Brig. Gen. Thomas Dubose

: (From affidavit) "I received a phone call from Maj. Gen. Clements McMullen,

Deputy Commander, Strategic Air Command. He asked what we knew about

the object which had been recovered outside Roswell... I called Col. William

Blanchard... and directed him to send the material in a sealed container to me

at Fort Worth. After the plane from Roswell arrived with the material, I asked

the Base Commander, Col. Al Clark, to take possession of the material and

to personally transport it in a B-26 to... McMullen in Washington, D.C.

...McMullen told me he would send the material by personal courier on his

plane to ...Wright Field. The entire operation was conducted under the

strictest secrecy."

(According to recent 2022 research by Anthony Bragalia and military author/historian John Schlund, McMullen's involvement with Roswell probably didn't end there. In December 1947, McMullen personally transferred his son, Cpt. Frank McMullen, from Japan and assigned him to Roswell. Bragalia speculates that McMullen, well trained in intelligence, wanted a trusted "inside-man" or spy to keep him informed about what base personnel might be saying about the incident months later. Schlund, an expert on McMullen, only expressed the opinion that if the matter was classified, Gen. McMullen would have done what was necessary to contain it.)

Dubose's story of this shipment is briefly alluded to in the Air Force Roswell report in their Attachment 32. (Caution: long download) But instead they attribute it to "crashed disc proponents" instead of one of their own generals. The omission of Dubose's name and the deliberate distortion of the actual source is a very clear illustration of the propaganda techniques employed by the Air Force counterintelligence people who wrote this report.

Nor did they stop at this. They also erroneously claimed that the shipment was supposedly ordered by Gen. Ramey. Dubose, however, repeatedly stated that the shipment was ordered by Gen. McMullen. McMullen further instructed him to not even tell Ramey about it. (Ramey was away from the base at the time.) They omitted Dubose's statements that everything was carried out under the strictest secrecy and the matter even went directly to the White House. They also tried to spin the story to the effect that if there were such a shipment, then the purpose was to have the debris identified by the top weather people in Washington. Omitted was the rest of Dubose's story of the debris subsequently being shipped on McMullen's personal plane to Wright Field for further analysis.

This was obviously the most mysterious weather balloon in human history! But in reality, news stories of the day had both Ramey and Dubose instantly identifying the supposed debris as a weather balloon. Dubose knew all about radar targets. He went on to become Air Force chief of air rescue. Corner reflector radar targets were already being used in WWII for sea rescues. As Dubose was quoted as saying during the photo shoot in Ramey's office on July 8, 1947:

"Colonel Dubose declared that tinfoil objects of the type used on the kite

were employed in Europe during bombing missions to throw off German radar.

The tinfoil causes huge "blips" on a radar screen, he added. The same device

also was used on life rafts in the Pacific to facilitate air-sea rescue work."

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 9, 1947)

Ramey also brought in a weather officer, Irving Newton, for official identification. Newton, of course, also instantly identified it as a weather balloon (photo), and the press release then went out that the Roswell "flying disc" had been positively identified by a weather officer as an Army meteorological device.

Newton and Dubose both remembered Ramey then stating in front of reporters that the special flight to Wright Field was no longer needed. Contemporary news story also state that the special flight had been canceled. But later that evening the story changed again. Now Ramey was again shipping the so-called weather balloon to Wright Field for still further identification. (See, e.g., ABC News radio broadcast)

One wonders how many times and how many experts were needed to certify this debris as coming from a weather device! What was really going on is perhaps hinted at in the FBI telegram about the event from their Dallas office. The FBI had also been told by one of Ramey's intelligence officers that the recovered device resembled a high-altitude weather balloon with its attached radar target. But then the telegram goes on to say that further telephone conversations with Wright Field "had not borne out that belief." (This part of the FBI telegram contradicting the AF's modern balloon explanation was also omitted by the AF propagandists in their summary statement.)

