All language subtitles for Historys Greatest Mysteries S01E02 1080p AMZN WEB-DL DDP5 1 H 264-SLAG_track3_[eng]

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- Tonight on "History's
Greatest Mysteries":
and may contain
mature subject matter.

The Roswell investigation goes
into uncharted territory.

Previously, a cryptic journal
may hold vital clues

to what crashed near
Roswell in 1947.

It belonged to an Army
intelligence officer

who inspected the wreckage

and was sure
it was extraterrestrial.

- It was not anything
from this Earth.

That I'm quite sure of.

Fishburne: But the Army said

it was a routine
weather balloon.

Decades later, that officer,
Jesse Marcel,

said he was forced to lie.

- But all I could do
was keep my mouth shut.

[flash bulb crackles]

Fishburne: His family hopes
a former CIA investigator

will find the truth,

which might be hiding
inside the mysterious journal.

- What I'm seeing throughout
the document is consistent

with that time period.

Fishburne:
It has been authenticated

by a forensic document expert,

but what does the strange
writing mean?

I'm Laurence Fishburne.

As our mystery continues, a
famed cryptologist

examines the journal
for signs of a code.

Is there a message the writer

wanted the world to hear?

And can new technology read
the words of a memo

from a photograph
taken after the Roswell crash?

- If this document says
"victims of the wreck,"

it negates
the skeptical arguments

about the Roswell case.

Fishburne: And tracking down
the family

of alleged eyewitnesses

who say they already
know the truth.

- There were little people
walking around,

and there were some dead
and some alive.

What really happened
at Roswell, New Mexico,

an event that has obsessed
the world?

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[ominous music]

- It's difficult to determine
whether or not

those are three
numerical sevens

or whether they are meant
to form a capital letter M.

♪ ♪

- What's the date of that page?
- August 31, 1947.

- That's interesting.

Your grandpa would have been
in Roswell at that point.

- He would have been
in Roswell, yes.

Fishburne: Former
CIA investigator Ben Smith

has returned to the office
of Jennifer Naso,

one of America's top
handwriting experts.

Joining Smith
is Jesse Marcel's grandson,

who believes his grandfather
was torn between his duty

as an intelligent officer
to keep secrets

and a hunger to tell people
what he really saw.

- I think my grandfather
really wanted to tell

everything he knew about it.

I can't believe for a second

that he was gonna let
the story die with him.

Fishburne: For more than
a month,

Naso has been analyzing
the puzzling journal

that Marcel kept among
his most valuable papers.

She has determined
that the journal was written

during the time period
of the Roswell incident.

♪ ♪

- It's this great mystery.

Why did Jesse
keep this journal?

What could it tell us
about Roswell,

which he said was the defining
event of his life?

- So what then have you
learned about the handwriting?

- So I did a handwriting
comparison with the journal

and the known specimens
I had for Jesse Marcel.

So here is the lowercase
P formation...

- Okay.
- Where it starts going up,

comes down, forms a loop

and ends to create
the hole of the P.

- Okay.

- Here is the known specimen
writing I had of Jesse Marcel.

And here's a P in "Japanese."
- Yeah.

- And it does not have
that high approach,

coming around to loop
and finishing with the P,

whereas that is seen
throughout this document,

so it's a constructural
significant difference

that I'm seeing.

- So this journal
was not written

in Major Marcel's handwriting?

- Not based on the known
writing I had for comparison.

Fishburne:
It is astonishing news.

Jesse Marcel is not
the author of the journal.

- There's no proof indicating
a hoax or a forgery...

- Mm-hmm.

- Or that it's anything
but an important document

to your grandfather in Roswell
at the time.

- At the time.
- Yeah.

- It actually raises more
questions than answers, then.

- Yeah.

♪ ♪

This is intriguing.

The paper and ink
are from the right period,

but Jesse is not the author
of the journal,

so why did he keep it
under lock and key

for so many years?

Fishburne: Unlocking
the secrets of the journal

will take more investigating.

- If it's not my grandfather's
handwriting, whose is it?

Fishburne: Who wrote it,
and what does it mean?

Is it a code
that can be deciphered?

To find out more,

Ben Smith heads to the photo
archive of a major university.

He's hoping to find
supporting evidence

to verify Marcel's story

that whatever crashed at
Roswell was extraterrestrial.

♪ ♪

- I'm at the University
of Texas Arlington,

where the keep
the original negative

of the infamous Ramey photo.

Fishburne: That photo
of the press conference

staged by General Roger Ramey

has long intrigued
investigators.

His colleague
General Thomas Dubose

is holding up a piece
of a weather balloon,

which Ramey tells reporters
is what really crashed

in Roswell,
but look more closely.

In his hand, Ramey is holding
a memo, too blurry to read,

that some believe could
confirm Jesse Marcel's story

of a flying saucer.

♪ ♪

- I'm here to meet
Kevin Randle

to learn about the history

of all the analyses
conducted on this photo

and also to figure out,
what more can we do

to decipher the message
on that memo?

Kevin.

- Ben.
- It's so nice to meet you.

- Good to meet you too.
Grab a chair.

- Sure.

Fishburne: Kevin Randle
has written

more than 80 books

and is a former
intelligence officer

and lieutenant colonel
in the Iowa National Guard.

Among ufologists,
he's considered

one of the preeminent experts
on the Roswell crash.

- The Ramey memo
is an interesting part

of the Roswell incident
because it's a photo

of potential debris
with Jesse Marcel.

- It's important because

we have a provenance for it.
- Right.

- We can say, "This picture
was taken on July 8, 1947,

in General Ramey's office."

We've got the time.

We know who
the photographer was.

We know who all
the participants were.

Fishburne: On July 7, 1947,

Jesse Marcel returned
to Roswell Army Airfield

with what he thought was
debris from a flying saucer

that crashed on a remote ranch
75 miles to the west.

After viewing
the strange material,

the base commander
for the 509th,

Colonel William Blanchard,

decided to issue
a press release.

- The press release shows up--

newspapers all over
the country, obviously.

"Fort Worth Star-Telegram"
gets it.

They say,

"Head out to the base,
to see what's going on.

They've got a flying saucer."

[dramatic music]

Fishburne: News of a flying
saucer set off alarm bells

at 8th division headquarters,

so the next day,
General Roger Ramey held

that famous press conference
to set the record straight.

- General Ramey is the one
who told the newsman

it was nothing more than
a weather observation balloon.

Of course, we both knew
differently.

♪ ♪

- The only reporter
in the room

is J. Bond Johnson,

and he's communicating
with the general,

and he poses Marcel with it

but apparently doesn't ask him
any questions,

or if he does ask him
questions,

Ramey would answer them.

- He told me
not to say anything.

He says, "I'll handle it
from now on,"

and that's exactly
what he did.

It was definitely not
a weather balloon.

What it could have been,
I wouldn't know.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Jesse Marcel's
grandchildren

believe he was completely
blindsided

by General Ramey's
press conference.

- I see my grandfather holding
up something that he knew

that wasn't what he found.

- He was adamant that this
was not what he saw

in the debris field.

Fishburne: The controversy
over what crashed near Roswell

has made this photo the
subject of intense scrutiny.

♪ ♪

- You know what we ought to do
is take a look at the thing,

give you an idea of exactly
what we're talking about

so that you can see
what's been done.

- Yeah, let's do that.

- People have been looking
at this document

for literally decades

trying to determine
what this memo says.

The problem
with the Ramey memo

is it's taken
at a slight angle.

It's crunched in his hand,
so it's got some folds in it,

so we're trying to interpret
the negative in such a way

that we don't read into it
what we want to read into it.

Right here by the thumb

is the words
"Fort Worth, Texas."

- At Fort Worth, Texas, yeah.

- Very critical given the time
of the photograph.

You move down here,

toward the very end
of the--the memo,

toward the very end
and to the right side,

you can see it says
"weather balloons"...

- Oh, yeah. Look at that.
- As well.

- You really can.
Weather--weather balloons.

- So that gives us an idea
what the document is about.

It's not the laundry list.
It's not a grocery list.

It has to do with what's
going on there in Roswell.

The other thing that is
important is right down here,

we have one word.

Now, if we can determine
what that word is,

that might tell us something.

If it's Ramey, then this is
a document that was prepared

by General Ramey,
and that provides us

with a little bit
of information about it.

- Mm-hmm.

- Some people
interpret it as "Temple."

Oddly, Temple was a codename
of J. Edgar Hoover.

- No case ever ends
for the Federal Bureau

of Investigation
until it is solved

and closed with
the conviction of the guilty

or the acquittal
of the innocent.

