Roswell and the History Channel
Sir Arthur C. B. Wholeflaffers A.S.A.
On Dec. 13, 1999, the History Channel ran a program about the Roswell Incident.
My strong Dec. 21 letter to the HC about the massive misrepresentations in the
program is posted at my website: www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfpage.html . I
received a brief unsigned response months later saying thanks for your interest.
We can't please everyone. Dealing with none of my specific objections to false
claims made by debunkers on the show.
They did it again on June 13, 2002. "Roswell Declassified." This show by Indigo
was even more deceptive and inaccurate than the first one. Very selective
choice of data, many factual mistakes, serious misrepresentation, character
assassination, and creative blending of items having no connection with each
other or Roswell.
Despite the title, there were no newly declassified Roswell documents!! A big
fuss was made about 11 boxes of material at the National Archives. The material
dealt almost exclusively with the USAF's attempts to debunk Roswell as opposed
to the Roswell event itself.
It was as if the consultants were USAF Col. Richard Weaver, author of the huge
1995 "Roswell Report: Truth Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert" (He
provided the fiction) and Capt. James McAndrew, author of the 1997 2nd Volume,
mercifully only 231 pages long, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed." (In the TV
program for reasons unknown, it was dated 1998.)
In the first place 11 boxes is not a lot of material. USAF Headquarters Files
for the Post WW II period until about 1956 totaled 9,800 feet of material, or
about 1,000 4-drawer filing cabinets. I have been to 19 Archives, and at none of
the archives including the Nat. Archives in College Park ,MD, where some of the
TV program was shot, was I asked to use gloves as were shown.
There was great drama when a triangular box was slowly opened to reveal, guess
what, a radar reflector used with weather balloons. Connection with Roswell?
NONE. It was pristine, clearly had a light foil backed with paper that any
3-year-old could tear.
Where was the very strong foil with no backing described by Maj. Marcel and Mack
and Bill Brazel? That material when folded many times would come back to its
original shape. The reflector material was certainly not memory metal.
The narrator claimed that the Roswell witnesses said the wreckage included balsa
wood. More nonsense. Jesse Marcel told me that the I-beams weighed almost
nothing, just like balsa wood, but couldn't be cut, broken, or burned-very much
unlike balsa wood.
Where were the strange lavender symbols on the I-beam as described by Dr. Jesse
Marcel Jr.? Where was the 2" wide toy factory tape used to hold the radar
reflectors together? Its strange symbols were supposedly mistaken for what Dr.
Marcel described. None has been found, not even in the picture taken in Gen.
Ramey's office showing him and then Col. (later Retired General) T J DuBose and
some phony wreckage.
A small piece of a video of Gerald Anderson (I shot the footage) was shown, and
it was falsely claimed he was speaking to government investigators. On that same
105-minute video, "Recollections of Roswell" (assembled by the Fund for UFO
Research), is testimony from 26 other witnesses, including Gen. DuBose. He makes
clear that the material in the photo was substituted for the real wreckage.
Using only the brief Anderson clip and none of the other witness testimony is a
great example of selective choice of data, which we have come to expect from
anti-Roswell propagandists.
Many films are shown of huge teardrop-shaped polyethylene balloons. None were
used for Mogul balloon trains until after Roswell. Instead, the small neoprene
balloons were used. Repeatedly we were told how highly classified Mogul and
other USAF programs were.
Mogul was so classified that several launches were allowed to just float on down
in the middle of nowhere without a chase plane or jeep recovering it. None of
the technology-only the purpose-was classified. Not a shred of evidence was
presented to link the supposed June 14 launch of a Mogul balloon train to
Roswell.
The program falsely claimed that Marcel changed his tune and made up a new story
in the late 1 970s, and then researchers swarmed all over him. He supposedly was
sent out to the crash site and then was joined by a platoon of soldiers!!
Neither Marcel nor Brazel via his family or neighbors ever said any such thing.
Jesse told me in 1978, in his first conversation about the incident in years,
that the rancher had come into town on Sunday, July 6 (The Program made it sound
like Brazel called the base-despite not having a phone on the 7th.) Marcel and
CIC Capt. Sheridan Cavitt followed Brazel out to the ranch, spent the night in
sleeping bags, having had a can of beans, and then went to the site, loaded two
vehicles with wreckage, leaving almost all of it behind, and went the long way
back to town.
Yet the program showed Brazel picking up a small amount of crunched up aluminum
foil with his daughter or wife, who was not even with him at the ranch. This
follows the obviously false claim of Cavitt in an interview with Col. Weaver
that he suddenly recalled just a small amount of wreckage from an obvious
weather balloon, which covered an area only 20 feet square and would easily fit
in one vehicle.
Of course, if that had been the case, Brazel would have taken it all with him to
the Sheriff's office in Roswell and there would have been no reason for Marcel
and Cavitt to make the long trek, much of it cross country, to the ranch.
Marcel, in our first conversation in 1978 and as shown on the Rec.of Roswell
tape and in my Video "UFOs ARE Real," said the wreckage covered an area about
3/4 of a mile long and hundreds of feet wide. There was nothing conventional
such as vacuum tubes, wires, rivets, etc. He had had a course in radar, and knew
about radar reflectors, which had to be very light weight.