What was so different about this weather balloon that it deserved special treatment? The Air Force claimed that further identification was necessary because this was really from a Project Mogul balloon. But the early Mogul balloons used off-the-shelf weather balloons and radar targets that were indistinguishable from standard meteorological equipment. Furthermore, the FBI telegram, Gen. Ramey's statements, and those of the meteorological officer, Irving Newton, all identified the debris as coming from a singular weather balloon and radar target. (I personally spoke with Newton on the phone, and he reiterated that all he saw was a standard meteorological balloon.) The photos taken in Fort Worth also clearly show very little debris, compatible with a singular weather balloon/radar target, but not with a multi-balloon, multi-target Mogul. (I have reconstructed the radar target debris from these photos in a 3-D ray tracer, which again scientifically confirms that it came from one, not multiple targets.)

The fact is, there was nothing on public display that could distinguish the debris from a ordinary weather balloon/radar target. Furthermore, when Ramey went on a Fort Worth radio station that evening, he denied that there was any instrumentation found, though he noted the weather balloons normally carried such instrumentation (various United Press stories).

If the debris couldn't be distinguished from a typical weather balloon/radar target combination, then how does one explain the statement in the FBI telegram that Wright Field after telephone conversations did not concur with the balloon/radar target identification?

One possible explanation is the previous shipment of debris to Wright Field described by Gen. Dubose. If one assumes Wright Field had examined this earlier shipment and determined the debris was from something else, this would explain why they would later disagree with the weather balloon identification.

Dubose's earlier shipment of crash debris may be alluded to in the Ramey message at the end of the first paragraph in the phrase "...the victims of the wreck you forwarded to the ?????? at Fort Worth, Tex." One possible interpretation of "...the wreck you forwarded..." would be the wreckage Dubose says was previously forwarded to Fort Worth and hence to Washington and Wright Field. If there was such a shipment a few days earlier, then it was likely on July 6 when rancher Mack Brazel came to Roswell to report the wreckage, and according to the Sheriff's family, brought samples along with him.

Besides Dubose independently corroborating Roswell intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel's story of a weather balloon cover-up, Dubose's subsequent actions also lend to Marcel's credibility. Dubose recommended Marcel for promotion to Lt. Colonel in the Air Force Reserve several months later, along with Roswell base commander Col. Blanchard. Dubose also co-signed Blanchard's highly laudatory evaluation of Marcel the following spring and recommended Marcel attend Air Command and Staff School. (click here to view document) Similarly Gen. Ramey a few months later wrote that he thought Marcel command officer material. (click here to view document) If Dubose (or Ramey) had any doubts about Marcel's competency following the encounter in Ramey's office, it isn't evident in Marcel's record. In another interview (below), Dubose indicates he felt Marcel was "set up" to take the fall for the debunked flying disc story, and maybe Dubose was trying to make it up to Marcel.

A new twist in the Dubose story emerged in 2006-2007 with the release of Roswell public information officer Walter Haut's "deathbed" affidavit and a videotaped interview from 2000. In them, Haut stated that both Dubose and General Ramey had flown to Roswell base to attend the general staff meeting on the morning of July 8 (thus about 10 hours before the action shifted over to Ramey and his weather balloon story in Fort Worth that afternoon). There briefings were given about the crashed saucer and recovered crew and a discussion was held on how to publicly handle the situation. Ramey stated that it was to be covered up.

Thus Haut's affidavit and interview would indicate that Dubose was well aware of the crash of a flying saucer and the recovery of alien bodies. If that was the case, then Dubose knew much more than he would publicly disclose. However, Dubose did hint that he knew more. Stanton Friedman, who was the first to find and interview Dubose, indicates that Dubose would tell him to keep going, that he was following the right track (i.e., flying saucer crash), without being fully explicit about what he meant.

Even if one discounts Haut's revelations, there is no doubt that Dubose's testimony was explicit about the high secrecy and the coverup surrounding Roswell that had nothing to do with a balloon crash. Further, it involved something far stranger than balloon debris that required a special and very secret shipment of debris to Washington and then to Wright Field.

