When strange debris was found after a crash in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 Major Jesse A Marcel was the chief counterintelligence officer in the area.
Major Marcel was in charge of security at the Roswell Army Air Force Base at the time and may have been one of the first to attend the crash site.
Reports of an alien UFO sighting spread around the world and hysteria increased as theories that aliens had visited Earth sprung up everywhere.
What Major Marcel found at the site was initially described by a US military press release on July 8 as "the crash and recovery of 'a flying disc".
Major Marcel himself is said to have publicly described the wreckage as being ‘not of this earth’.
However, the US government changed the story the following day and claimed it was part of a military project which had crashed.
Now it is thought that Major Marcel’s diary could hold the key to whether aliens really did visit Earth and crash in Roswell.
The Major’s family believe he was pressured by the US government to retract his original statement of what he discovered.
The family has possession of his diary and have agreed for it to be investigated to try to find clues as to what happened on that fateful day in August.
Ben Smith, a former CIA operative, is leading the investigation.
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Speaking to Sky History , Smith described finding strange signs in Major Marcel’s diary which could be a hidden message the intelligent officer was trying to reveal.
He said: “It has some pretty strange characteristics. Strangest of all is right at the period of Roswell, August 1947, you see a marked shift in handwriting style which can indicate a lot of things from duress to mental stability to writing in code.
“As an intelligence officer, he would have been trained in information security and some of that may have involved encryption. He was probably versed enough that if he had information to hide, that is how he would do it.
“We took this journal to a codebreaker and he attested to the fact that he sees clear signs of code.”
Smith added that he is not convinced that the debris found was part of a military project as the US government claimed.
It was stated that the crash site contained the wreckage not of a UFO but of a balloon used to detect sound waves by Soviet atomic bomb tests.
Theorists have speculated that the balloon story may be a cover up either to hide a more secretive military project or to hide away any evidence of alien life being found.
It is now believed that a thorough investigation into Major Marcel’s diary may offer more clues as to what the officer was trying to share to the world.
Many around the world still maintain that the Roswell incident is the closest the public has come to finding evidence of aliens visiting Earth.
Speculation around the incident became so intense that the US government released two reports about the events of July 1947 in the town explaining what happened.
But that did not stop rumours about extra-terrestrial life being discovered and the mystery remains as intriguing today as it has ever been.
