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Tonight on History's Greatest Mysteries.

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Late this afternoon, a person from New Mexico

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suggested that one of the strange discs had been found and infected.

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In 1947, something crashed in the desert in the American Southwest.

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Whatever the object was, it has created shock waves still felt today.

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I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

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On tonight's mystery, what crashed in Roswell, New Mexico?

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Was it a flying saucer, as headlines first announced, or a secret military aircraft?

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A new investigation seeks answers.

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This might be that piece of the puzzle.

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An ex-CIA officer named Ben Smith has obtained a cryptic journal.

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It was found among the papers of Major Jesse Marcel,

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the first U.S. Army officer to investigate the wreckage.

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He always said that he was sworn to secrecy.

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Does it contain coded clues of what Marcel really saw?

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It was not anything from this earth.

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What about stories of alleged alien bodies in the wreckage?

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She said there were little people and there were some dead and some alive.

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Did the U.S. government cover up the truth and does it still possess the wreckage of a UFO?

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I do know one name of a man who had pieces of debris.

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The truth behind Roswell, according to those who were there.

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A former CIA operative, investigator and author, Ben Smith has been intrigued by Roswell and UFOs for years.

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Investigating was at the core of my work at CIA.

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I went under deep cover, lived a double life to collect intel on terrorist networks,

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foreign spy activities, even weapons of mass destruction.

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Smith says this may be his most challenging mission,

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trying to figure out the truth about what really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

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So this is it, huh?

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This is it. Ground zero.

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Don Schmidt has written seven bestsellers about Roswell

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and interviewed more people connected to the incident than anyone alive.

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Take a look at the impact site now, that creation of 47.

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I was a special investigator for the late Dr. Jalen Heineck.

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Who was consultant to the Air Force Project Blue Book.

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I was a skeptic.

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And the one case that I wanted to investigate was Roswell.

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And for having talked to over 600 witnesses, either directly or indirectly involved,

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I am 99% convinced that what indeed crashed here back in 1947

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was a craft of unknown origin not manufactured on this planet.

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Ben Smith asked Schmidt to show him the site where the crash debris was found.

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This is it, Beth.

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What we consider the most significant location as far as in the entire history of the UFO phenomenon.

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It's total isolation.

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We could just as well be on the dark side of the moon.

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You know, my background is in the CIA.

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And I have no agenda except to explore this mystery,

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bring some clarity to some unanswered questions.

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It's thrilling to finally be out here after having read so much about it, a lot of your work.

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This is where it all began back in 1947.

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In the 1940s, New Mexico was home to some of America's most sensitive military installations,

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including where the atomic bomb was developed.

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By the summer of 1947, the U.S. was worried that the Soviets were building their own atomic bomb.

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And Americans were worried about something else, hundreds of reports of UFOs.

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What is the flying saucer?

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What's behind the daily reports of aerial phenomena in the nation's press?

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These supposed societies were reported in a number of newspapers throughout the United States,

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and they actually started to grow in number in kind of a mass hysteria.

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Much of the activity seemed to be focused in New Mexico, the hotbed of military activity at that time.

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New Mexico became the focus, not only the Soviet Union,

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but also the UFO phenomenon, as though someone else was very interested in our military potential.

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By late June 1947, more than a week before the Roswell crash,

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residents in the southern part of the state were spooked by nearly 70 sightings of UFOs.

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It was just going in a earthly motion at a pretty rapidly speed, but nothing like a falling star or meteorite.

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So bright like that, you couldn't look directly at it very long at a time,

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and you had to look to the side of it, just like looking into a bright sun.

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Then on the morning of July 6, 1947, something even stranger occurred.

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Roswell's sheriff called the nearby army airfield to say that a sheep rancher had come in

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with pieces of debris that he believed came from a crashed flying saucer.

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The base's commander was Colonel William H. Blanchard, a highly decorated military pilot,

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who in 1945 had supervised the mission of the Enola Gay, the bomber that destroyed Hiroshima.

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By 1947, the base was still home to the 509th, the world's only nuclear-equipped bomber squadron.

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Roswell was the headquarters of the elite military at that time.

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The base was always on full alert because they had the atomic bomb.

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In response to the call from the sheriff, Colonel Blanchard dispatched the base's intelligence officer,

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Major Jesse Marcell, with him was Sheridan Kavett, an agent for Army Counterintelligence.

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According to Don Schmitz' research, this is what happened next.

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Monday morning, July 7, Jesse Marcell and Sheridan Kavett arrived at the debris field with the rancher.

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Major Jesse Marcell said the first thing that struck him was the massive amount of debris.

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As he would say, there was just so much of it covered an area almost a mile long.

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Interviewed later about what he saw in the debris field, Marcell claimed it was three-quarters of a mile long, a couple of hundred feet wide.

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But at that point, that material has been out there for days and no one else is looking for it, which would clearly suggest it's not ours.

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And if it's not ours, then whose is it?

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So Marcell and Kavett spend the better part of the day out there looking at this thing and trying to determine what it was.

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Marcell picked up different pieces of the debris and put them in boxes in the trunk of his car.

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Kavett would stay behind and concentrate more of the wreckage in a general area. Marcell would make the drive back to Roswell.

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What Jesse did next, according to his family, was an uncharacteristic breach of military protocol.

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He knew the material would be classified top secret the moment it would cross the front gate at the Roswell Army airfield.

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It was important enough, strange enough, unusual enough that Major Marcell would stop at his home on the way back to the base.

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He came back real late one night, about two o'clock in the morning as I recall.

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Very excited because he found parts of a UFO or a flying saucer at that time and he wanted me to see it.

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Marcell would describe paper thin metal like material, practically weightless in your hands that you couldn't cut, you couldn't burn.

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There were silken strands of material that Marcell described that a lighter could be held to one end and the light would emit out the opposing end.

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They were describing fiber optics in 1947.

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The fiber optics didn't come into development until around 1970.

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And then the I-beam structures.

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The most unusual part of the debris that I saw was the I-beam fragments.

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Jesse Marcell Jr. spent a lifetime thinking about the strange materials his father brought home and let him handle.

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They were very light, very strong and they had some writing along the inside surface of this.

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And that was the thing that really set this apart from anything I'd ever seen before.

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I am on my way to meet with the Marcell family, the grandchildren of the first American official on the scene at Roswell in 1947.

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Having learned of Ben Smith's investigation, the Marcell family is eager to talk with him.

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They believe they have something he will certainly want to see.

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The Roswell incident could potentially be the greatest event in the history of humankind.

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You know, we have how many 300 trillion stars and 200 billion galaxies and scattered across like 15 billion light years.

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And to think that we're all alone and all of that space is pretty sad.

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So I personally want to know, is there anybody out there and have they been here?

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The Roswell incident has got the potential for physical evidence and, you know, a host of reliable witnesses who all describe something the world has never seen before.

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There's no way for me to know, but to research, to start at the bottom and work my way through the facts.

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The Marcell family has a journal belonging to their grandfather.

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This journal could change the entire story about what happened in Roswell.

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Hi, Jesse Marcell.

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Jesse, pleasure to meet you. Ben.

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Ben, nice to finally meet you. Come on in.

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My brother and sister are here as well.

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I first saw the journal going through some military documents of my grandfather and it was just in with the military documents.

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Here's a diary.

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Oh, OK. Wow.

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He put it in a cedar chest and it was in there until the day he died.

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There's something very important about that journal.

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This is pretty wild.

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Right?

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Until now, no one outside the Marcell family has ever seen this journal.

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Does it contain fresh details about what really happened in Roswell?

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January 4th, 1946 to 1948. See, that would have been a year, almost a year after.

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About a year after August? Almost exactly a year.

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Ben Smith's investigation of the Roswell incident has taken him to Spokane, Washington to meet the grandchildren of Jesse Marcell who believe they have a crucial piece of evidence.

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Well, this really does run the gamut then. It starts before Roswell and ends about a year after.

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Right.

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After his death, Marcell's family found a journal hidden with his military records that he had never shared with anyone.

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There's something very important about that journal.

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There are entries dated from around the time of Roswell, but the notations are strange and confusing.

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Could they be coded clues to what Marcell really saw?

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Why was he writing movie quotes or songs?

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How into pop culture and movie and books was your grandfather?

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We never talked about that kind of thing with our grandfather.

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No.

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You know, it could also be something like a mnemonic device where you memorize something totally different from the subject matter so that it prompts your recall later.

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Ben wonders if their grandfather, a seasoned intelligence officer, was trying to hide information because he'd been warned, never to reveal the truth about the UFO.

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Since he worked in intelligence, you're not going to stay it out.

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Oh, hell, wow. I just found a UFO. You know, you're not going to write it out like that.

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Right.

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You're going to be kind of cryptic about it because you don't want anybody else to maybe see what you're writing.

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At one point, the military came back and said, yeah, you guys stop making this stuff up about the UFO crash.

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And he grabbed his medals and threw them away.

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He said he was done. He was done. And he was very upset.

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Jesse Marcel was born in 1907 in the Bayou country of southern Louisiana.

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His childhood fascination with maps would lead to a job with shell oil where he worked with aerial photographs.