In his volume, Weaver described the genesis of the crash story, making the
following false statement: "In 1978 an article appeared in a tabloid newspaper,
the National Inquirer (sic) which reported the former intelligence officer,
Marcel, claimed that he had recovered UFO debris near Roswell in 1947. Also in
1978 a UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman, met with Marcel and began investigating
the claims that the material Marcel handed was from a crashed UFO."
The story has just been tabloidized, since the only way the National Enquirer
could have known about Marcel is if he had gone to them with his story. The fact
is that the Enquirer article appeared in 1980, well after William Moore and I
had talked to 62 witnesses while working on the first book The Roswell Incident.
I didn't get my lead from the Enquirer. In early 1978, I had been referred to
Jesse by an old ham radio buddy of his who had seen the original wire story
about the crashed saucer, and was twiddling his thumbs as manager of the TV
station where I was being interviewed to promote my lecture that night at LSU in
Baton Rouge, LA.
The reporter, fortunately, was late. Jesse didn't go to the Enquirer or to me. I
gave their excellent reporter, Bob Pratt, Marcel's address. Marcel did not
change any earlier story. He hadn't given one.
That National Enquirer story was probably responsible for Capt. (and outstanding
pilot) "Pappy" Henderson's telling his wife Sappho around 1980 about having seen
the wreckage and bodies and flown wreckage to Wright Patterson. Sappho and her
daughter and his good friend, Dr. John Kromshroeder, told their story on that
same video.
Karl Pflock, author of the Roswell debunking book "Roswell: Inconvenient Facts
and the Will to Believe" dismissed Pappy as a practical joker who, rather than
handing Dr. Kromshroeder a small piece of saucer wreckage back in 1978, on
John's honor as a former naval officer not to talk about it, had supposedly
shown him a piece of a V-2 rocket that he had. The family knew about the V-2
piece. Pappy's son and son-in-law also held the strange wreckage. Pappy had also
quietly told his story to his WW II bombardier, the late Vere McCarthy, who in
1989 wrote me about it in response to my call, and even had been one of Pappy's
pallbearers in 1986. Pflock doesn't say any of this in his book or in his many
negative comments in the History Channel video.
McAndrew had focused on various crash test dummies used to evaluate ejection
seats and methods of jumping out of very high altitude balloons. Nice visuals of
these experiments were shown in the video. These had absolutely nothing to do
with Roswell, especially since none were dropped until after 1953. McAndrew used
a map of drop locations three times. Strange there were no dummies dropped near
either the Foster Ranch or Plains of San Augustin crash sites!
The man in charge of the program told me that the dummies were 6 feet tall and
weighed 175 pounds. Could anybody mistake such items for small alien beings?
Time travel was further demonstrated by the claim that the reported red headed
officer seen by Glenn Dennis at the Roswell Army Air Force base (and also
independently claimed to have been observed in the Plains by Gerald Anderson, in
both cases accompanied by a black sergeant) was actually famed red haired pilot
Joe Kittinger, who had been to the hospital with a friend injured by a balloon
that had come down near Roswell. This was 1959!!
No black sergeant seen. Naturally there was a chase team present very quickly.
It was claimed that because the military wasn't desegregated until 1948 there
could not have been a black sergeant with a white officer. FALSE. Black
sergeants were allowed to work with security dog patrols, of which there were
several at the Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque from which the Officer had
supposedly come.
Other visually interesting items were shown, such as a chimp in a space capsule
and a bear used for a space launch. People out in the desert seeing these coming
down would obviously have thought they were space aliens! NONSENSE! It wasn't
noted that none of these experiments were conducted until well after Roswell,
and that there were always chase teams to dissuade any tourists in the desert
from interfering.
The "expert" team included Dr. Robert Park, a member of the American Physical
Society (as are Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Dr. Robert M. Wood, and myself. All active
in MUFON.) Park is the APS chief debunker of all things "paranormal." His 10
pages in "Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud" about UFOs in
general and Roswell in particular are a splendid example of the pseudo-science
of anti-ufology.
He bought into the McAndrew and Weaver opuses (crash test dummies, Project
Mogul, ad nauseum) hook line and sinker, and couldn't even get straight simple
facts, such as that George Wilcox was sheriff of Chavez County not Lincoln
County, and ignored the fact that newspaper articles of July 8, 1947, noted that
the wreckage had been found by Rancher Brazel "last week," not the June 14 date
deemed appropriate by the Army Air Force People who reprogrammed the rancher
with "new" (dis)info as noted in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9.
Park casually has the false story of Maj. Marcel loading sticks, cardboard, and
metal foil into the trunk of his car growing over the years into a major
operation. There isn't the slightest indication that he read any of the books
briefly flashed across the screen, including Don Berliner's and my Crash at
Corona, and three books by Kevin Randle, very briefly shown on the program. The
noisy negativists clearly had done no independent research, and accepted Weaver
and McAndrew.