Fishburne: It would not
be surprising

if the memo referred
to J. Edgar Hoover,

the legendary 37-year director
of the FBI.

- No clue, no matter

how seemingly unimportant,
can be overlooked.

Fishburne: He'd been pushing
for the FBI to have access

to the Army's
investigation of Roswell

but had been turned down.

In a note dated July 15, 1947,

just days after the crash,
Hoover contemplated the idea

of creating a special FBI unit
to investigate UFOs.

"I would consider it,"
Hoover wrote, adding that,

"We must insist on full access
to the disc recovered."

♪ ♪

- But the important
part of this

is this sentence right here.

It could be
"victims of the wreck."

"Victims" take us in one
direction, suggest something.

Could be "viewing of
the wreck," totally different.

If there's victims,
that implies a flight crew,

and a flight crew
implies an alien spacecraft

because there's no flight crew
in a weather balloon.

- The previous press release
put out the day before

didn't mention anything
about victims.

- If this document says
"victims of the wreck,"

it negates an awful lot
of the skeptical arguments

about the Roswell case.

- I think there's some new
technology we can bring

to get down
to the micron level

and really bring out the text

to decipher
the meaning of the memo.

- Anything like that
would be great

because what we need to know
is what it says.

[suspenseful music]

Fishburne: The photo archive
at the University of Texas

at Arlington
holds 4.5 million negatives,

most of which are stored
at 38 degrees Fahrenheit

to prevent them
from deteriorating.

- So why does the Ramey
photo negative

need to be stored
in cold conditions?

- It's in that very
vulnerable time period

from the 1930s
to the 1950s or so.

Those acetate negatives
in particular,

stored in regular
room temperatures,

will deteriorate.

♪ ♪

All right.

♪ ♪

Here it is. Okay.

It has--it's identified as
Brigadier General Roger Ramey,

left,
and Colonel Thomas J. Dubose

looking over the wind
forecasting device.

- Wind forecasting, aha.
- Yes, yes.

There are also pictures
of weather balloons

that are included

in this series of negatives...
- Right.

- Because that's what
they were saying it was.

- Fascinating.
- Yeah.

♪ ♪

- Wow.

So the memo is just,
what, 1/4 of an inch long?

- Abo that, and it's folded,

so you can't see
the whole thing.

- Yeah. I'd like to actually
bring in some analysts

with some new technology
called GIGAmacro photography.

- Sure.
- Using a microscope

to actually look at
the sublevels of the negative.

Fishburne: It will be the most
powerful microscope

ever used to read
the words in the memo,

and if Ben Smith can bring
into focus the word "victims,"

it could expose
one of the greatest

cover-ups in history.

♪ ♪

Coming up...

- My grandfather went out,

and when he got there,
he saw the spaceship.

- It was much more than just
debris and strange wreckage.

There were also remains.

There were also bodies.

Fishburne: Was this
the military secret

that forced Jesse Marcel
into silence?

- Someone might choose him
because he was

the fall guy for the incident.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Ben Smith has
gotten exclusive permission

from the University of Texas
photo archive

to analyze the negative
of a 70-year-old image.

It was snapped at the Army
press conference

where Jesse Marcel
said he was forced

to go along with a cover story
that a weather balloon,

not a flying saucer,
crashed near Roswell.

- General Ramey is the one
who told the newsman

it was nothing more than
a weather observation balloon.

Of course, we both knew
differently.

- How's it going?
- Good.

Fishburne: Smith has traveled
here with Gene Cooper,

an expert operator
of the GIGAmacro,

a powerful microscope
that will be used

to try to read the blurry memo
in General Roger Ramey's hand.

- This Ramey photo
is a piece of history

that you won't find
anywhere else.

I'm excited I get to see it
with my own eyes.

I don't get to touch it,
but I do get to use

the latest technology
to peer into it

at the molecular level
to see if we can decipher

whatever message
is in that memo.

[suspenseful music]

My goal is to read the memo
in General Ramey's hands.

This will spark
a lot of controversy,

but if we can figure out
what it says,

we can perhaps solve
the Roswell mystery.

- So what we're gonna do
is we're gonna get down

into the grains
of the emulsion.

We're gonna go up to 80,000 DPI

with the camera system
that we have here.

♪ ♪

It's gonna take a series
of focal stacks,

which is bringing all those
depths of field into view.

We're gonna merge
all those together.

We're gonna then do it over
the entire area of that memo

and then see what we find.

- And nobody's done it
to this photo yet.

No--
- No.

I believe
that the last scan,

done in 2015,
was around 1,000 DPI,

and what we'll be doing today

is in the neighborhood
of 60,000 to 80,000 DPI.

- Wow. Wow.

So we really might
be able to read this thing.

- That's what we're hopeful of,
and I'm excited

to get in there
and see what we can find.

- Oh, yeah.
This is gonna be great.

Fishburne: To try and read
the memo,

Gene Cooper will focus in

on hundreds of micro images

and then begin
the painstaking job

of stitching them together
into a mosaic.

♪ ♪

While Cooper works, Ben Smith
travels back to Roswell

to follow up
on an intriguing lead.

- Is there any other
information to help me

in my investigation to get
to that ground-level truth?

Fishburne: Local residents
have been reluctant

to give Smith
the names of acquaintances

that claim to know more
details of the Roswell story

than Jesse Marcel
ever divulged publicly.

- Why the hesitancy to share
with me his name?

- It's privacy.

We're still protecting
the people that--

who have been most affected.

- When the government says you
don't talk about something,

you didn't talk about it.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Smith has located
Barbara Duggar,

granddaughter
of Sheriff George Wilcox,

the man who first alerted
the military

that some strange wreckage
had been found in the field.

- Sheriff Wilcox is the fourth
person in that inner ring

of witnesses
with firsthand knowledge

of what was on
that debris field.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Wilcox got to see
the debris himself

when rancher Mac Brazel

brought some
to the sheriff's office.

Smith wants to find out
what else

Wilcox might have
told his family.

♪ ♪

- If you could, I'd like
to hear about your connection

to Sheriff George Wilcox.

- I am Inez Wilcox and George
Wilcox's granddaughter.

My grandfather, George Wilcox,

was a very kind
and loving man.

He tried to help the people
that didn't have anything

'cause, you know, Roswell

at that time
wasn't a real prosperous city.

- And when did you first hear
about his connection

to the events of July 1947?

- In 1969, I was
at my grandmother's house,

Inez Wilcox,

and it was the same day that
they had landed on the moon,

and that's when my grandmother

told me about
the Roswell incident.

- And what did she say?

- My grandmother got up
from her seat,

and she closed the door.

She locked it,

she put the blinds down,
and I looked at her,

and that was not her behavior.

She was very positive,

very beautiful and wonderful,
and she said,

"I have something
that I must tell you,

"and you must promise me
that you will never,

"ever, ever tell this story
to anyone.

If you do,
we will all be killed,"

and she started
telling the story

to my sister Phyllis and I.

[tense music]

Fishburne: According
to Barbara Duggar,

when her grandfather
got to the crash site,

it was already surrounded
by the military,

and they weren't happy
to see him.

- My grandfather went out
to see what had happened.

When he got there,
he saw the spaceship.

The flying saucer had crashed
outside of Roswell.

There were aliens.

And then she talked
about the aliens

and how they were dressed.

Yes.
- How--how were they dressed?

- Well, they had on
a silk suit,

and they had the big eyes.

She said there were
little people walking around,

and there were some dead
and some alive.

♪ ♪

I mean, I just sat there

and leaned back in my chair
and thought...

Fishburne: Barbara Duggar
believed,

even more than
the spaceship debris,

it was the arrival of aliens
on Earth

that the military wanted
to keep secret.

- Then the military came

and told him
to go back to the office

because there would be
a lot of interviewing.

♪ ♪

They surrounded
the courthouse.

They came in.

They roughed George Wilcox up
in front of Big Mom,

and she said a redheaded
colonel came into the office

and told Granddaddy--

got him and told him,
in no uncertain terms,

if they told the story
of the Roswell incident,

that their family
would be killed

and all their grandchildren.

I mean, they threatened him,

and I said to her, I said,
"You really believe, Big Mom,

that the military is going
to come and kill all of us?"

And she said,
"Yes, and they will."

- It sounds like it really
affected your grandmother.

- Yes.

She knew that they meant
business.

My grandmother, Inez Wilcox,
and George Wilcox

had been harassed,

they had been threatened,

and their lives
had been changed.

My grandfather went crazy,

and my grandmother had to go
through a lot of hell

because of that.

- How do you connect your
grandfather's mental illness

to the events of Roswell?

What leads you
to this conclusion?

- My grandfather
was perfectly normal.

He wouldn't have been sheriff
of Roswell if he weren't.

- Right. He was well-respected
from what I've read.

- And after that, he was not
normal ever again, ever again,

and if somebody from
the government doesn't like it,

well, that's just too dang bad.

♪ ♪

It is real.

The Roswell incident is real.

♪ ♪

- It's a powerful story.
- Thank you, Ben.

- And I will weigh it with
the rest of my investigation,

and hopefully
we can get to truth.

- People in America
and the world need to know

that the Roswell incident
is real

and the government
can't say it's not true.

"It's an air balloon.
It's a weather balloon."

It isn't. It was real.

Fishburne: Coming up...

- 40 miles north of Roswell.

That was the drum beat
we were hearing for years.

Fishburne: Ben Smith travels
to a new location

where some claim
they saw incredible things

that the government
decided to conceal.

- One body was shriveled up
against the wall,

and when we got in close,
we noticed that

there were three others
inside the craft.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- So we are on our way
to the second debris site.

- What we call the impact site.

- The impact site.
- Yes.

Fishburne: After meeting
with the granddaughter

of a key eyewitness...

- When he got there,
he saw the spaceship.

Fishburne: Ben Smith wants
to find physical evidence

from the crash in Roswell,

so he's linking up
with UFO researcher

and author Don Schmitt,

who claims to have interviewed
600 eyewitnesses

connected to the event.

- So who are our
primary witnesses

that identified this site?

- Initially it was the family
of Sheriff Wilcox

when they were describing
his coming out north of town.

Fishburne: It was Schmitt
who first took Ben Smith

to the debris field
west of Roswell,

the site
where Major Jesse Marcel

collected pieces
of what he saw.

♪ ♪

- This is where it all began
back in 1947.

Fishburne: But today
they are on their way

to a different location

referred to
as the impact site,

which is north of Roswell.

- "40 miles,
40 miles north of Roswell,"

that was the drum beat
we were hearing for years.

Fishburne: Schmitt believes
that a spacecraft

initially hit the ground
at the debris field,

where pieces broke off,

but then it skipped 25 miles
to this impact site,

where it finally came to rest.

- They had the much
more spectacular,

the much more sensitive
impact site

just north of town,

and this is where it was
much more than just debris

and strange wreckage.

There were also remains.

There were also bodies.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: The third member
of the team is Frank Kimbler,

a veteran geologist

based at the New Mexico
Military Institute.

- Well, I've been wanting to go
out to this final impact site

for a couple of years.

Fishburne: Kimbler has combed
every inch

of the debris field,

searching for pieces
of wreckage,

but this is his first visit
to the alleged impact site.

- I like science fiction,
but I also like science fact.

I actually lived here
for six months in Roswell

before I even visited
the UFO museum.

Then I went down
to the museum,

and I said, "You know what?
There's no physical evidence,"

and that was
the whole gist behind this.

Fishburne: If Kimbler
can find traces

that a spaceship crashed here,

it would mean Jesse Marcel
was right about

the source of the wreckage
at the debris field.

♪ ♪

- I'm excited about this site
because it feels fresh.

It's on private property.
It's not known to the public.

It's not marked
on any tourist map.

It's been protected
all this time.

- The debris field
was always conceded.

That was the one thing

that even the press release
was based on.

Mac Brazel,

the strangeness of the debris,

the unusual characteristics,

the qualities
of that wreckage.

- They've got the debris field.

It's scattered debris.

It's clearly, to them,

something that's not
terrestrially oriented.

They don't know
where it's from,

but they're looking
for something else,

and it was on
one of those flights

that they found
the rest of the wreckage.

[unsettling music]

- At the very time
that the rancher, Mac Brazel,

has led Major Jesse Marcel,

as well as
Captain Sheridan Cavitt,

back to the debris field,

so while they are
investigating that location,

the debris field,

the military is alerted
to the additional site

just 40 miles north of town,

which we would learn
was the impact site,

the remains of the craft
and the bodies recovered.

♪ ♪

- Don, you know that story
about the McKnights going over

to the Ball family ranch
before the military came out...

- Yes, yes.
- And basically said,

"Hey, do you want to come over
and see the little people?"

- Right.
That was the talk back then.

"The little people."
- Little people. Yeah.

- The little people,
the little men.

Fishburne: According
to the alleged eyewitnesses,

several members
of the alien crew

were badly injured or dead.

- Would this have been
before they made

the press release or after?

- Before.
- Yeah.

- Because given the crash
happened--

this was the late evening
of July 2nd,

so there's a full four to five
days before the military

actually is able
to seal off the areas,

come in and conduct
the recovery operation.

[dramatic music]

Fishburne: The story of a man
named Frank Kaufmann

has never been verified.

He claims he was a civilian
attached to a military unit

assigned
to recover alien bodies

and the spaceship
at the impact site.

♪ ♪

Kaufmann gave this interview
in 1995.

♪ ♪

- There was a lot of erratic
movement on the radar screen.

♪ ♪

Then all of a sudden
there was kind of a flash,

and it just disappeared.

Something just went down.

Fishburne: After spotting
an unidentified aircraft,

they headed to the location

where it had disappeared
from radar.

- We got to where it was,

and we learned right then
and there it wasn't a plane.

It wasn't a missile.

It was kind of
a strange-looking craft,

and it was open and--
kind of halfway.

- Witnesses not only observing
the egg-shaped craft

about the size
of a Volkswagen Beetle,

seeing a number of bodies.

- One body was shriveled up
against the wall.

The other one was--was half in
and half out of the craft,

and when we got in close,
we noticed

that there were about
three others inside the craft.

Fishburne: According
to Kaufmann's story,

the convoy loaded up the ship

and the alien bodies
into trucks

and headed back
to the same base

where Jesse Marcel
had brought his debris.

♪ ♪

Coming up, Ben Smith

finds clues
that support witnesses

who claim that this is
the site where the mysterious

Roswell UFO
made its final impact.

- Oh, look at this.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- If there was the remains
of a craft and bodies,

where would that be located?

Fishburne: If a flying saucer
with alien bodies

was recovered at Roswell,
Ben Smith

hopes that there still
could be evidence at the site

where the object
might have come to rest.

- The search
for the Holy Grail,

as we would call it,
continues.

- Yeah.

Fishburne: The debris field
is where Jesse Marcel

found pieces of wreckage,
but according to Don Schmitt,

it is not where the object
finally came to rest.

He believes it hit
the debris field

and skipped like a rock
to land

at what he calls
the final impact site.

- It's the only wooden windmill
on this ranch,

40 miles north of Roswell.

Fishburne: Schmitt says
eyewitnesses remembered

certain landmarks here,

including a windmill
and a water tank.

- Piece of the windmill.

- Piece of the original
windmill.

- Holy cow.
- There it is.

- Wow.

I mean, this thing
is a historical relic now.

- And we can see...
it is a relic.

- Yeah.
- I mean, you see

by the condition of the wood,

and that was
the one crucial element

in the description
of the witnesses,

that it was a wooden windmill.

- How tall would that windmill
have been, you think?

- 15 feet.
- Okay.

- So it wasn't where you
would think, you know,

a towering structure,

because as you see what--
the prevailing wind,

it didn't take much
to keep those blades going.

♪ ♪

You see the empty bed

where the metal water tank
existed back in 1947,

so you see,
by its circumference...

- Yeah. Yep.
- It was about 8 feet high,

as it was when we were
first out here.

- As I look around,
I see the Capitan Mountains,

the same mountains we could
see from the debris site

that Mac Brazel identified.

So coming about 25 miles

from that direction parallel
to the Capitans almost,

coming towards Roswell.

- Yes.
- Okay.

So if we have the windmill
right here--

so let's walk back towards
the Brazel debris site

100 feet, and we'll set you up
to begin your survey.

- That'll work.
- All right.

Sounds good.
- Yeah.

- I can't wait to take out
a metal detector

and see if we can find
something out here.

It would be great.

Fishburne: For Kimbler,
this is virgin ground.

He has never
explored it before.

It's a fresh chance
to uncover evidence.

[soft beeping]

♪ ♪

- Well, I don't know.
Piece of old wire.

- See, that's the thing
about this.

I think we're too close
to the windmill,

and we're gonna end up
with a lot of--

we're gonna end up
with a lot of trash on the--

in that general vicinity.

If you've got the evidence,

if you have a piece
of a UFO in your hand,

and you can prove that it's
of extraterrestrial origin,

it's history making.

That is a quest like
looking for the Holy Grail.

Oh, look at this.

That was right on the surface.

I wonder if that's it.

That's a bullet casing,

and that's a--that's
a high-powered one too.

