The Crash Near Roswell
An
unidentified flying object crashed on a ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico,
sometime during the first week of July 1947.
Rancher
W.W. “Mack” Brazel said later he found debris from the crash as he and the son
of Floyd and Loretta Proctor rode their horses out to check on sheep after a
fierce thunderstorm the night before. Brazel said that as they rode along, he
began to notice unusual pieces of what seemed to be metal debris scattered over
a large area. Upon further inspection, he said, he saw a shallow trench several
hundred feet long had been gouged into the ground.
Brazel
said he was struck by the unusual properties of the debris and, after dragging
large pieces of it to a shed, he took some of it over to show the Proctors.
Mrs.
Proctor, who later moved from the ranch to a house closer to town, said she
remembers Brazel showing up with the strange material.
The
Proctors told Brazel he might be holding wreckage from an alien spacecraft — a
number of UFO sightings had been reported in the United States that summer — or
a government project, and that he should report the incident to Chaves County
Sheriff George Wilcox.
A day or
two later, Brazel drove into Roswell, the county seat, and reported the
incident to Wilcox, who reported it to Maj. Jesse Marcel, intelligence officer
for the 509th Bomb Group, stationed at Roswell Army Air Field.
In their
book, A History of UFO Crashes, UFO researchers Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle
say their research shows military radar had been tracking an unidentified
flying object in the skies over southern New Mexico for four days. On the night
of July 4, 1947, radar indicated the object had gone down about 30-40 miles
northwest of Roswell.
The book
says eyewitness William Woody, who lived east of Roswell, said he remembered
being outside with his father the night of July 4, 1947, when he saw a
brilliant object plunge to the ground.
The debris
site was closed for several days while the wreckage was cleared, and Schmitt
and Randle say that when Woody and his father tried to locate the area of the
crash they had seen, Woody said they were stopped by military personnel who
ordered them out of the area.
Debris
Schmitt
and Randle say Marcel, after receiving the call from Wilcox and subsequent
orders from Col. William Blanchard, 509th commanding officer, went to
investigate Brazel’s report. Marcel and Capt. Sheridan Cavitt, senior Counter
Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent, followed the rancher off-road to his place.
They spent the night there and Marcel inspected a large piece of debris Brazel
had dragged from the pasture.
Monday
morning, July 7, Marcel took his first step onto the debris field. Marcel would
remark later that “something ... must have exploded above the ground and fell.”
As Brazel, Cavitt and Marcel inspected the field, Marcel was able to “determine
which direction it came from, and which direction it was heading. It was in the
pattern ... you could tell where it started out and where it ended by how it
was thinned out …”
According
to Marcel, the debris was “strewn over a wide area, I guess maybe
three-quarters of a mile long and a few hundred feet wide.” Scattered in the
debris were small bits of metal that Marcel held a cigarette lighter to to see
if it would burn.
Along with
the metal, Marcel described weightless “I”-beam-like structures that were
three-eights inch by one-quarter inch, none of them very long, that would
neither bend nor break. Some of these “I”-beams had indecipherable characters
along the length, in two colors. Marcel also described metal debris the
thickness of tinfoil that was indestructible.
After
gathering enough debris to fill his staff car, Marcel decided to stop by his
home on the way back to the base so he could show his family the unusual
debris. He’d never seen anything quite like it.
“I didn't
know what we were picking up,” he said. “I still don't know what it was ... It
could not have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather
balloon or experimental balloon ... I’ve seen rockets ... sent up at the White
Sands Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft or missile or
rocket.”
Under
hypnosis conducted by Dr. John Watkins in May 1990, Jesse Marcel Jr. remembered
being awakened by his father that night and following him outside to help carry
in a large box filled with debris. Once inside, they emptied the contents of
the debris onto the kitchen floor.
Jesse Jr.
described the lead foil and “I”-beams. Under hypnosis, he recalled the writing
on the “I”-beams as “Purple. Strange. Never saw anything like it ... different
geometric shapes, leaves and circles.”
Under
questioning, he said the symbols were shiny purple and they were small. There
were many separate figures. This too, under hypnosis: [Marcel Sr. was saying it
was a flying saucer] “I ask him what a flying saucer is. I don't know what a
flying saucer is ... It’s a ship. [Dad’s] excited!”
