The problem for me was that at first Jesse didn’t remember the precise date of the incident. Yet his story was credible, and it whetted my curiosity. I knew that the summer of 1947 had been a very busy flying saucer time, beginning with the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting in June, and escalating over the next few weeks. But I really didn’t have enough to go on at that point.

And so, after speaking with Jesse, I filed the story in my gray basket and shared it with Bill Moore, whom I had known because we had both earlier been active in the UFO Research Institute of Pittsburgh back in the late 1960s. Bill had moved to Minnesota and I was living in Hayward, California, and lecturing all over. A few months later, after a lecture to a packed hall which I gave at Bemidji State College in Bemidji, Minnesota, I was quietly approached, at my table of papers, by Vern and Jean Maltais, who asked if I had heard anything about a crashed saucer in New Mexico. I said I had heard something, but wanted to know more. They spoke of the experience of their friend Grady “Barney” Barnett, who had worked for the soil conservation service out of Socorro, New Mexico. Barnett had seen a crashed saucer and strange bodies, and was chased off by the military along with some college people who were also there. But the Maltaises didn’t have an exact date either. I obtained phone and address contact information from them and the next day I passed them on to Bill Moore, who was then teaching in Minnesota.

Bill found a third story about a crashed saucer in New Mexico in the English magazine, Flying Saucer Review. This story was about an English actor, Hughie Green, who had heard a story on the radio while driving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He was able to pin down the date as early July, 1947, as such trips were not very common back then. Bill went to the Periodicals Department at the University of Minne­sota Library and found the story. This was a real boost, as it named other people that were involved and vali­dated what Jesse had said. On July 8, 1947, many evening newspapers all over the US carried the very exciting story of a crashed saucer (sometimes called a disc) recovered by a rancher outside Roswell.

This began an intensive research effort that lasted for years for Bill and me. In 1980 the first book, The Roswell Incident by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz (of Bermuda Triangle fame) was published. Bill and I had done most of the work finding 62 people in those preinternet times. By 1985 we had published about five papers, presented mostly at annual meetings of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. We had spo­ken with 92 people. We both had spoken to Dr. Jesse Marcel and had been very favorably impressed.

Around 1988 a rather strange TV broadcast called, UFO Cover-up? Live, done in Washington, D.C., had been set up by Bill, working with Jaime Shandera, a Hollywood TV producer. Jesse was brought in for it, as was I. At the time I was living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, and Bill was living in Southern California.

I’d actually known Jaime for quite a few years. He had contacted me before I moved to New Brunswick, and had brought Bill in to help with do­ing a script for short-lived movie project. They con­tinued to work together and keep me informed across the land. Meanwhile, in 1978, I had been heavily in­volved as co-script writer, technical advisor, and on location for the production of UFOs Are Real, a 93­minute documentary for Group One of Hollywood. Major Marcel was one of the people we interviewed, and that’s when I finally went to Houma to meet Jesse in person.

Considering that the military group at Roswell was the 509^th Composite Bomb Group, the most elite mili­tary group in the world, that is absurd. They had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . They had hand-picked officers and hand­picked men and high security. Some debunkers have foolishly claimed that Colonel Blanchard must have been sent to Siberia for putting out that stupid story. In actuality he received four more promotions. At the time of his death of a massive heart attack in May 1966, he was a four-star general and vice chief of staff of the US Air Force.

Another common question has been, “If security was so tight, how come Jesse Marcel was blabbing to a ham radio buddy and to UFO lecturer Stan Fried­man?” That’s not the case at all. Truth be told, years after my meeting with the TV station guy, I finally asked him what Jesse had actually told him about what happened. His answer was, “I asked him about the story and he said that was something he couldn’t talk about.” He had read the story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, which mentioned that Jesse was from Houma. The most important witnesses, such as Jesse, Walter Haut, then-Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose, the rancher Mac Brazel, and others all were mentioned in the contemporary press coverage. They didn’t ask for publicity, but once they got it, they could hardly deny their involvement. However, Cavitt, whom Moore and I located by 1980, wasn’t mentioned in 1947, and kept avoiding telling anything useful until he gave false testimony to Colonel Richard Weaver about what he had found. Weaver’s massive 1994 volume, The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, provided many “official lies” about the Mogul Balloon explanation about what had happened, as did the “crash test dummy” explanation of a sec­ond volume, The Roswell Report: Case Closed.

Frankly, I was very pleased to be asked to con­tribute the forward to Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr.’s book. The story needs to be told by somebody of such high in­tegrity as Dr. Marcel, someone who was so close to the long-ago events and people involved in them. He makes the people come alive.

The world has waited a long time for the inside scoop on Roswell. Truth is an excellent curative for false proclamations. The Roswell crashed saucer re­trieval is one of the most important UFO cases ever, anywhere. We need more information from those di­rectly involved, and this book provides a good deal of important new material.