More recent Dubose revelations by NASA's Clark McClelland

--Roswell was an alien crash (New, 2012!)

Recently an interview with Dubose by Clark McClelland has come to light that would seem to corroborate Haut's affidavit that Dubose knew a lot more than what he publicly let on.

McClelland started his diverse career with NASA in 1958 at Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) and later moved to the Kennedy Space Center in Houston, ending his career in 1992 after McClelland says NASA fired him as punishment for breaking security on a UFO incident he personally observed (see below). His many jobs at NASA included Shuttle ground test pilot and in mission control. He informed me he was personally involved in launching or observing 679 missions during his career and into the present.

McClelland has recently written (stargatechronicles.com) having interviewed Dubose in 1990 in Dubose's Florida home. In this off-the-record interview (Dubose wouldn't allow McClelland to record it), reconstructed from notes and memory, McClelland claims Dubose went far further in his story, admitting that Roswell was indeed a crashed alien spacecraft recovery, including 4-5 small dead bodies and one live one. (The story of a surviving alien pops up in several other accounts as well. See testimony in support of Roswell mortician Glenn Dennis' story.)

McClelland depicts Dubose's language as profane (as it was in some other interviews), particularly so when he mentioned his disgust with the cover-up (even telling McClelland he might put out a public statement telling the real story--something he never did) and how he, as a senior officer, was not allowed to actually see the crash material or bodies because of all the security. It particularly riled him that captured Nazi scientists, people he hated and had fought against, were allowed to see the crash site but he was completely frozen out. This jibes with other interviews where Dubose said he was never allowed to see the real debris, with his boss, Gen. Roger Ramey, strictly enforcing orders from above to keep Dubose away from it.

Again Dubose confirms that the weather balloon depicted in the photos was a cover story, deliberately flown in (he said he was also responsible for this), whereas the real debris all went to Wright Field, Ohio. This does not necessarily conflict with Roswell intelligence officer Jesse Marcel's story, who said the plane he flew to Fort Worth to see Ramey en route to Wright Field was full of real debris, but he also brought a few wrapped samples of the more interesting stuff to show Gen. Ramey. Dubose would not necessarily have known of this if Ramey was keeping him away from it for security reasons. Dubose added that Marcel, also in the photos, was deliberately "set up" to take the fall. (In reality, the newspapers never blamed Marcel, instead usually attributing the supposedly bungled flying disc ID to Roswell public information officer Walter Haut.)

Some excerpts from McClelland's interview (with permission from McClelland, since this is copyrighted material):

The Air Force didn't even identify Dubose in the photos taken July 8, 1947, which they reproduced in their report, picturing him with Gen. Ramey. In the 1000+ page Air Force tome, I found his name mentioned only once by the AF in an interview with somebody else.

(See below for the rather lame explanation for ignoring Dubose by the head author of the report in a recent interview.)

Why the cold shoulder from the Air Force for this high-ranking officer? Quite simply because Dubose's statements contradicted the Air Force's party line. He stated that there was indeed a cover-up ordered from Washington (he said he personally took the phone call from Gen. McMullen) and that the weather balloon debris shown in the photos was not what was found at Roswell. It was instead a cover story designed to get the press off their backs and "put out the fire." Dubose insisted that even he never saw the actual Roswell debris (meaning that what was pictured in the photos was not the actual material recovered near Roswell).

As Dubose stated plainly in his affidavit,

"The material shown in the photographs taken in Maj. Gen. Ramey's

office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the

material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press."

In some interviews Dubose also spoke of an earlier, highly secret shipment of debris ordered by Gen. Clements McMullen (Deputy Commander of the Strategic Air Command) in Washington, to be sent by "colonel courier." This was after Dubose had been first informed of the recovery of debris by Roswell base. Dubose was handling the high-level phone traffic while Ramey and base commander Col. Hewlett Wheless were away from the base, attending an air show in nearby Denton, Texas, as reported in local newspapers.

