Jesse Marcel Jr - Telegraph The incident was more or less forgotten until 1978, when a UFO researcher called Stanton Friedman went to interview Jesse Marcel Sr, who insisted that he really had found a flying saucer, but that his superiors had covered it up and ordered everyone who came into contact with the UFO never to talk about it. Subsequently (Major Marcel died in 1986) other witnesses came forward to corroborate his story, with some even claiming that alien bodies had been found in the wreckage - small, humanoid figures with large heads and huge, slanted almond-shaped eyes. A local funeral director claimed to have received two mysterious phone calls on July 7 1947 from someone claiming to be a mortuary officer: "He said he needed to know how many two-foot-six-inch hermetically sealed baby caskets were in stock. Then he called back to ask about what embalming fluids would do to a body. A nurse at a local hospital claimed to have seen autopsies performed on 4ft-tall aliens. The stories eventually led to the publication of a book, The Roswell Incident (1980), which, with the release of the film ET (1982), helped ignite an explosion of interest in all things extraterrestrial. Over the next 30 years the "Roswell Incident" would grow into a huge commercial phenomenon, making millions for film companies, writers - and not least the town of Roswell, which hosts two museums and an annual UFO festival. The association proved lucrative, too, for Marcel Jr, who appeared on numerous television and radio shows, went on lecture tours and in 2007 published The Roswell Legacy, in which he continued to insist that the wreckage had an extraterrestrial origin - he even provided artists" impressions of the mysterious hieroglyphs. In the 1990s, however, the American military came up with an admission which was, in its way, even more fascinating than the UFO story. The Pentagon admitted that General Ramey had not been telling the whole truth when he said that the pieces came from an ordinary weather balloon. In fact, they came from a 700ft string of weather balloons, radar reflectors and acoustic sensors that had been launched on June 4 1947 as part of a top-secret experiment to eavesdrop on Soviet nuclear weapons tests - called Project Mogul. As for the hieroglyphs Marcel Jr remembered, these bore a striking resemblance to purple symbols on the tape that was used to reinforce the Project Mogul radar reflectors. The reflectors had been made by a toy company which, because of wartime materials shortages, used novelty tape they had in stock. As for Major Marcel's testimony, Captain Sheridan Cavitt, a fellow intelligence officer who had accompanied him on his foray into the New Mexican desert, used his release from his oath of secrecy to pour cold water on the UFO theory: "You had to know Marcel," he said. He was a wild Cajun from Louisiana. He made a lot of claims he couldn't back up. He was a one-of-a-kind. But Marcel Jr was having none of it, telling the interviewer Larry King that the debris could not have been from any sort of weather balloon - "even a Mogul balloon... because the material was totally different." It was, he maintained "something that came from another civilisation." Jesse Marcel Jr was born on August 30 1936 in Houston, Texas, and served as a medical officer in the US Navy from 1962, becoming a specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery. After retiring from the Navy in 1971 he opened a medical practice in Helena, Montana. In 1975 he became a medical officer in the Montana National Guard and earned his flight surgeon wings (flight surgeons at the time were allowed to fly solo in helicopters) at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He was appointed State Surgeon of of Montana and retired from the military in 1996. During Operation Iraqi Freedom he was called up again for active service and, from September 2004, spent 13 months as a flight surgeon with the 189th Helicopter Battalion in Iraq, reaching the rank of colonel. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and by eight children. Jesse Marcel Jr, born August 30 1936, died August 23 2013