Dust To Dust

The Roswell Incident took another step into irretrievable history last week when one of the last living eyewitnesses, Jesse Marcel, Jr., succumbed to a heart attack at 76 in Montana. I never met the amiable physician and Navy/Army National Guard veteran, but we chatted years ago, by phone, when I first got sucked into the Endless Debate, long before the Roswell UFO Festival & Alien Parade became an annual exercise in turnstyle self-parody. And through it all, Marcel's recollection of his brief, yet life-altering, role in the events of July 1947 never deviated. "The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice" -- Mark Twain/CREDIT: stacweb.stac.edu It's a complicated story. But you know that. The Air Force had trouble settling on a script, and its last revision was in 1997, when the uniforms attributed the fuss to the mistaken identity of a classified military balloon project, not flying saucer debris. And the alleged alien bodies were only military crash-test dummies deployed from balloons beginning in 1950. Unfortunately (or maybe not) for Marcel, his father, Jesse Sr., was among the first to arrive at the crash site. In addition to proclaiming the material "not of this earth," the Army major (it was all Army back then) brought some of the stuff home with him on the way back to the base. He thought it was so weird, he woke up his wife and 11-year-old son to show it off. Jesse, Jr., never forgot it. Even as the military explanations kept shapeshifting - from the hastily issued and hastily retracted "flying disc" press release, to a weather balloon cover story that held for half a century, 'til, finally, the Project Mogul panacea, an airborne A-bomb sentinel festooned with multiple radar targets - Junior held firm. Until the end of his days, Marcel asserted the scraps his father had collected, those thin, metallic-looking I-beams distinguished with geometric or hieroglyphic patterns, were extraterrestrial. Even when confronted with assertions that parts of the Mogul balloon train were reinforced with tape bearing flower-like designs, he never deviated. Marcel could've shut up about it and spared himself a lot of grief from critics who weren't there. Instead, he kept insisting the patterned tape didn't match what he remembered. If, as Emerson famously noted, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," how might the inverse be worded? Hopelessly contaminated by phonies, nutty speculation and sheer overexposure, the Roswell Incident, over the years, generated more slippery squirming "facts" than a sack of eels. It started with two principle witnesses, more than 30 years after the fact, when Marcel's Army colleague, Counter Intelligence Corps captain Sheridan Cavitt, got put on the spot and began repudiating everything Marcel said. As Kevin Randle, one of the early Roswell re-investigators reported, Cavitt initially denied being stationed at Roswell Army Air Field at all. When approached with documentation to the contrary, he denied being at RAAF during the time of the incident. He denied combing the debris field with Marcel. But by 1994, when the USAF began to assemble the first of its two belated and reluctant Roswell reports, Cavitt had miraculously recovered his memory. He told a military investigator that yes, he'd been there all right, with Marcel, and that he - Cavitt - immediately identified it as a weather balloon. Cavitt had repeated the same weather-balloon thing to De Void in 1991, which begged the question: Why, then, did the "flying disc" story get so big? Cavitt couldn't answer. But also in 1991, one of Cavitt's CIC subordinates, a retired sergeant named Lewis Rickett, told De Void about how Cavitt later escorted him through security pickets and into the debris field. "I had been in the military long enough, I'd seen weather balloons," said Rickett, who described the thin, lusterless grey fragments as unbreakable. "This was no weather balloon. This was entirely different." And he recounted what happened next: "When we got back, this weather balloon story was all over the radio. I looked at Cavitt. He looked at me. He just shook his head and said, 'Let's forget this ever happened.' I said, 'Right. We were never there.'" Rickett, who died in 1992, told De Void that Cavitt would continue to deny the truth because he was a "career guy." Cavitt died in '99. So yeah, just when you think this stuff is pushing up daisies, boom, last summer, retired CIA agent Chase Brandon announces he found documentary proof, during his employment in the 1990s, that Roswell was an ET event - complete with alien cadavers - in the Agency's archives. He invites universal scorn by timing his revelations to coincide with publication of his new sci-fi thriller. Then you ask his old boss, former CIA chief and ex-SecDef Robert Gates, for comment. Gates says only that he's never seen any UFO evidence, Roswell or otherwise, yet he refuses to assail Brandon's credibility. Sorry -- this was supposed to be about Jesse Marcel, Jr. Ah well, and so it is. Another old man dies. The center holds. History as we know it remains intact. Living memory ebbs, and this will be gone with the wind soon enough.