Part One: The Mystery Begins...

It has been called “the greatest fairy tale of all time or the biggest untold secret” (Randles 21-22). The alleged UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, has been the topic of debate since its occurrence fifty years ago. Was the debris discovered a top secret military project gone awry? Or did an unidentified flying object really land on Earth? The truth about the Roswell Incident cannot be discussed until all of the facts have been presented.

On July 2, 1947, a thunderstorm rolled across the desert of New Mexico, 75 miles northwest of Roswell. William “Mac” Brazel, a ranch foreman, heard an explosion as he prepared for bed. Dismissing the noise as thunder, he turned in for the night. The next morning, he and a young neighbor discovered something strange in a hilly, treeless area two miles from his farm. Light colored, metallic debris spread across 200 yards of desert. They found metal foil, pieces of plastic, and lightweight, flexible I-beams with purplish hieroglyphics like that of firecracker wrappers on them. Some portions were as light as balsa wood. Brazel assumed that the noise he had heard the night before somehow tied in with this debris. He thought a plane had crashed when he discovered what looked like parts of a fuselage. They collected the wreckage, which weighed less than five pounds, and Brazel stored it in a tin shed on his property. Testing it, he discovered that it could not be cut or burned (Randles 18; Stover 84).

His neighbors urged him to go to the police about his findings. On July 6, he drove to Roswell, where he heard about UFO sightings and a three thousand dollar reward for proof. He reported his findings to local sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox examined the debris and called the Roswell Air Force Base. On the following day, base intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel and Counterintelligence Corps officer Captain Sheridan Cavitt drove to Brazel’s farm. They spent the entire afternoon gathering the wreckage and putting it into the trunk of Marcel’s Buick. The Roswell Daily Record on July 9, 1947, printed these statements: “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all . . . the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds” (1). Excited by his findings, Marcel took the debris to his home before taking it to the base. He and his family tried to reconstruct it on the kitchen floor. Years later, Jesse Marcel “declared that the debris he found ‘was something I had never seen before or since . . . it certainly wasn’t anything built by us’ ” (Cousineau 27).

The next morning, July 8, Marcel delivered the debris to Base Commander Colonel William H. Blanchard, and it was stored in Hangar 84. At 10:30 a.m., Blanchard told First Lieutenant Walter G. Haut to issue a press release. The public information officer was twenty-five at the time and never saw the debris, but “ . . . he vividly remembers Blanchard’s orders: ‘Haut, put out a press release. Basically say that we have in our possession a flying saucer’ ” (Stover 85-86). A noon press release was printed in England’s issue of the London Times, as well as in a German paper and the Roswell Daily Record. The New Mexico newspaper reported that the Army Air Force possessed a flying saucer. Matters surrounding the crash were supervised by Brigadier General Roger Ramey. Concerned, he sent a memo to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It was dated July 8, 1947, twenty-four hours after the wreckage had been retrieved. The memo said the office in Dallas, Texas, received a telephone call stating the discovery of a flying disc. Roswell gave the information to Dallas due to the media’s attempt to find the location of the saucer (Randles 19-20). The Roswell Air Force Base released an official report a few hours before, but Ramey wanted a complete dismissal of the case. “He ordered that a ‘cover story’ be set up” (Randles 20). The wreckage, which filled an entire bomber plane, was flown to Wright Field, now Wright Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio. The debris was housed in the Foreign Technology Division of the Army/Air Force. In Fort Worth, Texas, Ramey held a press conference with Marcel, where the wreckage was classified as a “weather balloon and a tin foil radar attached to it” (Ritchie 178). Ramey told the public that the debris would not be shipped to Wright Field. However, the previously mentioned memo to the FBI stated that a special plane would take the wreckage to Ohio.

On July 9, the Roswell Daily Record published a front page report on the events at the press conference: “An examination by the army revealed last night that the mysterious objects found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was a harmless high-altitude weather balloon—not a grounded flying disc” (1). The government forced Marcel and the other military officers involved to pledge lifelong silence for national security’s sake (Cousineau 25). Brazel and Sheriff Wilcox both received death threats by the government (Randle and Schmitt 34).

Although the Brazel story holds the most credibility, there were other alleged crashes and sightings during that same time period. Roswell’s mortician Glenn Dennis claimed to have received two phone calls on July 5. “The calls were from a guy who said he was 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” (Stover 86). Later, while at the base hospital, he saw shiny objects in the back of an ambulance. Having a Coke afterwards, he encountered an Army nurse who, before he was sent away, told him about “strange-looking, small bodies” (Jaroff 67). He met with her at the officer’s club later that night. She claimed she had witnessed autopsies on “foreign bodies” (Randle and Schmitt 22). Shocked and nervous, she described the corpses as having brittle bones. The arms were longer between the wrist and elbow than the elbow and shoulder. The thumbless hands had four fingers with what appeared to be suction cups on the tips. The head was large with sunken eyes, a concave nose, and small openings for ears. The lips were thin, and the teeth were harder than bone. The skull was moveable like that of a newborn baby. The horrible odor in the room made her nauseous, and she left before the completion of the autopsies. Dennis and the nurse finished their conversation and parted. He never saw her again but heard of her death in a plane crash. He was later warned by the military not to speak of the things he saw or heard at the hospital (Jaroff 69; Randle and Schmitt 22).

Notes
1 Stanton Friedman called the Roswell Incident a “cosmic Watergate.” The original source of this quote could not be found. The author chose to associate it with the following work.
Leon Jaroff, “Did Aliens Really Land?,” Time 23 June 1997: 69.