Fishburne: Today,
Kimbler is looking

for metallic debris.

Alleged eyewitnesses say

that when the military first
came to this site,

they tried to clean up
any evidence of what crashed.

[soft beeping]

- You find something?
- Yeah.

We need to dig this one up.

So it's right there.

Right there.
X marks the spot.

- Deeper than I thought
it'd be.

[soft beeping]

♪ ♪

Oh, here we go.
- Did you find it?

- What's that?

♪ ♪

It's a little sharp.

Feels--looks corroded.

- It's--I don't know
what that is.

It's heavy.
- It is a little green,

so maybe
a little copper in there.

- Copper, it's been buried
for a little while.

Let's just bag it up.
So mark the waypoint.

Now we got the exact location.

We can plot this
on Google Earth.

- Uh-huh.
- We'll know exactly

where we are
and where the piece was found.

♪ ♪

- Had this site not existed,
if witnesses had not described

this location
with bodies and a spaceship,

then we might not have
the Roswell conspiracy

that exists today.

I don't know what to make
of it just yet,

but there are
supporting details

that suggest something
bigger happened here.

Fishburne: Ben Smith will have
this piece of metal tested

to see if it could be a bullet
casing from the 1940s

or possibly
a kind of material

mankind hadn't yet
manufactured.

♪ ♪

Meanwhile, progress
has been made

on another important test.

At the University of Texas,

Gene Cooper has been taking
history's closest look

at the negative
from the famous photo

using a GIGAmacro microscope
to focus on the memo held

by General Roger Ramey.

♪ ♪

- Gentlemen.

Hey.
- Hey.

- Hello.
- How's it going?

- Good.
- How's the analysis going?

- We've been busy here.

Fishburne: Gene Cooper's goal
is to create

the most high-resolution
image possible.

The GIGAmacro's lens
is so powerful,

it can capture the grains
of a negative

at 80,000 dots
per square inch.

♪ ♪

- We shot probably around
3,000,

4,000 images total.
- Wow.

- It's a combination
of focal stacking

and then image mosaic stitching
to put it all together.

♪ ♪

- Nobody's ever
tried this before.

We will have created
the clearest resolution

in the history
of this iconic photo.

The question is,
will we be able to read it?

And will we find
the smoking gun

that proves
the eyewitnesses right?

- So in this case,
we're looking at the very top

of the acetate base
of the negative.

- Mm-hmm.
- And on there,

you'll see different scratches
and different artifacts,

so this one that's right next
to a key point,

a letter there...

- This little dot here?

- That little dot there.
You can see it there.

You'd normally see it
on a regular scan,

but when I actually focus down

into the negative,
it disappears.

- Oh, perfect.
- And not by any, you know,

cloning or copying material
from one location to the other

or anything like that
digitally, purely optically.

We can start enhancing it

to bring out
and take a closer look

at each of the individual
letters and phrases.

- The memo is one of the most
controversial parts

of the Roswell story.

A lot of ufologists believe

that it contains
a reference to victims.

So the question is,
can the GIGAmacro

identify that word?

I mean, right away,
I notice our word "victims"

looks like it starts with a P.

Is that--are you--
do you see that too?

- Yeah, I--
when he first brought it up,

I thought the word
became "pending."

Fishburne: This extraordinary
high-resolution version

produced by the GIGAmacro

shows the photo
in greater detail

than anyone
has ever seen before.

♪ ♪

- What about, yeah,
the signature?

Can we see the signature line?

- This is the signature line.

- R-A-M-E-Y.

- The Y is way separated
from the word.

- Could that be, like,

a slight rise in the paper
or something,

like an option illusion?
I don't know, like a...

- It could, in fact,
be an optical illusion,

based on the way
the camera was held

and the lens of the camera

and the lighting conceals
things from us.

- Right, right.

So do we have any samples

of actual teletype
or fonts from the age?

- Yeah, we did look up--
there was a font case

that did match,

and it actually looks
something like this.

- Actually, that's really
fascinating because

I, for some reason in my mind,

expected the letters
to be of varying widths

and sizes a bit like
they are in modern fonts.

So go back to
that Ramey photo.

Yeah, the uniform size
of each letter

really makes for more
possibilities, actually.

We're getting closer now
to clarity.

We can start to feel,
but it still feels fuzzy,

like we're groping
for the answer that we want.

- Is this about as far as you
can go with magnification

without just losing everything?

- You are, at this point,
seeing the grains

of the emulsion layer
of the silver halides,

and there's nothing
more to see beyond that.

- I was a little disappointed
there wasn't perfect clarity

in that image,
but using those new details,

I think there's enough there
to continue pushing forward

to identify the different
letters in that memo.

Fishburne: They have come
closer than anyone ever has

to reading the words
in the infamous Ramey memo,

but if it does say
"victims in the wreck,"

Ben Smith will have to find
another way to prove it.

Coming up...

- Think motive too.

Who would give that to him?

Fishburne: Does the journal
contain the story

the government
was trying to hide?

- To a cryptographer,

this indicates
a certain kind of cipher.

- It does?
- Yes.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Ben Smith believes
Jesse Marcel knew far more

than he ever
admitted in public.

- I was familiar with all
materials used in aircraft.

This was nothing like that.

Fishburne: As an intelligence
officer,

Marcel knew that
he was duty-bound

to keep classified secrets
for life.

♪ ♪

- It's curious.

Jesse said the wreckage
he found was extraterrestrial,

but if he thought
it was an alien spacecraft,

why didn't he mention its crew?

Fishburne: Does the journal

Marcel kept close
his whole life

contain the rest of the story,

including details
of a cover-up?

What Smith knows so far
is that Marcel

didn't write it himself
and it is a jumble

of disconnected phrases
that might be code.

- "When down in the mouth,
remember Jonah.

He came out all right."

If this journal is related
to the events of Roswell

and you're writing it
to conceal your thoughts,

it's an interesting quote
to start off your code.

♪ ♪

- How did it go out there?

- It's been interesting.

Fishburne: To discuss
how to push

the journal investigation
forward,

Ben Smith is meeting
with Joe Pappalardo,

an aviation expert and author
of "Spaceport Earth:

The Reinvention
of Space Flight."

Pappalardo is well-versed
in the Roswell story.

- I went to a former
Secret Service authenticator.

- Uh-huh.
- She cut her teeth

tracking threats
from crazy people

and nefarious people.

- To link the letter
to the person writing it

to build a criminal case or...

- Yeah, basically.

- That had to hold up in court,

so she's the real deal.

- Yeah.

- The first question
we started out with was,

"Is this an
authentic document?"

The paper itself dates
to prior to 1950.

- Okay.

- So she actually looked
at the ink,

which suggests that it was
written before there were

ballpoint pens,
so again, before 1950.

Another feature she identified
was this watermark.

This watermark
belongs to a paper mill

located in Juniata,
Pennsylvania, Juniata County,

which is actually
next to Harrisburg,

where Jesse went
to intelligence school.

Now, I don't know yet whether
that's just a coincidence,

but it's pretty exciting

that at least
the journal itself

and the ink and the paper
are all legitimate.

- No matter what else
this says--

this journal could say
anything or nothing,

but at this point, it has
told you something important,

which is the Marcel family
is acting in good faith.

If you had found
that the paper and the ink

didn't match chronologically,

you'd have to doubt every
other part of this story,

so this is the foundation
by which the rest

of the investigation into this
piece of evidence is grounded.

- Yeah.

Now, the sample size
of Jesse's handwriting

is actually pretty small,
but she felt fairly confident

that the handwriting
in this journal

did not match Jesse Marcel's.

- Hmm.
That's even more intriguing.

If it's not his,
why did he keep it?

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Jesse Marcel stayed
silent for more than 30 years,

working as an ordinary
TV repairman

in his hometown
of Houma, Louisiana.

- We left Roswell perhaps
around 3:30 or 4:00

in the afternoon.

It is very difficult.

In fact,
with just verbal directions,

we never would have found it.

Fishburne: In 1980,
he returned to Roswell

and gave that bombshell
TV interview

in which he claimed
before the world

that he'd been forced to lie

about what he'd found
in the debris field.

- I had never seen anything
like that before.

As of right--as of now,
I don't know what it was.

Fishburne: After Marcel
went public,

several retired officers
from the 509th

spoke up to support his story
of a cover-up

and added
the extraordinary claim

that the Army had recovered
a spaceship

and the bodies of aliens.

Some of that testimony
was recorded by ufologist

in a 1991 document called
"Recollections of Roswell."

- I had learned first

that the sergeant of the guard
with a series of airmen

went out,
and they surrounded the site.

