Roswell #6: It Looks Like A Cover-Up: Press Censorship

I was a young adult who voted for President Nixon in 1972.  Twelve quick months later I wrote a letter to the editor of my BYU college paper, calling for his resignation.  The letter was printed and friends talked to me about it.  Why?  Because I couldn't trust him any more.  Too many scandals, too much dirt.  Quickly becoming the biggest piece of that dirt was the Watergate Cover-up.  They were hiding the truth.  What the truth was, was still guesswork.  What was clear was that the Nixon White House was taking great measures to keep the voters from learning what that truth was.  The cover-up lasted many more months, but collapsed, and Pres. Nixon resigned 9 months after I wrote my letter to the editor.

Maybe I'm wrong, but at first glance Roswell looks like Watergate--vast efforts being made to hide something.  We can't see what it is they're covering up, but some of the efforts to suppress are right out in the open, or have become public knowledge with the passing of time.

One.  Censorship of the press.  The BBC interviewed Frank Joyce, who worked at Roswell's radio station, KGFL.  Joyce made the on-air announcement that the Army said it had a flying disc in its possession.  Joyce said that, later that day, he picked up the phone to hear a young woman's voice telling him a Colonel from the Pentagon was ready to talk to him.  The man "read me the riot act" in a powerful voice, "of the type that really conveys menace and power." Joyce said.  'You're gonna get in a lot of trouble for this,' something threatening.  I said, 'Look, I'm a civilian.  You can't tell me what to do in stories I put on the air.'  And he says, 'I'll show you what I can do!' Bang, hung up the phone."
Then George Roberts of KGFL told the BBC of a call Walt Whitmore, station owner, got from one of the senators [New Mexico's senator Chavez] from Washington who said, 'Look, if you put out any stories on this, you're gonna lose your license.  It's not gonna be over a period of time.  It's gonna be the same day that we tell you you're off the air."   What the station was about to air was an interview with discoverer Mack Brazel, with details about the debris.

In 1998 Joyce told Thomas Carey that a day or two after the Colonel's call, his boss Walt Whitmore took him out into the country and had him wait "in a shack off the Corona road."  A man in an odd uniform sat in the car's back seat for the ride out there, without saying a word.  After Joyce waited a few minutes in the shack, wondering what to expect, in walked Mack Brazel, discoverer of the wreckage, who said in a pleading voice, 'You're not going to say what I told you the other day, are you?'  "Not if you don't want me to."  "Good.  Our lives will never be the same."  Now the silent man in the back seat had disappeared.  Joyce told Carey that not long after that he, Joyce, was picked up and removed by soldiers to a military hospital in Texas for reasons never made clear.  He was kept there about a year.

Brazel also was held in military custody after he reported the crash, but released after about six days.  Several locals saw soldiers escort him to local media outlets in town.    (Sources here are BBC documentary, 1995, and Carey and Schmidt's book, The Children of Roswell, 2016, pp 61-62, 141, 205)

Next: threatening witnesses if they talked:  the Anaya brothers, Frankie Rowe, probably 1-2 dozen others.  There's a lot to this.  It's work.