Original subtitles

Tonight on History's Greatest Mysteries.

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

sure it was extraterrestrial.

It was not anything from this earth that I'm quite sure of.

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 is keep a mouth shut.

His family hopes a former CIA investigator will find the truth, which

hiding inside the mysterious journal.

What I'm seeing throughout the document is consistent with that time period.

It has been authenticated by a forensic document expert.

But what does the strange writing mean?

I'm Lawrence Fishburne.

As our mystery continues, a famed cryptologist examines the journal for

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

If this document says victims of the wreck, it negates the skeptical

about the Roswell case.

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

some alive.

What really happened at Roswell, New Mexico?

an event that has obsessed the world.

It's difficult to determine whether or not those are three numerical sevens or

whether they are meant to form the capital letter M.

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

That's interesting.

Your grandpa would have been in Roswell at that point. Yeah, he would have been

in Roswell, yes.

Former CIA investigator Ben Smith has returned to the office of Jennifer

one of America's top handwriting experts.

Joining Smith is Jesse Marcel's grandson, who believes his grandfather

between his duty as an intelligence 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 going to let the story die with him.

For more than a month, Nassau 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? What he said was the defining event of

life.

So what then have you learned about the handwriting?

So I did a handwriting comparison with the journal and the known specimens I

for Jesse Marcel.

So here is the lowercase T formation.

Okay. Where it starts going up, comes down, forms a loop, and ends to create

bowl of the pea. 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

was not written in Major Marcel's handwriting.

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

It is astonishing news.

Jesse Marcel is not the author of the journal.

There's no proof indicating it's a hoax or a forgery or that it's anything but

an important document to your grandfather in Roswell at the time. At

Because it actually raises more questions than answers.

This is intriguing.

The paper and ink are from the right period, but Jesse is not the author of

journal. So why did he keep it under lock and key for so many years?

Unlocking the secrets of the journal will take more investigating.

It's not my grandfather's handwriting.

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 they keep the original

of the infamous Ramey photo.

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, Rainey is holding a memo, too blurry to read, that some believe

could confirm Jesse Marcel's story of a flying saucer.

Here to meet Kevin Randall, to learn about the history of all the analyses

conducted on this photo, and also to figure out what more can we do to

the message on that memo.

Kevin.

Ben.

So nice to meet you.

Good to meet you, too. Grab a chair. Sure.

Kevin Randall 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 Rainey 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.

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.

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 and see what's going on. They've got a flying

saucer.

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

observation balloon.

Of course, which we both knew differently.

The only reporter in the room is J. Bon 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 have it from now on.

And that's exactly what he did.

It was definitely not a mother balloon.

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

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

found. He was adamant that this was not what he saw on the Drayfield.

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.

crotch to his hand, so it's got some folds in it. So we're trying to

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. Very, very critical given the time of the

You move down here toward the end of the memo, toward the very end and to the

right side, you can see it says weather balloons as well. Oh, yeah, look at

that. You really can.

So that gives us an idea of 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

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.

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.

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.

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

the disk recovered.

But the important part of this is this sentence right here.

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...

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

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

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 rainy 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.

It's identified as Brigadier General Roger Ramey left in Colonel Thomas J.

DuBose looking over the wind forecasting device.

Wind forecasting. Yes.

There are also pictures of weather balloons that are included in the series

negatives. That's what they were saying.

Fascinating.

Wow.

The memo is just...

What, a quarter of an inch long?

About that, and it's folded so you can't see the whole thing.

I'd like to actually bring in some analysts with some new technology called

gigamacro photography using a microscope to actually look at the sub -levels of

the negative.

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.

Ben Smith has gotten exclusive permission from the University of Texas

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

It was snapped at the Army press conference, where Jesse Marcel said he

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

observation balloon.

Of course, which we both knew differently.

How's it going?

Good. 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

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.

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

It's the spark of a lot of controversy, but if we can figure out what it says,

we can perhaps solve the Roswell mystery.

So what we're going to do is we're going to get down into the grains of the

emulsion. We're going to go up to 80 ,000 dpi with the camera system that we

have here.

It's going to take a series of focal stacks, which is...

bringing all those depth of field into view.

We're going to merge all those together. We're going to 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 could be great.

To try and read the memo, Gene Cooper will focus in on hundreds of micro

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?

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 who have been most affected.

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

him.

Smith has located Barbara Dugar, granddaughter of Sheriff George Wilcox,

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.

Wilcox got to see the debris himself when rancher Mack 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

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 because, 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

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.

