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The Roswell Incident

Cosmic Conspiracies

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Summary: Roswell is the most well known UFO crash in History. Here is the full story of the events that happened at Roswell, New Mexico in early July, 1947

Roswell is the most well known UFO crash in History. Here is the full story of the events that happened at Roswell, New Mexico in early July, 1947.

William W. "Mac" Brazel was a stereotypical cowboy , although he actually tended sheep. He was foreman of the Foster Ranch in rural Lincoln County near Corona, New Mexico. Brazel was married, with children, but his wife and kids lived in Tularosa, New Mexico, near Alamogordo (so the kids would be near a good school), while he mostly lived in an old house out on the ranch where he worked.

From all accounts, he was happy with his life, riding the range and tending the sheep, shearing the sheep and selling the wool. Pictures from that time show a man who might have stepped out of an old Roy Rogers movie, a real cowboy. He was the type who would tip his hat and say "Howdy, ma'am!" when he passed a lady on the street.

On the evening of either July 2 or July 4 (the various sources disagree) there was a severe thunderstorm in the area with lots of lightning. Mac had often wondered why lightning struck the ground repeatedly in the same spots on the ranch. He wondered if it might mean that there were metal deposits underground at those spots and probably considered doing some prospecting in the area. But this time there was a different sort of sound amid the booming thunderclaps. Mac later said it sounded like an explosion. Two of Mac's children were staying with him at the ranch that night, as they often did, but they didn't notice the "different" sound.

The next morning, July 3 or 5, Mac rode out as usual to check on his sheep and to "ride the fences". A seven-year-old neighbor boy, William D. "Dee" Proctor, accompanied him. Dee Proctor loved riding horses more than anything, so he rode with Mac whenever he could.
Riding south of the ranch headquarters, they suddenly came upon an area about a quarter of a mile long and several hundred feet wide that was strewn with debris, shiny bits and pieces unlike anything Mac had ever seen. The sheep refused to cross the debris, and had to be herded the long way around to get to water. Mac picked up some of the material andcarried it with him back to the ranch headquarters, where he put it in a shed.

Bessie Brazel Scheiber(Mac's daughter):

"There was what appeared to be pieces of heavily waxed paper and a sort of aluminum-like foil. Some of these pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but there were no words you were able to make out. Some of the metal-foil pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them, and when these were held to the light they showed what looked like pastel flowers or designs. Even though the stuff looked like tape it could not be peeled off or removed at all." "[The writing] looked like numbers mostly, at least I assumed them to be numbers. They were written out like you would write numbers in columns to do an addition problem. But they didn't look like the numbers we use at all. What gave me the idea they were numbers, I guess, was the way they were all ranged out in columns.""No, it was definitely not a balloon. We had seen weather balloons quite a lot - both on the ground and in the air. We had even found a couple of Japanese-style balloons that had come down in the area once. We had also picked up a couple of those thin rubber weather balloons with instrument packages. This was nothing like that. I have never seen anything resembling this sort of thing before - or since..."

Later that day, Mac put a small piece of the debris in his pocket when he drove Dee Proctor to his home about ten miles away from the ranch headquarters. He showed the debris to Dee's parents, William and Loretta Proctor, and tried to get them to go back and look at the debris field with him.

Floyd Proctor:

"[He said] it wasn't paper because he couldn't cut it with his knife, and the metal was different from anything he had ever seen. He said the designs looked like the kind of stuff you would find on firecracker wrappers...some sort of figures all done up in pastels, but not writing
like we would do it."

"The piece he brought looked like a kind of tan, light-brown plastic...it was very lightweight, like balsa wood. It wasn't a large piece, maybe about four inches long, maybe just larger than a pencil." "We cut on it with a knife and would hold a match on it, and it wouldn't burn. We knew it wasn't wood. It was smooth like plastic, it didn't have real sharp corners, kind of like a dowel stick. Kind of dark tan. It didn't have any grain...just smooth."

"We should have gone [to look at the debris field], but gas and tires were expensive then. We had our own chores, and it would have been twenty miles."

The next night, Mac went into Corona, where he told his uncle, Hollis Wilson, about the debris. Wilson and another man who was present told Mac about the "flying saucers" that were being reported around the area and advised him to report his find to the authorities.

So, on July 6, when Mac was going into Roswell to see about trading for a new pick-up truck, he took some of the debris with him and stopped off at the office of Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. At first, Wilcox paid little attention, but when Mac showed him a piece of the debris, he realized that this might be important, so he called Roswell Army Air Field and spoke to Major Jesse A. Marcel, the base intelligence officer. Marcel told Wilcox he would come into Roswell and talk to Brazel.

