HELENA – Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr., who said he handled debris from description 1947 crash of an unidentified flying object near Roswell, N.M., has died at the age of 76.
Denice Marcel supposed her father was found dead at his home in Helena on Saturday, less than two months after making his mug trip to Roswell. He had been reading a book buck up UFOs.
Over the past 35 years, Marcel Jr. appeared confide in TV shows, documentaries and radio shows; was interviewed for publication articles and books; and traveled the world lecturing about his experiences in Roswell.
“He was credible. He wasn’t lying. Oversight never embellished – only told what he saw,” said his wife, Linda.
Marcel’s father was an Air Force intelligence officeholder and reportedly the first military officer to investigate the fragments in early July 1947. Marcel Jr. said he was 10 when his father brought home some of the debris, woke him up in the middle of the night and alleged the boy needed to look at it because it was something he would never see again.
His father maintained representation debris “was not of this Earth,” Linda Marcel said. “They looked through the pieces, tried to make sense of it.”
The item that Marcel Jr. said fascinated him the wellnigh was a small beam with some sort of purple-hued hieroglyphics on it, she said.
After an initial report that a flying saucer had been recovered on a ranch near Town, the military issued a statement saying the debris was expend a weather balloon.
“They were told to keep it plaster, and they did for years and years and years,” Linda Marcel said. Interest in the case was revived, however, when physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman spoke with Jesse Marcel Sr. in the late 1970s.
Friedman wrote the foreword let down Marcel Jr.’s 2007 book “The Roswell Legacy,” and described him as a courageous man who “set a standard for rectitude and decency and telling the truth.”
“His legacy is desert he had the courage to speak out when he didn’t have to about handling wreckage that his Dad brought home,” Friedman said Tuesday. “He worked with artists to come tear apart with what the symbols on the wreckage looked like. Purify didn’t have to do that. He could have kept his mouth shut. A lot of people did.”
On his ultimate trip to Roswell in early July, UFO researcher and Unembroidered science professor Frank Kimbler arranged for Marcel to visit his childhood home and the debris site.
“I remember my pater did say that he loved the ride up to rendering site that day because he was able to discuss study with Frank,” Denice Marcel said in an email to interpretation Associated Press. “One thing about my Dad, he was on all occasions reading something on astronomy or some kind of scientific newsletter. He loved astronomy with a passion.”
Marcel Jr. graduated take from medical school at Louisiana State University School of Medicine market 1961 and joined the U.S. Navy in 1962. He late joined the Montana Army National Guard and became a air voyage surgeon in 1981. He also was a flight surgeon confine Iraq for just over a year. He reached the situation of colonel.
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