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This combination of skills made him an obvious candidate for Air Force Intelligence School after America went to war in 1942.

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Lieutenant Marcel's job, mapping targets for bomber squadrons in the Pacific, earned him two air medals and a bronze star.

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When World War II ended, Marcel, with a young family to support, decided to stay in the military,

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receiving a plum assignment with the Army Air Force's most elite unit, the 500 and 9th bomber squadron based in Roswell.

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He always said that he was sworn to secrecy, so he never shared everything that had happened out there.

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But whatever he saw was so significant, he was willing to take a chance with his entire military career to show his son and his wife this stuff.

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The Marcel's say that after stopping at home to show the debris to his wife and son, Jesse arrived at the Roswell Army Airfield for the regular morning officers meeting.

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He presented the strange debris he'd collected to the base's commanding officer, Colonel William H. Blanchard.

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Blanchard ordered his public affairs officer, First Lieutenant Walter Hout, to issue an immediate press release.

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I was instructed by Colonel Blanchard to put out a press release, which in effect stated that we had in our possession a flying saucer.

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As soon as that hit the Roswell Daily Record, it was broadcast by the local radio station.

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It went. They didn't use that term back then, but it went viral across the whole globe.

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Late this afternoon, a bulletin from New Mexico suggested that the widely publicized mystery of the flying saucers may soon be solved.

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Army Air Force officers reported that one of the strange discs had been found and infected sometime last week.

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As news that a flying saucer had been discovered spread around the world, the Army chain of command took control.

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Millions of Americans believe that what happened next, the effort to conceal the UFO crash, is one of the greatest cover-ups in U.S. history.

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Colonel Blanchard ordered Major Marcel to fly to Carzwell Army Airfield in Fort Worth, Texas to present the material to Brigadier General Roger Ramey,

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head of the 8th Air Force Commanding Officer over the 519th Bomb Group.

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Marcel thought he was flying to Fort Worth with pieces of flying saucer debris.

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Major Marcel would arrive at Fort Worth approximately four o'clock that afternoon and he presented the material.

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Ramey took Marcel to an adjoining map room.

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When Marcel would return with the general back to his office, the real material was gone.

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And its place was a weather balloon.

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The Army called a hasty press conference. It's at this moment, according to Schmidt, that the alleged cover-up begins.

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Ladies and gentlemen, mystery solved. It's just a weather balloon device. Nothing to worry about. And the press accepted it.

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All the personnel at the base were ordered never to bring it up again, never to talk about what had transpired, and they got away with it.

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Thirty-one years later, however, the man at the center of the Roswell incident from the very beginning came forward with what he said was the real story.

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The following morning we went out to the site where the crash was. And what I saw, I couldn't believe.

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Marcel says in interviews, that's not the stuff I brought from Roswell.

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In a 1980 interview for the series, in search of with Leonard Nimoy, Marcel claims he was forced to go along with a cover-up.

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They took pictures of course, they had a whole flock of microphones there. They wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't that good, but they do that.

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So all I could do is keep a mouth shut. And General Rayme is the one who told the newspapers, I mean the newsmen, what it was and to forget about it.

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It was nothing more than an observation balloon, of course we both knew differently.

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I had never seen anything like that before. I don't know what it was. It was not anything from this earth that I'm quite sure of.

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Watching this interview with his grandchildren, you can really feel the emotion in the room. Marcel claimed the military swore him to secrecy and hid the truth.

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For his family, it was a government cover-up, plain and simple.

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Our grandpa wasn't really a public person, he didn't want the spotlight. He didn't, in fact he kind of shied away from it.

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But I really think this gave him a way to release a lot of weight on his shoulders. This was like a cleansing in a way, a way just to let off this office chest, going to kind of go where it's going to go.

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I mean he's incredibly courageous. There are very few intelligence officers who ever come forward in public about what they did. So there's a very admirable trait of bravery.

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He stood up for what he believed and he went out and he spoke to everyone and that takes guts and then to deal with the blowback.

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He felt that there was an importance for it to come out, to be seen, you know that something did occur.

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No, I think he was really upset that they made him the fall guy and that he couldn't believe that it's still at this point that it was still being covered up.

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And then I think he did want it to be out, but at the same point he knew that there were seekers that had to stay secret.

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I think grandpa wanted us to learn more. I think he was really wanted to tell everything he knew about it.

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That's the reason I think there's evidence out there that he did. We just got to get to it.

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Jesse Marcel's grandchildren hope the journal will vindicate him by revealing the truth about what really crashed at Roswell and the cover-up they say he was forced to participate in.

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Somebody come out and says, you know what, he served his country well and we apologize for making him go through this. And also my father, I want some vindication for him too.

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I probably want to have answers immediately just looking at it, but over time and as we start to build the investigation, perhaps some of these clues will come into focus.

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This could be a game changer. The rest of the story about what happened at Roswell from its most important witness.

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During his investigation, Smith will work with Joe Papalardo, a veteran journalist who specializes in aviation.

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My investigation really starts from this man here, Jesse Marcel Sr., the chief of intelligence at the 509th bomber group at Roswell Army Air Force Base.

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Jesse Marcel Sr. kept a small army portfolio of his military records and in it a small journal.

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Jesse Marcel, the man at the center of the claim that Roswell was a cover-up, kept this journal among his most important papers. Obviously it was very valuable to him. The question is, is it a key to my investigation?

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Some of the dates described in the journal capture 1947. It's a remarkable piece of history and nobody really knows about it yet.

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You're right to be excited. If this is real, if this is an actual journal from that time, it would represent a primary source document from that era. So that's the thing that you want to go after as a researcher.

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I would like to take a look at what you got to see a little bit more about this diary.

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Let me actually bring it up on the projector here.

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This is the notebook here. Right away I see a typical Army field issue notebook. So here we have a date 1946.

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This entire journal comes from when he was at Roswell.

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Correct. Our date here, we have August 31, 1947. About six weeks, seven weeks after the U.S. Army Corps put out their infamous UFO crash at Roswell flying disc.

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There's a beautiful cursive handwriting. And then if we fast forward, shift just kind of erratic mixed case blocky lettering. And I can't make sense of it.

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A couple of things leap to mind immediately when you see a change that's this drastic. It's impossible not to notice that it's different. It's either a different person writing it or it's a same person in different mindset.

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Is that by design or is that just unintentional?

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The content seems the same.

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How does the journal compare with the timeline of the incident?

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Well, there's no mention of Roswell at all. No mention of any events, no mention of any wreckage. It's just these jokes and quotes and musings and ideas captured in different handwriting. And there's only sporadic dates.

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They read like quotes from Reader's Digest. Life is what you make it until someone comes along and changes it. Two half brothers make one. Well, now that I am too old to set a bad example, I delight in giving good advice.

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So it meant something to him, but no one knows what?

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Yeah. He's a soldier. He was in charge of intelligence at the 509th. He knew a lot of secrets. He took them very seriously.

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It's kind of hard to imagine the seriousness that people back then took secrecy and took nuclear secrecy and nuclear weapons in particular. I mean, there were hordes of Soviet spies trying to get this information at the time.

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In 1947, the United States and the Soviet Union were already Cold War enemies. The U.S. possessed nuclear weapons while the Soviets did not. Major Jesse Marcel and his colleagues in the 509th bomber squadron wanted to keep it that way.

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They were basically the only nuclear bombing group in the world. He was entrusted with the biggest secrets that the military has.

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One thing that the Marcel children insist on is that their grandfather was absolutely certain that the debris that he was holding in this photo right here, the official government photos and the press release, is not the debris that he found in the field.

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I see my grandfather holding up something that he knew that wasn't what he found.

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He was adamant that this was not what he saw in the drill field.

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I see a man that is not liking what they're having him do, but he knows he has to do it because that's his job.

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That's not what he found. And at that point in time, I'm sure he kind of felt, well, maybe I'm going to be made out to be a fall guy.

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Keeping a secret is one thing, but telling a lie is another, and being the face of that lie in the newspaper could break a man like Jesse Marcel.

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That could explain the difference in the journal as well. Someone under that much stress, who knows how that manifests, it's different handwriting because in a different mental state.

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What made the writing so cryptic, and why did it suddenly change? Did it have to do with the UFO or its passengers?

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Okay, so you've got this hot piece of evidence in your hands. How do you plan on verifying that it's real?

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I think the first step is to authenticate the document itself. Is this dated to the time period or is this a recreation? If we can exclude the fact that it's a forgery, then we're winning.

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Do the forensics first to make sure that it's actually of the era?

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Another interesting question. Why did he have it? Why was it so important to him that he kept it and left it among his things to pass on to his children?

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And then the third tier is trying to figure what the hell it says.

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Yeah, exactly.

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We're cut out for you in this one.

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To further his investigation of Marcel's journal, Ben Smith contacts Jennifer Nassau, a leading handwriting expert. She will perform a forensic analysis on the document to determine if it's genuine or a forgery and also whether Jesse Marcel wrote it himself.

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I understand you worked for the Secret Service.

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I did. I completed my training with the Secret Service and worked there for a number of years.

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I used to work for the CIA, so we have a little bit of like USG connection going on.