Meanwhile, Frank Joyce of radio station KGFL either called Wilcox looking for news, or Mac called him. Sources differ on this point, but since Mac was hardly the type to seek publicity, it's less likely that he called KGFL. Either way, Joyce interviewed Mac over the phone. Marcel arrived at the Sheriff's office, questioned Mac, and was shown the debris. Then Marcel went back to the base to make his report. He reported to Colonel William H. Blanchard, the base commander, and they decided that Marcel should go out to the site and investigate further. Marcel took his Buick, and an Army Counter Intelligence Corps officer named Sheridan Cavitt drove a Jeep carry-all, and they followed Brazel back to the ranch.

By the time they got to the ranch it was too late in the evening to go to the site , so they spent the night in an old house on the ranch and ate beans for supper. Next morning, Brazel saddled two horses, and he and Cavitt rode out to the site while Marcel followed in the carry-all. After showing them the debris field and watching for a few minutes, Brazel left them to their task and went back to finish his chores. Frank Joyce of KGFL had told his boss, Walt Whitmore Sr. about Brazel's find, and Whitmore drove out to the ranch and picked up Mac. Whitmore took him to his own home in Roswell, where Mac spent the night. There, on a wire recorder, Whitmore recorded an interview with Mac that would never be aired.

Next morning, Whitmore took Mac down to KGFL and called the base. The military came out and picked Brazel up and carried him back to the base, where Mac was kept under guard in the "guest house" for several days.

On July 8, Mac was escorted by the military to the offices of the Roswell Daily Record, where he gave a press interview. The story he told them was a bit different from what he had told before, however. Now he said that he and his son had originally discovered the debris on June 14, but that he was in such a hurry that he ignored it. Then, on July 4, he and his wife and two of his children rode out to the site and picked up some of the debris, which consisted of smoky gray rubber strips, tinfoil, heavy paper, and some small sticks. He said that he had twice before found weather balloons on the ranch but that this material in no way resembled what he had found before.

"I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon," he said. "But if I find anything else beside a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it." Brazel's military escorts then led him out to a car and drove him to KGFL. People who saw him leave the newspaper office said he kept his head down and pretended not to see any of his friends.At KGFL, he was allowed to go in alone while his escorts waited outside. He went in and began telling Frank Joyce the same story he had told at the Record. Joyce interrupted him and asked why he was telling a different story than he had told earlier. He later said that Mac became agitated and said, "It'll go hard on me." At the end of the interview, Brazel went back out to where his military escort was waiting, and they took him back to the base.

When he was finally released by the military, Brazel refused to say anything other than that he had found a weather balloon. He privately complained of his treatment by the military, who he said wouldn't even let him call his wife. He told his children that he had taken an oath not to talk about the incident. Within a year, he moved off the ranch and into Tularosa. There he opened a refrigerated meat locker rental establishment where people could rent lockers to keep their frozen meat in those days of few home freezers. Mac Brazel passed away in 1963.
 

Roswell Army Air Force Base was an elite facility, home to the only atomic bomb group in existence at the time, the 509th Bomb Wing. All the personnel at the base had to have high security clearances and thus
were hand-picked.

The intelligence officer at the base was Major Jesse A, Marcel. Marcel had been a highly skilled aerial cartographer before the U.S. entered World War II, and after Pearl harbor, he had been sent to intelligence training by the Army. He did so well that he was kept on for a time as an instructor. Fifteen months later, he applied for combat duty and was sent to New Guinea. He logged 468 hours of combat duty as a pilot, bombardier, and waist gunner, receiving five air medals for shooting down enemy aircraft. At the end of the war, he was chosen to become part of the 509th Bomb Wing, and as such handled security for the 1946 atom-bomb tests called "Operation Crossroads". He was awarded a commendation for this work. In 1947, he was intelligence officer for Roswell AAFB.

Major Marcel was eating lunch when he received the call from Sheriff George Wilcox that a rancher had found a lot of debris from some sort of aerial craft out in a pasture. He went into town and talked to Brazel and then returned to the base to report to Colonel Blanchard, the base commander. Blanchard told him to go out and check out the site, so he and a CIC officer named Sheridan Cavitt followed Brazel in his pick-up out to the ranch. Marcel took his old Buick and Cavitt drove a Jeep carry-all. It was late when they arrived, so they spent the night in their sleeping bags in Brazel's old house and ate cold pork-and-beans and crackers for supper.

The next morning, Brazel led them out to the site. Brazel and Cavitt rode horses, but Marcel didn't ride, so he drove the Jeep.

