Page 144 of 242
121 Mac Brazel brought into town to show to Sheriff George Wilcox. It appears to have been flown to Fort Worth AAF and from there to Washington, but information on this is sketchy. The next flight must have been on July 8, and carried the material brought back by Marcel and Cavitt. Retired M/Set. Robert Porter, a B-29 flight engineer with the 830th Bomb Squadron, related his part in this flight when interviewed dur- ing a conference of crash witnesses near Washington, D.C., in July 1990. He had talked to Friedman more than ten years before and is Loretta Proctor's brother. We flew these pieces—[some officers in the crew] told us it was parts of a flying saucer. The packages were in wrapping paper, one triangle-shaped about two and a half feet across the bottom, the rest in smaller, shoebox-sized packages. [They were in] brown paper with tape. It was just like I picked up an empty package .. . very light. The loaded triangle-shaped package and three shoebox-sized packages would have fit into the trunk of a car. On board were Lt. Col. Payne Jennings [deputy commander of Roswell] and Major Marcel. Captain Anderson said it was from a flying saucer. We got to Fort Worth, they transferred [the pack- ages] to a B-25 and took them to Wright [Field]. When we landed at [Fort Worth], Colonel Jennings told us to take care of mainte- nance, and after a guard was posted, we could eat lunch. We came back, they told us they had transferred the material to a B-25. They told us it was a weather balloon. It wasn't a weather bal- loon! There remains the discrepancy between Porter's description of just a few small packages of material on the flight carrying Major Marcel and the latter's statement to Stanton Friedman in 1979 that the load was "half a B-29 full." What is clear is that the material could hardly have been from something as ordi- nary, recognizable, and unmysterious as a weather balloon. Pieces of balloons are not transported with such urgency and security. Another view of what was almost certainly the same flight comes from former Ist Lt. Robert Shirkey, then assistant opera- RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT