The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# STATEMENT OF WITNESS

Place:

Washington

I Sheridan W.Cavitt hereby state that Richard L. Weaver was identified to me as a Colonel, USAF. I do hereby voluntarily and of my own free will make the following statement without having been subjected to any coercion, unlawful influence or unlawful inducement.

I was a Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) Special Agent for the US Army Air Force who was initially assigned to Roswell AAF following my graduation from CIC school at Ft. Holabird, MD, in late June or Early July, 1947. Shortly after arriving at Roswell, New Mexico in that time frame I had occasion to accompany one of my subordinates, MSGT Bill Rickett, CIC, and Major Jesse Marcel, Intelligence Officer the 509th Bomb Group, to a ranchland area outside of Roswell to help recover some material. I think that this request may have come directly from Major Marcel. I do not know who may have made the report to him. To the best of my knowledge, the three of us traveled to the aforementioned ranch land area by ourselves (that is, no other persons, civilian or military, were with us). I believe we had a military jeep that Marcel checked out to make this trip. When we got to this location we subsequently located some debris which appeared to me to resemble bamboo type square sticks one quarter to one half inch square, that were very light, as well as some sort of metallic reflecting material that was also very light. I also vaguely recall some sort of black box (like a weather instrument). The area of this debris was very small, about 20 feet square, and the material was spread on the ground, but there was no gouge or crater or other obvious sign of impact. I remember recognizing this material as being consistent with a weather balloon. We gathered up some of this material, which would easily fit into one vehicle. there certainly wasn't a lot of this material, or enough to make up crates of it for multiple airplane flights. What Marcel did with this material at the time was unknown to me, although I know now from reading about this incident in numerous books that it was taken to Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth where it was subsequently identified as a weather balloon, which I thought it was all along. I have reviewed the pictures in the 1991 Book by Randle and Schmitt on the UFO Crash at Roswell wherein Marcel and Ramey are holding up this material and it appears to be the same type of material that we picked up from the ranch land. I did not make a report of this incident to my headquarters since I felt that the recovery of a weather balloon was not a big deal that did not merit a written report. In the same referenced book by Randle and Schmitt I was reputed to have told Rickett (on Page 63) that we were never there and this incident never happened. The book seems to imply this was in some sort of conspiratorial tone; however it is more likely I told him not to mention it to our headquarters because we had wasted our time recovering a balloon. I only went to this area once and recovered debris once and to the best of my knowledge there were no other efforts to go back there. If there were, they did not involve me. There was no secretive effort or heightened security regarding this incident or any unusual expenditure of manpower at the base to deal with it. In fact, I do not recall the incident being mentioned again as being any big deal and I never even thought about it again until well after I retired from the military when I began to be contacted by UFO researchers. Many of the things I have mentioned to these people have either been taken out of context, misrepresented, or just plain made up. I did know both Jesse Marcel and Bill Rickett very well (both are now deceased). I considered them to be good men, however both did tend to exaggerate things on occasion. With regards to claims that we tested this material by hitting it with sledgehammers without damaging it, I do not recall any of us doing so. I also did not test this material for radioactivity with a Geiger counter (or anything else). I do not recall attempting to burn any of this debris but my wife tells me she recalled that Jesse Marcel, his wife and son did have a small piece that they held over the fire when we had a cookout. In short, I did help recover some debris near Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. I thought at the time and think so now, that this debris was from a crashed balloon. I am not part of any conspiracy to withhold information from anyone, either the US Government or the American public. I have never been sworn to any form of secrecy by anyone concerning this matter and I have received authorization from the Secretary of the Air Force to discuss with Colonel Weaver any information of a classified nature that I may have concerning it. There is no classified information that I am withholding. I have never been threatened by the US Government or any of its subdivisions, or by any persons, not to talk about this incident with anyone, and in fact I have talked to a number of private researchers. My bottom line is that this whole incident was no big deal and it certainly did not involve anything extraterrestrial.