of the formations of the letters
might be lost in the image quality of that copy.
Looking at the Walter Haut handwriting
and the Bob Shirkey writing,
this is a more extended sample of writing,
so there's going to be a lot more information,
almost characteristics
that I'm going to be able to compare to the journal.
- Even if you can provide any, even just the slightest
new piece of information on one or the other,
it could help me eliminate one person from the group
closest to Jesse Marcel. And if I have to,
I may have to expand the search
and move out from there
to identify who could've given him this journal.
Fishburne: Smith will leave the journal,
which was so precious to Jesse Marcel,
in Naso's hands, hoping she can uncover its author.
♪ ♪
Coming up, the investigation returns to Marcel's hometown.
What did he tell his family and no one else?
- He said, "There are things
that this world is not ready for."
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: As the search
for the journal's author escalates,
Ben Smith returns to Jesse Marcel's hometown
of Houma, Louisiana.
Marcel's granddaughter, Denice,
has convinced the extended Marcel family to divulge
some of the strange things Jesse told them.
- So how is everyone related to Jesse Marcel?
- He was my brother-in-law's uncle.
- Okay. - But I always called him
Uncle Jesse. - You know, we're all cousins.
- Yeah. [laughter]
- My grandmother and Jesse were brother and sister.
- Oh, wow. - Mm-hmm.
- Okay, so do you remember speaking to him a lot?
- Yes. - Yeah.
- We were very close. We lived next door to him for 10 years.
I went over there a lot.
Fishburne: Smith wants to know what they know
from the lips of Marcel himself.
Their memories seem clear.
- Wallace, how old were you
when Jesse shared his story with you?
- I was a teenager. - You were a teenager?
- Uh-huh. I want to say that it was in 1957.
- In 1957, just 10 years after Roswell.
- Yeah. - Okay.
- I was 12, 13 years old or something like that.
- Yeah. Okay.
- He told me, "Don't believe everything
the government tells you," and he started telling me
the story about the crash in Roswell
and that they forced him to lie about it.
Fishburne: This means that two decades
before he told the world
an extraterrestrial spacecraft had crashed,
Marcel told the same story with the same details
to the people he trusted.
- What details did he describe?
Did he mention a UFO crash? Did he--
- He did tell me a UFO crashed.
- Okay. - He was telling me
about what it looked like.
I put two and two together and figured,
I think he's telling me
that we've got people from outer space coming here.
- Okay, and what was your reaction then?
What did you think?
- Looking up at the sky at night.
[laughter]
- Did you believe him?
- Of course I believed him. - Yeah.
- 'Cause I don't think Uncle Jesse
would've lied to anybody. - Right.
- He wasn't that type of man.
- Wallace remembers talking to Jesse.
I don't remember talking to him.
- Okay. - But Jesse told my dad
stories about the Roswell incident.
Fishburne: And those stories went further
than anything Jesse Marcel ever said in public.
- The thing that interested me the most was
that Jesse drew a picture of an alien.
- Jesse drew a picture of an alien?
- Yeah. He hand-drew a picture of an alien.
- Huh. - Yeah.
- My dad lost that picture, but later on in life, he wrote,
"What the picture looks like that Jesse drew for me."
♪ ♪
- It looked like the picture that Jesse drew.
- Yeah.
- That's the first time I'm hearing any stories
about Jesse himself drawing or referencing an alien.
- I don't remember my dad ever saying
that Jesse saw an alien. - Okay.
- Maybe somebody told him about this.
- I--so, Wallace, do you think
that extraterrestrials crashed in 1947?
- Yeah.
- Okay.
Did Jesse ever tell you, June,
about his experience at Roswell?
- Yes. - He did?
- He did. I think probably '74 to '76, somewhere in there.
- Okay.
- He started talking to me about it.
- Mm-hmm. - Basically what
they're telling you, too.
He found wreckage.
He said it was not of this world.
- Mm-hmm. - He described the metal,
saying that you could crumble it up in your hand,
but it would automatically go right back like it had memory.
- Mm-hmm. Okay. He used the word memory?
- Mm-hmm. - Okay.
- And my daughter, who was 10 at the time,
approached him and asked him,
"Uncle Jesse, were there any bodies?"
And he looked at her,
and she says his eyes kind of glazed over, and he said,
"There are things that this world is not ready for."
- That's what he told your daughter?
"There are things this world is not ready for."
- Right. - Yeah.
Fishburne: In front of family members,
Jesse displayed emotions
he kept hidden from the outside world.
- He seemed angry at times about the government.
He told us that they had told him to change the story
and that it was not UFO wreckage.
It was a weather balloon.
I think it bothered him a lot,
you know, that he was told to shut up about it.
It was a very notable event in American history,
and he couldn't talk about it.
- Right. - You know, and it was him
that found it, you know, and then had to lie.
- Right. - You know,
so that tore him up.
- Right. - It really did.
I think he needed to express himself about it,
so back in '78, '79, he got sort of emboldened about it
and decided he was going to talk.
- Yeah, but you heard all of these stories
before there was any big media...
- Absolutely. - Sensation about the story.
- Absolutely. He was being open
with family about it.
- My family members were aware of that.
It really upset him a lot that people thought
that he was making it up, you know?
- Yeah. - He had to kind of deal
with some ridicule, and that kind of--
- Well, I know it wasn't from our family
that he got that from. - Right.
- Outsiders would ridicule him and call him Crazy Jesse
because -- - Oh, really?