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My name is Jennifer Nassau. I'm a forensic document examiner. And what I do is I receive documents that are in question and I analyze them to determine their authenticity.

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At the Secret Service, I authenticated a lot of the threat letters that came in. We also did a lot of work with documents that were false and forged.

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I do have a very interesting document that I need your help authenticating.

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A document belonging to the first guy on the scene of the alleged Roswell incident in 1947.

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Okay.

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The man named Jesse Marcel Sr. This could potentially hold Marcel's private thoughts about the incidents that July, about the crash, about the materials, about the potential cover up.

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So I need to determine that this is not in fact a forgery.

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If the journal was written by Jesse Marcel in 1947, could it hold the key to unlocking the mystery of Roswell?

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I do have a very interesting document that I need your help authenticating.

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Former CIA operative Ben Smith has brought Jesse Marcel's mysterious journal to a forensic document examiner for testing.

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This could potentially hold Marcel's private thoughts about the incidents that July.

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Marcel was the first investigator at the Roswell crash site. While the U.S. Army claimed the wreckage was from a weather balloon, Marcel's family alleges something different.

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That the journal may hold coded clues about what really happened.

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I would like to believe that the journal is going to give us the truth we've been looking for for the last 70 years.

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So I see most of the document is written in a cursive writing and then when you get to the end it changes to a print writing.

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Yeah.

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It may be an indication that there were two different writers in this journal. That I would have to do a more thorough examination in order to determine.

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It's important to authenticate historical documents because it can turn the tables in terms of what we know versus what we thought we knew.

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The date of the document is important to know because what I'm going to do is static dating. We know the introduction dates of certain elements of the paper or the inks.

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We can see whether or not they were available during the time that this document was reportedly produced.

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Some of the dates in the journal itself range from 1946 to 1948 and 49. So they cover the period of the Roswell incident.

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But one of my biggest concerns about this document is forgery. I want to make sure that this document is real. What can you tell me about what you've seen in forged documents?

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Have you seen forgeries of this length before?

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I have not. But there is a famous case where there were several diaries purportedly written by Hitler.

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On April 25th 1983 the West German magazine Stern announced that it was in possession of never before seen diaries written by Adolf Hitler that could rewrite the history of World War II.

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Stern had paid close to four million dollars for the diaries and sold the rights to other major publications around the world.

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Totalling 60 volumes, the writings were authenticated by several prominent historians.

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But just days before publication, the diaries were exposed as fakes.

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A forensics analysis by the West German archives quickly discovered that the diaries were made from a kind of paper and ink that wasn't even invented until after World War II.

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Their author was a prolific East German forger named Konrad Kujau, who wrote out his own confession in the style of Hitler's Pemminship.

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The way that they ended up determining that they were fraudulent is because the paper contains optical brightners that were not available until after Hitler's death.

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Interesting. You know, there's always conspiracy in every corner that I look. How long do you think it will take?

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It usually takes a few weeks.

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Oh, it does. OK.

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Especially something of this magnitude.

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While Jennifer Nassau performs a forensic analysis of the journal, Smith asks a team of archaeologists and geophysicists to meet him at the debris field.

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He hopes state-of-the-art technology will bind signs that something more powerful than a balloon crashed here.

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Even 70 years later, if we can find evidence that what crashed here was not a balloon, it could prove that Jesse Marcel was telling the truth.

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That whatever crashed here was not of this world.

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According to author Kevin Randall, the weather balloon explanation put forward by the military at that 1947 press conference,

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blindsided not only Jesse Marcel, but also Mac Brazel, the rancher who found the ranch.

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General Ramey, of course, trotted it out. It's a weather balloon.

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The problem with that is Mac Brazel knew what weather balloons looked like.

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This is Bill Brazel's memory of how his dad reacted.

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He said that's what the Air Force tried to make him believe, that it was a weather balloon.

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He said Bill, he said it was not a weather balloon.

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He said I don't want it, but...

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But he said it was something all the other different and much bigger.

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In this 1991 interview, Jud Roberts, manager of Roswell's local radio station KGFL, says that local residents were very familiar with the military's weather balloons.

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What was the general reaction to the weather balloon story?

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Hell, the weather balloons would be a lot about a block from us every night.

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So, weather balloons per se were not that interesting to us.

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If local residents were indeed familiar with weather balloons, is it likely Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer, could have mistaken a balloon for a flying saucer?

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It was definitely not a weather balloon. And it was an aircraft. So, what it could have been, I wouldn't know.

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She mentioned Roswell, and most places these days, people bring up UFOs.

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It's a question, a story, a myth that is known practically worldwide.

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Smith has asked Bill Doleman to join the team of experts at the debris field.

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Doleman is the former principal investigator for the University of New Mexico's Office of Contrary.

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He's also the director of the Interact Archaeology.

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Of all the disputed locations, this is the one that is least disputed.

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You're the only one who's actually done a dig out there, and you've done two of them.

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Doleman made two previous expeditions to the debris field in 2002 and 2006.

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But he's hopeful that using new technology might uncover fresh evidence.

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So, a potential debris site. I'm hoping that we can turn up some fresh new evidence.

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So, what hit the debris field? There are a lot of conflicting counts.

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A craft, just debris. Some people saw a meteor-like object.

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What do you recommend we do first? Start with the archaeology dig, or deploy the drone technology?

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We definitely deploy the drone technology because the archaeology comes in where they identify anomalies that we can then go investigate using standard archaeological methods.

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There isn't a U.S. government map with this mark, but I actually happened to have a journal that belonged to Jesse Marcel Sr.

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And Jesse was an intelligence officer. He was a smart guy.

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It's possible that he could have hidden some of what he knew in this journal.

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I would like to determine one way or the other if there was any evidence of a cover-up.

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If there was a debris site or an impact site and it was removed and then leveled over, we might be able to see something like that.

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I am finally back at the Roswell debris field.

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It's kind of hard to believe that a place this abandoned and a quiet could be the birthplace of ufology in the United States or in the world, actually.

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The term ufology refers to the study of UFOs and for some, Roswell is the most important UFO because it is the site where an alien spaceship allegedly crashed to Earth.

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With Roswell, you have the best elements of all UFO cases, crash sites, physical bodies recovered, and then all the eyewitness testimony on top of that.

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It's just this big mystery. Did it happen? What was it? That's still not solved. It's hard to write it off.

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And so you're left with this big question about something of incredible potential significance.

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This is the famous back-o-trench 103.

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So this would be what ufologists considered the actual furrow in the ground where some kind of craft made contact with the Earth.

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You were here in 2002. You conducted an archeological dig here right in this furrow.

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Yeah, and the furrow runs that way supposedly. There are nails, big nails and rebar spikes in the ground marking the grid system that we used for locational control in 2002.

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Archeologists are the crime scene investigators of the past. We treat archeological sites just the way a CSI treats a crime scene to use our methods to look for the evidence of it.

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122.8.

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Those methods are about to get a serious upgrade. Joining the team are two Canadian geophysicists, Colin Meisga and Eric Johnson, who will deploy 21st century technology to investigate abnormalities in the terrain.

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So density altitude 6770 feet.

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This may be the best equipped team ever to answer the question that has stumped generations of investigators. What kind of airborne vehicle crashed outside of Roswell?

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I'd like to find additional proof of that impact zone. What crashed here and how heavy it was and at what velocity?

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At the Roswell crash site, Ben Smith and a team of experts are using state of the art equipment to find possible evidence that Jesse Marcell may have been telling the truth that what crashed landed here was no weather balloon.

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It makes the most sense to start here and then widen the search from there.

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One curious aspect is that weeks before that early July day, when Marcell found what he believed was the wreckage of a flying saucer, there were a huge number of headlines making UFO sightings in the area.

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At the local radio station, Jud Roberts remembers fielding dozens of callers reporting UFOs.

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I knew who were highly respectable and saw some of these things and they had no reason to forget anybody about standing on the side of their pickup and watching these lights go back and forth up in the middle.

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Dad looked up in the west and saw an object that came down and had lights blinking and it was rather frightening to him.

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In 1947, Paul Wilmont's elderly parents were sitting on their porch when they were sure they saw a flying saucer.

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He said all of a sudden it seemed to rock a little bit and started to counterbalance itself, wiggle a little bit, then seemed to settle down and take off at rapid rate of speed.

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Then came Roswell, the event that would become the Holy Grail of Ufology, a discovery that would be proof for many that aliens had visited the earth.

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In truth, there is no agreement on what day the crash occurred. UFO investigator Don Schmidt believes it was July 2nd.

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On the late evening of July 2nd, 1947, there was a severe lightning storm in the central high desert of Lincoln County.

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All ranchers go out on the porch to see where it's raining. My husband, he had to stand out there and see where it was raining.

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There was so much thunder and lightning that I begged him to come to the house and finally there was this terrible thunder clap and he came in and he says, boy, that hit something.

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People think about desert as just pure dry and most of the time it is, but once that moisture starts creeping in, all it needs is something to lift it and that's going to give you incredible thunderstorms.

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Witnesses describe not only the storm, but between the thunder claps, they heard what sounded like an explosion and then seeing something in the northern portion of the sky.

