Jesse marcel jr death note pictures

A long-hidden diary belonging to a U. A press officer at the RAAF issued a statement on July 8 describing "the crash and recovery of 'a flying disc,'" which many interpreted as evidence of alien contact.

Jesse Marcel Jr., who said he handled debris from the crash of an unidentified flying object near Roswell, N.M., has died at the age of

But the next day, another army official told reporters that RAAF officers had recovered a weather balloon, not a flying saucer. Newspaper photos showed Marcel posing with pieces of what appeared to be a shredded high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector. But in the decades since, many have speculated about the military's initial "flying disc" report, wondering if the wreckage was perhaps more unusual than the photos implied.

Recently, Marcel's family revealed that he had kept a diary from that period that might contain clues about the crash, sparking a new investigation by the History Channel in "Roswell: The First Witness," part of the network's " History's Greatest Mysteries " series. The show revisits the Roswell crash site, incorporating aerial surveys and mapping, and using multispectral imaging to detect micro-depressions in the ground that could indicate where debris landed, Smith said.

But the central component of the new inquiry is a diary, which Marcel supposedly kept during the time of the Roswell crash, and which is now in the possession of his grandchildren. Decades after the event, Marcel told an interviewer that he believed the object that crashed in the New Mexico desert had extraterrestrial origins, Time reported in Analysis of the diary — and translation of its cryptic language — could reveal coded messages that Marcel wrote about the crash at the time that it happened, Smith said.

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Interest in UFOs hasn't waned since the Roswell Incident — if anything, recent evidence has amplified it. In and , U. Navy pilots recorded three encounters with fast-moving UFOs also referred to as UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena ; the Navy officially declassified the videos in April of this year, Live Science previously reported. Also in , a former Pentagon official confirmed the existence of a federal agency that had been secretly investigating UFOs since , and which may still be active today.

Mindy Weisberger is an editor at Scholastic and a former Live Science channel editor and senior writer.