- Because of when they started hearing about Roswell.
- That must be hard for an intelligence officer,
a decorated veteran to be ridiculed
by his neighbors and his community.
- Yeah. - That's--
- I think that would've been hard for him.
- Well, all the reports have been lost.
All of the original files have been lost,
so at this point in time, it really is Jesse's word
against the government's word, right?
One part of my investigation, and it's just a part,
is to see can we find any proof anywhere that this happened?
- Yeah. - June, did Jesse ever hint
that he might have something more, more information,
more details or maybe something hidden in his house?
♪ ♪
- What he told me is, he came home to Roswell.
He had some wreckage in his car.
- Mm-hmm. - He pulled it out
and brought it inside and showed his family.
♪ ♪
But what other things he might've done, I don't know.
He did not ever tell me that he had anything, you know?
- Okay.
- A piece of the wreckage or anything like that, no.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up, did Jesse Marcel keep evidence
of what crashed all along... - Jesse said he had proof?
- I said, "Oh, I'd love to see it."
Fishburne: Hidden in his house in Houma?
♪ ♪
[dramatic mus]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: After meeting with the Marcel family
in Jesse's hometown of Houma,
former CIA investigator Ben Smith
and Jesse's granddaughter, Denice,
get the opportunity to meet someone outside the family
who claims Jesse shared with him
extraordinary details of the Roswell incident,
secrets that might lie hidden in the coded writing
of the mysterious journal.
- He started off by saying, "Look, you know,
this thing that happened to me was real."
Fishburne: Calvin Parker says
he was introduced to Jesse Marcel
by a mutual acquaintance.
- Your granddaddy said that they staged a site away
from the actual site
to keep the general public away.
They took weather balloons out to the field
and tried to distribute little pieces around
so people could find them.
- That I have never heard.
Fishburne: Parker claims that Jesse Marcel told him
about an elaborate military operation
to retrieve alien bodies and orchestrate a cover-up
to make it look like a weather balloon had crashed.
- The first time he mentioned it,
he said they was actually bodies out.
- He said that he saw some? - Exactly.
A special unit got the bodies, and he wasn't part of that.
- Oh. - But they took them back
to the base at Roswell.
- And he described all of this to you?
- He described every bit of it to me.
- It's so interesting that these are details
that I've not heard before-- - Yeah.
I've not heard these either.
- That he didn't tell Linda Corley,
that he didn't tell his family members.
- He didn't tell us, yep. - That's pretty--
- Well, he felt like he could talk because I told him
that as long as he was alive,
I would never say nothing about it, and I didn't.
To my surprise, he told me--
He said, "I've got something that I want to show you."
He said, "I have evidence.
I have proof of this." - He has proof?
Jesse said he had proof?
- I said, "Oh, I'd love to see it,"
so he told me there's a screwdriver
in the kitchen drawer, go get it,
go down to a hot-water heater and take the top off
and bring it up here to me.
Fishburne: Calvin Parker says that Marcel told him
he'd kept pieces of debris from the Roswell crash
and hidden them inside a water heater in his home.
- I was fixing to unscrew it. I was going to look at these.
- So you actually touched it and put the screwdriver to it?
- Oh, I was ready to when somebody showed up at the door.
- Huh. - Oh, my gosh.
- I don't know who this was knocking at the door,
but he didn't want to talk about it in front of him.
- Right. - So I didn't feel
real welcome there, and I got up and left.
I was planning on coming back the next day,
but I had to go to work.
I went offshore for 160 days, and I got back,
and I couldn't wait to get back over and see
and get that debris.
I went to the house, and I found out he had passed away.
It broke my heart.
- Did your father ever talk to you about the water heater,
about hiding debris here in Houma?
- No. This is literally the first time
I've ever heard this story. If anything, I always was told
that my grandfather didn't keep anything.
Did he ever say why he had never brought it out earlier?
That would've helped prove his story
that he wasn't making it up and is like,
"Hey, people. I really do have proof,"
so I'm wondering-- I'm curious as to why
he decided to show it to you at that point.
- Well, he was real loyal to his country.
- Right. - He was military.
You follow orders when the military gives you orders.
And I think there was
a reluctance there against his conscience
about coming out against an order that he had had.
- Right. - He told me that
when he took this material,
it was a real trip for him to keep it hid,
but he knew that he'd never get to see it again
when they got to Roswell.
- Yeah. - So he,
for lack of a better word, had to steal it--
- Yeah.
- From the cleanup effort. - He stole the material, yeah.
The man was on his deathbed.
- Right. - You could tell
physically that he was having to take something.
- Yeah. - But mentally, he seemed
to be intact, he seemed to be all there.
- Yeah. - He didn't wanna die
with this on his conscience.
♪ ♪
- From a security standpoint, it makes sense that Jesse Sr.
would anticipate continued scrutiny on his family.
- Yes. - And that he might
want to introduce somebody without--
who believes, who we can identify with
but without that public presence.
- Right. - Someone like Calvin.
- Right.
♪ ♪
- There could be some debris left around,
probably right there in that house somewhere,
if it's still there.
- So you think the debris could still be at the house?
- I know it could be. - Huh.
The house is just down the road from here, and--
- Yeah. There's no doubt in my mind.
- And I've been to the debris field.
I've been out there searching,
and it's hard to find anything,
but here actually is a fresh lead in the investigation
that I haven't encountered yet.
- It could mean everything. - Yeah, everything.
- This is probably the best chance
we have of finding anything left of that crash site.
