UFOS INSPIRE SKEPTICS

16 June 1996 / July 6, 1996
Source: The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C
By Mark Schultz

ROSWELL, N. M. - I didn't see any objects in the sky on my trip to New Mexico in April - except for some spots from squinting too long at the sun.

That's no surprise to Philip Klass, a technical writer and the chief UFO debunker for the Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine devoted to discovering the truth about unexplained phenomena.

Klass has heard about Midway and the objects shot first by Jose and then Manuel Escamilla. He doesn't buy it.

"My goodness, if those were authentic it would be the biggest story of all time," he said.

Klass is familiar - or obsessed - with tales of recovered flying saucers and alien autopsies. He has written four books on the subject, with science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke calling his 1988 "UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game" a "welcome breath of sanity in a field where it is sadly lacking."

He has even more to say about Roswell, however, enough to fill pages of his Skeptic's UFO Newsletter, which each month rebuts new evidence suggesting that in 1947 a flying saucer crashed in the New Mexico desert.

Rather than a simple weather balloon as the Army originally said, Klass said the Roswell crash involved a Top Secret experiment designed to discover whether the Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb.

Project Mogul was under way at nearby Alamagordo Army Air Field, Klass says. He cites project researcher Charles Moore's confirmation that a train of two dozen weather balloons, several radar targets and an acoustic sensor package measuring a total 600 feet was launched on June 4, 1947 - 10 days before Mac Brazel said he found some unusual debris on his ranch.

Klass also rejects the idea that a small metal fragment now in the hands of the International UFO Museum & Research Center came from an alien spaceship. "Anyone who claims they have recovered a piece of metal while they were in Roswell is lying," said Klass, who is also a contributing avionics editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology Magazine.

"While a number of persons have claimed to have been members of a 'recovery team' sent to the Brazel ranch - and some claim to have covertly pocketed pieces of debris [which they have since lost] -such tales are necessarily spurious, based on the known facts," Klass wrote in his May newsletter.

In fact Klass doubts there ever was a recovery team, saying only two people accompanied Brazel to the ranch - Maj. Jesse Marcell and Capt. Sheridan Cavett - and that neither man ever returned to the ranch to show such a team where to look.

Predictably, both Manuel Escamilla of Midway and Walter Haut of the UFO museum bristle at Klass' opinions.

"A lot of people accuse us of capitalizing on it," Escamilla said as he walked through a make-shift souvenir shop filled with images of bright objects captured on video. "But we have no choice," he continued. "What we make off souvenirs we turn around and buy more tape with to keep on filming. It can get expensive."

Haut, who is familiar with Klass' criticism, challenges him to visit the museum and put in the hours he and other volunteers do.

"It's hard to argue with some thing like that, but it's so darn asinine," Haut said. The museum is now housed in three buildings, the latest built in the 1920s. All need repair work. "We are not getting fat," Haut said. "Our money goes back into things we think will enhance our ability to present a better image to the public."

There is one question Klass cannot answer and he concedes that it more than anything, continues to feed the Roswell story.

"What no one will ever know is why Maj. Marcel told [Walter Haut] to put out a press release," he said "It was a dumb, dumb thing to do.'

But Haut, the former public in formation officer ordered to issue the release, has an answer. Haut believes his superiors had him issue the release precisely so that it could be refuted by higher-ranking - and presumably more credible - military officials.

"What better cover-up?" he asked. "You've got to put the monkey on somebody's back."

Klass is not impressed. "Haut is basically a nice guy," he said. "But he doesn't mind twisting the facts a little to bring tourists into Roswell.

"The myth was created by others. They're simply exploiting it," Klass continued. "I suppose if I were in their shoes I might do the same thing."

Mark Schultz is the editor of The Chapel Hill Herald.

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