Then-Major and intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field. Tasked with recovering the July 1947 ranch debris; later, in his 1978 interview with Stanton Friedman, stated the recovered material was not consistent with a balloon. His account is the foundational witness statement of the Roswell case.
Major Jesse Marcel was an intelligence officer with the 509th Bomb Group, the only nuclear-equipped squadron in the world, stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947. He was the first military official to arrive at the Foster ranch debris field and visually inspect the highly anomalous, indestructible materials scattered there. Marcel's key contribution to the disclosure movement came in the late 1970s when he publicly stated that the debris he recovered was not of this earth and that the weather balloon explanation was a military cover-up. He described I-beams with strange, hieroglyphic-like symbols and foil that could not be burned or permanently bent. His late-in-life testimony single-handedly resurrected the Roswell incident from historical obscurity.