- Right.
- Thank you for taking the time. This has been wonderful.
- Thank you. It's been my pleasure.
- Thank you very much. - Denice, thank you.
- Thank you.
♪ ♪
- Order of business number one is get that home
and see what we can find. - Yes.
- The trickiest part about the debris field
is that even if we find a piece of metal,
we have no idea how it got there.
- Right. - So many people
have been there over time,
before and after.
It could've arrived there in any number of ways,
But if we something hidden on the inside of a water heater,
we know your grandfather put it there.
- Right.
Fishburne: If they could find a piece of debris
taken from the crash site,
it would be an astounding development
in the saga of Roswell.
♪ ♪
Smith and Denice Marcel
will try to get inside Jesse Marcel's old house,
which is only a short drive away.
♪ ♪
- Coming into this cold.
The person doesn't know us.
We don't know them. - Right.
- We just have to be prepared for the gamut.
- I got you.
- Tea and cookies versus shotgun kind of thing.
- Okay. - So I have no idea.
♪ ♪
Let's not say that we're UFO researchers.
- Oh, yeah. No. - We're researching
local family history. - Okay.
- You used to live in the house.
- Okay. - The Marcel family,
in particular,
and we can get into the UFO stuff later...
- Okay. - Once we feel comfortable
that it's not gonna put them off.
- That sounds like a really good idea.
♪ ♪
- This is the part that makes me nervous
but also gets me excited.
- Yes. I know what you mean.
♪ ♪
- Hello. - Hi. How are you?
- Hello. - All right.
- Hi! - Hey. I'm Ben.
- Matt.
- Matt. Nice to meet you. - Hi. I'm Denice.
- Denice used to live here.
Well, her grandfather used to live here.
- My grandfather used to live here.
- Would you mind if she walked me
through a little bit of the property
to show me where things were?
♪ ♪
Fishburne: The owner is reluctant to let them enter,
and so for now, it's impossible
to verify Parker's claim.
♪ ♪
Coming up...
- Whatever they hit is squished,
but all these are holes.
Fishburne: This man claims he has debris
from a UFO that crashed
at nearly the same time as Roswell
but 200 miles away.
♪ ♪
[dramatic mus]
♪ ♪
- I am in Southern New Mexico on my way
to the home of a guy named Chuck Wade.
Now, Chuck Wade claims to have a piece of debris
recovered from a potential UFO crash site.
Fishburne: Ben Smith couldn't get access
to Jesse Marcel's former house
to verify whether it contained
Roswell crash debris.
Now Smith is following up another lead
and meeting with a man named Chuck Wade,
who is convinced he has UFO debris
from a spacecraft that crashed in 1947.
♪ ♪
- Hey. How you doing? - Good. How are you, Chuck?
- Come on in.
- Did your dad have
a relationship with Mac before that July?
- Oh, yeah. - If you're the guy
that owns the bar, everybody knows you.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Dad owned that bar for many, many years,
and I just loved to be there and listen to the stories.
I was seven years old the year
that the Roswell incident happened there next to Corona.
Fishburne: Chuck Wade's father, Jesse Wade,
owned the bar in Corona where rancher Mac Brazel
first came to show his neighbors
the strange debris he'd found while herding sheep.
Although it is known as the Roswell incident,
the small farming community of Corona
was the closest to where Mac found the debris.
- Mac Brazel found something that he doesn't know,
and recognize at all on the Foster Ranch,
so he came to Corona and asked my father to go out
and see what in the world it was,
'cause he--Mac just flat didn't know.
But my dad was busy, and it was just himself in the bar,
so Dad chose not to close the bar.
Dad regretted that, I'm going to say, immensely.
He'd always say,
"I wished I'd went with Mac to see what was out there."
- Right.
Fishburne: Chuck Wade also wanted
to see what was out there.
After running his own construction company,
Wade has devoted most of the last 20 years
to researching UFOs.
♪ ♪
- So tell me a little bit about some of the sites and debris
that you recovered.
I think it could inform my investigation of Roswell.
- Have y'all studied the crash on the Plains of San Agustin?
- No.
Fishburne: Wade has come to a startling conclusion:
Roswell was only one of a series of UFO crashes
that took place in Southern New Mexico during that time.
According to Wade, there were seven UFO crashes in total.
Five of them occurred during the first week of July 1947.
- The first one here was August 1945.
This one right here, the night of the 1st
to the 2nd of July, 1947.
These three, four, five and six
was about 11:00 on July the 4th, 1947,
and this one up here was in March 1948.
Fishburne: Chuck Wade has a theory
about what caused the spaceships to crash.
- What happened, folks, is,
whenever they put in Los Alamos National Laboratory,
they installed three major, high-powered radars
to guard the skies over Los Alamos.
Fishburne: Wade, who supervised construction
of dozens of air-traffic-control towers
across the U.S., believes powerful radar signals
emitted from the Los Alamos nuclear site
caused short circuits in the spaceships.
- It electrified that craft, and it came down in flames.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Of what he claims are seven UFO crashes,
Wade became obsessed with one in particular,
which he believes crashed on the Plains of San Agustin
48 hours before the Roswell crash.
- New Mexico is basically square.
Corona is basically
really close to the center of the state.
What we call the Roswell incident happened about
30 miles southeast of Corona.
The Plains of San Agustin is over here,
about 200 miles.
♪ ♪
- Chuck started going to UFO conferences.
One of the speakers had discovered
some pieces of debris,
and he wanted to go and look for more debris.