According to Dubose, this debris traveled from Roswell to Fort Worth and was transferred to another plane, with the acting Fort Worth base commander, Col. Alvin Clark, assuming the role as the new courier (thus the "colonel courier"), obviously attesting to the importance attached to this shipment. This was then flown to Washington. Dubose added that Gen. McMullen would also inform him the debris was subsequently shipped on McMullen's personal plane to the aeronautical labs at Wright Field for further analysis . (The story of this debris shipment is mentioned in Dubose's affidavit, but confused with the other events of July 8. In other interviews Dubose made it clear that this shipment took place several days before when he was first made aware of the discovery at Roswell.)

New, Jan. 2012! In a recent 2009 interview with Col. Richard Weaver (ret.), the chief AF counterintelligence debunker for the 1994 Roswell report, Weaver was asked why they ignored Dubose's testimony, such as his affidavit statement that the weather balloon photographed in Ramey's office was a cover story to divert the attention of the press. Weaver again totally ignored the totality of Dubose's various statements (more immediately below), instead tried to sidestep the question with a lot of propagandistic doubletalk (a subject he taught for AF counterintelligence), claiming the one affidavit statement meant nothing because Dubose didn't specify what they were trying to cover up. Weaver also stated that they never claimed in their report that the weather balloon in Ramey's office was definitely what was recovered at Roswell, just that it was "consistent" with what others said was recovered (ignoring or misquoting--examples--many others who said otherwise), nor did they claim it came definitively from a Project Mogul balloon. (These were simply flagrant lies by Weaver, unless one wants to argue these weren't definitive claims in their report but "very strong insinuations.")

Here are some more sample Dubose quotes from various interviews describing the balloon cover story and the highly secret shipment of debris, making it quite clear Weaver was again being disingenuous when it came to Dubose and the significance of his testimony:

"There was a host of people descending on our headquarters seeking information

from Ramey, badgering him for information we didn't have. I didn't know what it was.

Blanchard [base commander at Roswell] didn't know. Ramey didn't know... We didn’t

know what the hell it was. Nobody knew. But I can tell you this — it damn sure wasn’t

a weather balloon. ...McMullen said, Look, why don't you come up with something,

anything you can use to get the press off our back? So we came up with this weather

balloon story, which I thought was a hell of a good idea. Somebody got one and we

ran it up a couple of hundred feet and dropped it to make it look like it crashed, and

that's what we used... Now I imagine, privately, some people felt bad about doing

things that way. But it worked. The story stuck."

(Interview with reporter Billy Cox (blog) , Florida Today, 11/24/91, requoted in Timothy

*Good, Beyond Top Secret, p. 465 )

"Actually, it was a cover story, the balloon part of it... Somebody cooked up

the idea as a cover story ...we'll use this weather balloon. ...We were told this

is the story that is to be given to the press, and that is it, and anything else,

forget it. …And McMullen, if you ever knew him, ...if he told you he wanted to run

something, he goddamn sure ran it. He knew every facet of the operation. He's a

busybody. He wanted to know what the hell was going on, who was pissing on the

sidewalk, and all that sort of thing.

"McMullen told me, ‘You are not to discuss this… this is more than top secret…

it’s beyond that. It’s within my priority as deputy to [Gen.] George Kenney,

and he in turn responsible to the President, this is the highest priority you can

exhibit. And you will say nothing. And that's the end of it. ...Jesus, that's the

commander and chief and you forgot about it."

(Audio, directly below; quoted in Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt, UFO Crash at

Roswell, 1991, p. 166)

“It happened, Clark, it damned well DID happen. Shit, I am considering again releasing an official statement on that damned case... Hell, the US Army Air Force recovered alien hardware and recovered those pale, skinny little bastards many miles outside of Roswell in July 1947.