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A large red pole sliding like came directly at us and all I could think of was that it was a plane that was in trouble.

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While there is no definitive proof about what crashed in the field 75 miles west of Roswell, no one disputes that it was rancher Mack Brasil who made the first discovery while taking his sheep to pasture.

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Ranching in New Mexico would be very focused on the monsoon season and so a rancher, they'd be watching for those storms and watching where the rain chefs come down because their cattle or whatever they're raising needs water.

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There was a young boy who was with Mack Brasil, the son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor. His name was Timothy D. Proctor. D. as he was called.

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Mack happened to stumble upon this huge debris field, strange, unusual wreckage.

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Mack had found huge field filled with metallic debris and he was annoyed because A. he didn't know who's going to clean it up and B. he had to drive the sheep around it to get him to water.

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They would not cross it. They were either spooked or they sense something else coming from the wreckage.

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Mack then takes D. Proctor back to his parents and he presents some of the material to the proctors.

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He showed us this piece that looked like plastic or wood of some kind and he said that there was some metallic looking stuff that when you crushed it it just straightened right back out.

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It wouldn't, you know, wouldn't stay crushed.

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According to Roswell author and researcher Don Schmitt, Loretta Proctor was the first person to see samples of the debris that Mack Brasil brought back from the fields.

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Well, we told him it's probably a UFO and he should report it.

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Mack Brasil was convinced by his neighbor that he should take it into Roswell.

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Mack would take samples of the debris to Wade's Bar in Corona and present pieces there to fellow ranchers, his friends, his neighbors.

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The small farming community of Corona was only 15 miles from the debris field.

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It would be Mack Brasil's first stop before going on to Roswell.

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Mack Brasil came to Corona and talked to my dad about the debris that he had found out on the foster ranch.

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The material was as thin as a wrapper on a lucky strike package which he couldn't break it.

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And if you twisted it and scrunched it up together it would come back to its own.

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He had no idea what it was and they said, I bet you have one of them UFOs we've been reading about.

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Mack Brasil was convinced by his neighbor that he should take it into Roswell and show it to the sheriff.

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But Brasil is still responsible for the ranch and it isn't until the end of the week, Sunday, his day off that he finally makes the trek.

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The 75 mile drive into Roswell to present it to the sheriff, George Wilcox.

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Lieutenant George Wilcox had been the county sheriff for 20 years.

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Most of his work involved locking up drunks and settling disputes between ranchers over livestock and grazing rights.

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Mack Brasil brought in two boxes of wreckage.

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Sheriff George Wilcox handled and observed the material firsthand.

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The sheriff immediately suggested that Mack Brasil would report this to the Roswell Army Airfield, the 509th bomb group.

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It sounds like a matter they need to know about most urgently.

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It was that call to the 500th knife that led its commander to dispatch Jesse Marcell, his intelligence officer, to investigate the strange report.

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I had never seen anything like that before and as of now I don't know what it was.

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When Marcell returned to the air base and showed colleagues pieces of the debris he'd collected, base commander William Blanchard made the decision to go public and issue that famous press release.

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Late this afternoon a bulletin from New Mexico suggested that the widely publicized mystery of the flying saucers may soon be solved.

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With the story of the flying disc making international news, Mack Brasil didn't see any harm in being interviewed by the local radio station.

377
00:47:42,000 --> 00:47:53,000
That morning reporters from KGFL and Roswell brought Mack Brasil over to the radio station to finally tell the world the truth about what had happened.

378
00:47:53,000 --> 00:48:04,000
The military was waiting for him. They nabbed Brasil and they would then hide him out at the base for the next five full days.

379
00:48:05,000 --> 00:48:18,000
He would later complain he felt like he was in jail, that they had asked him the same questions over and over and over again, 24 hours around the clock, over a weather balloon.

380
00:48:19,000 --> 00:48:29,000
According to alleged eyewitness accounts, in the days that followed the military swept through Roswell and Corone, threatening scores of individuals who heard Brasil's story.

381
00:48:30,000 --> 00:48:37,000
These local residents were warned to keep quiet or they could be charged with treason which carried the death penalty.

382
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:45,000
The whole neighborhood was scandalized that the army, that the services would treat people like that.

383
00:48:46,000 --> 00:48:54,000
The military reportedly used Brasil to walk back the previous day's front page story that a flying saucer had crashed.

384
00:48:55,000 --> 00:49:06,000
Days later Brasil was escorted by the military, taken to the newspapers, taken to the two radio stations, but specifically KGFL.

385
00:49:06,000 --> 00:49:15,000
When Frank Joyce, reporter, meets Mac Brasil in two his dismay, Brasil only describes a weather balloon.

386
00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:21,000
Joyce sees the two MPs and is like, oh, now I see what's happening.

387
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:27,000
Agents or agencies or people unknown wanted him to change off of the original story.

388
00:49:28,000 --> 00:49:34,000
And in his total frustration, Joyce takes him off the air.

389
00:49:35,000 --> 00:49:41,000
Right at that point, the little green men and that's where he said, yeah, only they weren't green.

390
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:55,000
At the Roswell crash site, Smith is with a team of experts searching for evidence of the wreckage found here in 1947.

391
00:49:56,000 --> 00:50:01,000
The best plan for us would be to start getting our multispect data going out of the area.

392
00:50:02,000 --> 00:50:07,000
We can cover a broad area, get the highest resolution, most up-to-date aerial imagery.

393
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:09,000
We also have the multispectral camera.

394
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:11,000
Oh, cool. So you can do both at once?

395
00:50:12,000 --> 00:50:17,000
Yeah, so in one flight we're getting multispectral imagery and the regular RGB.

396
00:50:17,000 --> 00:50:25,000
Until now, no one has ever used this technology here. Whatever we find, we'll know more about this place than anyone ever has.

397
00:50:26,000 --> 00:50:32,000
We want to look for unnatural features. We want to look for straight lines and that impact and then that skid mark kind of thing.

398
00:50:33,000 --> 00:50:38,000
So the common thought spot is just down in this area.

399
00:50:39,000 --> 00:50:45,000
Archaeologist Bill Doleman gives the geophysicists some never-before-seen images of the area.

400
00:50:46,000 --> 00:50:56,000
By comparing an aerial photograph of the terrain taken just months before the Roswell incident to one taken seven years later, the team can identify distinct changes.

401
00:50:57,000 --> 00:50:58,000
Look at that.

402
00:50:59,000 --> 00:51:00,000
Wow, that is.

403
00:51:01,000 --> 00:51:02,000
Here's the original location of interest.

404
00:51:02,000 --> 00:51:08,000
And then there's a big linear feature that we're interested in.

405
00:51:11,000 --> 00:51:21,000
Just 800 meters from where Jesse Marcell examined the debris, the 1954 photo shows what could be several long furrows carved into the earth.

406
00:51:22,000 --> 00:51:35,000
There are delineations in the soil from a northwestern to a southeastern direction that match witness descriptions of something falling from the sky, hitting the earth, skipping and scattering debris.

407
00:51:36,000 --> 00:51:38,000
That's what we see in the aerial footage.

408
00:51:40,000 --> 00:51:49,000
I want to throw everything we got now at that new site. What can we bring to exploit these linear features here?

409
00:51:49,000 --> 00:51:51,000
We'll send the drone over there for sure.

410
00:51:52,000 --> 00:51:58,000
If the team can show something with more force and velocity than a weather balloon hit here, it would be a major discovery.

411
00:52:02,000 --> 00:52:07,000
At any time there's differences in soil, different vegetation can arise.

412
00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:13,000
And if there's something that doesn't look natural in the vegetation that we pick up in the multi-spectral, we'll see that very well.

413
00:52:14,000 --> 00:52:20,000
So the drone is going back and forth, taking thousands of photos across parallel lines across the whole site.

414
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:32,000
So here we have the aerial photography collected by the drone on the entire site.

415
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:36,000
Then we can turn on the multi-spectral imagery.

416
00:52:36,000 --> 00:52:45,000
So we have the reds are little to no vegetation. Blue is going to be kind of dense vegetation and kind of everything in between.

417
00:52:46,000 --> 00:52:50,000
But after hours of searching, the team gets disappointing news.

418
00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:56,000
At the moment we're not picking up any distinct feature near the furrow.

419
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:05,000
So the multi-spectral imaging didn't really show us the anomalies other than trenches that we've already done.

420
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:07,000
Yeah, nothing that can't be unexplained at the moment.

421
00:53:08,000 --> 00:53:11,000
The team concludes the archival image had a defect.

422
00:53:12,000 --> 00:53:15,000
What else can we throw at that puzzle to figure out what happened?

423
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:22,000
Really what we have right now is surface information. So we need to get boots on the ground, get subsurface information.

424
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:29,000
Next, Colin Meisge will use a magnetometer, a tool that can detect changes in the Earth's magnetic field.

425
00:53:30,000 --> 00:53:36,000
So something really hot hit the Earth and heated up the surrounding soil.

426
00:53:37,000 --> 00:53:46,000
It basically hits the reset button on the Earth's magnetic field of that soil and it'll take on the Earth's magnetic field at the time as it cools back down.