- Mm. - Chuck said, well,
he would help him with that,
and he'd get some guys to come and help dig.
So they did.
That was in 2004.
And they found some stuff.
- I'd love to see it, if I can.
- Well, I think it's right around the corner here.
Fishburne: The Wades have several fragments.
♪ ♪
- Can you tell me what I'm looking at here?
- These here is the foils. - Mm-hmm.
- And then these here have got --
Whatever they hit is squished, but all these are holes.
- Actually, can I remove the glass for a closer look?
- Sure, be glad to.
- And did you take this to the government at all?
- Not going to have any reason to do that.
- Well, I'm just curious, you know?
- No. I'm sure. - If you find a UFO,
I don't know what the government would say,
to be honest.
- I believe they said they didn't exist.
- That's true.
The official position is, you know, they don't exist,
but things are starting to change.
- It's a good question, but no.
I avoid the government as best as I possibly could.
There is a huge, monstrous, gigantic cover-up
on the Roswell incident.
No one in Corona was allowed--
they were ordered not to talk about that crash.
- Yeah. There's a lot of mistrust in the community
among UFO researchers of the federal government.
I think a lot of it stems
from the reaction or overreaction in 1947.
- They found something on the Foster Ranch.
They didn't know what it was or where it came from.
I think Jesse Marcel is telling the truth 100%.
I see no reason for him to do other than tell the truth.
The Roswell incident was from outer space,
and there's not a chance
it was a damn balloon that we made.
- Now, this one is pretty fascinating.
♪ ♪
Can I take a piece with me to get it analyzed myself?
- What do you think?
I don't know. It's okay with me.
- Do you mind if I take this one here?
- Oh, sure. Sure.
- Yeah? - We'd be glad to--
Any of them that you want,
we'll be glad to take a piece off.
I want to know where it came from.
Why is it here? Why don't they tell us about it?
[saw whirring]
- That is pretty hard to cut, actually.
- Yeah. - It's, uh--
Fishburne: Smith plans to get this piece of metal tested
to see what elements it's composed of
and if there is anything about it
that can suggest where it came from.
♪ ♪
Coming up...
- How are you doing? - Good. How are you?
Fishburne: Has this seasoned crash investigator
found the clue that everyone missed?
- There's something under the ground there.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- I'm just outside Denver, Colorado,
on my way to meet David Soucie,
our crash-site expert.
Fishburne: David Soucie is a former accident inspector
for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Soucie has investigated hundreds of crash sites,
so when Ben Smith took him to the debris field
where Jesse Marcel first saw what he believed
to be pieces of wrecked spacecraft,
Soucie started by measuring wind currents.
Soucie's gut reaction:
whatever crashed here wasn't lightweight.
This contradicts the U.S. military's story
that what crashed at Roswell was a weather balloon
or part of the top-secret,
lighter-than-air Project Mogul.
- I'm not sure I buy that whole balloon-drag theory.
- Really?
David collected all kinds of data from the debris field:
wind, geographic features, weather.
I'm hoping that he can eliminate
one aircraft or another.
Fishburne: Smith wants David Soucie
to compare his initial finding
with the Deep Earth analysis
done by Canadian geophysicists
Colin Miazga and Eric Johnson
when they visited the debris field late last year.
Soucie has been communicating with them online.
- I understand you do
ground-penetrative radar, as well.
- Yeah. Yeah. - Okay.
Fishburne: The geophysicists used ground-penetrating radar
and gamma-ray technology
to identify strange anomalies in the Earth...
- Look at that. - Wow. That is interesting.
Fishburne: A kind of scarring that couldn't have come
from a deflated balloon crash.
- So this is the radar. - It doesn't make sense.
I can't understand what that would be.
♪ ♪
- Hey, Ben. - Hey, David.
- How are you doing? - Good. How are you?
- Yeah. Well, come on in. - Oh, man.
I have been dying to see what you've done with that data.
- Well, there's a lot to look at, probably more
than you want to see.
The first thing I want to start with:
This is an overview of the entire site, the entire area.
- Oh, wow.
- That is the reported trajectory.
That's where they found the debris.
- Yeah. - And then from there,
it spread, they said,
as much as a mile in this direction off of that.
- Mm-hmm.
- A bunch of other interesting stuff that we can get through,
and now this is what's really interesting.
This area really intrigues me right down at the bottom here
because the gamma readings
are not consistent with the ground-penetrating radar.
♪ ♪
I've never seen that before.
- Huh. - It doesn't make sense me.
- You might have to walk me through the actual readings.
- All right. - Because I'm having
a hard time visualizing it. - Yeah. Let's do that.
These red areas indicate that the ground-penetrating radar
says it's extremely dense, which is where the rocks are.
- Yeah. - And that sort of thing.
Here's an example of a dense area,
and in this dense area,
you would expect to see low gamma rays because it has --
It's not coming through. It's blocking the gamma.
So let's look at that spot here.
Gamma rays are indicated by yellow or green,
and if there's less gamma, it's blue, and sure enough,
here's this light blue where the rocks were.
- Yeah. - And then here's
the same thing here.
- It almost matches perfectly with the GPR.
- Yes. You could look at
any of these spots, any of these blues here.
- Yep. - And it aligns
with these reds here. - Got it.
♪ ♪
- This spot...
♪ ♪
now that we're just a little above the green line--
We were looking here before, below the green line.
- Right.
- But now above there, that's red.
Let's take a closer look at it.
