A diary of Maj. Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer, could shed light on the suspected UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, Live Science reported on Friday.
In July 1947, Marcel was tasked with supervising the wreck of a weird object that crashed in the desert near the Roswell Army Air Field. The RAAF issued a statement the next day, calling it a "flying disc", which was apparently perceived by many as a "flying saucer", sparking conspiracy theories about the existence of aliens that continue to surround the Roswell story up to the present.
The RAAF retreated from its previous statement a day later, saying it was a weather balloon they discovered, and not a flying saucer. Newspapers also featured Marcel standing next to what appeared to be debris from a crashed weather balloon.
New Revelations
The Roswell story has drawn attention recently as Marcel's family said his diary from that period could contain new details regarding the crash, prompting an investigation by the History Channel.
According to his family, the notes Marcel took are "encrypted". They claimed their grandfather was "ordered" by the government to deny what he really saw.
"He was made to be the fall guy", one of his grandchildren told the Daily Mail newspaper. "He was the head of intelligence in Roswell, New Mexico, and followed his orders".
The lead investigator on the project, ex-CIA operative Ben Smith, also referred to the mystery of the story, pointing out that "no other government in the world" would say they've found a saucer and the next day announce it was a false alarm. He hinted that Marcel's mental state could have changed after discovering the alleged saucer and said that an analysis of his personal diary could decrypt what he wrote in it.
"There are breaks in the journal that are not clear, but it could be a secret code", Smith said.
Time reported in 1997 that Marcel once told an interviewer he believed that the wreck he inspected was "extraterrestrial".