427
00:53:47,000 --> 00:53:50,000
So this thing is going to pick up anything with iron, magnetite.

428
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:53,000
And then what else do you have left in your toolbox?

429
00:53:53,000 --> 00:54:01,000
We've got the ground penetrating radar and the gamma ray spectrometer to measure for radioactive material.

430
00:54:02,000 --> 00:54:09,000
So anything that's been in really high altitude or space is going to be exposed to a lot more radiation.

431
00:54:10,000 --> 00:54:16,000
That radiation is going to stay with that material and then it's going to give a strong signature when it hits the ground. It's going to stay there forever.

432
00:54:24,000 --> 00:54:33,000
Colin hopes to pick up a strong magnetic signal in the vicinity where rancher Mack Brazel first came across the debris.

433
00:54:37,000 --> 00:54:41,000
It's enough metal to basically max out the sensor.

434
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:47,000
We did find an interesting anomaly. As we were walking around I was doing the magnetometer survey.

435
00:54:47,000 --> 00:54:55,000
So now this is the magnetometer. You can see all these high spots. Those are all the metal pins in the ground. They're really, really high responses.

436
00:54:56,000 --> 00:55:01,000
The most interesting thing was something up here. Definitely an interesting magnetic anomaly that I want to investigate.

437
00:55:02,000 --> 00:55:10,000
So could this be one of those instances where the heat of an impact could change the magnetism of the soil around it or beneath it?

438
00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:12,000
Potentially, yeah, absolutely.

439
00:55:12,000 --> 00:55:26,000
Many hours into their search, Colin finds something exciting. A patch of ground with unusually high magnetic readings. It's an anomaly that could provide groundbreaking new evidence of what crashed here.

440
00:55:27,000 --> 00:55:31,000
So given its possible depth, is that agent out of our 70 year time span?

441
00:55:32,000 --> 00:55:39,000
I won't be able to say until we start digging and I'm going to leave that to the archaeologists to start dating as they dig down.

442
00:55:39,000 --> 00:55:45,000
So this was one of the high points hovering between 10, 15 nano teslas per meter.

443
00:55:46,000 --> 00:55:55,000
Colin marks the perimeter of the anomaly so that archaeologist Esperanza Juarez can collect soil samples to analyze for radiation traces.

444
00:55:57,000 --> 00:56:03,000
Run your line along the major axis. Definitely hitting right over top of this spot.

445
00:56:03,000 --> 00:56:08,000
So the flags here outline the general shape of the anomaly?

446
00:56:09,000 --> 00:56:22,000
Exactly. And conveniently enough, it's the same orientation as Bill's original furrow. If we keep the UFO crash site in mind, it's like something hit here.

447
00:56:23,000 --> 00:56:26,000
Maybe there was slightly more minerals that could become magnetized in this area.

448
00:56:26,000 --> 00:56:36,000
And then as it kind of skidded, it still was hot enough to cause that magnetization, but maybe there's just slightly less particles in that spot.

449
00:56:36,000 --> 00:56:38,000
So there's a slightly weaker signature.

450
00:56:41,000 --> 00:56:51,000
After stringing a grid across the site of the anomaly, Esperanza begins her work, collecting a range of samples and documenting the location of each.

451
00:56:52,000 --> 00:56:56,000
The strongest signature was over in this square right here?

452
00:56:56,000 --> 00:56:57,000
Yes.

453
00:56:57,000 --> 00:56:58,000
OK.

454
00:56:58,000 --> 00:57:00,000
And then plus, I've also taken a soil sample.

455
00:57:00,000 --> 00:57:05,000
The team wants to rule out routine earthly causes for the anomaly.

456
00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:11,000
No clear signs of a campfire or like a prehistoric site or anything like that.

457
00:57:11,000 --> 00:57:16,000
So we've eliminated a volcanic anomaly.

458
00:57:16,000 --> 00:57:18,000
That's out. There's just no volcanic.

459
00:57:18,000 --> 00:57:22,000
We've eliminated a campfire anomaly. There's no firehards.

460
00:57:22,000 --> 00:57:31,000
So we're still looking at that. The most likely candidate for this anomaly right now is the remnant magnetization due to heat.

461
00:57:31,000 --> 00:57:34,000
The soil will be able to tell you the time frame.

462
00:57:35,000 --> 00:57:47,000
So the idea is that we test the soil and if the magnetism of that soil matches 1947, then we know that something potentially an impact froze its signature to 1947.

463
00:57:47,000 --> 00:57:48,000
Yeah.

464
00:57:50,000 --> 00:58:00,000
The soil and rock samples will be sent to a lab where they will be analyzed to see if they contain metals not from this area and possibly not from this world.

465
00:58:01,000 --> 00:58:20,000
While he waits for the soil analysis to be completed, Ben goes to visit the grandson of Mack Brasil, the rancher who took his sheep into the field looking for water but found crash debris.

466
00:58:20,000 --> 00:58:27,000
It was Mack who alerted the military and according to local legend was then detained and threatened to keep quiet.

467
00:58:28,000 --> 00:58:35,000
Joe Brasil lives a few miles outside of Roswell and has avoided journalists and researchers for years.

468
00:58:35,000 --> 00:58:36,000
Hello.

469
00:58:36,000 --> 00:58:47,000
With no proof about what crashed, spaceship, weather balloon or something else, Ben believes Joe might have a piece of the puzzle that could help unravel the mystery of Roswell.

470
00:58:49,000 --> 00:58:52,000
Thanks for taking the time to meet with me.

471
00:58:53,000 --> 00:58:59,000
Joe rarely talks about how the Roswell incident impacted his family but he's agreed to meet me.

472
00:58:59,000 --> 00:59:21,000
The Roswell incident recently has popped up in my research as one of the more credible phenomenon to investigate and in particular the first people to encounter the debris on the field, your grandfather Mack being the patient zero, the first person to encounter this debris makes a huge impact.

473
00:59:22,000 --> 00:59:32,000
People close to him, especially important to the investigation and I would love to hear about some of the details you inherited from your father and from your grandfather Mack.

474
00:59:33,000 --> 00:59:36,000
Well, everything I heard was from my dad.

475
00:59:36,000 --> 00:59:37,000
Okay.

476
00:59:37,000 --> 00:59:49,000
You know, he told me what he knew and what he experienced with it and then you know what had Mack, you know, the few things that he said after he came back to Roswell.

477
00:59:49,000 --> 00:59:58,000
I think if you really want to hear what my dad had to say, you know, we have a clip that you can watch, you know, and then we can talk a little bit more about it after that.

478
00:59:58,000 --> 01:00:00,000
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hear.

479
01:00:03,000 --> 01:00:10,000
Joe Brazell's dad, Bill, was Mack's son. He was interviewed in 1989 by Japanese television.

480
01:00:11,000 --> 01:00:23,000
I was not out at the ranch at the time and I picked up an Albuquerque paper and here's my dad's picture looking at me and I thought, well, I wonder what he's done now.

481
01:00:24,000 --> 01:00:38,000
My dad was living in Albuquerque and what he found out about it. Well, he went to the ranch because he knew that his dad was gone and he went down there to actually take care of the stock and the army had it blocked off.

482
01:00:38,000 --> 01:00:44,000
They had a detachment out there picking up the pieces and everything and wouldn't let him in.

483
01:00:44,000 --> 01:01:03,000
The Air Force had asked him to stay in Roswell and I went out to the ranch and stayed until he got back and I asked him what he'd got into and oh, he says I found a bunch of trash.

484
01:01:04,000 --> 01:01:15,000
And I kept asking him questions and he said, well, I told the Air Force I wouldn't tell anybody. He said, you probably better off without knowing.

485
01:01:17,000 --> 01:01:28,000
After the army did their thing and you know, dad was down there helping Mack on the ranch, you know, rainstorms or whatever they'd be riding, they'd see a little piece and he'd pick it up.

486
01:01:28,000 --> 01:01:33,000
So, and of course riding horseback, you see lots of things, you know.

487
01:01:33,000 --> 01:01:41,000
And I picked up a few scraps and the army hadn't picked up.

488
01:01:43,000 --> 01:01:50,000
And I made them and I'd bring them in my Shaps pocket and put them in a cigar box down at the barn.

489
01:01:50,000 --> 01:01:57,000
His description of some of this stuff is like tinfoil but it was, you know, just a lot tougher.

490
01:01:57,000 --> 01:02:02,000
And he'd bend it over like a crease and it'd straighten right back out.

491
01:02:02,000 --> 01:02:10,000
This is the way my dad put it to me. It's material that he never saw before or ever saw again.

492
01:02:12,000 --> 01:02:19,000
Bill Brazel's decision to collect his own souvenirs eventually brought the military to his door, just as it had with his father.

493
01:02:20,000 --> 01:02:27,000
The debris was confiscated and military police told him to keep quiet about what he knew and had seen or he would face arrest.

494
01:02:29,000 --> 01:02:37,000
The debris that he had collected was confiscated by the military police or somebody from the base.

495
01:02:37,000 --> 01:02:39,000
He just said two guys in a car.

496
01:02:39,000 --> 01:02:41,000
Two guys in a car.

497
01:02:41,000 --> 01:02:43,000
That's all he ever told me.

498
01:02:43,000 --> 01:02:45,000
See whether they were government.

499
01:02:45,000 --> 01:02:51,000
He just said that there's two guys that showed up in a car and they said they weren't going to take it but they weren't leaving without it.

500
01:02:51,000 --> 01:02:53,000
Did they ever identify themselves?

501
01:02:53,000 --> 01:02:54,000
No.

502
01:02:54,000 --> 01:02:55,000
Well, that's...

503
01:02:55,000 --> 01:03:01,000
You know, and the other thing you got to understand is that Matt gave his word. He wouldn't talk about it.

504
01:03:01,000 --> 01:03:07,000
You know, and his dad, if he gave his word, that kind of extended to him as well.

505
01:03:07,000 --> 01:03:08,000
Right.

506
01:03:08,000 --> 01:03:18,000
I don't mean to misinterpret your father's claims, but I did want to ask, was there anything ever in your life that would make you question what your dad saw?

507
01:03:18,000 --> 01:03:19,000
No.

508
01:03:19,000 --> 01:03:25,000
Nothing about his character? Nothing about his mental stability or his emotions?

509
01:03:25,000 --> 01:03:26,000
No.

510
01:03:26,000 --> 01:03:27,000
Okay.

511
01:03:27,000 --> 01:03:32,000
I like to explain my dad this way and myself. What you see is what you get.

512
01:03:32,000 --> 01:03:33,000
Mm-hmm.

513
01:03:33,000 --> 01:03:41,000
He's not going to tell you something to your face that isn't true or, you know, tell you something and then go tell somebody else something else.

514
01:03:41,000 --> 01:03:42,000
Right.

515
01:03:42,000 --> 01:03:43,000
Yeah.

516
01:03:43,000 --> 01:03:52,000
There's a rumored intelligence, as we say in the business, that Mac or your bill, your dad hid some of the material on their property.

517
01:03:52,000 --> 01:03:56,000
And some might even claim here on this property.

518
01:03:57,000 --> 01:04:08,000
One of the most persistent rumors about Joe's father is that despite surrendering the cigar box, he managed to hide a few shards of the wreckage somewhere on this property.

519
01:04:08,000 --> 01:04:18,000
To just to get a little more specific, I think there was a claim at one point that there was perhaps some debris buried under a cement slab on the old Brazzel property.

520
01:04:18,000 --> 01:04:19,000
Yeah.

521
01:04:19,000 --> 01:04:23,000
And I wanted to know, is there any truth to that story?

522
01:04:23,000 --> 01:04:25,000
Why don't I just show you where that slab is?

523
01:04:25,000 --> 01:04:26,000
Lead the way.

524
01:04:26,000 --> 01:04:33,000
If Joe still has a piece of what he believes his dad took from the debris field, it could be a bombshell development.

525
01:04:33,000 --> 01:04:37,000
They hid it underneath this house, right here.

526
01:04:38,000 --> 01:04:55,000
Investigator Ben Smith is meeting with Joe Brazzel, the reclusive grandson of Mac Brazzel, the rancher who first stumbled upon the mysterious crash debris at Roswell, but never spoke publicly about how the army threatened him into silence.

527
01:04:55,000 --> 01:04:58,000
He said he gave his word that he wouldn't talk about it.

528
01:04:58,000 --> 01:05:01,000
He said very little about it after that.

529
01:05:01,000 --> 01:05:08,000
Jesse Marcell also never disclosed everything he'd seen or the full story of the cover-up.

530
01:05:08,000 --> 01:05:10,000
They hid it underneath this house.

531
01:05:10,000 --> 01:05:23,000
Meanwhile, back in New York, handwriting expert Jennifer Nassau is doing a test to try and authenticate the journal that belonged to Marcell and could contain the secrets of Roswell.

532
01:05:23,000 --> 01:05:33,000
This is the journal I was given as a question document to compare the handwriting of Jesse Marcell, but it's not just handwriting.

533
01:05:33,000 --> 01:05:37,000
I'm looking at a lot of elements to help try to solve this puzzle.

534
01:05:37,000 --> 01:05:40,000
The first thing I do is I look at the paper.

535
01:05:40,000 --> 01:05:50,000
I use specialized equipment in order to analyze to see what might be in the paper, and that might help to date the document.

536
01:05:50,000 --> 01:05:59,000
I then look under my microscope and determine what type of writing instrument was used to create this document.

537
01:05:59,000 --> 01:06:12,000
In order to conduct a handwriting analysis, I do a side-by-side comparison between the question and the known, in this particular case, Jesse Marcell, and determine whether or not there are similarities or differences.

538
01:06:12,000 --> 01:06:23,000
For example, the formation of the lowercase p had a very tall introduction stroke, which dropped down below the baseline and then wrapped around to form the bowl of the p.

539
01:06:23,000 --> 01:06:30,000
And that p is found throughout the entirety of the question document.

540
01:06:30,000 --> 01:06:34,000
Jennifer Nassau is trying to determine whether the journal is genuine or fake.

541
01:06:34,000 --> 01:06:43,000
The first step before decoding its meaning to learn if it might change what we know about Roswell.

542
01:06:43,000 --> 01:06:45,000
Back in New Mexico...

543
01:06:45,000 --> 01:06:47,000
So tell me a little bit more about this house here.

544
01:06:47,000 --> 01:06:52,000
This house was built in 1902, so it's kind of in rough shape.

545
01:06:52,000 --> 01:06:56,000
Smith has reached what he hopes will be the most interesting part of his visit.

546
01:06:56,000 --> 01:07:01,000
I asked Joe about the rumor that there might still be some debris hidden on his property.

547
01:07:01,000 --> 01:07:08,000
The story goes that Bill Brazel, Joe's dad, might have kept some of the debris as souvenirs.

548
01:07:08,000 --> 01:07:14,000
Some researchers have claimed that your father or Mac might have buried something or hidden it under a cement slab.

549
01:07:14,000 --> 01:07:22,000
Yeah, well I can show you right here. This is where the rumor was that this house, they hid it underneath this house.

550
01:07:22,000 --> 01:07:31,000
And as you can see right here, there is no foundation. There is no cement slab under this house.

551
01:07:31,000 --> 01:07:33,000
Yeah, looks just like dirt under there.

552
01:07:33,000 --> 01:07:43,000
It is. In fact, when this house was first built, of course they put the hardwood floors in, but this is built on the dirt.

553
01:07:43,000 --> 01:07:54,000
The only slab that was ever put in this house, as far as this rock slab right here for the old fireplace.

554
01:07:54,000 --> 01:07:55,000
Yeah.

555
01:07:55,000 --> 01:08:03,000
That's it. And there's nothing under there that's on dirt. It's been there since 1902, long before the UFO.

556
01:08:03,000 --> 01:08:04,000
Yeah.

557
01:08:04,000 --> 01:08:11,000
I could put the rumor to rest that there's nothing underneath this cement slab here, because there is no cement slab.

558
01:08:13,000 --> 01:08:20,000
There's no truth to that rumor whatsoever. When they took that cigar box he had, they took everything he had.

559
01:08:20,000 --> 01:08:26,000
I guarantee you if there had been something buried underneath this house, my dad would have dug it up a long time ago.

560
01:08:26,000 --> 01:08:35,000
How do you think the rumor about debris hidden under this cement slab that is not here sort of impacted the way your dad approached the story?

561
01:08:35,000 --> 01:08:41,000
What it did was it put a fear into him that something might happen to one of his family members.

562
01:08:41,000 --> 01:08:42,000
Yeah, that's true.

563
01:08:42,000 --> 01:08:48,000
Because they focus on the monetary and think he has a piece of it and it's worth so much money.

564
01:08:48,000 --> 01:08:49,000
Right.

565
01:08:49,000 --> 01:08:59,000
And then so he got real reluctant about talking about it, and therefore you don't really get at the truth because you're always trying to fight and debunk the rumors.

566
01:08:59,000 --> 01:09:09,000
You've confirmed a lot of things for me that I think is pretty fascinating. One, the integrity and the quality of the person that your father and your grandfather, the people that they were.

567
01:09:09,000 --> 01:09:20,000
And two, that you've confirmed some things in the timeline for me that make me think that it's reasonable for me to continue the search, continue to use resources.

568
01:09:20,000 --> 01:09:28,000
Well, something happened because they spent a lot of money trying to figure out what happened and they spent a lot of money hiding what really did happen.

569
01:09:28,000 --> 01:09:36,000
Is there any other information that I could use to help me in my investigation to get to that ground level truth?

570
01:09:36,000 --> 01:09:42,000
There's some other people you can talk to you, but I don't feel comfortable telling you on camera.

571
01:09:42,000 --> 01:09:47,000
Okay. Would you mind typing their names into my phone so at least I could.

572
01:09:47,000 --> 01:09:49,000
I'll give you one name.

573
01:09:50,000 --> 01:09:58,000
Joe Brazel doesn't have any crash degree, but he does have something else. The name of someone Ben Smith has never heard of.

574
01:09:58,000 --> 01:10:06,000
Someone Smith hopes can bring this investigation closer to the truth.

575
01:10:07,000 --> 01:10:23,000
Following up on a promising lead from Joe Brazel, Ben Smith is on his way to a senior center in the farming community closest to where the debris was found.

576
01:10:23,000 --> 01:10:29,000
He hopes the local residents who gather for lunch every day will have memories they'd be willing to share.

577
01:10:29,000 --> 01:10:34,000
Well, I've got all the village elders around the table here today.

578
01:10:34,000 --> 01:10:41,000
I wanted to learn a little bit more about your perspective on what happened in that early July 1947.

579
01:10:41,000 --> 01:10:51,000
My father-in-law, he was on top of a windmill tower working and this was about the same time that this supposed incident happened.

580
01:10:51,000 --> 01:11:02,000
He said there was something that came at him out of the sky. There was really no noise and he was afraid it was fixing to cut his head off.

581
01:11:02,000 --> 01:11:11,000
So he went running down the windmill and he said it was just a flash. It was there and he just like to never got out of the way quick enough.

582
01:11:11,000 --> 01:11:16,000
And then when he looked up, it was going gone.

583
01:11:16,000 --> 01:11:20,000
That's not a story that I have not heard in connection to the events before.

584
01:11:20,000 --> 01:11:29,000
It hasn't been out a whole lot. He's for it by it. When this man said something, he was truthful.

585
01:11:29,000 --> 01:11:35,000
I have a lot of questions. There's some characters here that are involved in this incident in 1947. Do you remember Mack Brazel?

586
01:11:35,000 --> 01:11:40,000
I've seen that. That's the one I'm talking about, the UFO fold? I remember Mack.

587
01:11:40,000 --> 01:11:43,000
Oh, you do? Can you tell me what you remember about Mack?

588
01:11:43,000 --> 01:11:44,000
He was cowboy.

589
01:11:44,000 --> 01:11:55,000
Mack had a reputation for being honest. He had a reputation for working hard. He just was a hard working cowboy.

590
01:11:55,000 --> 01:12:04,000
Cheryl Perkins' parents owned the drugstore from which Mack Brazel called the sheriff to report finding some strange crash debris in his grazing fields.

591
01:12:05,000 --> 01:12:13,000
Mack Brazel goes to the Du Bois Pharmacy and he makes the phone call with your mother, Geraldine.

592
01:12:13,000 --> 01:12:20,000
Mack calls the sheriff and from there, that's really the first time that information gets transmitted to the public.

593
01:12:20,000 --> 01:12:26,000
I'm curious whether you overheard any of these details and what you recall from that whole sequence of events.

594
01:12:26,000 --> 01:12:32,000
I remember conversations about it, but probably was not there when that call was made.

595
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:38,000
The main thing that I remember my parents talking about was they certainly believed that something happened.

596
01:12:38,000 --> 01:12:44,000
Do you recall your mother ever talking to Mack Brazel about what he saw out in the field?

597
01:12:44,000 --> 01:12:46,000
I think that did not happen.

598
01:12:46,000 --> 01:12:47,000
Oh, really?

599
01:12:47,000 --> 01:12:54,000
It would have been natural for him to have followed up with, yeah, I had to go to Roswell and stay for three nights.

600
01:12:54,000 --> 01:13:00,000
Or yeah, I did this or yeah, I did that. He didn't say anything.

601
01:13:00,000 --> 01:13:04,000
It just didn't stand a reason that they wouldn't have talked about it.

602
01:13:04,000 --> 01:13:05,000
Right.

603
01:13:05,000 --> 01:13:07,000
So something happened after they took him to Roswell.

604
01:13:07,000 --> 01:13:19,000
My daddy was a World War II veteran and when the government says you don't talk about something, you didn't talk about anything.

605
01:13:19,000 --> 01:13:23,000
And that was my theory as to why it was never talked about.

606
01:13:23,000 --> 01:13:29,000
The ethos, the attitude at the time, like you said was, look, this is your duty not to say anything and to follow orders.

607
01:13:29,000 --> 01:13:33,000
And so keep your mouth quiet about anything that might have happened here.

608
01:13:33,000 --> 01:13:37,000
And the general attitude was it was not a weather balloon.

609
01:13:37,000 --> 01:13:39,000
If there was anything, it wasn't that.

610
01:13:39,000 --> 01:13:41,000
It was not a weather balloon. No, it was not.

611
01:13:41,000 --> 01:13:44,000
What about the Proctor family?

612
01:13:44,000 --> 01:13:47,000
Well, D, Proctor was in my class.

613
01:13:47,000 --> 01:13:51,000
Started first grade together and graduated from high school together.

614
01:13:51,000 --> 01:13:56,000
D Proctor was the young boy who was with Mack Brazel when he found the wreckage.

615
01:13:56,000 --> 01:14:02,000
Brazel would allegedly take D home and show his mother some of what they found.

616
01:14:02,000 --> 01:14:10,000
There was some metallic looking stuff that when you crushed it, it just straightened right back out.

617
01:14:10,000 --> 01:14:12,000
It wouldn't, you know, wouldn't stay crushed.

618
01:14:12,000 --> 01:14:18,000
Well, we told him it was probably a UFO and he should report it.

619
01:14:18,000 --> 01:14:21,000
D was seven when all of this happened.

620
01:14:21,000 --> 01:14:29,000
And D's sister told me for positive sure that he was with Mack Brazel.

621
01:14:29,000 --> 01:14:37,000
Looking back on it and knowing for sure that D was with Mack, he never ever talked about it.

622
01:14:37,000 --> 01:14:42,000
So that makes me think for sure something happened.

623
01:14:42,000 --> 01:14:46,000
I do believe that people purposely kept quiet about what happened

624
01:14:46,000 --> 01:14:49,000
because I think they were probably threatened by the government

625
01:14:49,000 --> 01:14:54,000
or their sense of patriotic duty was appealed to and they said,

626
01:14:54,000 --> 01:14:59,000
don't say anything about this because if it's true and they were truly aliens,

627
01:14:59,000 --> 01:15:02,000
then we think everybody is going to panic.

628
01:15:06,000 --> 01:15:11,000
Has anybody that you know personally ever claimed to have found a piece of this debris?

629
01:15:11,000 --> 01:15:18,000
I do know one name of a man who supposedly had several pieces of debris.

630
01:15:18,000 --> 01:15:24,000
And I haven't heard his name mentioned at all today, so I'm not mentioning it either.

631
01:15:24,000 --> 01:15:28,000
Why the hesitancy to share with me his name?

632
01:15:28,000 --> 01:15:30,000
It's privacy.

633
01:15:30,000 --> 01:15:36,000
I don't know I can ask if they would be willing to talk, but I can bet you that they would not.

634
01:15:36,000 --> 01:15:38,000
Put in a good word for me.

635
01:15:38,000 --> 01:15:39,000
I will.

636
01:15:39,000 --> 01:15:40,000
I will.

637
01:15:40,000 --> 01:15:46,000
We're still pretty private about protecting the people who have been most affected.

638
01:15:49,000 --> 01:15:55,000
As I was leaving, one of the seniors slipped me the name of someone related to another eyewitness.

639
01:15:55,000 --> 01:16:02,000
The Roswell incident is like an intricate puzzle and I finally feel like the pieces are starting to fall into place.

640
01:16:10,000 --> 01:16:16,000
Investigator Ben Smith heads to the office of handwriting expert Jennifer Nassau,

641
01:16:16,000 --> 01:16:24,000
who has spent nearly a month doing a forensic examination of the journal to find out if it is genuine or a fake.

642
01:16:24,000 --> 01:16:34,000
With him is Jesse Marcel's grandson, who believes the journal may contain the intelligence officers coded secrets about what really happened at Roswell.

643
01:16:35,000 --> 01:16:43,000
It's fascinating and potentially helpful to solving, you know, for me, the larger story about the Roswell incident.

644
01:16:43,000 --> 01:16:53,000
I just can't imagine he wouldn't leave some kind of evidence, some writings of some kind, about what was a very, very important event.

645
01:16:53,000 --> 01:16:54,000
Right.

646
01:16:54,000 --> 01:16:57,000
This might be that piece of the puzzle.

647
01:16:57,000 --> 01:16:58,000
Jennifer?

648
01:16:58,000 --> 01:16:59,000
Hi.

649
01:16:59,000 --> 01:17:00,000
Hey.

650
01:17:00,000 --> 01:17:01,000
Nice to see you again.

651
01:17:01,000 --> 01:17:02,000
Good to see you.

652
01:17:02,000 --> 01:17:03,000
This is Jesse.

653
01:17:03,000 --> 01:17:04,000
Hi, Jesse.

654
01:17:04,000 --> 01:17:05,000
Jennifer Nassau.

655
01:17:05,000 --> 01:17:06,000
Nice to meet you.

656
01:17:06,000 --> 01:17:07,000
Jennifer Nassau.

657
01:17:07,000 --> 01:17:08,000
Follow me.

658
01:17:08,000 --> 01:17:09,000
I'll show you what I've been doing.

