The Secret History of Extraterrestrials: Advanced Technology and the Coming New Race (6 page)

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

In the chapter titled “Trauma and Transformation,” Mack takes the position that although the abductees may be terror stricken and traumatized initially, as they usually are, if they refuse to be victimized, confront the fear squarely, and take advantage of the opportunity for growth, ultimately their consciousness expands, and they become transformed. Does this mean that such transformation is the intended result of the experiences and that the aliens are using some sort of shock treatment to force us to grow up and save the planet? Isabel asks, “How do we know that [they] . . . aren’t using extreme emotions to help us grow?”

However, the evidence in
Passport to the Cosmos
strongly suggests that such transformation is a by-product of the experience—the result of a courageous reaction and the triumph of the human spirit over life-shattering and psyche-shattering events. The abductees testify that exposure to the fourth dimension, where the aliens basically reside, is, by itself, life transforming and that it demolishes previous illusions of our cocoonlike material existence. They also say that the comprehension of the immensity of a creation that includes such strange creatures with such marvelous powers is a powerful, mind-opening, and religion-confounding realization. Ultimately, the abductee becomes acutely aware of his or her own inner power. Karin sums it up nicely when she observes that the collapse of the barriers between dimensions allows one to become “very aware of your soul. You’re very aware of your higher consciousness, that thing inside of you that’s you.”

This means that individual growth is simply an unavoidable, unintended result of what the aliens are doing. It is beginning to appear that perhaps all the alien concern about an environmental apocalypse is really an elaborate, deceptive cover story to justify the hybrid program, and that perhaps Sparks is right—they are just trying to save the planet for themselves and the hybrids. Mack suggests, however, that, whatever their intent, this gives us the opportunity to seize on these events to our own advantage. He says, “The alien abduction phenomenon is largely an opportunity or gift, a kind of catalyst for the evolution of consciousness in the direction of an emerging sense of responsibility for our own and the planet’s future.” For those who believe that such jump-starting of consciousness expansion is a violation of natural progression and would therefore resist this invitation, I might point out that military reprisal does not appear to be an option at this point. However, worldwide acceptance of this reality might be the first step toward a solution, and both of Mack’s books will definitely help us reach that goal.

THE ROSWELL BUNNY

It’s a controversy that refuses to go away. Now, sixty years later, the mystery of Roswell continues to intrigue and fascinate and provoke strong reactions, perhaps even more so lately than in the beginning. As with the Kennedy assassination and the Energizer Bunny, the Roswell dispute just “keeps going and going and going.” Mark Larsen, communications category manager for Energizer, says, “The Bunny has become the ultimate symbol of longevity, perseverance and determination.” But I would say that Roswell now trumps the Bunny. It wins hands-down in longevity, and dogged determination and perseverance are abundant on both sides of the debate.

Just when it seems that public interest has waned and the incident has been relegated to the obituaries, something comes along to jolt it right back to the front page. First there was the Showtime television movie
Roswell,
starring Martin Sheen. Then there was New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff ’s investigation and the outrage and renewed suspicion it provoked when it was found that the Air Force had destroyed all the relevant documents. Then came the blockbuster—the book
The Day After Roswell
by Colonel Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes. In 1995 the television documentary
The Roswell Incident
breathed new life into the believer cause. Also keeping it in the news were the several clumsy efforts by the Air Force to explain it away, starting with the famous “Mogul balloon” gambit and culminating in the notorious “crash dummy” proposition, which, in terms of sheer absurdity, have now far surpassed the classic “swamp gas” and “planet Venus” explanations of UFO phenomena. Most recently, we have been treated to a theory that attempts to breathe new life into the crash dummies. In the book
Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story
by British UFO writer Nick Redfern, we are seriously expected to entertain the possibility that the bodies found at the crash site were not dummies at all but “deformed, handicapped, disfigured, and diseased” Japanese POWs, still in U.S. custody despite Japan’s official surrender two years earlier, who were being used in experiments in high-altitude survivability by the Air Force, thus supposedly explaining their oriental features and diminutive size. And so the Roswell Bunny continues to bang his drum.