See all the red? All the red. It's dense.
It's hard and solid, which would block gamma.
- Uh-huh.
- So now I'm going to flip this. I'm going to think,
well, we're going to find a blue spot there.
But instead, look what we find:
the opposite of what I would expect.
- Right. - And not only
what I would expect, but what we witnessed right here.
That was consistent with tight compaction
and blocking the gammas.
- Yeah. - But now it's yellow.
- The highest. - Not only is it high,
it is the highest right there.
♪ ♪
- It's something that-- It doesn't make sense to me.
- Have you ever seen that in a wreck that you--
- No. No. I have not.
I've not seen this before. There's something there.
There's something unique about this spot above the green line.
As an accident investigator
and what I've been doing my entire life,
there's something under the ground there.
There's something making these changes,
these readings different.
- So what could make that kind of contrast,
the high density with high radiation?
- The only thing I can think of
is that in ground-penetrating radar,
a rubber or polyethylene and rubber...
- Uh-huh. - Can create that illusion
of high density.
But it would also allow gamma to come up through it
because it's not going to block the gamma rays.
Fishburne: After analyzing the data,
David Soucie can no longer rule out the possibility
that it was a Mogul balloon that went down at Roswell.
- So, I mean, a Mogul balloon
was made of something like neoprene.
- Exactly, so to me, that explains it.
To me, that is what I would be looking for.
That's the assumption I would make
and go out and try to find that.
Fishburne: Soucie admits that his analysis is just
an educated guess,
and even that is based on a 1995 government report
which provided no physical evidence
but asserted that a Mogul balloon crashed at Roswell,
a report millions of Americans
still don't believe.
- [chanting] Hey, hey, UFOs, people have the right to know!
- If this group of 100 demonstrators is correct,
the U.S. government is covering up
the most important secret of all time:
alien beings who have made contact with Earthlings.
- They said, "Well, what about the bodies?"
How could so many people have come forward and say,
"Well, when I was a kid, I saw this, and I saw these bodies,
"and I saw this stuff, and some Air Force guys
came out and picked up stuff in the desert."
How do we explain that?
Fishburne: At that infamous 1997 press conference,
where the Air Force doubled down on its claim
that what crashed at Roswell was a Mogul balloon,
it also issued a remarkable second report
that some believe undermined its entire explanation.
♪ ♪
- We're confident once the report is out
and digested by the public,
that this will be the final word on the Roswell incident.
Fishburne: This second report
offered what the Air Force hoped
was a logical explanation to appease those Americans
who found alleged eyewitness stories
about aliens at Roswell both believable and compelling.
- Bodies observed in the New Mexico desert
were probably test dummies that were carried aloft
by U.S. Air Force high-altitude balloons
for scientific research.
- Additional research uncovered information
which explained some of the claims of alien bodies
associated with the Roswell incident.
Fishburne: The second report, called "Case Solved,"
was accompanied by a short film
produced by the Air Force.
♪ ♪
- The project's main objective
was to study methods
for returning a pilot or astronaut safely to Earth
by parachute if forced to eject
at extremely high altitudes.
For these tests, dummies were transported up to 98,000 feet
by high-altitude balloons.
Fishburne: The Air Force contended
that anyone who thought they'd seen
the military recovering alien bodies
were actually witnessing exercises
that involved dropping anthropomorphic dummies
from high-altitude balloons.
♪ ♪
- Many of the dummies landed outside the confines
of military reservation
and were regularly observed by local civilians.
Critical examination of alleged alien sightings
consistently match the physical characteristics
of these dummies,
as well as where and how they were used.
♪ ♪
- I think it's logical to assume that the people there
saw Air Force ambulances come out.
They saw gurneys come out.
They saw body bags come out
because the dummies were put into body bags
to protect them, and when you put all that stuff
together and spin it,
you'll find that it fits perfectly
with many of the occurrences in Roswell during that era.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: At the press conference,
the problem with the Air Force's explanation
was obvious to reporters.
Its dummy-drop exercises didn't take place in 1947.
They only started in the early 1950s.
- They're talking about 1947, but you're talking
about dummies used in the '50s, almost a decade later.
- Well, I'm afraid that's the problem
that we have with time compression.
I don't know what they saw in '47,
but I'm quite sure it probably was Project Mogul.
Fishburne: UFO author and researcher Don Schmitt
believes the Air Force was disrespectful,
writing off alleged eyewitnesses
as having aging and faulty memories.
- "Oh, it's time compression."
New malady, not even in the medical books,
created by the Pentagon.
"The older you get, you start to not only compress the years
but also the decades." But the problem with that:
All the personnel who were here in '47,
who were involved were no longer here in '52,
so how could they be mistaking wooden crash dummies in '52
if they weren't even here?
- Colonel, let me just go back one more time.
You say that this is case closed,
and people should now believe it,
but with the major hole, though:
You're saying that they're wrong about the date.
What explanation can you give them
other than just saying,
"Well, we just think they're just mistaken by six years?"
- I have no other explanation.
I'm sorry. I just-- I have no other explanation.
I'm looking at the facts as we have studied them,
and I have no other explanation
of that but what I've already given.
- But how-- - Yes, sir?
- Would that make it case closed?
- Because we've reviewed all the relevant information,
and we have finished this, and we're not going to revisit it.
- How do you know that you're not being used?
How do you know that you know the full story?
[laughter]
You're confident that you're not part of any cover-up
wittingly or unwittingly.