According to Barbara Dugar, when her grandfather got to the crash site, it

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.

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

some alive.

I mean, I just sat there and leaned back in my chair and thought.

Barbara Dugar 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

be a lot of interviewing.

They surrounded the courthouse. They came in. They roughed George Wilcox up

front of Big Mom. And she said a red -headed 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 them. And I said

her, I said, you really believe, Big Mom, that the military is going to come

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

conclusion? My grandfather was perfectly normal.

He wouldn't have been sheriff of Roswell. Right. He was well respected

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

bad.

It is real. The Roswell incident is real.

It's a powerful story, 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

balloon. It isn't. It was real.

our way to what we second debrief site what we call the impact site the impact

site yes after meeting with the granddaughter of a key eyewitness when

there he saw the spaceship ben smith wants to find physical evidence from the

crash in roswell so he's linking up with ufo researcher and author don schmidt

who claims to have interviewed 600 eyewitnesses connected to the event

So who are our primary witnesses that identify this site?

Initially, it was the family of Sheriff Wilcox when they were describing his

coming out north of town.

It was Schmidt 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.

But today they are on their way to a different location, referred to as the

impact site, which is north of Roswell.

Forty miles, forty miles north of Roswell. That was the drumbeat we were

for years.

Schmidt believes that a spacecraft initially hit the ground at the debris

where pieces broke off.

But then it skipped 25 miles to this impact site, where it finally came to

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.

The third member of the team is Frank Kimbler.

a veteran geologist based at the New Mexico Military Institute.

I've been wanting to go out to this final impact site for a couple of years.

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

there's no physical evidence and and that was the whole chest behind this 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

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 conceited. That was the one thing that even the

press release was based on.

Mack 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.

At the very time that the rancher, Matt Brazel, has led Major

Jesse Marcel as well as Captain Sheridan Cavett back to the debris field.

So while they are investigating that location, the debris field, the military

alerted to an 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

before the military came out? 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. The little

people, the little men.

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. Because given the crash happened, this was the late evening of

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

actually is able to seal off the areas, come in.

and conduct a recovery operation.

The story of a man named Frank Kaufman 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.

Kaufman gave this interview in 1995.

There is a lot of erratic movement on the radar screen.

Then all of a sudden there was kind of a flash, and it just disappeared, or

something just went down.

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 thrown 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 three others inside the

craft.

According to Kaufman'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.

If there was the remains of a craft and bodies,

Where would that be located?

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

to rest.

The search for the Holy Grail, as we would call it, continues.

Yeah. The debris field is where Jesse Marcel found pieces of wreckage, but

according to Don Schmidt, 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.

The only wooden windmill on this ranch, 40 miles north of Roswell.

Schmidt says eyewitnesses remembered certain landmarks here, including a

windmill and a water tank.

Feast of the windmill. Feast of the original windmill. There it is.

Wow. I mean, this thing is a historical relic now.

It is a relic. 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?

Fifteen feet. Okay. So it wasn't where you would think, you know, a towering

structure, because as you see the prevailing wind, it didn't take much to

those blades going.

You see the empty bed where the metal water tank existed back in 1947.

So you see by its circumference. Yeah.

It was about eight feet high. Yep. As it was when we were first out here. As I

look around, I see the Capitan Mountains, the same mountains we could

the debris site that Mack Braswell identified. So coming about 25 miles

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

here. It would be great.

For Kimbler, this is virgin ground.

He has never explored it before.

It's a fresh chance to uncover evidence.

Well, I don't know, a piece of old wire.

See, that's the thing about this. I think we're too close to the windmill,

we're going to end up with a lot of trash in the 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 is 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 a bullet casing, and that's a

high -powered one, too.

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.

Find something?

Yeah, we need to dig this one up.

So it's right there.

Right there. X marks the spot.

Oh,

here we go.

Did you find it?

It's a little sharp.

It looks corroded. 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've got the exact location. We can plot this on

Google Earth.

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. There are supporting details that

suggest... Something bigger happened here.

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 giga -macro microscope to focus

the memo held by General Roger Ramey.

Gentlemen.

Hey. Hello.

How's it going?

Good. How's the analysis going? We've been busy here.

Gene Cooper's goal is to create the most high -resolution image possible.

The giga -macro'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

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 eyewitness is right?

So in this case, we're looking at the very top of the acetate base of the

negative. And on there, you'll see different scratches and different

So this one that's right next to a key point, a letter there. That 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 cloning or copying material from one location to the other

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

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 noticed our word victims looks like it starts with a P.

