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When returning to the base, he stopped by his house with a few pieces of the unusual wreckage to show his wife and 11-year-old son. (His son, Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., now a practicing medical doctor, a qualified National Guard helicopter pilot, and a flight surgeon, remembers the incident well.) During his career, Jesse Marcel, Sr., went on to other important assignments, including the preparation of the report on the first Soviet nuclear detonation which went directly to President Truman. The late General Thomas DuBose was a colonel and General Ramey's chief of staff at Eighth Air Force Headquarters at Fort Worth, Texas, in 1947. Before his death in 1992, General DuBose testified that he had personally taken the telephone call from General Clements McMullen at Andrews Army Air Field in Washington, D.C., ordering the cover-up. The instructions were for General Ramey to concoct a cover story. Retired General Arthur E. Exon was stationed at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, as a lieutenant colonel in July of 1947 during the time the wreckage from Roswell was brought in. In a 1990 interview, General Exon said of the testing that was done, "The overall consensus was that the pieces were from (outer) space." According to members of Sheriff Wilcox's family, he was told by the military, in the presence of his wife, that he and his entire family would be killed if he ever spoke about what he had seen. The rancher who originally discovered the wreckage, Mac Brazel, was sequestered by the military for almost a week and sworn to secrecy. He never spoke about the incident again, even to his family. In the months following the incident, his son, Bill Brazel, found and collected a few scraps of material, which he kept in a cigar box. The material was eventually confiscated by the military. (Why, if it was just a weather WW a balloon?) What really occurred at Roswell remains a mystery. The predictable prejudice against an extraterrestrial incident, along with the fear of ridicule, has been further compounded by frauds, disinformation, and hoaxes." For 50 years, the quiet tensions behind the intimidations, ostensible cover-ups, and ridicule has continued. Wading through the countless documentaries, interviews, etc., and allowing for emotions, exploitations, disinformation—much of it deliberate by the U.S. Government—one can clearly conclude there was, indeed, a cover-up of some kind. But why? By the end of 1947, more than 850 sightings of alleged unidentified flying objects had been reported to the U.S. Government. On September 23, 1947, the U.S. Government opened its first official investigation into the UFO phenomenon called "Project Sign." After several months of investigation, officials involved with Project Sign produced a top-secret document called the "Estimate of the Situation." To the dismay of many government officials, the document gave a startling endorsement for the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" for the origin of UFOs. General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the commanding General of the U.S. Air Force, disagreed with the conclusions of Project Sign and had all copies of the "Estimate of the Situation" destroyed. On February 11, 1949 Project Sign was replaced by Project Grudge. After examining 244 UFO reports in Europe and in the United States, they prepared a 600-page report which admitted that 56 sightings, or 23 percent of the cases examined, defied 37 UNCLE SAM TO THE RESCUE?