- I'm totally confident, but I think Colonel Weaver--
you might have seen him on TV earlier--said it best.
We can't even keep single secrets.
How could we have a conspiracy or a cover-up?
- Well, it happened in 1953.
How could anybody mess that up from 1947?
People's memories fade over time.
- We think that this answers lots of questions,
and it answers them logically and with integrity.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up, closing in on who wrote the journal.
Could it be this man, a highly decorated war hero?
- There are some words and letter combinations
I do see in agreement. There is potential.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- I'm excited to hear about your findings.
- So there are two styles of uppercase Ws
that I noticed in the journal.
Fishburne: Ben Smith is with forensic handwriting expert
Jennifer Naso, who has been analyzing writing samples
from some of the officers in the 509th bomber group.
She is checking to see if they could've written
the puzzling journal that belonged to their colleague,
Jesse Marcel.
Colonel William Blanchard,
commander of the Roswell Air Base,
would certainly have known
about any top secret operation in his sector.
- When we look at the Blanchard,
there are some dissimilarities,
but it's really not a whole lot to go on.
- So your professional judgment would be,
there's not enough data yet to confirm one way or the other.
- Right. There would be no conclusion
as to whether or not he authored the journal
based on just the one signature that we have.
- Right.
- So in the Walter Haut handwriting,
I noticed that's what we would call
a combination style of writing.
Fishburne: Lieutenant Walter Haut
was the public information officer for the 509th,
who was ordered by Colonel Blanchard
to draft that famous press release
that a flying disc had been recovered.
- Where it's not all cursive, it's all not hand-printing,
so some letters have connecting strokes while others do not.
Right away, that's a difference between what I see
in the all-cursive writing of the journal,
so here is the word "and" in the journal.
See the formation of the A-- - Yeah.
- How it starts up around 2:00
and then comes counterclockwise and forms this other loop.
When we look at the "and" in the Walter Haut handwriting--
- Oh, totally different. So already, I get the sense
that this journal was not written by Walter Haut.
- The characteristics that I'm noting thus far
are not similar to what I'm seeing in the journal.
- Yeah.
- The next sample would be
Robert Shirkey. - Yeah.
Fishburne: Lieutenant Robert Shirkey
was assistant operations officer for the 509th.
He also said Jesse Marcel was telling the truth
and claimed he'd seen debris flown out of Roswell
and believed it was extraterrestrial.
- So here we have the word "July"...
- Mm-hmm. - In the journal,
and just note the formation of the uppercase J.
- Uh-huh.
- Here in the word "July," look at the formation
of the J compared to the known writing...
- Mm-hmm. - And the questioned.
- So already, again, I see a deliberate contrast in strokes
that they start to pop as different handwriting styles.
- And what we're looking for is a pattern of writing,
and when Easley creates this drag stroke--
- "Being," yeah. - "Being," it's a long,
exaggerated drag stroke.
Fishburne: Major Edwin Easley
was in charge of base security.
He would've been responsible for safeguarding the debris
and controlling which personnel had access to it.
♪ ♪
- And you see that again. You see that repeated
throughout the known writing, whereas in the journal,
you just have the I-dot above the letter,
so you do have some dissimilarities
in this writing sample, as well.
- Shoot. Well, that leaves us Patrick Saunders.
Fishburne: Patrick Saunders was Colonel Blanchard's
number two, his top deputy.
He would've been in the room when Jesse Marcel
returned from the debris field
to brief the commander.
- There are some words and letter combinations
I do see in agreement,
so one of the words in common between the question
and the known is the word "anything."
And if you look at the writing in the journal...
- Right. - There is a pen lift
after the Y, in between the Y and the T,
and you see that again here.
- Right. - The Y terminates and then--
- That's pretty distinctive. - The same thing here,
and in the known writing-- - Wow!
- We do see that combination, as well,
where that pen lifts between the Y and the T.
- Yeah. - I would describe that
as more of a general characteristic.
- Okay. - But right now,
it is a similarity. - Huh.
♪ ♪
- Also, when you look at the letter formations,
the termination of the Y in all three "anythings"
in the journal terminates downward.
There is no upward-move formation.
It terminates downward.
If you look at the height ratios between the T and the H,
here you see the H is much taller than the T,
and you see that throughout the questions.
The H and the T,
and you also see that the H in the known's
is also taller than the T. - Okay.
- So do you see enough then to exclude this
as a candidate, or is it still a viable option?
- I don't see enough right now to exclude this person
as a candidate.
Of all the samples,
with the Pat Saunders one, there's potential.
- This man is at the nexus of all the secrets.
Because Patrick Saunders would've touched
every document, overhead every phone call,
would've seen everything Colonel Blanchard's seen,
and if he is the author of the journal,
then I really think we're onto something.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up,
did Patrick Saunders organize a cover-up?
- He just mentioned that he changed the serial numbers,
and he destroyed files about it.
- Really?
Fishburne: What did he tell his family about Roswell?
- Do you think he was protecting you
from the secrets that he knew? - Absolutely.
♪ ♪
tic music]
♪ ♪
Fishburne: He was the base commander's number two,
his right-hand man,
but who is Patrick Saunders?
What was his role in the Roswell incident?
What did he believe? And if he wrote the journal
Jesse Marcel kept close for decades,
what secrets did the two men share?
Investigator Ben Smith
has tracked down two of Saunders' five children.
- So you were three years old in 1947,
and you were living in Roswell at the time?
- Yes. We were living in Roswell on base.