659
01:17:09,000 --> 01:17:10,000
Great.

660
01:17:10,000 --> 01:17:24,000
So I looked at the writing ink lines of every passage in the journal and I'll show you under magnification.

661
01:17:24,000 --> 01:17:29,000
You can see a little bit better image of the ink line.

662
01:17:29,000 --> 01:17:32,000
This is consistent with non-ballpoint pen ink.

663
01:17:32,000 --> 01:17:33,000
Oh, okay.

664
01:17:33,000 --> 01:17:38,000
And the way I can tell is you can see the ink line, how the ink kind of bleeds into the paper fibers.

665
01:17:38,000 --> 01:17:39,000
Sure.

666
01:17:39,000 --> 01:17:45,000
Whereas in ballpoint pen, the pen ink is more viscous and so it kind of sits a little bit more on top of the paper.

667
01:17:45,000 --> 01:17:49,000
Here is an example of ballpoint pen ink.

668
01:17:49,000 --> 01:17:50,000
Okay.

669
01:17:51,000 --> 01:18:00,000
And the characteristics commonly seen with ballpoint pen ink is you don't see that ink bleed into the paper and kind of sits more on top and has a sheen to it.

670
01:18:00,000 --> 01:18:01,000
Okay.

671
01:18:01,000 --> 01:18:07,000
And on curvatures, you see what we call burst striations that move from inside to outside on a curve.

672
01:18:07,000 --> 01:18:14,000
So what I'm seeing throughout the document that the entirety of the document is created with that non-ballpoint pen ink.

673
01:18:14,000 --> 01:18:15,000
Okay.

674
01:18:15,000 --> 01:18:19,000
That is consistent with the time period which this document is reportedly created.

675
01:18:19,000 --> 01:18:20,000
Yes.

676
01:18:20,000 --> 01:18:26,000
The next thing I looked at was the paper itself and what I'm looking for are optical brightners.

677
01:18:26,000 --> 01:18:27,000
Okay.

678
01:18:27,000 --> 01:18:35,000
Optical brightners are added in the paper manufacturing process and it's to make the paper look nice and bright and bright.

679
01:18:35,000 --> 01:18:40,000
So the way to look for optical brightners is to look under UV radiation.

680
01:18:40,000 --> 01:18:45,000
And what should happen if it contains optical brightners is that the paper should luminous.

681
01:18:45,000 --> 01:18:48,000
It should glow under UV.

682
01:18:48,000 --> 01:18:52,000
Here I'll put the journal in so you can see.

683
01:18:52,000 --> 01:19:00,000
And just to give you a comparison, I'll put a document which I know contains optical brightners under right on top.

684
01:19:00,000 --> 01:19:01,000
Wow.

685
01:19:01,000 --> 01:19:04,000
So that technology began in around 1950.

686
01:19:04,000 --> 01:19:05,000
Correct.

687
01:19:05,000 --> 01:19:09,000
Well that makes sense because I think the last date that I saw in the journal was like 1948.

688
01:19:09,000 --> 01:19:15,000
So professional opinion and the evidence showing that it was created before 1950 anyway.

689
01:19:15,000 --> 01:19:16,000
Yes.

690
01:19:16,000 --> 01:19:19,000
It is consistent with documents that were produced during that time period.

691
01:19:19,000 --> 01:19:20,000
Great.

692
01:19:20,000 --> 01:19:21,000
Okay.

693
01:19:21,000 --> 01:19:26,000
So did you find anything like a watermark that might also provide a clues about the time period?

694
01:19:26,000 --> 01:19:27,000
Right.

695
01:19:27,000 --> 01:19:36,000
So there is no logos or insignia on either cover or in the pages which would indicate the company that manufactured this document.

696
01:19:36,000 --> 01:19:43,000
However, when I looked with transmitted light shining through the document, there is a watermark present on the document.

697
01:19:44,000 --> 01:19:46,000
In looking at...

698
01:19:46,000 --> 01:19:47,000
Oh, yeah, I see it.

699
01:19:47,000 --> 01:19:49,000
You can see the watermark.

700
01:19:49,000 --> 01:19:59,000
And on the top, looking through several pages and being able to piece it together, the top actually says Juniata, J-U-N-I-A-T-A.

701
01:19:59,000 --> 01:20:01,000
So curiosity got the better of me.

702
01:20:01,000 --> 01:20:02,000
Okay.

703
01:20:02,000 --> 01:20:07,000
And a quick internet search revealed that Juniata is a university in Pennsylvania.

704
01:20:07,000 --> 01:20:08,000
Interesting.

705
01:20:08,000 --> 01:20:10,000
That was the area where my grandfather went through intelligence school.

706
01:20:10,000 --> 01:20:11,000
In Pennsylvania.

707
01:20:11,000 --> 01:20:12,000
Yeah.

708
01:20:12,000 --> 01:20:13,000
He went to intelligence school in Pennsylvania.

709
01:20:13,000 --> 01:20:14,000
Yeah.

710
01:20:14,000 --> 01:20:17,000
He was actually a member in the very first class of the very first intelligence school.

711
01:20:17,000 --> 01:20:18,000
Oh, really?

712
01:20:18,000 --> 01:20:21,000
When he finished that class, he turned around and they had him teach that class to the...

713
01:20:21,000 --> 01:20:22,000
Oh, I did read that.

714
01:20:22,000 --> 01:20:25,000
And again, it was written in the same area where this paper came from.

715
01:20:25,000 --> 01:20:26,000
And that was in what year?

716
01:20:26,000 --> 01:20:27,000
1940?

717
01:20:27,000 --> 01:20:29,000
It had been 41, 42, something like that.

718
01:20:29,000 --> 01:20:31,000
Yeah, it was after the war and I already started it.

719
01:20:31,000 --> 01:20:32,000
Exactly.

720
01:20:32,000 --> 01:20:34,000
Yeah, he joined really right after Pearl Harbor.

721
01:20:34,000 --> 01:20:40,000
To sum up, this document does appear to be consistent with the time period with which

722
01:20:40,000 --> 01:20:41,000
it's reported to be written.

723
01:20:41,000 --> 01:20:43,000
It's half the battle right there.

724
01:20:43,000 --> 01:20:49,000
So I did a hand-write comparison with the journal and the known specimens I had for Jesse Marcel.

725
01:20:49,000 --> 01:20:56,000
Now, I will say that in flipping through the journals, the handwriting did appear to be

726
01:20:56,000 --> 01:20:57,000
freely and naturally executed.

727
01:20:57,000 --> 01:20:58,000
Okay.

728
01:20:58,000 --> 01:21:02,000
It does not appear to be deliberate or hesitant in its execution.

729
01:21:02,000 --> 01:21:09,000
There is one feature that I'll point out and that is the capital letter M, where it is

730
01:21:09,000 --> 01:21:14,000
written almost like three sevens attached.

731
01:21:14,000 --> 01:21:17,000
So this is in the printed section.

732
01:21:17,000 --> 01:21:23,000
This M does appear in the cursive section from time to time.

733
01:21:23,000 --> 01:21:28,000
Oh, it's just like it.

734
01:21:28,000 --> 01:21:30,000
It is stunning news.

735
01:21:30,000 --> 01:21:34,000
Both the cursive script and the print were written by the same person.

736
01:21:34,000 --> 01:21:38,000
The journal is genuine.

737
01:21:38,000 --> 01:21:42,000
Next on Roswell, the first witness.

738
01:21:42,000 --> 01:21:45,000
The Roswell incident is real.

739
01:21:45,000 --> 01:21:48,000
The investigation moves into uncharted territory.

740
01:21:48,000 --> 01:21:52,000
It negates the skeptical arguments about the Roswell case.

741
01:21:52,000 --> 01:21:55,000
With new leads that have never been explored before.

742
01:21:55,000 --> 01:21:58,000
It actually raises more questions than answers that.

743
01:21:58,000 --> 01:22:04,000
Was the mysterious journal Jesse Marcel kept secret, written in code, to hide its meaning from the government?

744
01:22:04,000 --> 01:22:08,000
To a cryptographer, this indicates a certain kind of cipher.

745
01:22:08,000 --> 01:22:12,000
Or was it something more sinister that forced Jesse Marcel into silence?

746
01:22:12,000 --> 01:22:16,000
He said there are things that this world is not ready for.

747
01:22:16,000 --> 01:22:21,000
The impact site remains of the craft and the body's recovered.

748
01:22:21,000 --> 01:22:25,000
What else was Jesse Marcel hiding from the world?

749
01:22:25,000 --> 01:22:27,000
I know I've got to just pin it.

750
01:22:27,000 --> 01:22:29,000
32 years without saying anything else.

751
01:22:29,000 --> 01:22:33,000
The investigation uncovers shocking possibilities.

752
01:22:33,000 --> 01:22:35,000
You think the debris could still be at the house?

753
01:22:35,000 --> 01:22:37,000
I know it could, babe.

754
01:22:37,000 --> 01:22:41,000
Could it change what we know about Roswell?

755
01:22:41,000 --> 01:22:43,000
I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

756
01:22:43,000 --> 01:22:46,000
Thanks for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.