Fishburne: Robert Shirkey was
assistant operations officer

for the 509th bomber group.

- Then they swept the area
and picked up

everything they could.

The bodies were brought in,

and everything was laid out
in hangar 84.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Hangar 84
has figured prominently

in the stories
of alleged eyewitnesses

who say it's where the secrets

of this extraterrestrial crash
were hidden.

- I received a telephone call
from the mortuary officer

out at the Army Airfield Base.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Glenn Dennis
was the mortician

at the Ballard Funeral Home,

which provided services
for the Roswell Army base.

- He was inquiring about,
what would be

the smallest possible casket

that we could get that
would be hermetically sealed?

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Dennis says
he assumed

there'd been some kind
of deadly accident

involving children,

so he delivered three
small coffins to the air base.

- And I had this friend,
this lieutenant nurse

that I knew quite well.

She said,
"How did you get in here?

What are you doing in here?"

And she said, "You're gonna
get in a lot of trouble."

She said,
"Would you please leave?

And get out of here
in a hurry."

By the time I had
turned around,

there was another
officer said,

"Hey, wait a minute,"
and I said,

"Looks like you had a crash.

Where was the crash?"

And he said,
"You get the hell out of here,

and you didn't see anything,
and you don't talk to anybody."

Fishburne: Like Marcel,
Walter Haut,

also with the 509th,

felt intimidated
to stay silent.

- This is censorship,
pure and simple.

♪ ♪

I don't like it.

Fishburne: For many years,
Walter Haut,

the 509th's public
information officer,

claimed he simply did
as he was told

and issued that famous
press release, but later,

Haut told ufologists that
what Marcel said was true

and only a fraction
of the story.

He had personally seen
the alien bodies

inside Hangar 84.

♪ ♪

- Some type of craft
from outer space.

From where, I do not know.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Before he died,

a pilot named
Oliver "Pappy" Henderson,

who was stationed
at Roswell Army Air Base,

in July 1947,

made a shocking claim
to his wife and daughter.

[foreboding music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: According
to their testimony,

Henderson told them
that he was the one

who flew the small coffins

from Roswell
to Wright-Patterson,

even glimpsing
the alien bodies inside.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Could these stories
be validated in the journal

that belonged to Jesse Marcel?

There is no way of knowing
until it is deciphered.

- One question
that I'm considering was,

was this handed to him
for safekeeping?

I'm hoping that I can get
more handwriting samples

of other people
in the 509th group

to see if this might
have been passed to him

by somebody else
within the bomber group.

It's written
by the same person,

and for me,
that raises another question:

why the marked shift?

There could be stress involved,
but could stress also mean

there could be
a distress signal?

I don't know if you remember
Vietnam vets

blinking into the camera
with Morse code

to relay a message
while they're talking.

The order of these quotes
is nonsensical.

It's not clear why they held
meaning for the writer.

Maybe there's no meaning
at all,

but it was just
a mnemonic device,

a particular quote recalls
a memory or a detail.

- Think motive too.
Who would give that to him?

You can understand that
if you're a tight-knit group,

and you're in
the middle of nowhere,

and you work in an air wing
with nukes,

it's a pressure cooker.

They know that they could
trust each other with secrets.

Someone might choose him

because he was the fall guy
for the incident,

so if you're gonna
give your encoded journal

or what have you
to one figure from the whole

Roswell thing, you would
likely trust him to do it.

- Right.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Coming up...

- That's kind of strange

and could indicate
something hidden here.

Fishburne: Can one of
America's top code breakers

unlock the secrets
of this mystifying journal?

- So wait a minute.
You're telling me the 777

means the angels
are providing abundance,

and then immediately
in the next paragraph,

we have a total shift

and something
that could be coded.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: To further
investigate

Marcel's baffling journal,

former CIA investigator
Ben Smith is meeting

with one of the nation's top
cryptologists, Craig Bauer,

professor of mathematics
at York University.

- Craig.
- Oh, hi.

You must be Ben.
- That's right.

- Good to meet you.
- You too.

I brought by the document
that we discussed on the phone.

- Mm-hmm.
- Um...

I can't remember
how much I told you,

but I have with me a journal
that belonged to a man

by the name
of Major Jesse Marcel Sr.

He was an Army
intelligence officer

and was at the center of
the Roswell incident in 1947,

the alleged UFO crash out
in the desert of New Mexico.

The family, after his death,

finds this journal hidden
with his military records,

but it's not
in his handwriting.

Now, I've flipped through
this a little bit.

There are a lot of quotes,
a lot of musings.

It's not addressed to anybody.

There aren't any names
that I can pick out.

- It doesn't appear
to be autobiographical?

- No.
- Okay.

- From what I can tell.
- Yeah.

- With my background
in intelligence,

I'm curious if this
is perhaps encoded,

if whoever owned this journal
had sensitive information

they wanted to pass on
without actually revealing it,

but I need your help.

I can't make sense of it.

You know, I'll let you
look through it.

- Okay.

There are a lot of ways

that you can hide
a message in a journal.

I'm a mathematician
focused on cryptology,

making and breaking codes
and ciphers.

Ciphers are the coolest,

sexiest form of writing
that there can be.

If you're reading
somebody's diary,

you're flipping through
page after page

and all of a sudden
you see something in a cipher,

you know that's the best part
of the whole diary, right?

This is--this is what
you want to get at.

We don't use ciphers
for our laundry list,

for our grocery list, right?

We use ciphers
to protect things

that are extremely important
or sensitive,

so that's the stuff
we most want to read

when we're trying
to unravel history.

♪ ♪

Yeah, the text
is a little odd.

We have uppercase letters
in the middle of a word.

- Mm-hmm.
- This is, you know,

obviously a unique item.
- Mm-hmm.

- I mean, do you have it
in a digital form that,

you know, we could really...
- I do, yeah.

- Let me see
the digital copy.

I love when I have
a cipher to myself,

when I'm the first
to have eyes on something

and get a stab
at deciphering it,

so it's very exciting
to be able

to look at the this journal

because I'm the first person
with the skills

to ferret out
what might be hidden there.

♪ ♪

- We have 122 pages
of cursive writing,

and then on page 123...

- 1-2-3.
- After Roswell,

August 31, 1947,

it shifts to this block
letter format.

Now, the military has had
the debris now for six weeks.

What have they learned
in that time?

And guys like Jesse Marcel

were told to be quiet
about what they found.

So this shift, to me,
looks like

it could be the start
of something interesting.

- Yeah, I see a number
of things

we could look at here.

I think this might be intended
to be an M,

but it kind of looks like 777.

- Yeah, the document expert
pointed that out to me

that that was a typical way
he wrote Ms,

but it's more separated here.

- I mean, if it is an M,

we have
some dashes after that.

Is that the number of letters?

Fishburne: Craig Bauer agrees
that the capital Ms

may be the telltale sign

that a code
is embedded in the journal.

- The writing that's intriguing
in the journal,

the kind of writing
that seems like it

could be hiding
a secret message,

follows after whatever happened
near Roswell happened

in the summer of 1947,

so the timing
is kind of interesting.

I'm sure you know 666.

- Yeah, I'm familiar.
The--the devil, right?

- The number of the beast.
- The beast, yeah.

- But also, in some systems
of belief,

777 is a special number,
the perfect being.

Some people equate that
with Jesus.

- Interesting.
- So maybe it's just an M,

but that's something.

- Says here that 777
is the number of abundance

and that when angels start
sending you this message,

it means that the abundance
you have been waiting for

is just there
waiting to be unlocked.

[dramatic music]

- There is something
interesting

right in that first line.

We have "when"
with a lowercase N.

- Mm-hmm.

- But then the next word,
"down,"

ends with an uppercase N.

- Ah.

- And then "in"
with a lowercase N again.

- Okay.

- Why would he suddenly
capitalize

the last letter in a word?

That's kind of strange
and could indicate

something hidden here.

- So wait a minute,
you're telling me that 777

means angels
are providing abundance,

and then immediately
in the next paragraph,

we have a total shift.

It's something
that could be coded.

♪ ♪

That is almost too crazy
to believe.

Fishburne: Coming up, first
Roswell was a flying saucer.

Then they said a weather
balloon, and now this.

- In 1947, it was
the misidentification

of these radar reflectors

that is most likely
the famous flying disc.

Fishburne: Why do some people
find it hard to believe them?

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

- Well, let me go ahead
and look at a couple

more pages,
see what else we have here.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Ben Smith
is certain he's brought

the journal
that belonged to Jesse Marcel

to the right place.

- Okay, here we're
one page further along.