Do you see that too?

Yeah, when he first brought it up, I thought the word became pending.

This extraordinary high -resolution version produced by the Gigamacro shows

photo in greater detail than anyone has ever seen before.

What about, yeah, the signature. Can we see the signature line?

The signature line.

R -A.

M -E -Y?

Y is way separated from the word.

Could that be like a slight rise in the paper or something, like an optical

illusion? I don't know.

It could, in fact, be an optical illusion based on the way the camera was

and the lens of the camera and the lighting can feel things from us.

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 rainy photo.

Yeah, the uniform size of each letter really makes...

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, 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.

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.

Ben Smith believed 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.

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?

Does the journal Marcel kept close his whole life?

contained 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

How did it go out there?

It's been interesting.

To discuss how to push the journal investigation forward, Ben Smith is

with Joe Pappalardo, an aviation expert and author of Spaceport Earth, the

Reinvention of Spaceflight.

Pappalardo is well -versed in the Roswell story.

I went to a former Secret Service authenticator. Uh -huh. She cut her

tracking threats.

from crazy people and nefarious people.

She linked the letter to the person writing it to build a criminal case?

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,

County, which is actually next to Harrisburg, where Jesse went to

school. Now, I don't know yet whether that's just a coincidence, but it's

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 the story. So this is the foundation by

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.

felt fairly confident that the handwriting in this journal did not

Marcel's.

That's even more intriguing.

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

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 o 'clock in the afternoon.

It is very difficult. In fact, with just verbal directions, we never would have

found it.

In 1980... He returned to Roswell and gave that bombshell TV interview in

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 now, I don't know what it

After Marcel went public, several retired officers from the 509th spoke up

support his story of a cover -up and added the extraordinary claim that the

had recovered a spaceship and the bodies of aliens.

Some of that testimony was recorded by ufologists in a 1991 documentary called

Recollections of Roswell.

I had learned, of course, that the sergeant of the guard with a series of

went out and they surrounded the site.

Robert Shirky was assistant operations officer for the 509th Bomber Group.

And then they swept the area and picked up everything they could, and the bodies

were brought in.

And everything was laid out in Hangar 84.

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

Base.

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 dramatically sealed.

Dennis says he assumed there had been some kind of deadly accident involving

children.

So he delivered three small coffins to the air base.

I had this friend who was a lieutenant nurse that I knew quite well.

She said, How did you get in here? What are you doing in here? And he said,

you're going to get in a lot of trouble if you said, would you please leave and

get out of here in a hurry.

By the time I turned around, there was another officer who 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.

Like Marcel, Walter Hout also with the 509th.

felt intimidated to stay silent. This is censorship, pure and simple.

I don't like it. For many years, Walter Hout, the 509th Public Information

Officer, claimed he simply did as he was told and issued that famous press

release. But later, Hout 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.

What do you think it was that was on that ranch?

Some type of craft from outer space,

from where I do not know.

There were newspapers at the stand, and he said, well, I guess now that they're

putting in the paper, I can tell you about this. I wanted to tell you for

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.

He said, I want you to read this article because it's a true story.

And I not only know that it's true, but I'm the pilot who flew the wreckage of

the UFO to Dayton, Ohio.

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.

I remember him telling me that they were small people, certainly shorter than we

were, pale, slightly planted eyes, sort of larger heads,

and humanoid looking, human -esque looking, but not like us.

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

group to see if this might have been passed to him by somebody else within

bomber group.

It's written by the same person. And for me, that raises another question.

Why the market 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

for the writer.

Maybe there's no meaning at all, but it was just a demonic device.

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

of nowhere you're working an air wing with nuke it's a pressure cooker they

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 going to 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.

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. Must be Ben. That's right.

Good to meet you. You too. I brought by the document that we discussed on the

phone.

I can't remember how much I told you, but I have with me a journal that

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.

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 could hide a message in a journal.

I'm a mathematician focused on cryptology, making and breaking codes

ciphers. Ciphers are the coolest, sexiest form of writing that there can

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 what you want to get at.

We don't use ciphers for our laundry list, for our grocery list, right? We

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.

This is, you know, obviously a unique item.

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 this journal because I'm the first person with the skills to ferret

what might be hidden there.

We have 122 pages of cursive writing.

And then on page 123, after Roswell, August 31st, 1947,

it shifts to this.

block letter format.

Now the military's 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.

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?

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 falls after whatever happened

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 devil, right? The number of the beast. The beast,

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.

It 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.