"Did I view the craft or the creatures? No, I was not fortunate enough to have that opportunity because of the restrictions placed at that damned recovery site and on the recovered material and bodies that were eventually delivered to Wright Field in Ohio... (Colonel) “Butch” Blanchard [Roswell base commanding officer] witnessed those creatures; dammit, and I was denied that privilege. Hell, I was a senior USAAF officer to Butch Blanchard. I wanted to see them for myself when it arrived but, Ramey had returned from a short leave and said no. He had been given STRICT orders NOT to share it with his staff or anyone else. Keep it totally QT [quiet] was ordered by General Clem (Clements) McMullen [Deputy SAC Commander], who received his apparent orders from General George Kenney, SAC Commander. The fewer who knew about it, the better. That left me out, dammit. Hell, I bitched about it, but Ramey stuck to his orders...

"...Hell, Ramey was not aware of the alien disc story initially. I received a call directly from Washington and General McMullen who reported the incident to me. McMullen ordered me to keep it QT, even from Ramey until he decided how to handle it. McMullen mentioned that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were discussing a release of the incident to the White House and President Truman. I do believe they did release it to the President. Ramey was on leave to visit his family in Texas and other activities.” [A little known fact that I discovered from review of local newspapers. Ramey on July 6, 1947, was away from the base visiting his family in nearby Denton, Texas and acting as a dignitary at an airshow there. I doubt McClelland would have been aware of this.]

“...Ramey was briefed about the debris recovered upon return from his leave, the 4 or 5 bodies, and the injured little bastard and was secretly informed later by General Exon [Exon's public comments about crash] that the craft and occupants were not from earth... one was recovered injured, but, alive.” I added, “I had heard that from von Braun, but no other person until now..." "Yes, now you can see how disappointed I was to not view such a being?”

"...Clark are you aware that many unknown crafts were being tracked over White Sands, Los Alamos, Alamogordo Army Air Base and that general area prior to this event?... There were numerous other objects that had been acquired and tracked by the Army Air base and White Sands Proving Ground (WSPG) radar for many months prior to July 1947. Hell, they were flying all over the place in the New Mexico skies. This was probably due to the nuclear activity happening in Los Alamos and the German V-2 testing at WSPG. Ramey, Blanchard and I were alerted of these objects on many occasions. They were NOT all weather balloons or any other damned excuse to explain them away.” [See my June/July 1947 list of New Mexico UFO cases, Gen. Ramey debunking UFOs a week before Roswell, and Ramey and UFOs essay for more details.]

"...I asked him why he had not released what he was telling me to any reliable publisher or magazine? He stressed, 'I have a nice life that’s running out of years and would rather ride it out. Hell, the USAF did not officially recognize me in reports concerning the fabricated weather balloon stories. I was removed from any notice of my participation. ...I was damned insulted by being shut out, hell, I was as important as any other officer involved."

“Blanchard absolutely did [saw the wreckage and creatures]. Hell, he was a junior officer to me. Ramey never admitted to me that he had but, I was told he did. You are aware that General Nathan Twining and other scientists were at the crash site?" I quickly answered, “Yes sir, I am aware of Twining

and was told that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Dr. Hermann Oberth, and a German expert on manned space physiology, Dr. Hubertus Strughold and others were on site.”

“...Following the release of the story by Blanchard, Ramey was ordered by the Pentagon to concoct a story about weather balloons and to release it to the local newspaper knowing full well that an astounding release such as this would travel faster than ‘shit through a duck’. He had me pose with him and that damned foil that has been a main stay explaining the Roswell debris being that of a damned weather balloon. Clark, that’s a lot of bullshit. Hell, it caused a lot of trouble for that respected officer, Jesse Marcel, the Intel officer at Roswell. Hell, he was set-up as a scape goat..."

“Ramey consulted with me about the weather balloon bullshit that was used to cancel the original release made by Colonel Blanchard through his deputy, Walter Haut, that a saucer had crashed near Roswell. Of course, you have seen the Roswell newspaper; I can’t recall its damned name, which said the Army Air Force had captured a flying saucer. That was an idiotic statement to issue. The God damned machine crashed, I could not find any proof that our military had shot it down.”

"...We received orders from D.C. to ship all the retrieved material directly to Wright Field, Ohio and no other AAF base. Wright Field had German Scientists from the von Braun group there that were back- engineering it for technical advantages. That’s the main reason why I did not see the strange hieroglyphs, etc. It was Top Secret, the same clearance level of the Atomic Bomb..”

“The Roswell material was sent directly to Wright Field, Ohio. The material 'claimed' to be that which was retrieved, I had sent to Ramey at Fort Worth. However, that bogus material was the fake foil from a weather balloon. Apparently, Ramey had been in touch with the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff and other Government agencies.”

COMMENTS: Since there was no recording of this interview and McClelland told me he no longer has his notes, no doubt many skeptics will dismiss the interview as being made up or exaggerated. I think it reasonable to question the exact quotations (similar to the style NICAP's Donald Keyhoe used in his books, for which he was also criticized) but the overall contents strike me as authentic, with McClelland capturing Dubose's persona well and the contents meshing with statements in documented interviews and his affidavit immediately below, and with at least one obscure historical detail (Ramey being away from the base seeing his family) being almost completely unknown to everybody, a fact I was only able to verify by reviewing the local newspapers from Fort Worth and Denton, Texas.

No doubt the most sensational part of the interview is McClelland saying Dubose confirmed the extraterrestrial nature of the crash, both craft and bodies, but so did Brig. Gen. Arthur Exon, mentioned in the interview, later C/O at Wright-Patternson AFB, where Dubose said all the debris was taken to. Further Dubose dropped hints to Roswell researcher Stanton Friedman that this was the case (telling him he was on the right path).

McClelland is also a very controversial figure, writing and speaking about other sensational UFO incidents and interviews with historical figures while he was at NASA, people like German rocketry pioneers Werner von Braun and his mentor Dr. Hermann Oberth. One highly controversial claim of McClelland's (which he asked me to mention) was viewing on a NASA monitor late at night an 8-9 foot "astronaut" working in the space shuttle payload bay with two normal-sized astronauts, with a "flying wing"-type spacecraft visible in the background (McClelland's drawing and further description), a story he has been publicly telling for nearly 20 years and he claims cost him his job and pension with NASA after 34 years of service. McClelland says we have no astronauts that size and assumes the being and craft were ET. He also said a colleague told him of seeing on a monitor a similar tall ET inside the shuttle cabin with two astronauts.

This may sound like a fantastic claim. But McClelland also wrote me that many of the things he was told by others like von Braun and Oberth were too much for him to believe. E.g., he was shocked by von Braun's and Oberth's claims that humans were seeded on Earth as breeding stock for other star races. In his interview with Dubose, he brought this up, reporting that Dubose dismissed it as nothing but speculation and "Nazi bullshit." He says he is merely passing on what he has personally observed or was told and trying to be as honest about it as he can. (You can hear McClelland describing the tall ET and the Von Braun/Oberth star people stories on the Jeff Rense show--see YouTube replay here. Detailed chapters can be purchased at his website.)

An important source of information on McClelland can be found in this 1999 article by journalist/ UFO researcher Michael Lindemann. A somewhat skepical Lindemann located two of McClelland's old co-workers, who vouched for his integrity and work with NASA. The late Richard Hall of NICAP, well-known and highly-respected in the UFO community, also completely vouched for McClelland's honesty, saying he had known him for decades, he was always careful in his comments and never seemed to exaggerate anything. McClelland had a long-standing interest in UFOs dating back to 1947. He headed NICAP's local branch in Florida in the 1960s and had been feeding NICAP UFO incidents that NASA had been suppressing. Lindemann, after looking more into McClelland's background, felt he was a true whistleblower who should be treated seriously.