PANDORA’S BOX

The stakes in this confrontation are very high. If it can be categorically proved that the Roswell crash did happen, then a cascading series of remarkable possibilities would become certainties. First, it would mean that there is intelligent life on other planets with technology greater than ours. This would have tremendous ramifications in terms of society, technology, weaponry, religion, economics, and more. Then, the sixty-year cover-up would imply the existence of a shadow government that continues in power from administration to administration. Otherwise, how could the fraud continue to be perpetrated so expertly? This, in turn, means that our democracy is an illusion and that we really live in some sort of oligarchy. Then, it would mean that we have most certainly gained extraordinary knowledge about our place in the universe that has not been shared with the public and that could possibly revolutionize our life here on Earth. Very possibly this knowledge could solve all our energy problems. And very probably we would now have the ability to travel to other star systems ourselves, which opens up vast vistas for the human race. These would all be colossal developments, and they all hinge on the reality of Roswell. To prove Roswell is to open Pandora’s box and the Stargate to our future, at one and the same time.

The dramatic events of those first ten days of July 1947 in that tiny, remote military town in the high plains of central New Mexico remained cloaked in impenetrable secrecy for more than thirty years! But interest slowly and unobtrusively built among UFO groups during that period. This activity culminated in 1978 with a historic two-hour presentation by researcher Leonard Stringfield at a monthly Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) meeting in Dayton, Ohio, in which Stringfield revealed the details of several crash retrievals throughout the Southwest and presented strong evidence that all the wreckage and several dead alien bodies ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Base right there in Dayton. Stringfield spoke of retrievals in Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Montana and gave prominent mention to one particular crash near Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947. His book,
Situation Red: The UFO Siege,
filled in many of the sketchy details.

Stringfield’s work drew the interest of researchers William Moore and Charles Berlitz, and in the summer of 1980 they unleashed the first book on the subject,
The Roswell Incident,
which has now become a classic. Veteran ufologist Stanton T. Friedman was a key researcher on that project, although he did not get authorship credit. After ten more years of research, he went on to write his own book about Roswell with Don Berliner, titled
Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO,
and ultimately has emerged as the preeminent authority on the subject. Since 1980, the Bunny drumbeat has picked up as dozens of other books have been written about Roswell, and the town itself has become a world-famous UFO mecca. But final proof of the crash has remained elusive because the government has continued to keep a tight lid on any information that could help researchers bolster their case and has, in fact, deliberately led them down blind alleys with planted disinformation. Hoping to provide the coup de grace to the cover-up and finally validate the Roswell crash, Jesse Marcel Jr. released his autobiographical book,
Roswell: It Really Happened.
He is the son of Major Jesse Marcel, who was the base security officer at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947.
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I spoke with Marcel about his remembrances of his father and the book.

“IT WAS NOT A WEATHER BALLOON”

From the outset, it was clear to all the investigators that Major Jesse Marcel was the central figure in the case. In fact, it was Marcel’s involvement and testimony that first attracted Friedman, convinced him that the crash really did take place, and drew him into the investigation. As an Army Air Force intelligence officer with a distinguished war record, Marcel’s credibility was unchallenged. The 509th Bomb Group at Roswell was a top-secret facility, and everyone there had a high-level security clearance. As the base intelligence officer, Marcel was especially security conscious. Just prior to the Roswell assignment in 1946, Marcel had been in charge of security for Operation Crossroads, the ultrasecret Bikini Atoll nuclear test program, for which he was awarded a commendation. The top brass knew they had no reason to be worried about such a loyal and dedicated officer, especially since they promoted him to lieutenant colonel immediately after Roswell and spirited him away to a top Cold War job. Whether this was calculated to ensure his cooperation can only be a subject of speculation. So it is not surprising that Marcel remained silent about Roswell for thirty-two years. On the contrary, what was surprising was the fact that he agreed to the Friedman interview at all in 1979. Maybe it was because so much time had elapsed that he felt he could now speak freely. More likely, good soldier though he was, Marcel nevertheless came to realize that his first obligation was to humanity. As we will see, this was clearly the case, because he had already planted the seeds of revelation.

It was Marcel who received the phone call from Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox about the debris found on the sheep ranch of Mac Brazel that Sunday morning, July 6, 1947. And it was Marcel and counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt who drove out to the Brazel ranch and collected two carloads of the strange debris that stretched out over three-quarters of a mile. Of that discovery, Marcel said in his interview with Stanton Friedman as reported in
Crash at Corona
by Friedman and Don Berliner, “It was amazing to see the vast amount of area it covered . . . It’s something that must have exploded above ground, traveling perhaps at a high rate of speed . . . It was quite obvious to me . . . that it was not a weather balloon, nor was it an airplane or a missile . . . It was something I had never seen before, and I was pretty familiar with all air activities.”

