Reviewing the Weird: The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore
This side of ghost stories, more UFO books have been published than any other Weird subject, including the John F. Kennedy assassination – and the latter is hard to top. All kidding aside, among the library of UFO chronicles, there exists a sub-niche focused on “The Roswell Incident,” the 20th-century granddaddy of UFO crash tales. Those who have written texts on Roswell include Kevin D. Randle and Don Schmitt (UFO Crash at Roswell, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell), Stanton Friedman (Crash at Corona), Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt (Witness to Roswell), and Nick Redfern (Body Snatchers in the Desert). All have contributed significantly to our understanding of the infamous alleged UFO crash. In fact, some of these investigators have unearthed a conga line of witnesses whose tales have problematized our understanding of the event and pushed it into the realm of Mondo-Weird.
The Roswell Incident (1980) by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore is one book that preceded the above volumes and is seldom mentioned today. The Berlitz/Moore text was the first to provide a detailed examination of the New Mexico crash – and perhaps give it the pop culture name we use to identify it. (Frank Scully’s 1950 volume, Behind the Flying Saucers reported a New Mexico UFO crash, but the book was hastily written, and Scully relied heavily on hoaxers’ testimonies.) Though a slim volume, The Roswell Incident shouldn’t be overlooked by those interested in ufology in general and the alleged 1947 saucer crash in particular.
The Berlitz/Moore text is well-written and concise. That should come as no surprise, since one of its writers was an author and teacher who spoke 32 languages and whose family owned the respected Berlitz School of Languages. Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle (1974) stirred the curiosity of millions with its bizarre stories of airplane and ship disappearances in the region between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Not content with starting one paranormal tsunami, Berlitz launched another with The Roswell Incident. While someone else may have ended up writing Jesse Marcel’s story of the Roswell crash, Berlitz and William Moore beat them to it.
The Roswell Incident commits to print the basic narrative of the crash. It’s a tale that has since been retold countless times in books and documentaries: how rancher Mac Brazel discovered a mile of strange debris scattered across a field on the Foster Ranch, prompting him to drive 75 miles to report it to the Roswell sheriff. Soon after, the military got involved. The rest is debatable history.
Over the years, the saucer crash story has grown more elaborate, thanks to scores of alleged witnesses. These individuals were struck by either crises of conscience or the prospect of monetary gain. Whatever their motive, the Roswell story has certainly been good for tourism. In the decades since The Roswell Incident was published, Roswell has become one of the nation’s most popular tourist attractions. If you want extraterrestrial celebrations, histories, and souvenirs, go to Roswell, especially during the city’s annual summer UFO Festival.
That’s today. When the Berlitz/Moore book was first published in 1980, Roswell was still pretty much a non-descript metropolis. We can thank famed ufologist and nuclear physicist, Stanton Friedman, and Colonel Jesse Marcel, Sr. (a major at the time of the alleged crash) for rescuing the event from the realm of forgotten history.
It was Friedman who in 1978 tracked down and first interviewed Marcel, the first military officer to accompany rancher Brazel to the Foster Ranch to inspect and retrieve the wreckage.
Marcel made it clear that he didn’t see any space aliens or banged up saucers at the ranch; nevertheless, what he found was most unusual and not a weather balloon. (Weather balloons would soon factor largely into the military’s explanation for the debris.) The unusual materials included pieces of metallic beams that looked like balsa wood but couldn’t be broken or burned; countless fragments of a dark plastic substance that wasn’t plastic; and shards of a wafer-thin metal that when folded would return to a smooth flat shape.
Jesse Marcel wasn’t the only one to recognize the strangeness of the materials. Upon examining the recovered remains back at the airbase, Colonel William Blanchard ordered public information officer Walter Haut to release the infamous writeup announcing to the Roswell community – and indeed, the world – that the Army Air Forces had captured a flying saucer.
The story didn’t last long without being radically altered. Hours after the explosive article was published in the Roswell Daily Record and newspapers the world over, Brigadier General Roger Ramey held a Ft. Worth press conference and insisted that what was found in New Mexico was a weather balloon (as if Major Marcel couldn’t have distinguished the odd debris from a regular weather balloon; such devices were launched frequently in the region).
Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt deserve credit for expanding on the material that Charles Berlitz and William Moore introduced. Ditto Stanton Friedman, who aside from getting Jesse Marcel to talk, provided us with a detailed volume recounting the event. Thomas Carey and Don Schmitt have written on the subject and produced the greatest number of witness testimonies. Yet with The Roswell Incident, Berlitz and Moore set the table upon which others have layered a feast of facts and supposition. The book introduces us to the foundation story, Major Marcel, rancher Brazel, press agent Walter Haut, and others. We hear Jesse Marcel make the astonishing claim that at least one of the iconic photos taken during the Ft. Worth press conference shows him holding an actual piece of crashed saucer metal. We hear Barney Barnett topping Marcel’s story when he tells of stumbling upon a crashed saucer near Magdalena, New Mexico, just as an archeological team of university students arrives on the scene. Together, they inspect the wreckage and small dead alien bodies.
Most intriguing to me are the witness stories in The Roswell Incident. Though fewer than those found in future volumes, these early unadorned narratives seem more convincing than some of the wild tales shared in later Roswell studies. I am fascinated by Jesse Marcel’s no nonsense revelations; by his son Jesse Marcel Jr. (himself, a physician and decorated military pilot) and his recollections of handling the alleged alien-craft material when his father brought it home before delivering it to the base; by rancher Mac Brazel’s practical motive for reporting the event in the first place: his sheep weren’t crossing over the material to the other side of the field; by former Wright-Patterson worker Norma Gardner’s deathbed revelation that while working at the air base in 1955, she typed a manifest that catalogued over a thousand recovered UFO artifacts and alien bodies. Even incidental short tales in the book, such as the one told by local hardware dealer Dan Wilmott and his wife, are valuable. It was their story that may provide a definite date for the event. According to the Wilmotts, it was shortly before 10 p.m. on July 2, 1947, as they sat on their front porch, that they first saw “a big glowing object zoom[ing] out of the sky from the southeast.” These and many other stories make The Roswell Incident a valuable book, despite the more detailed investigations that followed it.
I began this review by mentioning a few Roswell UFO books that came after The Roswell Incident. I’d like to add to these The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You to Know by Karl K. Korff (1997) and Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe by Karl T. Pflock (2001). These texts offer strong rebuttals to the idea that anything extraterrestrial dropped out of the sky near Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. They too should be considered when assessing the famed event. (After all, Top Secret Project Mogul balloons, designed to detect faint soundwaves set off by Russian nuclear tests, hardly looked like ordinary weather balloons.)
I’ve been fascinated by ufology since I was 10 years old and my beloved Aunt Lupe gave me her copy of Edward Ruppelt’s The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956). (The book still holds proud placement on my ufology bookshelves.) The Roswell Incident amped my passion for the subject when it first appeared. Other fine studies by fine investigators have fueled this fire – but I still believe that to fully understand the events that occurred in Roswell in July 1947, it’s worth taking a spin through The Roswell Incident.
– Oscar De Los Santos
Works Cited and Consulted
Berlitz, Charles and J. Manson Valentine. The Bermuda Triangle. New York: Doubleday, 1974.
Berlitz, Charles and William L. Moore. The Roswell Incident. New York: Grosset & Dunlap,
1980.
Carey, Thomas J. and Donald R. Schmitt. Witness to Roswell (Revised Ed.). Weiser: 2009.
Korff, Kal K. The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You to Know. Amherst, NY:
1997.
Pflock, Karl T. Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Amherst, NY: Prometheus,
2001.
Randle, Kevin D. & Donald R. Schmitt. UFO Crash at Roswell. New York: Avon, 1991.
—. Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell. The. New York: 1994.
Redfern, Nick. Bodysnatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell
Story. Gallery Books, 2005.
Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Doubleday, 1956.
Scully, Frank. Behind the Flying Saucers: The Truth About the Aztec UFO Crash. Inner Light, 2012 (reprint; originally published in 1950).