Roswell files
IS THE TRUTH REALLY OUT THERE?
Former CIA operative Ben Smith investigated the crash which took place in Roswell in 1947 for a television documentary aired on the History Channel, or Sky History in the UK, called Roswell:The FirstWitness. He spoke to the grandchildren of Major Jesse Marcel, the person sent to the crash site to gather debris for analysis. He also visited the site with aviation crash experts, studied a journal found among Marcel's possessions for clues and spoke to other witnesses. Was Marcel right? Was the evidence gathered that day really not of this Earth?
© Ben Smith
Before you began investigating, were you sceptical about what happened that day in 1947?
I think my initial attitude was one of not scepticism, but healthy doubt. Being a member of government, having formerly worked for the CIA, I'd seen how information is compartmented. The priorities, from a national security standpoint, didn't really seem to align with aliens and the possibility of a huge, vast conspiracy. I've been involved with some pretty expensive operations and I had never heard about the need to cover something like this up. But maybe I was so low or unimportant that I didn't know everything that was going on at the CIA.
In the series you heard Marcel's version of events, not only through his family, but via tape and video recordings from past interviews. Do you believe what he was saying was true?
Listening to the recordings, talking to body language experts, getting to know Marcel's family and seeing the fruits of his personality and his character manifested in his children and his grandchildren, I did believe his account in so much that he believed it, and I don't think he was lying. But I still found discrepancies.
We had Jesse saying that what he found was like balsa wood, but his son calling it an i-beam, so there are already witnesses with different accounts. And then you stack on properties of what was found, like ‘memory metal’ and ‘unbreakable’, and I could not find any direct evidence that these claims were from Jesse Marcel's mouth. That was always a tricky part. What came first: the idea of memory metal or the witness accounts?