There is something interesting right in that first line.

We have when with a lowercase n, but then the next word down ends with an

uppercase n.

and then in with a lowercase n. Okay. Why would you suddenly capitalize the

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 the angels are providing

abundance, and then immediately in the next paragraph we have a total shift in

something that could be coded.

That is almost too crazy to believe.

Well, let me go ahead and look at a couple more pages, see what else we have

here.

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.

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.

It doesn't have a dot on the I.

The next line looks like a foreign word. It does have the dot.

I mean, you could sometimes forget the dot and 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.

It's not like we just have a small passage. It continues over several

there's the potential for, you know, a little greater depth of information

conveyed here.

This is jumping out at me.

Again, we have a phenomena where a word ends with an uppercase letter, short

with a capital P.

I mean, he uses lowercase T's elsewhere. It's not like the whole thing's an

uppercase, you know, somebody shouting at you in an email.

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 when you're trying to hide something.

The handwriting doesn't look natural or the characters don't look right.

It's just, you know, anything that looks like a little hinky and off from normal

writing can indicate that the author was trying to do something else at the same

time. And so it's a sign that this should bear closer examination.

Yeah.

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

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,

so we want to keep rolling with that and build a little catalog of what's going

on in 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

and which of these is B?

It's unclear.

Right. So we'd have a lot of possibilities to check.

Any given letter, we'd have two possibilities, that this form is A or

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.

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

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.

If Craig Bauer can decipher it, the journal could be the missing link, the

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,

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.

By 1990, a Gallup poll reported that nearly 70 million Americans believed

spaceships had visited the Earth.

Yet the government stayed silent about Roswell, which it officially considered

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

and 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.

Then in 1993, Congressman Stephen 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

authors. We just didn't go to a big master file that said Roswell and open

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

of course, the base had been closed for a long time.

The report does not dispute that something crashed in the ranch lands

Roswell. But in a stunning twist, it reveals that it was not a weather

If you will read this book, and I'm sure you're going to take it home tonight

and read it, quite frankly, you're going to find some very interesting and quite

fascinating pieces of information about Air Force research.

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.

In 1947, the United States launched 32 Mogul balloons over the course of seven

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.

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 1947 still oversaw the nation's growing air

forces. For Don Schmidt 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.

What do you think people in Roswell still are not convinced, no matter what

say?

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

To this day, the family of Jesse Marcel is definitely not convinced.

It was a mobile 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.

So far, there has never been...

A researcher with your experience and credibility on the site to examine the

potential of a crash. Okay.

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.

David Susi 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 Susie'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 the speeds and something that could explain

the witness accounts at the debris field. Okay.

Even 70 years after the Roswell crash, David Soucy 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 that.

Even when I go on an accident site, just...

days after the accident, there's credibility issues there. They train us

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 I can

say, here's what is here, but at the very least, we might be able to

what is not there.

Doesn't look like much, but it's the birthplace of ufology in the United

Yeah. Just by measuring the patterns and velocity of the wind, Susie 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

missile launches.

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 sensor called a sonobuoy.

In 1947, it was the misidentification of these radar reflectors that is most

likely the famous flying disc.

The 1995 Air Force report theorized that Mogul Balloon No.

4, 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

weather was and all these things. And they tried to recover the material if

could, but the material in and of itself wasn't important. The purpose was

important.

It was slightly more than three weeks between the time Mogul Balloon 4 was

reported lost and the Roswell wreckage was found.

So let me show you exactly what the witnesses described as a 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. claims 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.

Ufologist and author Kevin Randall is an expert on the Roswell crash.

Randall is certain that Jesse Marcel would have recognized the wreckage.

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 soundings 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 or retrieves.

But Richard Weaver says that only officers directly involved in Project

would have known about it.

They classified Mogul top secret, which means only a few people have a need to

know.

The project's lead engineer was Professor Charles Moore of New York

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.

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?

What I like to do is get a documentation of the site.

I'll take the angle of every photo, and then we'll be able to map that against

what I expect the airflow would have been.

Then what I like to do with every accident site is get some pictures of

would be the approach path to the impact point.

So from every location.

We take pictures coming in and going out.

I'm not sure I buy that whole balloon drag theory.

Really? Down through there.

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

it's straight and there's debris straight off to the east. Not really

that.

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

was described.

You've got wind readings up there, wind readings on the west side, and then wind

readings in the bottom. Yeah. And you can see that it changed direction

throughout that. So we can rule out a MOGA balloon making contact with the

at the furrow, dragging across the ground, laying to rest across that

field. That's not the way it works.

