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By Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt
From the moment that a craft of unknown origin descended tragically from the summer skies and crashed in the high desert of New Mexico in 1947, high-level officials outside of Roswell, N.M., clamored to get the materials into their hands for analysis.
At that time, and certainly as a consequence of World War II, there were a large number of national laboratories that specialized in a wide variety of military technologies. But there was only one facility that was dedicated to the science of reverse-engineering.
The Foreign Technology Division at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio,
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Aerial photo of Wright Field, ca. July 1947. Wreckage from the UFO that crashed north of Roswell was taken to the Foreign Technology Division here. After extensive laboratory tests were conducted, the consensus among the scientists was that the pieces of wreckage were "from space."
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ROSWELL INTERNATIONAL UFO MUSEUM.
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was responsible for the breakdown and analysis of all weapons and equipment captured during the war. When the military got their hands on something of foreign design — or of an even "higher level" — the captured technology would go to FTD. As we noted in a previous column, Wright Field Air Base was Maj. Jesse Marcel's original destination when he made his first trip escorting wreckage from Roswell Army Air Field.
Instead, that flight was diverted after takeoff to Fort Worth, Texas, where Gen. Roger Ramey announced to the press that what Maj. Marcel had recovered was, in fact, the remains of a weather balloon. Officially, the flight scheduled to carry Marcel to Wright Field was cancelled, and he was ordered to return to Roswell AAF.
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This FBI memo, dated July 8, 1947, contradicts Gen. Ramey's statement that the wreckage was not flown to Wright Field. (Click the image above to see a larger version.)
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ROSWELL INTERNATIONAL UFO MUSEUM.
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But an official Telex from the FBI's Dallas office disputed that version of events, alleging that a clandestine flight carried the recovered Roswell material to Wright Field and that FTD had made preparations for its arrival while the Army was still in the midst of spinning its weather-balloon story to the media.
Brig. Gen. Arthur E. Exon described to us what happened after the flight reached FTD. Exon, who in 1947 was a lieutenant colonel, was an administration student in technology at FTD. "We heard the material was coming to Wright Field," he said. Analysis of the debris was performed in FTD's various labs. "Everything from chemical analysis, stress tests, compression tests, flexing. It was brought into our material-evaluation labs. I don't know how it arrived, but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual." Exon also described the material. "[Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed," he said, but did not elaborate. "There were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with heavy hammers. ... It was flexible to a degree."
According to Exon, "Some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell, and the [rest] was almost like foil but strong. It had them [the FTD analysts] pretty puzzled."
The lab chiefs at Wright Field set up a "special project" for the testing of the material. "They knew they had something new in their hands," Exon said. "The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian, but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space."
Exon's experience with the recovered debris wasn't limited to the work at Wright Field. A number of months later, he said, he flew over central New Mexico and checked out the crash site he had heard about while stationed back east.
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Gen. Arthur E. Exon (U.S. Army, Ret.). In July 1947, Exon was a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Exon later served as that base's commanding officer.
PHOTO BY TOM CAREY.
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"[It was] probably part of the same accident, but [there were] two distinct sites," he said. "[At] the northwest [site], pieces found on the [Foster] ranch, those pieces were mostly metal."
Exon also confirmed having seen the gouge that others had reported. Exon said, "I remember auto tracks leading to the pivotal sites and obvious gouges in the terrain."
When asked about the bodies, he said, "There was another location where ... apparently the main body of the spacecraft was ... where they did say there were bodies."
Asked if the bodies had been sent to Wright Field, Exon said simply, "That's my information."
Like others who had been on the crash site in July 1947, and who had been in Roswell at the time of the recovery or who had been in Fort Worth when Marcel brought the material to the office of Gen. Ramey, Exon was convinced that the wreckage had come from something not manufactured on earth.
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