A silly attempt was made to link the nearby crash in 1956 of a bomber resulting
in 11 crewmen being burned to death with mortician Glenn Dennis' confusing this
with Roswell aliens. Speaking to me at the Ballard Funeral Home, Glenn recalled
that crash very well. Another ludicrous claim on the program was that the
International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell is owned by Glenn Dennis
and Walter Haut, who had issued the famous press release! It is a non-profit
organization, does not charge admission, and is NOT owned by them. It has had
1.2 Million visitors in less than a decade.
Those who want facts about Roswell didn't find them in this program, which will,
of course, be repeated, as was the 1999 History Channel production. An excellent
source is outstanding researcher David Rudiak's website
http:www.Roswellproof.homestead.com . For those who want to review a serious
effort to compare the wreckage descriptions with the makeup of Mogul Balloons, I
would recommend FUFOR's 69-page 2002 report by engineer Robert A. Galganski,
"The Roswell Debris Field: An Engineer's Perspective."
Harold Ensle
Sir Arthur C. B. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote in
message news:JB8m9.43748$15.1...@www.newsranger.com...
Excellent post. I am glad to see that Friedman has posted corrections.
H.Ellis Ensle
Art's Good Twin
> Sir Arthur C. B. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. <nos...@newsranger.com> wrote in
> message news:JB8m9.43748$15.1...@www.newsranger.com...
> >
> > "The Roswell Debris Field: An Engineer's Perspective."
>
> Excellent post. I am glad to see that Friedman has posted corrections.
>
> H.Ellis Ensle
Excellent reposting of the ENTIRE LONG BUNCH OF BULLSH*T in order to add one
lousy single line. AND to agree with a kook who once masqueraded as a doctor to
harass people in a medical support group. No netiquette, and lousy choice of
friends. Way to go, Harold.
Next time, try snipping.
Harold Ensle
Art's Good Twin <nob...@nowhere.com> wrote in message
news:3D99C045...@nowhere.com...
Correct in that it was not appropriate for me to repost the whole article.
But what does that have to do with the content? How is Friedman's article
BS?
The mistakes he claims that were made in the show are true and documented.
The alleged activities of the poster (Art) does not change the content of
Friedman's article.
Is it possible that you would be able to summon up enough logic to
understand this?
I wonder.
H.Ellis Ensle
BTW I actually reposted it on purpose to keep it in view of the readers.
This group rarely gets articles of any substance, so when I see one, I don't
want anyone to miss it.
Harlow Campbell
> Excellent post. I am glad to see that Friedman has posted corrections.
>
> H.Ellis Ensle
"H.Ellis Ensle" is a gay name...I can prove it using empirical logic.
1) H.Ellis Ensle...Initials are H.E.E. (Are you with me so far?...Good)
2) If you say his initials twice it's "HEE HEE" And THAT, my friends, is gay!
3) Any questions?
Sir Arthur C. B. Wholeflaffers A.S.A.
>But what does that have to do with the content? How is Friedman's article
>BS? The mistakes he claims that were made in the show are true and documented.
>
>The alleged activities of the poster (Art) does not change the content of
>Friedman's article.
Don't even bother discussing the facts with the debunkers here.
Hugh/Arts Twin/Sucke is a scorned gay man who
"hates everything!" He is by his own admission a
"troll...with nothing better to do!"
down would obviously have thought they were space aliens! NONSENSE! It wasn't
Widdershins
snip
> > Excellent reposting of the ENTIRE LONG BUNCH OF BULLSH*T in order to add
> one
> > lousy single line.
snip
> The alleged activities of the poster (Art) does not change the content of
> Friedman's article.
No it doesn't, but since Artie only posts bullshit and outright lies, it
does make one leery of accepting his screed at face value.
>
> H.Ellis Ensle
>
> BTW I actually reposted it on purpose to keep it in view of the readers.
> This group rarely gets articles of any substance, so when I see one, I don't
> want anyone to miss it.
Thanks, but as I mentioned above, most of Artie's posts were written by
someone else with his adding a line or two at the top. He also reposts
a lot of crap just to have the masturbatory pleasure of seeing his name
on a news group byline.
HTH
Widdershins
Muddy Mudskipper!
> In article <ancq22$sf0$1...@slb4.atl.mindspring.net>, Harold Ensle says...
>
>>
>>Art's Good Twin <nob...@nowhere.com> wrote in message
>
>
>>But what does that have to do with the content? How is Friedman's article
>>BS? The mistakes he claims that were made in the show are true and documented.
>>
>>The alleged activities of the poster (Art) does not change the content of
>>Friedman's article.
>
>
> Don't even bother discussing the facts with the debunkers here.
> Hugh/Arts Twin/Sucke is a scorned gay man who
> "hates everything!" He is by his own admission a
> "troll...with nothing better to do!"
And you are, by your own admission a kingted "Sir" and a Doctor, however
both of these have been proven to be lies! What's your point. Someone
says they're a troll. Another lies that he is a Doctor, then that he has
been knighted. Should we make fun of you (oh yeah - we do already....As
you were!)