Just not the way it works. 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, man.

David Soucy 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,

investigation will be one step closer to discovering whether Jesse Marcel was

telling the truth.

Because so much of his investigation hinges on Jesse Marcel's testimony, Ben

Smith has come to New York City to see Tanya Ryman, 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 8th, 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.

Smith has brought with him footage of some of Jesse Marcel's interviews.

Ryman will watch them closely, looking for any sign that Jesse Marcel may not

telling the truth.

He told me not to say anything.

He says, I'll have it from now on.

And that's exactly what he did.

When he came out, he told the press that was there, he said there was nothing

but a weather balloon, a 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

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

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. 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.

His family says he was an honest man, a man of duty, and he's telling the truth.

The government says they don't know why he's making these claims. He's not

telling the truth.

In its 1995 report, the Air Force cited a sworn affidavit from Sheridan Cabot.

Cabot was the special agent for counterintelligence who accompanied

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, nobody

you if you're an intelligence officer.

As the other official on site, Cabot could have backed Marcel's story about

strange wreckage that littered a field with nearly a mile of debris, but he

didn't.

Cabot, who was there with him, said that there's not much material there at all,

which they recovered most of.

He said it was obvious to him at the time that the stuff they were picking up

was just crap, you know, for lack of a better term. The fact was the material

that's depicted in the photos was identified by Cabot, still alive in

the material he and Marcel physically picked up in the desert on the farm in

July of 1947.

In his affidavit, Sheridan Cabot 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 of which we didn't know what it was.

There were just fragments strewn all over the area, an area about three

-quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide.

So we proceeded to pick up the parts.

So which intelligence officer was telling the truth?

Sheridan Cavett 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

fumble, he would autocorrect. He did it consistently and comfortably.

Uh -huh.

This next clip.

He's going to describe the materials that he discovered. And this is a key

of the investigation. Can we trust his eyewitness account about the actual

debris that he found? Okay.

But the thing about that got me is that you couldn't even bend it. You couldn't

even bend it.

Even with a sledgehammer, it would bounce off of it.

So I knew that I had never seen anything like that before.

And 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 vegan until I was almost, I was familiar with just about all the

materials used in aircraft and in our air travel.

This is nothing like that.

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

what he's saying.

After analyzing Marcel's body language with expert Tanya Ryman, who sees no

indication of deceit... He truly believes what he's saying.

Ben Smith heads to York College in Pennsylvania to see if cryptologist

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

somewhat coded in some way?

I think if your grandfather is making claims that someone else believes or

someone else had the same experience.

but for whatever reason they feel afraid of openly speaking out, they might

capture that 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 was truly not made by human hands.

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.

Craig, nice to meet you. Jack is one of our best math and computer science

majors. Oh, great.

Good to see you again.

So, we've been studying your grandfather's journal.

The first really interesting thing we noticed 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 on the line above, he's using lowercase L's in

girl.

We started to see these different forms.

So I asked Jack to prepare this table, and I was thrilled with this result.

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.

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

of cipher.

It does.

Yeah. If you have two different versions of a letter, you know, we could call

them, say, zero and one. Sure.

So you have an apparent message, but really it's spelling something out in

binary. Binary, is that? Okay, just that simple. Yeah, yeah. There's a system

that uses that kind of approach.

Okay. This made us very hopeful.

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

But there is some bad news.

If somebody's implementing a bilateral 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 them.

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 is kind of frustrating, and the result was that we had to run

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 they 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

that just tests 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 A's and B's 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 MacArthur at one point.

So we were kind of checking the timing. What have you been writing about

MacArthur? But on run after run, we're just periodically getting words, but

never a complete sentence, never anything that looked like it couldn't

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

that there's not something hidden there with a straightforward bilateral 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 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, you're just going to exchange a

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.

I always said that you can always believe the other people that were

So maybe this is one of the other people that was involved and some way of

getting a message.

We need to go find out who wrote this.

Yeah.

Next on Roswell, the first witness.

He told me, don't believe everything the government tells you. 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.

He confessed to her there was more.

So much more he could have said.

Did

Marcel

hide a piece of what he found at home?

Jesse said he had proof.

That could be some debris left around.

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

wreck? No. There's something under the ground there.

She says her father staged a cover -up. And he also destroyed files.

Or changed them.

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.

He didn't write the journal, but did he share its secrets with this man?

Who could have?

I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thanks for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.

time, our conclusion to Roswell, the first witness.