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Thank you for your response re the etiology of the Roswell "flying saucer" debris, which I photographed in General Ramey's office on July 8, 1947. I have seriously and diligently tried to locate ANY evidence that the debris I photographed was anything OTHER than the debris gathered up by Major Marcel on the ranch near Roswell. I have been totally unable to unearth ANY evidence whatsoever to support the "balloon switch" theory.

I have had conversations at length with the only two other individuals still living who saw and actually touched the debris -- Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., Irving Newton. Jesse Jr. recalls that his dad told him that at least some of the debris in General Ramey's office was the "real stuff" and Irving Newton says there is no doubt in his mind that the debris he saw and examined in Ramey's office was the same that Marcel brought from New Mexico. Newton also told me that Marcel followed him around the general's office that afternoon trying to get him to examine closely the symbols on some of the "sticks" that Marcel believed were "not of this world".

I also have discussed this point carefully and at length with several of the major Roswell writers, including Stan Friedman, Kevin Randle, Bill Moore and Philip Klass. None of them have advanced ANY real evidence that there was any "switch" or "dummying" of the real Roswell debris.

Marcel's role in the Roswell Event apparently was not fully reported until he was interviewed by Stan Friedman and Bill Moore about 30 years later. This is reported in "The Roswell Incident," written by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz, and published in 1980. In that account Marcel was asked:

"Do you think that what you saw was a weather balloon?"

Marcel replied:

"It was not. I was pretty well acquainted with most everything that was in the air at that time, both ours and foreign. I was also acquainted with virtually every type of weather-observation or radar tracking device being used by either the civilians or the military. It was definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile. What it was we didn't know.

We just picked up the fragments. It was something I had never seen before, or since, for that matter. I didn't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't anything built by us and it most certainly wasn't any weather balloon." (page 72.) As far as I know Marcel never changed that statement.

Later in the Moore-Berlitz book Marcel says:

"...that next afternoon we loaded everything into a B-29 on orders from Colonel Blanchard and flew it all to Fort Worth... Just after we got to Carswell, Fort Worth, we were told to bring some of this stuff up to the general's office -- that he wanted to take a look at it.

We did this and spread it out on the floor on some brown paper." (I certainly can vouch for that statement, William, since I helped to spread it out on the general's carpet in trying to pose a decent photo of the junk.)

Marcel continued: "What we had was only a very small portion of the debris -- there was a whole lot more. There was half a B-29-ful outside. General Ramey allowed some members of the press in to take a picture of this stuff. They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less interesting metallic debris... the stuff in that one photo was pieces of the actual stuff we had found. It was not a staged photo." (pages 74-75.) (Actually, I took two pictures of Marcel, which have been reproduced in numerous books published since that time. No other pictures have surfaced of him.)

The "balloon switch" story apparently stemmed from an additional comment from Marcel:

"Later, they cleared out our wreckage and substituted some of their own. Then they allowed more photos.... I was not in these. I believe there were taken with the general and one of his aides." (page 75.) It is obvious that the intervening 30 years had dimmed the memory of Marcel. A close observation of the photos I took of him, General Ramey and Colonel Dubose all clearly show the SAME debris displayed just as I had posed it. There was NO switch of ANY of the material.

So, William, unless you or someone else has some real EVIDENCE to the contrary -- not just speculation -- I am afraid that the "balloon switch" fable must remain just that.

James Bond Johnson, Ph.D.

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