Major Jesse Marcel:

"When we arrived at the crash site, it was amazing to see the vast amount of area it covered."
"...it scattered over an area of about three quarters of a mile long, I would say, and fairly wide, several hundred feet wide. "It was definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile."

"I don't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't anything built by us and it most certainly wasn't any weather balloon." "...small beams about three eighths or a half inch square with some sort of heiroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. These looked something like balsa wood, and were about the same weight, except that they were not wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible, and would not burn at all. There was a great deal of an unusual parchment-like substance which was brown in color and extremely strong, and great number of small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn't tinfoil. I was interested in electronics and kept looking for something that resembled instruments or electronic equipment, but I didn't find anything. "

"...Cavitt, I think, found a black, metallic-looking box several inches square. As there was no apparent way to open this, and since it didn't appear to be an instrument package of any sort, we threw it in with the rest of the stuff."

"It had little numbers with symbols that we had to call heiroglyphics because I could not understand them. They were pink and purple. They looked like they were painted on. I even took my cigarette lighter and tried to burn the material we found that resembled parchment and balsa, but it would not burn - wouldn't even smoke." "...the pieces of metal that we brought back were so thin, just like the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes." "...you could not tear or cut it either. We even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, and there was still no dent in it."

Marcel and Cavitt filled the Carry-all up with debris and Marcel sent Cavitt back to the base with it. He then took his Buick out and filled it with debris as well. He later said that even the two vehicles full was just a minor portion of the debris. Marcel headed back to base, but on the way, he stopped off at his home to show the debris to his wife and son, Jesse Jr.

Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr. (Marcel's son):

"The material was foil-like stuff, very thin, metallic-like but notmetal, and very tough. There was also some structural-like material too - beams and so on. Also a quantity of black plastic material which looked organic in nature." "Imprinted along the edge of some of the beam remnants were hieroglyphic-type characters."

When Marcel got back to the base, Colonel Blanchard ordered him to load the debris on a B-29 and fly with it to Wright Field in Ohio, stopping at Carswell AAFB in Fort Worth, Texas on the way. Marcel did so, but as soon as he landed at Carswell, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, Commander of the 8th Air Force, took over. The debris was taken to Ramey's office and spread out on brown paper. Marcel said later that one photo was taken of him with the real debris, then Ramey took him into another room, and when he came back, a weather balloon had been substituted for the debris. A weather officer, Warrant Officer Irving Newton, was brought in, and he immediately identified the material he saw as a weather balloon and a Rawin radar target. A Rawin radar target was a reflector made of metal foil and balsa wood sticks that was attached to a weather balloon so that it could be tracked on radar. Ramey announced to the press that the "flying saucer" was only a weather balloon.After more photographs with the weather balloon, Ramey ordered Marcel back to Roswell with a strong hint to keep quiet about the incident. When Marcel got back to Roswell, he found that he had been made to look rather foolish for not recognizing the debris as a "weather balloon."

Three months later, Marcel was promoted to Lt. Colonel and assigned to a program for determining whether the Soviets had detonated a nuclear weapon by analyzing particles in the atmosphere. When he was interviewed in 1978, he maintained that the debris he found on the Foster ranch was definitely NOT a weather balloon. He insisted that it was like nothing he had ever seen...

Was there a second crash site?

Was the debris found by Mac Brazel just part of a craft that got struck by lightning or collided with something? Did the main part of the craft crash somewhere else, and were there aliens aboard?

The stories that there was a second crash site are what keeps the Roswellstory going. No matter what explanation the Air Force gives for the debris that Mac Brazel found, it's never good enough if there was a second crash site...

The Roswell Incident and Crash at Corona make a case for a second crash site on the Plains of San Agustin near Magdalena, New Mexico. Thistheory is heavily based on second-hand testimony from a couple named Vern and Jean Maltais. The Maltaises said in 1978 that in February, 1950, an engineer friend of theirs named Grady L."Barney" Barnett told them thathe had been working out in the field near Magdalena, New Mexico on July 3, 1947 when he came upon a crashed disc-shaped object with dead, non-human bodies both inside and outside the craft. But a diary kept by Barnett's wife was subsequently recovered that stated that Barney Barnettwas not on the Plains of San Agustin on July 3, 1947.

The San Agustin story was given new life when a man named Gerald Anderson came forward after television's Unsolved Mysteries telecast a segment about Roswell in January of 1990.

