h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It was not Major Jesse Marcel who put out the press release on Roswell, it was Lieutenant Walter Haut, who was the Roswell Army Air Field Public Information Officer at the time, and he did it by order of Colonel Blanchard, the base commander. Blanchard found himself in trouble with 8th Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, but it wasn't serious, because his actions were taken in the absence of any prior standing orders on the subject. Major Marcel was then called to Fort Worth to help them defuse the situation with the military's first "cover story": the weather balloon tale. It was in late 1978 or early 1979 that Marcel, who knew he was dying, gave a videotaped interview (from which I have seen at least excerpts) in which he told what he knew about the crash and recovery, which, later investigations revealed, was only part of what actually happened at Roswell. It was shortly after this that Marcel was contacted by Stanton Friedman and the first "civilian" investigations of Roswell began. From his investigations of Roswell, Friedman wrote his book, "Crash at Corona" and then his book "Top Secret/Majic" was a follow-up volume after the first "Majestic-12" document was "leaked" to "civilian" investigators in the middle 1980s and Friedman became the "point man" in investigating it as well. A few years ago, another book made its appearance, "The Day After Roswell" by Col. Philip Corso (US Army - Retired), which told at least part of the story of the "reverse engineering" of the Roswell alien ship wreckage.

I just noticed: the head of 8th Air Force was Brigadier General Ramey, not "Ramsey" and Marcel (note spelling) was a Major at the time, not a Captain.

I first heard of the Roswell incident in the late 70's, when reading an older book which mentioned a letter allegedly signed by the President at the time (Roosevelt?) giving orders for the cover-up and treatment of alien corpses. This document was apparently leaked in the 60s and provided a lot of the impetus for the story.

A few years back some smart-Alec claimed to have studied the letter and decided that a) it was produced using a typewriter that wasn't invented until the 50s, and b) the president's signature had been lifted from another document.

So the letter is a forgery, unless the mysterious incident was involved with some kind of top secret typewriter development program?

That isn't to say that it wasn't forged by someone in the know and desperate to have the truth made public, even to the extent of forging the evidence. Or that the forger didn't happen to somehow be recreating a real document after being fed information by benign aliens anxious to raise public awareness. Then again it could all be complete rubbish.

As someone else said, whatever you believe without evidence is just faith. And faith encourages people to believe all kinds of stupid things, even that the US government operates some kind of mysterious hypersonic aircraft, originally codenamed Aurora, out of an airfield north of Las Vegas......