CRASH AT CORONA - Stanton Friedman-pages

Page 134 of 242

Page 134 of 242
CRASH AT CORONA - Stanton Friedman-pages

Page Content (OCR)

111 Eighth Air Force commander Gen. Roger Ramey took control of them. According to retired Brig. Gen. Thomas Jefferson Du- Bose, interviewed in 1990 by Stanton Friedman, material from the Corona crash site was at Fort Worth two or three days before the July 8 press conference at which General Ramey promoted the phony "weather balloon" story. Those samples could have arrived at Fort Worth while Mar- cel and Cavitt were still on their way to the Foster ranch, and while hardly anyone else in the world was aware that anything unusual had happened near Corona. This was probably the small amount of material that then-colonel DuBose saw wrapped in plastic and attached to the wrist of Col. Al Clarke, base commander at Fort Worth. With his precious cargo treated like secret diplomatic correspondence, Clarke was flown to Washington, D.C., on the direct orders of Gen. Clemence McMullen, acting commander of the Strategic Air Command at Andrews AAF. It was McMullen who gave the telephone order to DuBose to rush the scraps there by "colonel courier" and to concoct a cover story to mislead the press. What hap- pened to the material when it got to Washington is unknown, but it well could have played a major role in convincing those two thousand miles from the New Mexico desert that some- thing of cosmic significance had happened. When Marcel and Cavitt returned to Roswell Army Air Field early on the morning of July 8, they brought with them two carloads of debris. It was this, or at least most of it, that Marcel accompanied on a flight to Fort Worth AAF; he described it as "half a B-29 full." While a B-29 is a large airplane, it was designed to carry a load of heavy items—bombs—rather than a lot of lighter objects that might be carried by a cargoplane. Thus it would have been feasible to half-fill a B-29's storage area—its bomb bays—with no more debris than could have been stuffed into a station wagon and a Jeep Carry-All. It isn't known how many airplanes left Roswell AAF car- rying materials from the Corona crash site, or where all of them went. Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton, Ohio, is most often mentioned as the destina- RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT