GALENA, Ill. -- Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" -- made popular by Bing Crosby -- sat on the top of U.S. music charts on Jan. 4, 1947, out of this world so to speak. Several months later, Roswell, N.M. would become the epicenter of all things out-of-this world.

Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. was 11 when he was awakened around 1 a.m. on a July morning in 1947, when his father, Jesse Marcel, rushed into the family home. What he showed his wife and son changed the world forever.

Marcel Jr., the author of "The Roswell Legacy," was one of several guest speakers at this weekend's Out of This World UFO Conference at Eagle Ridge Resort and Spa in Galena.

Marcel Sr. was a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a major, who was dispatched to collect debris from a crash at a ranch near Roswell.

"He realized this was something unique, not a radar target or an aircraft or anything that he had ever seen before," Marcel Jr. told his Jo Daviess County audience. "He knew what radar targets looked like."

Marcel brought the debris into

Jesse Marcel Jr. Jesse Marcel Jr. began a 38-year military career in the U.S. Navy and went on to retire as a colonel in the National Guard. He works as a specialist in otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine) at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Fort Harrison, Mont.

the house which was on the way from the ranch to the nearby air base. He wanted his family to see it. It was placed neatly on the kitchen floor.

"He said, 'Look at this. I think this is parts of a flying saucer,' or words to that effect," Marcel Jr. said. "I thought, 'What's a flying saucer?'"

The debris contained no electronic components, like vacuum tubes, resistors or condensers.

"There's a lot of foil-like debris, you can't really describe it," Marcel Jr. said. "It had a strange quality to it, weird stuff. It was like Mylar -- nothing like what we had in 1947 -- or what we have now. One of the beams had writing, resembling geometric symbols."

Marcel flew the debris to Fort Worth (Texas) Air Field where its commander, Gen. Roger Ramey examined it.

"The cover story started at that point," Marcel Jr. said. "The cover story was this was a radar target -- nothing more, which obviously was ludicrous."

Marcel Jr. recalled that after his father returned from Fort Worth, he told his family never to talk again about what had happened.

That's the way it was for many years until Stanton Friedman, a UFO investigator and nuclear physicist, interviewed Marcel Sr. in 1978 and got the story going from there.

Marcel Jr. said the incident changed his life.

"It actually made me more religious because it made me realize that our creator created a vast universe with other people out there -- so we're not the only ones," he said.

"It's maddening that the government has not released this information ...," he said. "They will in due time, and I hope in my lifetime because I would like to tell people I saw this stuff and I told you so."