Roswell UFO: the nitinol connection revealed
Front page which broke news of Roswell crash
When I first heard about the alleged crash of a flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico, many years ago, I was sceptical. There were too many unanswered questions. But in the four decades that have elapsed, I have had to change my mind.
Now, new evidence, just obtained under Freedom of Information legislation in the US, makes me certain that something extraordinary did occur at Roswell on 8 July 1947 and has been covered up by the military and the US government ever since.
What has changed my mind over the years is the steady trickle of testimonies from people who say they were directly or indirectly involved in aspects of the incident. Of course, we have to try to make a judgment about the credibility of each one, which is not easy.
Col Philip J. Corso
Some of these people testified when they were close to death and seemed to want to “come clean” about the secret they had carried with them over the years.
Individuals such as Jesse Marcel Sr and retired Col Philip Corso , both of whom had direct involvement in the Roswell incident, went public with their accounts of what happened.
Marcel described the material recovered as thin, like tin foil, but it could not be bent or damaged, even with a sledgehammer.
Corso, who wrote the book The Day After Roswell, says he was involved in work with the artifacts recovered form the crash site. Marcel’s son, Jesse Jnr, has written of his father’s involvement in The Roswell Legacy.
To their testimony we can add that of astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. Mitchell grew up in Roswell and tells us that he knows aliens have visited our planet and that the Roswell incident was for real.
However, an aspect of the Roswell case that I have never subscribed to is the claim that scientists have been able to develop remarkable technology and materials as a result of reverse engineering, having studied the alien spacecraft that crashed in New Mexico and was taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force base.
But now comes some astonishing news that has made me change my view on that topic, too.
Among those who were said to have seen and handled the flying saucer debris and commented on its unusual qualities was Elroy John Center, whose name will mean nothing to those outside the UFO fraternity. Because of the nature of his work as a research scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, which was shrouded in secrecy, the only people he told, in confidence, were his family. Cross is also understood to have been researching UFOs for government agencies at the same time.
In 1960, he revealed to close relatives that he had “analysed metal from a fallen UFO”. It was not until 1992, after his passing, that they shared this information with others. It seemed to be just one more piece of a tantalising puzzle but nothing more. Like some other testimonies, it was not made public until the witness was no longer around to question, and attempts to verify it were unsuccessful.
Title of the just-released Battelle report
All that changed this month with the release of a research study, Research and Development of Titanium Alloys, by Battelle, conducted in 1949, two years after Roswell. Its availability had been restricted to the US Department of Defence. Its existence was discovered in footnote references to later military-sponsored studies on shape-memory alloys. Previous attempts to make the study public had failed because it was reportedly “lost”.
The report is incomplete – some pages are missing, others are not numbered – but it shows that Battelle was asked to carry out work on testing and producing various titanium metals and alloys – which retain a memory of and can return to their manufactured shape after being distorted – by Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Even more important is that Elroy John Center is now shown to be one of the report’s co-authors. Until this document’s release, no-one had linked him with the research.
Center, incidentally, is also credited with having “seeded” these studies to the US Naval Ordance Laboratory which is credited with the discovery in 1962 of nitinol, the now-famous nickel titanium shape-memory alloy.
The release of the report, 60 years after it was produced by Battelle, is not the end of the story, because it is clearly labelled “Second Progress Report”. So where is the first and what does it contain? Whether that will also now be released after FOIA requests remains to be seen, though I suspect that it has also gone missing.
The first report could explain why Battelle was asked to do this work by Wright-Patterson as well as shedding light on an intriguing reference in the newly-published document. This refers to “comparing the tensile properties for the various alloys as listed in tables 23 and 24; it is evidence that results quite comparable with those of earlier tests were obtained from a considerable number of these compositions”.
So, what was it the Battelle scientists were comparing their results with? There could be a more prosaic explanation, but there are many who now assume that it was material recovered from the site of a UFO crash at Roswell.
Battelle Memorial Institute
As far as I can tell, no one is suggesting that nitinol was developed as a direct result of studying the Roswell debris. What seems to have happened is that scientists were asked to compare certain alloys or try to develop new ones that would have similar behavioural characteristics to the recovered Roswell material.
The FOIA request was made by Sarasota Herald Tribune reporter Billy Cox, and an excellent account by Anthony Bragalia, “Scientist admits to study of Roswell crash debris”, can be found at UFO Digest.
FOOTNOTE: the man who is generally acknowledged as nitinol’s discoverer, Dr Frederick E. Wang, was involved in experiments in which spoon-bender Uri Geller apparently changed the structure of a piece of nitinol so that it did not return to its former shape, as it should have done.
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