Fishburne: Top codebreaker
Craig Bauer

is starting to see patterns
in the lettering,

a clear signal that a message
may be hidden in code.

- Here, again, you can see
some different forms.

In the second line, "in"
doesn't have a dot on the I.

In the next line,
it looks like a foreign word,

perhaps--does have the dot.

I mean, you can sometimes
forget to dot an I,

but if we're seeing
two versions of many letters,

there could be more to it
than just forgetfulness.

There could be a method
to the madness.

- Yeah.

- It's not like we just have
a small passage.

It continues over
several pages,

so there's a potential
for, you know,

a little greater
depth of information

being conveyed here.

♪ ♪

This is jumping out at me.

Again, we have the phenomena

where a word ends
with an uppercase letter:

"short" with a capital T.

I mean, he uses lowercase
Ts elsewhere.

It's not like the whole thing
is in uppercase, you know,

somebody shouting at you
in an e-mail.

- Oh, right, so while the words
themselves are innocuous,

the actual cases of the letters

might indicate
some kind of code.

- Yes, there's several ways
to do that with a cipher.

It just doesn't seem natural.

That's one of the giveaways
you're trying to hide something

is the handwriting
doesn't look natural

or the characters
don't look right.

It's just--anything that
looks, like, a little hinky

and off from normal writing
can indicate that the author

is trying to do something else
at the same time,

and so it's a sign

that this should bear
closer examination.

- Yeah.

Fishburne: After spending
less than an hour

looking at the journal,
Bauer sees telltale signs

that a code
might be embedded in the text.

To his trained eye,

having two forms
of a single letter suggests

what is called
a biliteral code

where the alternate form
represents a different letter

altogether in what is known
as the B alphabet.

♪ ♪

- We already identified
two versions of I,

two versions of T,
two versions of N.

- Mm-hmm.
- So we want to keep rolling

with that
and build a little catalog

of what's going on
on these few pages.

- Once you've separated
the letters, then what?

- Well, we just investigate
different schemes.

We had G like this
and G like this.

- Right.
- So in some cases,

it was a lowercase
versus an uppercase,

but which of these is A,
and which of these is B?

It's unclear.
- Right.

- So we have a lot
of possibilities to check.

Any given letter,
we'd have two possibilities:

that this form is A
or that this form is B.

- Mm-hmm.
- So two choices

for each letter,
well, 26 letters.

- Oh, wow.

- We'd have that many
possibilities to consider.

- That grows pretty fast.

- That's 67,108,864.

- Over 67 million possibilities
in that journal.

Wow.

- Well, fortunately,
we're not looking at

the journal in 1947.

Okay, with the computing power
we have now,

we can test all of those

and figure out which one looks
the most like English.

- Yeah. Do you have a program
already that can do that?

- No. This is a custom job.

- Oh, really?
- But exciting.

- I expected it to be hard,

but I didn't think it would
take custom code to do it,

but that's impressive.

That means I came
to the right guys.

- Yeah, it should be fun.
- Yeah.

- We'll be in touch.
- Cool. Thanks, guys.

- Have a good trip back.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: If Craig Bauer
can decipher it,

the journal could
be the missing link,

the key to unlocking
what happened at Roswell.

♪ ♪

From the moment
he broke his silence,

millions of Americans have
believed that Jesse Marcel

was telling the truth.

♪ ♪

His story struck a chord
in the 1970s

when unrest
over the Vietnam War

coupled with scandals
like Watergate

made many distrustful
of big government.

♪ ♪

After Marcel,
other members of the 509th

elaborated on what happened
at Roswell.

- What do you think it was?

- Some type of craft
from outer space.

From where, I do not know.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: By 1990,
a Gallup poll

reported that nearly
70 million Americans

believed alien spaceships
had visited the Earth,

yet the government
stayed silent about Roswell,

which it officially
considered a non-event.

Decades after the crash
and the press conference

that claimed it was
a weather balloon,

people still asked questions.

♪ ♪

- The issue is providing
to the public

whatever records
may still exist, if any.

There may not be any,

but if any on
the Roswell incident,

so people can make
their own determination.

That is the mission

that I discussed with
the general accounting office.

Fishburne: Then in 1993,

Congressman Steven Schiff
of New Mexico

began pressing hard
for answers.

Following his request,
the U.S. Air Force

undertook a fresh
investigation of Roswell.

It examined the records
of half a dozen agencies

and even interviewed
those still alive

who claimed
they'd been witnesses.

♪ ♪

The result was
a nearly 1,000 page report

made public in 1995.

Colonel Richard Weaver
supervised the investigation

and was one
of the report's authors.

- We just didn't go to a giant
master file that said "Roswell"

and open up a file folder.

We started to methodically
look at all the things

that were taking place
in the Air Force in 1947

at Roswell Air Force Base
in New Mexico,

and so we searched
a multitude of records

in a multitude of locations
because, of course,

the base has been closed
for a long time.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: The report does not
dispute that something crashed

in the ranch lands
west of Roswell,

but in a stunning twist,

it reveals that
it was not a weather balloon.

♪ ♪

- If you will read this book,
and I'm sure you're gonna

take it home tonight
and read it,

quite frankly,

you're gonna find
some very interesting

and quite fascinating
pieces of information

about Air Force research.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: The Air Force
claimed that what crashed

was almost certainly a type
of balloon called a Mogul.

- I don't know what they saw
in '47,

but I'm quite sure
it probably was Project Mogul.

Fishburne: In 1947,
the United States launched

32 Mogul balloons
over the course of 7 months.

They were part
of a top-secret project

in the growing Cold War
with the Soviet Union.

♪ ♪

Each Mogul balloon
was essentially

a listening device

equipped to detect
the sound waves

that would be produced
by a Soviet atomic bomb test.

The U.S. was the only
nuclear power in the world,

and keeping track
of the Soviets

was the highest priority.

The Mogul balloons
were launched

from the Alamogordo Air Base,

just 70 miles from Roswell.

- In 1947, it was

the misidentification
of these radar reflectors

that is most likely
the famous flying disc.

Whether you accept that
as the Roswell information,

I quite frankly don't know,
but we do

because it overlays so well
with this period of time.

Fishburne: For many, the
explanation seemed plausible,

but for others,
it was deeply unsatisfying,

but the Air Force
investigation

has been criticized

for not having full access
to U.S. Army records,

which in 1974,

still oversaw the nation's
growing air forces.

For Don Schmitt and others,
it didn't wash.

- They were quickly trying
to put together

their third explanation.

"Ladies and gentlemen,
we lied about Roswell in 1947.

"We lied about
the balloon explanation,

but here's our new theory,"

and they presented
Project Mogul.

- So why do you think
people in Roswell

still are not convinced
no matter what you say?

- I'm sorry, but I just can't
answer that question for them.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: To this day,
the family of Jesse Marcel

is definitely not convinced
it was a Mogul balloon.

- In 1995, the government
came out with a story

to explain what the crash
at Roswell was.

Looking at that information,

based upon what my grandfather
and my father told me,

they just don't match up.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Coming up,
this former FAA inspector

has investigated hundreds
of aviation crash sites.

He doubts this one was what
the government says it was.

- Not sure I buy that whole
balloon drag theory.

- Really?
- Something's wrong with it.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- So far, there has never been
a researcher

with your experience
and credibility on the site

to examine
the potential of a crash.

- Okay.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: The argument over
what crashed at Roswell

has always been missing
physical evidence.

Ben Smith is returning
to the debris field,

where in 1947, Jesse Marcel,

a 40-year-old
Army intelligence officer,

was certain he'd picked up
pieces of wreckage

that were extraterrestrial.

♪ ♪

On this visit,
Smith has brought with him

one of America's leading
experts on aviation crashes.

- So a lot of my investigative
work on accidents

is post-accident.

Fishburne: David Soucie
is a former

FAA accident inspector

and the author of "Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370,"

the commercial airliner

that mysteriously disappeared
without a trace.

♪ ♪

Smith hopes
that Soucie's expert eye

will find something
that others have missed.

- My hope, originally,
with the tech survey,

was that we could bring out
all this equipment

that didn't exist,
and all this software

and find evidence of debris

or an impact zone
or a large-scale cover-up,

and so far, we haven't
been able to find anything.

What I'd love from you
is your perspective

on entry angles and speeds

and something
that could explain

the witness accounts
at the debris field.

- Okay.

Fishburne: Even 70 years
after the Roswell crash,

David Soucie knows
that some things

won't have changed much
at the debris field,

like the topography
or landscape features.

♪ ♪

- What is intriguing to me
about this

is the witness credibility
aspect of it.

Even when I go
on an accident site

just days after the accident,

there's credibility
issues there.