- On base? - Yes.
We lived there until about 1950.
♪ ♪
- And can you tell me a little bit about your father?
- Well, my dad was a very proud officer.
He was a very personable man, and while he could be serious,
he could also be lots of fun to be with.
- Can you tell me a little bit about his role
at Roswell Army Air Force Base?
- He was in charge of assigning the troops
to the cleanup effort at the crash site.
- He was involved in the first meeting
they had after the crash with Colonel Blanchard.
- And what was your reaction when you first found out
about your dad's role
at the Roswell Army Air Force Base at this time?
- You know, I wasn't even born when it happened.
Years later, I hear my sisters asking him questions
and things like that,
but I just thought everybody's dad was cool like that.
[both laugh]
♪ ♪
- Do you know if he ever saw or handled the debris
or any intelligence reports
about descriptions of the debris?
- He said he knew it wasn't a weather balloon.
- So your father said
it was definitely not a weather balloon?
- Absolutely. That's one of the things I remember him
telling me more than once
and that he knew about weather balloons
because he dealt with them with spying over Russia.
He did tell me that the debris helped to develop
the stealth jet fighter
and that there was a similarity
between the jet fighter
and the thing that crashed at Roswell.
- That is fascinating.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Patrick Saunders' daughter
says her father gave her a well-known book
about the Roswell incident
and wrote comments in the margins.
- He wrote down page numbers,
and then he highlighted sentences
that he thought were very important.
On page 142, he highlighted, "Patrick Saunders was a major
"and assigned as the base adjutant.
"His job would've required him accomplish paperwork
"surrounding the assigning of the troops
to clean up the debris."
- Did he ever share any names
about who might have cleaned it up?
- No. He just mentioned that he changed the serial numbers,
and he changed files or destroyed files about it.
- Really? - Mm-hmm.
- So your father, in some ways, was involved then
with the cover-up-- - Yes.
- And changing the serial numbers of the soldiers--
- Of the men who cleaned up the debris.
- Wow. And he also destroyed files.
- Mm-hmm. - Huh.
- Or changed them.
♪ ♪
- A key figure to the whole question: Jesse Marcel Sr.
did confirm there was a cover-up,
that he was not holding the actual debris
in the original press photo.
- Yes. He was concerned about Major Marcel
and the things that he was saying.
He didn't say he shouldn't have said them.
He just showed--
voiced concern about talking about these things.
♪ ♪
- You know, Jesse Marcel
seemed a little bit distraught
by the fact that he had to retain this secret
and lie to the public for the good of his country,
what he believed was important
to national security.
Did you ever get a sense that your father was disturbed
by the official government line
about what was recovered there?
- I think it was hard for him
to keep the secrets that he knew.
Even if other people were talking about them
and writing books about it,
I think he struggled with that.
- He took his role as officer in the Air Force
and ensuring national security--
he took that very seriously.
♪ ♪
So, yeah, he did what he had to do
and was instructed to do and made no apologies.
♪ ♪
- You know, we were warned not to talk about Roswell
outside the family,
and we generally didn't talk about it.
This is the first time
I've really talked to people about what he said.
- Some of the threats that others have described
were pretty intimidating,
right, threats to your career,
threats to your safety,
threats to your legacy and perhaps even--
- Your entire family, your entire family was at risk.
- So do you think he was protecting you
from the secrets that he knew?
- Absolutely.
♪ ♪
- He said that the world wasn't ready to know the truth
about what happened at Roswell,
and I asked him what he meant by that, and he said,
"Well, it would cause social upheaval and problems."
- Why? - They weren't sure
whether the beings were friendly or not.
Fishburne: By the term "beings,"
she said she understood her dad
was referring to extraterrestrials,
the aliens who had sent the spaceship
that crashed at Roswell to Earth.
- Knowing your dad,
what do you think happened at Roswell in 1947?
- Knowing my dad, if it was nothing or a weather balloon,
he would've just said what it was, and let's move on.
- Do you feel like he had answers
to who these possible beings were,
where they came from and what they wanted?
- I think he was full of questions about them.
♪ ♪
I don't think he had come up with all the answers
about what they found at Roswell.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Coming up, how close has Ben Smith come
to unlocking the secrets
of what really happened at Roswell?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- I think a guy by the name of Patrick Saunders
could've written this journal.
- Wow. - That actually got me
pretty excited. - That is interesting
because it's a whole new person
to take a very close look at.
That opens up a whole other sort of avenue, doesn't it?
- It really does.
Fishburne: The real possibility
that one of Jesse Marcel's
fellow officers in the 509th, Patrick Saunders,
wrote the journal that was in Marcel's possession
is an incredible twist in Ben Smith's investigation
of what happened at Roswell.
Now Smith wants to go over the results
of his investigation with Joe Pappalardo,
the veteran aviation journalist
he has been consulting with from the start.
- No explanation is going to be complete
without a physical component, probably.
Please tell me you found a spaceship.
- Oh, dude, I wish I could tell you
that I came back with the smoking gun
to prove that it's definitely a Mogul balloon
or it's definitely an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
I haven't found anything definitive either way,
and that is frustrating.
- Well, if it was easy, it would be cracked by now,
so I'm eager to hear what you actually have uncovered.
- Chuck Wade claimed that he had a piece
of alien spacecraft.
The lab unfortunately could not find anything
extraterrestrial about the metal.
For me, it doesn't really impact
the Roswell question either way.
It was collected on the Plains of San Agustin
some distance away, except that it's a knock
against the established evidence of ufologists.
- So in terms of the probable crash site,
I knew you were gonna bring some pretty cool technology
to investigate that.
Did you find anything that would lead you
to think that something happened there?
- We found a pretty strange magnetic signature
close to what would've been described
as the impact identified by witness accounts.
We took some soil samples, but we couldn't actually find
when or why this anomaly was created.
We haven't found any evidence that definitively proves
something extraterrestrial crashed here.
- Did you find anything that would indicate
that something else crashed?
- To the south of the established debris field,
the FAA crash-site investigator
found a strange contrast in data,
that we don't know what it means.
It's not metal because our magnetometer
didn't pick up any metal.
There might be something
that could be some kind of plastic or neoprene layer.
- That would buttress that argument
that a balloon crashed there,
and here is an actual physical remain from it.
That would be about as close to a smoking gun
as something who doesn't believe in UFOs,
like myself, would cling to desperately, probably.
- Yeah. Well, a lot of the facts are fuzzy still,
and I'm still trying to piece the puzzle together,
but I feel confident that the government lied
to the American people
about what it collected at that debris field.
There were others like Jesse in that unit at the 509th group
who had some of the same ideas.
I've spent a lot of time now with the Marcel family,
and I think at the very least,
what they wanted was vindication.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: Jesse Marcel's three grandchildren
have been eagerly awaiting the results
of Ben Smith's investigation
and want to know what he has found out
about the strange journal.
- Thank you, guys, for making
yourselves available to chat with me.
I wanted to circle back with you
and share some interesting turns in the case
and some unexpected surprises.
There's one thing that's still missing
from this investigation, and that's evidence.
- I mean, there's a piece out there somewhere.
- Well, we didn't find anything yet.
- Sure. - Jesse, you were there
with me in Pennsylvania
when we went to the codebreaker.
Without the key, the other half of the puzzle,
we can't crack that home-brew code,
so what's left is to keep looking for that other half,
but that makes an interesting challenge
because we didn't know who wrote it.
I refocused my efforts back on the inner circle
at the 509th group to see if I could identify
who might have written the journal.
I collected a few more handwriting samples.
There was one individual who actually,
with the short sample that we had,
matched to some degree that we couldn't rule it out.
- Ooh, interesting.
- This would've been the base adjutant at the 509th group--
- Okay. - The second-in-command,
a guy named Patrick Saunders.
He was really close with Colonel Blanchard,
so close, in fact,
that Colonel Blanchard was his best man at his wedding.
- Oh, wow.
- For me as an intelligence officer,
if I'm looking for somebody with access to information,
this guy is as close as it gets.
- Wow. - That's very exciting.
- Did your grandfather ever mention that name to you?
- I don't recall that name coming from him.
- Obviously, they had a relationship for Grandpa
to have ended up with that journal.
- I was able to track down his children.
A lot of the things Patrick Saunders
told his children matched what Jesse Sr.
told you three, that it was something not of this world.
And there was a cover-up. - No kidding.
- And he even mentioned that he was directly responsible
for organizing the cover-up by changing the names
and the personnel records of people
involved in the cleanup effort at the debris field.
- Oh, my gosh.
- Another echo in Patrick Saunders' story with his family
is he said almost the exact same things verbatim:
"The world isn't ready for this kind of information."
- Oh, yeah.
- And, Denice, you were with me in Houma.
Your cousin mentioned the same thing.
- Yep, exact same words. - His eyes kind of glazed over,
and he said,
"There are things that this world is not ready for."
- I wonder if they discussed it to come up with almost,
like, the same terminology.
This is just so completely amazing. [laughs]
- I think you're closer to the truth
now than we've ever been or anybody's ever been.
- Sounds like it.
- Another interesting comment Patrick Saunders made
was actually about Jesse Sr.
He thought that Jesse had gone too far,
that he had said something he shouldn't.
He had told the public too much.
- When Grandpa came out in 1978
and told the story about what had happened,
I wonder if that worried him a little bit
because I know it would worry me
if I was trying to keep something covered up,
and this man just came out and said,
"No. What everybody saw wasn't something from here."
- Yeah. The duty to keep quiet
is a pretty powerful commitment.
- I think he was courageous for coming out and telling it
because he was going against the protocol.
He felt that everybody deserved
to know what the truth was
and that the cover-up needed to end.
- Mm-hmm.
♪ ♪
You know, we started this journey together
trying to figure out the journal
and to prove with evidence
that your grandfather was telling the truth.
Now, we didn't quite get to either of those ends.
How do you feel about this investigation,
and what does it tell you about your grandfather?
- If anything, you've added
more credibility to those stories,
and I think we're getting closer than ever
to resolving this.
- I'll just echo that.
I think that everything that you've come across
has actually more or less confirmed for me
that Grandpa and our dad were telling us the truth
and that they did want everybody to know
what really did happen.
- I looked at the journal recently, and I found a quote
that really captures sort of the investigation,
and the quote was,
"Keep your eye on the doughnut and not the hole."
If we just focus on the lack of evidence,
the hole in the center,
we miss all the evidence that we have found.
I think that this journal has more secrets to give,
more evidence to point me to than what I've found so far,
and I'm reluctant to simply put it away.
♪ ♪
Fishburne: To some, Jesse Marcel
is a courageous truth sayer.
To others, a man who let his imagination
get the best of him.
Either way, he believed
he'd witnessed an extraordinary event,
and he was not alone.
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries".