Documents / Official release
This file, released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library under FOIA request 2006-0476-F, holds White House correspondence records for case 243544. In a July 8, 1997 letter to President Clinton, Kent Jeffrey of the International Roswell Initiative submitted more than 20,000 signed copies of the Roswell Declaration, which asks for an Executive Order declassifying UFO information. On December 9, 1997 the Air Force replied that such an order was unnecessary because declassification under E.O. 12958 was already underway.
“UFO Research Society”2 pages
MUFON UFO JOURNAL Strut and tape patterns as remembered by Irving Newton. Drawing by Kimberly Moeller. out the United States and Canada. The sightings were something that were in the news daily and were on almost everyone's mind - an "un known" in the sky. At the same time, balloon ar rays under a secret project known as "Mogul" were being launched from the Alamagordo area, just under 100 miles to the west of Roswell. These balloon arrays carried ML-307 radar re flectors, which would have been totally unfamil iar to Butch Blanchard, Jesse Marcel, and the other men at Roswell AAF. The debris from one of these reflectors scattered over the desert would likewise have been something unfamiliar to them an "unknown" on the ground. It is understandable that the unknown debris found northwest of Roswell would have been as sumed to be related to the unknown objects that had been so frequently reported flying around in . the sky, the flying "disks." Such a connection, although with the benefit of hindsight, incorrect, would have been very logical and understand able for the men at Roswell to make. This is al most certainly how the Roswell story began. The Missing Tape In the last few months, as part of my effort to reconstruct what happened at Roswell, I have had a number of conversations with Irving Newton, the weather officer at Fort WOIth Army Air Field who was called in by General Ramey to identify the unusual debris. The debris was al ready suspected to be part of some type of bal loon device. Newton told me that he immedi ately recognized it as being from an ML-307 radar renector. An ML-307 was a box kite-like device covered with a tough, paper-backed foil that was suspended below balloons or balloon arrays to facilitate radar tracking. According to Newton, most weather officers, much less the men at Roswell or Fort Worth, would not have been familiar with such a device. Newton had worked with the reflectors a couple of years ear lier during the invasion of Okinawa in the Pacific. The devices were suspended below bal loons, released to gather wind data for use in helping direct heavy naval artillery fire. In one of my conversations with Newton, quite by chance, a new and important revelation came to light. He was describing the color of the symbols on one of the balsa sticks and men tioned how it was faint and had somewhat of a mottled appearance because of "the way that the dye had bled through onto the surface of the stick." This was a very important piece of infor mation. The symbols that Newton saw on the debris in Ramey's office were on the surface of the stick, not on tape! The tape had apparently peeled away, probably because of several weeks' exposure to sunlight while it layout in the desert. This serendipitous revelation imme diately cleared up one of the biggest questions in my mind about the Roswell case - how could Jesse Marcel, Sr., or Jesse Marcel, Jr., for that matter, not have recognized nower patterns on tape? The answer is now crystal clear. The sym bols they saw were not on tape. What they saw were images of the original symbols from the dye that had bled through before the tape had peeled away. Jesse, Jr.'s testimony about the symbols definitely not being on tape was ab solutely correct. A Remarkable Resemblance During the sessions in Washington, D.C., the professional illustrator who was present drew a very accurate depiction of what Jesse, Jr., re membered - the "I-be am-like" member with the symbols on it. After learning what a good recollection of the symbols Newton had, I arranged for him to work with the same illustra tor so that we might have side-by-side sketches from the same perspective for comparison. As it turned out, the resemblance between the two sketches was remarkable. Even the artist commented that "it sure seemed like these two men were describing the same thing." Probably most amazing was the closeness of the color that the two men remembered. Other than Newton's color being more faded, the colors are nearly identical. The most significant discrepancy was the way the slight ridges on the upper and lower edges gave Jesse's beam the appearance of an 1 Amazingly, by incredible co Incidence, a balloon array that disap peared in the same general area four weeks earlier carried three radar reflectors constructed from reflective foil, short beams that have a maxi mum length of about three feet, and pieces of Bakelite-like material. June 1997 Number 350 Page 11
Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 47 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.