Marcel
reported what he found to Blanchard, showing him pieces of the wreckage, none
of which looked like anything Blanchard had ever seen.
Bodies
Meanwhile,
Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working at Ballard Funeral Home, received some
curious calls one afternoon from the RAAF morgue. The base’s mortuary officer
was trying to get hold of some small, hermetically sealed coffins and also
wanted to know how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for
a few days and avoid contaminating the tissue.
Dennis
later said that evening he drove to the base hospital, where he saw large
pieces of wreckage with strange engravings on one of the pieces sticking out of
the back of a military ambulance. He entered the hospital and was visiting with
a nurse he knew when suddenly he was threatened by military police and forced
to leave.
The next
day, Dennis met with the nurse, who told him about bodies discovered with the
wreckage and drew pictures of them on a prescription pad. Within a few days she
was transferred to England; her whereabouts remain unknown.
Roswell Army Air Field Press Release
At 11
a.m., July 8, 1947, Lt. Walter Haut, RAAF public information officer, finished
a press release Blanchard had ordered him to write, stating that the wreckage
of a crashed disk had been recovered.
He gave
copies to the two radio stations and both of the local newspapers. By 2:26
p.m., the story was on The Associated Press wire:
“The Army
Air Forces here today announced a flying disk had been found.”
As calls
began to pour into the base from all over the world, Lt. Robert Shirkey watched
as MPs carried loaded wreckage onto a C-54 from the First Transport Unit.
To get a
better look, Shirkey stepped around Col. Blanchard, who was irritated with all
of the calls coming into the base. Blanchard decided to travel out to the
debris field and left instructions that he'd gone on leave.
Headquarters Gets Involved
Blanchard
had sent Marcel to Fort Worth Army Air Field (later Carswell Air Force Base) to
report to Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force.
Marcel
told Haut years later that he’d taken some of the debris into Ramey's office to
show him what had been found. The material was displayed on Ramey's desk for
the general when he returned.
Upon his return,
Ramey wanted to see the exact location of the debris field, so he and Marcel
went to the map room down the hall — but when they returned, the wreckage that
had been placed on the desk was gone and a weather balloon was spread out on
the floor. Maj. Charles A. Cashon took the now-famous photo of Marcel with the
weather balloon in Ramey's office.
It was
then reported that Ramey recognized the remains as part of a weather balloon.
Brig. Gen. Thomas DuBose, the chief of staff of the 8th Air Force, said, “[It]
was a cover story. The whole balloon part of it. That was the part of the story
we were told to give to the public and news and that was it.”
Later that
afternoon, Haut’s original press release was rescinded and an officer from the
base retrieved all of the copies from the radio stations and newspaper offices.
The next day, July 9, a second press release was issued stating that the 509th
Bomb Group had mistakenly identified a weather balloon as wreckage of a flying
saucer.
On July 9,
as reports went out that the crashed object was actually a weather balloon,
cleanup crews were busily clearing the debris. Bud Payne, a rancher at Corona,
was trying to round up a stray when he was spotted by the military and carried
off the Foster ranch. Broadcaster Judd Roberts and Walt Whitmore were turned
away as they approached the debris field.
As the wreckage was brought to the
base, it was crated and stored in a hangar.
Back in
town, Walt Whitmore and Lyman Strickland saw their friend, Mack Brazel, who was
being escorted to the Roswell Daily Record by three military officers. He
ignored Whitmore and Strickland, which was not at all like Mack, and once he
got to the Roswell Daily Record offices, he changed his story. He now claimed
to have found the debris on June 14. Brazel also mentioned that he’d found
weather observation devices on two other occasions, but what he found this time
was no weather balloon.
The Las Vegas Review Journal, along
with dozens of other newspapers, carried the AP story:
“Reports
of flying saucers whizzing through the sky fell off sharply today as the Army
and the Navy began a concentrated campaign to stop the rumors.”
The story
also reported that AAF Headquarters in Washington had “delivered a blistering
rebuke to officers at Roswell.”
The
military has tried to convince the news media from that day forward that the
object found near Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon.
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