They train us as inspectors
to vet those witness accounts

because they really believe
that they saw something happen

that we know
for a fact didn't happen.

♪ ♪

As far as the physical
evidence piece,

I'm hoping to find something
that could say,

"Here's what is here,"
but at that very least,

we might be able to determine
what is not there.

♪ ♪

- Doesn't look like much,
but it's the birthplace

of ufology
in the United States.

- Yeah.

Fishburne: Just by measuring

the patterns and velocity
of the wind,

Soucie is confident
he can gather enough data

to test the government's claim

that what crashed here
was a Mogul balloon.

♪ ♪

- Mogul was an attempt
to acoustically detect

Soviet nuclear blast

and ballistic missile
launches.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: A Mogul balloon
was actually

a series of weather balloons

linked together
in a 650-foot-high chain,

100 feet taller than
the Washington Monument.

♪ ♪

Each balloon chain carried
a crude acoustic censor

called a sonobuoy.

- In 1947, it was
the misidentification

of these radar reflectors

that is most likely
the famous flying disk.

Fishburne: The 1995
Air Force report theorized

that Mogul balloon
number four,

which had been launched
on June 4, 1947,

was the one
that crashed near Roswell.

- These flights were all
meticulously logged,

when they were launched

and what the weather was
and all these things,

and they tried to recover
the material if they could,

but the material in and
of itself wasn't important.

The purpose was important.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: It was slightly
more than 3 weeks

between the time Mogul
balloon four was reported lost

and the Roswell wreckage
was found.

♪ ♪

- So let me show you
exactly what

the witnesses describe
as a furrow.

- Furrow.
- Or a gouge

beginning here
heading in that direction,

cut across the landscape
for 200 to 300 feet

in this direction.

- And how wide?

- 10 feet.
- 10 feet wide.

Interesting.

- And from this location,

we also start the fan
of the debris field.

Jesse Marcel Sr. claimed that
the debris looks scattered

as if something exploded
from the sky.

- There was so much of it.

It was scattered over
such a vast area.

Fishburne: Ufologist
and author Kevin Randle

is an expert
on the Roswell crash.

Randle is certain
that Jesse Marcel

would have recognized
the wreckage of a balloon.

- Jesse Marcel examined
that debris.

Had it been a weather balloon
and a ray wind target,

he would have recognized it,

and that would be
the end of the story,

and you and I
would not be here today.

- Weather balloons
have been used

to take soundingss
of the atmosphere.

They're launched
around the world twice a day,

and that's been the case

from before 1947
right up to now.

Eventually they do pop
and come down to Earth

and are retrieved.

♪ ♪

Fishburne:
But Richard Weaver says

that only officers directly
involved in project Mogul

would have known about it.

- They classified Mogul
top secret,

which means only a few people
have the need to know.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: The project's
lead engineer

was Professor Charles Moore
of New York University.

He agreed with the government

that the eyewitnesses'
descriptions of debris

matched one of his
Mogul balloons.

- The rancher who picked up
the debris

noted that it contained
brass eyelets

at the corners
of these radar targets.

They were also
on the targets we flew.

Fishburne: Moore said
that the instant news broke

that the Army had recovered
a flying disc,

he knew it was his lost
Mogul balloon number four.

- When Moore and his Mogul
team learned of the flap

over the Roswell incident,
he said they laughed,

but they kept quiet
about their project.

♪ ♪

- So they're saying
it went this direction,

which is almost east, right?

- Right.

- What I'd like to do is get
documentation of the site.

I'll take the angle
of every photo...

[camera shutter clicks]

And then we'll be able
to map that against

what I expect
the airflow would have been.

Then what I like to do
at every accident site

is get some pictures of what
would be the approach path

to the impact point.

So from every location,

we take pictures coming in
and going out.

♪ ♪

Not sure I buy that
whole balloon drag theory...

- Really?
- Down through there.

Fishburne: It's only his first
visit to the debris field,

but already, this seasoned
former FAA crash inspector

has doubts
that a Mogul balloon

could have crashed here.

- Something's wrong with it,
with that whole theory

of the fact that it drug
and it strayed,

and there was debris
straight off to the east.

Not really buying that.

To think of a balloon
going this way,

if it were a Mogul balloon

that was settling as the
balloon approaches the ground,

It picks up the ground flow,
so it'd be highly irregular

to see a "balloon accident"
go across this valley

and continue in that direction
the way it was described.

We got wind readings up there,
wind readings on the west side

and then wind readings
at the bottom...

- Yeah.
- And you can see

that it changed direction
throughout that.

- So we can rule out
a Mogul balloon

making contact with the Earth
at the furrow,

dragging across the ground,

laying to rest
across that debris field.

- It's not the way it works.
Just not the way it works.

- Ugh, I don't know if you've
removed a piece of the puzzle

or added a new one.

I'm not sure at this point.

- "Just the facts, ma'am."

[both laughing]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: David Soucie
will put his readings

into a computer program

designed to analyze
crash sites.

If he determines
a Mogul balloon

could not have gone down here,

the investigation will be
one step closer to discovering

whether Jesse Marcel
was telling the truth.

♪ ♪

Coming up, she can spot a liar
in the smallest gesture.

- We're looking for things
like fidgeting

or diverting attention.

Fishburne: So does this body
language expert

think Jesse Marcel
was telling the truth?

- We have two forms
of every letter

that appears more than once.

Fishburne: A top cryptologist
is sure

the journal
is hiding a message.

- To a cryptographer,
this indicates

a certain kind of cipher.

- It does?
- Yes.

Fishburne: But will he
crack the code?

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Because so much
of his investigation

hinges on Jesse Marcel's
testimony,

Ben Smith has come
to New York City

to see Tonya Reiman,
an expert in body language

and what are called
microexpressions.

♪ ♪

- This is a photo

of the primary subject
of my investigation,

an intelligence officer
by the name of Jesse Marcel.

Here he is in a press release
on July 8, 1947.

He was ordered to pose
with this tinfoil here

and say what earlier had been
reported as a flying saucer

was a weather balloon.

It's not until 1980
that he comes out publicly

and starts speaking
to the cameras

about what he really saw.

He was of the impression

that these materials
were not from this planet.

- Right.
- So that led to the idea

that there was a government
cover-up to hide a UFO crash

and bodies and many
other extraordinary claims,

but it all comes back
to the integrity

and the testimony
of this man here.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Smith
has brought with him

footage of some of
Jesse Marcel's interviews.

Reiman will watch them
closely, looking for any sign

that Jesse Marcel
may not be telling the truth.

- He told me
not to say anything.

He said, "I'll handle it
from now on,"

and that's exactly
what he did.

When he came out, he said--he
told the press that was there,

he said, "That was nothing
but a weather balloon,

crashed weather balloon."

It was definitely not
a weather balloon,

and it was an aircraft,
so what it could have been,

I wouldn't know.

I still don't know.

- Is there anything we can take
away from these clips here

about whether he's being
deceptive or not?

- We're looking for
a few different things.

Is he moving around too much?
Is he fidgeting?

He held eye contact,

he smiled at appropriate times,

and he actually shook his head
up and down

when he was saying
something in the affirmative,

and he shook his head side
to side when he was saying,

like, you know,
"I couldn't say anything,"

so those are signals of truth.

Those are signals
of congruency.

- So that tells you he believed
in what he was saying, right?

- Right, he believed
what he was saying,

but at the same time,
he's not really

saying anything specific.

At the end, he says,

"I don't even know
what I saw,"

which makes it easy for him
to be congruent.

- Of course.

♪ ♪

So Jesse has become
a bit of a lightning rod

for the whole controversy
around the Roswell incident.

- Right.
- His family says

he was an honest man,

a man of duty,
and he's telling the truth.

- Right.
- The government says

they don't know why
he's making these claims.

He's not telling the truth.

[foreboding music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: In its 1995
report, the Air Force

cited a sworn affidavit
from Sheridan Cavitt.

Cavitt was the special agent
for counterintelligence

who accompanied Marcel
to investigate the debris.

- As a CIC agent, he was in
a different chain of command,

but they were friends,
because nobody likes you

if you're
a counterintelligence officer,

and nobody likes you if you're
an intelligence officer.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: As the other
official on site,

Cavitt could have backed
Marcel's story

about strange wreckage
that littered a field

with nearly a mile of debris,
but he didn't.

♪ ♪

- Cavitt, who was there
with him,

said there was not
much material there at all,

which they recovered
most of it.

He said it was obvious to him
at the time

that the stuff they were
picking up was just crap,

just, you know,
for lack of a better term.

The fact was the material
that's depicted in the photos

was identified by Cavitt,
still alive in 1994,

as material he and Marcel
physically picked up

in the desert
on the farm in July of 1947.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: In his affidavit,
Sheridan Cavitt wrote,

"The amount of debris was very
small, about 20 square feet.

"I remember recognizing
the material as consistent

"with a weather balloon,

which would easily fit
into one vehicle."

- One thing I was certain of,
it was not a weather balloon

nor an aircraft nor a missile.

It was something else,

which we didn't know
what it was.

There were just fragments
strewn all over the area,

an area about
3/4 of a mile long

and several hundred feet wide.

So we proceeded
to pick up the parts.

Fishburne: So which
intelligence officer

was telling the truth:

Sheridan Cavitt
or Jesse Marcel?

♪ ♪

- We're looking for things
like fidgeting

or diverting attention.

I didn't see that with this,
and once again,

when he did make a fumble,
a verbal fumble,

he would autocorrect.

He did it consistently
and comfortably.

- Uh-huh.

In this next clip,

he's going to describe the
materials that he discovered,

and this is a key part
of the investigation.

Can we trust
his eyewitness account

about the actual debris
that he found?

- Okay.

♪ ♪

- The thing about it
that got me is

that you couldn't even
bend it.

You couldn't ben--dent it.

Even with a sledgehammer,
it would bounce off it,

so I knew that I had never
seen anything like that

before, and as of
right--as of now,

I don't know what it was.

It was not anything
from this Earth,

that I'm quite sure of,

because I was--
being an intelligence officer,

I was familiar with
just about every--

all materials used in aircraft
and in air travel.

This was nothing like that.
It could not be.

It could not have been.

- Do you see
any signs of deception?

- I don't see any signs
of deception in him,

in his own self-belief.

- So he's not being willingly
deceptive to trick us all

into believing something
that isn't true.

He truly believes
what he's saying.

- I got the impression

that he truly believes
what he's saying.

Fishburne: Coming up, they
swore an oath to keep secrets,

but could the journal be the
biggest secret they shared,

the story of Roswell
written in code?

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

Fishburne: After analyzing
Marcel's body language

with expert Tonya Reiman,

who sees no indication
of deceit...

- He truly believes
what he's saying.

Fishburne: Ben Smith
heads to York College

in Pennsylvania to see
if cryptologist Craig Bauer

has made progress
deciphering the journal.

With Smith
is Jesse Marcel's grandson,

who is just as eager to know

what the writing
in the journal means.

♪ ♪

- Do you think that there
would have been any reason

why another intelligence
officer on base

would have wanted
to give him information

that would have been
somewhat coded in some way?

- I think if your grandfather
is making claims

that someone else believes...
- Yes.

- Or someone else
had the same experience

but for whatever reason,

they feel afraid
of openly speaking out...

- Sure.
- They might capture that

in--in a code and give it
to your grandfather.

- I would like to believe
that what we find in there

is going to be something
significant enough

that it makes it irrefutable

that what my father
and grandfather believed in

was something that wasn't--was
truly not made by human hands.

Fishburne: Craig Bauer has
devised a customized program

to try and crack whatever code

might be hiding
in the journal.

♪ ♪

- Knock, knock.

♪ ♪

- Hey, Ben.
Good to see you again.

- Yeah, you too. How are you?
- Good.

You must be Jesse.
- Jesse Marcel.

I'm Craig.
- Craig, nice to meet you.

- Jack is one of our best math
and computer science majors.

- Oh, great.
- Nice to see you again.

- Nice to see you again.
- Yeah.

- So we've been studying

your grandfather's journal.

The first really interesting
thing we noticed...

- Okay.
- Was, you know,

sort of weird ways
of writing letters.

Like, he has a capital L
in the middle of a word.

- Okay.
- And it's not like

the whole thing
is in uppercase.

It's just randomly a capital L.

You can see in the line above,
he's using lowercase Ls

in "little girl."

- I can see your point.

- We started to see these
different forms,

so I asked Jack
to prepare this table,

and I was thrilled
with this result.

- Uh-huh.
- We have two forms

of every letter
that appears more than once.

You can see a K where it's two
separate pieces and together.

- Oh, wow. Yeah.
- Up at the top right,

you can see an O and an O

that's filled in
like a solid circle,

a P with a loop,

a P without a loop.

So this really intrigued us.

To a cryptographer,

this indicates
a certain kind of cipher.

- It does?
- Yes.

If you have two different
versions of a letter,

you know, we can call them
and say, zero and one.

- Sure.

- So you have
an apparent message,

but really it's spelling
something out in binary.

- Binary, it's--
okay, it's that simple.

- Yeah, yeah.

There's a system that uses
that kind of approach.

- Okay.

- This made us very hopeful,
and we--

- You got my heart going,
I'll say that much.

- But there is some bad news.

♪ ♪

If somebody is implementing
a biliteral cipher,

that person has to be
very careful to stick to one

or the other form
and make it clear which it is.

- That makes sense.
- Go ahead and show 'em.

- Oh, okay.
- This is the real result.

We found, in many instances,
three forms of a letter,

and this is a big problem.

- This would throw
everything off.

- Yeah, so this was
kind of frustrating,

and the result was that we had
to run our program again

and again and again

with different assumptions,
with different assignments

for some of these third
characters, these third forms.

Our government has poured

so much money into
the development of computers

because it needed them
for code breaking.

This is why computers
were developed.

You could go through
a lot of combinations by hand.

67 million, no, okay?

But we have computers because
of this need to break ciphers,

and this is how we're going
to apply them in this journal.

We had to write
a computer program

to just test
all the possibilities.

We tested our program
on little pieces,

little sections of the journal.

Why don't we show them
a typical result?

Maybe just the very first
passage that was printed,

about Jonah.

♪ ♪

Here's the original quote.

"When down in the mouth,
remember Jonah.

He came out all right."
- Okay, sure.

♪ ♪

- The program just takes
a few minutes.

We get things like this.
"A web."

- Okay.
- And then the asterisk means

we got a string of As and Bs

that does not correspond
to a letter.

That's a bad sign,

to get one that doesn't
even map to a letter.

- Okay.
- Every so often,

you can pick out
a word here or there.

I think you got McArthur
at one point,

so we were kind of
checking the timing.

Would he have been
writing about McArthur?

But on run after run,

we're just periodically
getting words

but never a complete sentence,
never anything

that looks like it couldn't
have arisen by chance.

- Okay. Sure.

- Nothing meaningful.
- Right. Right.

♪ ♪

- I mean, I guess
there's a ray of hope.

We can't conclude that there's
not something hidden there.

- Okay.
- We can conclude

that there's not something
hidden there

with a straightforward
biliteral cipher.

- Okay.
- But there are many ways

to hide a message.

We still don't have
a good explanation

for why you would have
an uppercase L

in the middle of a word

or, you know,
these strange different forms.

- Yeah.

- So there could well be
something there.

- You know, the 509th bomb
group where Jesse worked

was a pretty unique place.

They had a lot of need

to communicate sensitive
information to each other.

Is it possible that a group
like the 509th

could communicate in a cipher
that only they knew about?

- Oh, yeah, I think they could
do that pretty easily.

There are a lot
of homebrew systems.

You know, to make up
a little cipher system

that you're just gonna
exchange a few messages,

it's not that hard to make it
really hard to break.

- Uh-huh.

I have a lot of faith
that there's something here.

♪ ♪

My grandfather would have
wanted to leave some kind

of message behind, something.

He always said that you could

always believe that there were
people that were involved,

so maybe this is one of the
other people that was involved

and some way
of getting him a message.

We need to go find out
who wrote this.

- Yeah.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Next on "Roswell:
The First Witness"...

- He told me,

"Don't believe everything
the government tells you."

Fishburne: What did
Jesse Marcel say in private

that he never said in public?

- He said there are things

that this world
is not ready for.

Fishburne: He confessed to her
there was more,

so much more
he could have said.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: Did Marcel
hide a piece

of what he found at home?

- Jesse said he had proof.

- There could be some
debris left around.

Fishburne: Is the proof still
buried in the ground?

- Right there.

It's something that doesn't
make sense to me.

- Have you ever seen
that in a--in a wreck?

- No. There's something
under the ground there.

Fishburne: She says her father
staged a cover-up...

- And he also destroyed files.
- Or changed them.

Fishburne: Even though he knew
Jesse Marcel was right.

- He said that the world
wasn't ready to know

the truth about
what happened at Roswell.

♪ ♪

Fishburne: He didn't write
the journal,

but did he share its secrets
with this man who could have?

I'm Laurence Fishburne,

Thanks for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries".

Next time, our conclusion to
"Roswell: The First Witness".