Anderson claimed he and his family had been hunting rocks on the Plains of San Agustin in early July, 1947, when they came upon a crashed UFOwith four alien bodies inside. Although Gerald was only six years old at the time, he told of vivid memories of the scene, including the presence of an archaeologist named Dr. Buskirk and five of his students. But Anderson's testimony soon began to fall apart, and with it the likelihood of a crash onthe Plains of San Agustin. Dr. Buskirk turned out to have been a former teacher of Anderson's, and he was in Arizona at the time, not New Mexico.

Crash at Corona also makes the first case for a second crash site nearRoswell. This case is also heavily based on very little testimony, that of Glenn Dennis and the second-hand stories of Captain Oliver Wendell "Pappy" Henderson, whose daughter and wife said he claimed to have flown debris and bodies to Wright Field. There are discrepancies in Dennis' story as given in Crash and in Truth.

Randall and Schmitt, in The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, introduce new testimony from Jim Ragsdale, William Woody, Frankie Rowe, Frank Kaufman, and W. Curry Holden. All this seems to point to asecond crash site with bodies recovered, followed by a massive military cover-up. But the testimony of each of these witnesses can be questioned. No information is given about Ragsdale that would bolster his credibility.We know nothing about him, yet his story is presented as if it were gospel. Sources on the net say that with each passing year, his story gets more elaborate and less believable. W. Curry Holden was 96 years old when interviewed by Randle, and his family made a point of mentioning that he "gets confused". Randle says that when he asked Holden if he was at thecrash site, he answered in the affirmative. But why couldn't he name any ofthe students who were with him? The students, being younger, might have clearer memories about what happened.

It's important to be discriminating in our search for the truth. We mustquestion every "fact", every bit of "testimony", and every bit of "evidence". It's far too easy to fall into the trap of believing what people tell you whenthey tell you what you want to hear. Those providing "evidence" must give as much detail as possible and not just throw some testimony out andexpect us to accept it.

If you want to get enough information about Roswell to make up your own mind, you should read Crash at Corona by Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner, The Truth About The UFO Crash at Roswell by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt,Conspiracy of Silence by Kevin Randle, and Watch the Skies by Curtis Peebles.

MANY SCEPTICS HAVE SAID THAT THE CRASH AT ROSWELL WAS A HOAX...
WELL LETS LOOK AT THE EVIDENCE!

Peebles wants to say the whole thing is solved because the debris in thenewspaper photos is obviously a weather balloon and radar reflector. But that's just the point! The debris in the pictures isn't the real debris, according to Major Jesse Marcel and Colonel Thomas DuBose, two of the three people present. I'm not counting Warrant Officer Newton because he was not even aware that there might have been "other debris".Witnesses said that the foil-like debris wouldn't crease, and that it regained its shape immediately when you crumpled it. The material in the photos iswrinkled badly.

Skeptics keep going back to the story that Mac Brazel gave to the newspapers AFTER he had been "talked to" by the military. But we knowthat "Dee" Proctor was with Mac when he found the debris field, so we know that he changed his story! Why keep going back to a story that we know contains intentional misinformation?

Skeptics also rely heavily on the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt. Cavitt atfirst denied even being at the debris field, then denied having ever met Mac Brazel, and then claimed he knew it was a weather balloon as soon as he saw the debris. (Yet he let a comedy of errors ensue without saying so???)

The Air Force and C.B. Moore would have us believe that the debris wasa top-secret Project Mogul balloon train. Sigh... Neoprene balloons, balsa wood, and tin foil such as were used in the test flight that Moore claims was the source of the Roswell debris were not top secret. Mac Brazel andJesse Marcel had seen neoprene balloons and radar reflectors before. They both insisted that the Roswell debris was not the same thing. C'mon!Saying it was several balloons and reflectors instead of just one doesn't change anything! The test flight of which Moore speaks didn't carry any top-secret devices. Neither does this theory explain the behavior of the military. It certainly doesn't explain the testimony of several witnesses whosaid the "i-beams" were not balsa (Does coating balsa with Elmer's glue make it unbreakable? If it does, then I want my next car made of a balsa & Elmer's glue frame, with an uncreasable & unburnable aluminum foil skin.Should get great gas mileage...), wouldn't burn, and that a grown man couldn't break one of them. It doesn't explain why the "foil" wouldn't crease, but resumed its normal shape immediately after being crumpled.

To repeat: Most importantly, it doesn't explain the behavior of the military.Cordoning off the area and practically sifting the dirt, keeping Mac Brazel as a "guest" for a week, threatening him and others that were involved, and substituting a weather balloon for the real debris does not make sense if itwas a test balloon train made of neoprene balloons and tinfoil and tape and balsa wood radar reflectors.

Whatever Roswell was, it's obvious that we don't have the real answer yet..or do we?

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