Matthews on Roswell

Not long ago, I encountered Rupert Matthews's Roswell Uncovering the secrets of Area 51 and the fatal UFO crash. The book has a number of errors, or discrepancies with other accounts:

--According to Matthews, after Governor Montoya saw alien bodies in a hangar, he returned to the waiting car, driven by Pete Anaya. This differs from the account in Randle's The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. In that version, Montoya had to call Anaya to get a ride out of there.

--Matthews wrote that during his trip to Baton Rouge, LA in February 1978, Stan Friedman first learned of Jesse Marcel from a TV technical crewman (page 44). But in his Top Secret/Majic (page 17) Friedman himself indicates he heard about Marcel from a TV station manager.

--On the basis of Bill Brazel's claim (page 103) that Mac Brazel went to Roswell primarily to "do some business," Matthew concludes that Brazel arrived there on Monday July 7th, 1947, not Sunday the 6th, because businesses weren't open on a Sunday. But the emphasis on "business" contradicts what appears elsewhere in the book (page 67). A brother-in-law, and a "man from Alamogordo" advised Brazel that the mysterious wreckage was important, so he decided to go to Roswell "as soon as possible." I don't think Brazel needed their advice, and in view of the importance of cleaning up the mess ASAP, wouldn't have wasted a whole day.

It is also noteworthy that according to Friedman (page 17, Top Secret/Majik) Marcel told him that when he first got to the ranch, it was too dark to see anything, so he stayed overnight. If Marcel didn't go to the ranch until the 7th, he wouldn't have seen the debris field until the 8th--too late to fit the established chronology. He didn't report back to base until the day after inspecting the debris field, yet the press release was already out on the afternoon of the 8th.

Matthews's book is well illustrated but far from the best on the subject. Besides the apparent errors, he doesn't even reach a definitive conclusion as to what the crash involved.