ALIEN HIEROGLYPHICS

The material collected by Marcel and Cavitt was definitely not of this world. Marcel said, “This particular piece of metal was . . . about two feet long, and perhaps a foot wide. See, that stuff weighs nothing, it’s so thin, it isn’t any thicker than the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes. So I tried to bend the stuff [but] it wouldn’t bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. And there was still no dent in it. And, as of now, I still don’t know what it was.” Strangest of all were the fragments he described as “like parchment.” Among these parchmentlike pieces were small I beams inscribed with strange characters that appeared to have been painted on in a purple-violet color. Marcel said that they were “symbols that we had to call . . . hieroglyphics because I could not interpret them, they could not be read, they were just symbols, something that meant something and they were not all the same.” These fragments couldn’t be broken or burned. There was other tinfoil-like metal that always returned to a smooth state after being crumpled. The two men loaded up a Jeep Carry-All, and Marcel instructed Cavitt to drive that first load back to the base. He then went back out into the field and loaded up his 1942 Buick with more fragments. Even then, he says, “we picked up only a very small portion of the material that was there.”

That night, Marcel returned home late and woke his wife and son to show them what he had found. He spread the fragments out on the kitchen floor, and they all marveled at this strange stuff from space. Jesse Marcel Jr. was only eleven at the time, but he evidently appreciated the import of what he was seeing—and he never forgot that night. The next day, July 8, Marcel brought the debris back to the base and was immediately ordered by base commander Colonel William Blanchard to put it all on a B-29 and fly along with it to Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio, with a stop at the 8th Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. That same morning, Blanchard ordered base public information officer Lieutenant Walter Haut to issue a press release stating that the Air Force had recovered the wreckage of a “flying saucer.”

U.S.
Army photo of Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel

Haut released the report to Roswell radio station KGFL, and the station, in turn, sent it to United Press International via Western Union, and so the story broke in the evening papers in the Midwest and the West. That’s when the cold, clammy hand of official suppression descended on Roswell. In Fort Worth, Marcel was instructed by 8th Air Force Commanding General Roger Ramey to pose with him for photos showing that the wreckage was from a weather balloon and then was told to go home and forget the whole thing. A couple of days later, Army reconnaissance planes discovered the crashed disc itself and four alien bodies a few miles from the debris field.

THE DRAWINGS

Lieutenant Colonel Marcel died in 1986. Jesse Marcel Jr. went on to become a physician and a flight surgeon. At the age of forty-two, in 1978, he joined the National Guard and was trained as a helicopter pilot and became certified as a crash investigator. In March 1991, Marcel signed an affidavit (published as
Roswell in Perspective
by Karl Pflock in 1994) in which he described the material his father brought home that night in 1947. About the I beam, he said, “On the inner surface . . . there appeared to be a type of writing. The writing was a purple-violet hue and had an embossed appearance. The figures were composed of curved, geometric shapes. It had no resemblance to Russian, Japanese or any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics but had no animal-like characters.”

In that affidavit, Marcel said that his father was certain the material was not from a weather balloon and “may have mentioned the words, ‘flying saucer.’” In that document, he also drew a picture of the I beam about eighteen inches in length and showing the characters as best as he could remember them, and in a postscript he mentions that he showed the drawing to his mother and that she concurred with his description. While it is a rough drawing, each unique character is carefully delineated. Is it possible that the fifty-five-year-old Marcel could have remembered those characters so convincingly after only a quick look forty-four years previously when a boy of only eleven?

It now turns out that the answer to that question is “no, he could not.” In
The Roswell Legacy,
Marcel revealed for the first time that his father did more than simply gawk at the fragments arrayed on his kitchen floor that night in 1947. He sat down and made drawings as painstakingly accurate as possible, and that may have been his motive for bringing them home in the first place. He was a seasoned intelligence officer, so we can be confident that Marcel knew how detailed the drawings should be. Jesse Marcel Jr. kept those drawings under wraps for almost sixty years, and once he himself was retired and outside the reach of military obligation, he decided, as did his father in the interview with Friedman, to go public and leave this extremely important information to the world as his father’s legacy. The drawings are reproduced in his book. He told me that the I-beam characters had been decoded and explained, and this exciting information was also revealed in his book.

Jesse Marcel Jr.’s book may very well be the final word on Roswell. The fact that the artifacts are now proved to be of extraterrestrial origin means that all speculations have become certainties. It may have taken sixty years, but Jesse Marcel, thanks to the diligence of his son, has reached out from the grave and circumvented the official suppression machine with which he was very familiar, so that the world would know of that remarkable event in Roswell. Once again, fate has conspired to put the right person in the right place at the right time, for the benefit of humanity.