Roswell Revisited

At first, and for nearly forty years afterwards, the Roswell case, when it was mentioned at all, was concluded to be a hoax or a misidentification with a weather balloon as the most likely solution. Among the few exceptions were a couple of paragraphs in Frank Edwards’ 1966 book Flying Saucers Are Serious Business. Almost everything he wrote about the case was wrong, other than his suggestion that something had crashed and that the Air Force attempted to explain it away but he did mention Roswell and the crash of something unusual. Harold T. Wilkins, in his 1954 book Flying Saucers on Attack mentioned it once in the same inaccurate vein.

The Roswell story as we now understand it, begins when Mack Brazel, a hired hand and ranch foreman living near Corona, New Mexico, drove into Roswell in early July 1947 with samples of strange metallic debris. The date of this event has always been in dispute. The some of the news reports suggest Brazel went to Roswell on Monday, July 7, yet there are other stories, such as one attributed to the United Press quotes Wilcox as saying that it had been the day before yesterday, or, in this case, Sunday. Time lines constructed by researchers and based on the testimony of various participants seems to corroborate the Sunday, July 6 date for Brazel’s trip into Roswell.

Adding to the confusion is the article that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on July 8. According to that story, Dan Wilmot of Roswell had seen something flying to the northwest on the evening of July 2. When the rest of the story was told, some researchers believed that the object Wilmot saw that evening was the same one that crashed some 75 miles to the northwest.

Brazel, then, sitting in his ranch on that evening, or possibly a day or two later, heard the rumblings of a distant thunderstorm. There was a sound, an explosion that didn’t sound like thunder, that caught his attention. In the weeks that followed, Brazel would tell some of his neighbors about this. One of those, Marian Strickland, in a video-taped interview, told it to me. Others, such as Loretta Proctor told a similar tale, also on video tape and to others so that a wide range of testimony about the thunderstorm and the strange explosion was available for independent review. This, of course, doesn’t suggest proof, merely corroboration of an observation.

The Object in the Air

There were those, however, who did see something in the sky. William Woody was a young man in 1947. Later he would sign an affidavit for the Fund for UFO Research attesting to the veracity of his claim. He told me, he and his father were working outside when something seemed to light up the ground around them. Woody said that the object had a bright white intensity and that it had a long, flame-like tail with bright colors like a blow-torch flame fading down into a pale red. This tail, according to Woody, was very long.

They watched it travel across the sky, appearing in the south and moving to the north, vanishing below the horizon. He said that he thought it had been in view for as long as half a minute and that his father thought that it was a big meteorite that might have fallen to the ground north of Roswell.

The object was of enough interest to Woody and his father that they decided to go look for it a couple of days later. Woody was not sure of the exact timing of the drive, but did say that as they drove north, out of Roswell on the main highway, they saw military vehicles off to the west. He wrote in his affidavit, signed on September 28, 1993, “We headed north through Roswell on U.S. 285. About 19 miles north of town, where the highway crosses the Macro Draw, we saw at least one uniformed soldier stationed beside the road. As we drove along, we saw more sentries and Army vehicles. They were stationed at all places — ranch roads, crossroads, etc. where there was access to the highway and drive east or west, and they were armed, some with rifles, others with sidearms… We stopped at one sentry post, and my father asked what was going on. The soldier, who’s [sic] attitude was very nice, just said his orders were not to let anyone leave 285 and go into the countryside.

“As we drove north,”he continued, “we saw that the Corona road (State 247), which runs west from Highway 285, was blocked by soldiers. We went on as far as Ramon, about nine miles north of the 247 intersection. There were sentries there, too. At Ramon we turned around and headed south and home… I remember my father saying he thought the Army was looking for something it had tracked on its way down.”

On the Roswell base, Corporal E. L. Pyles, thought that he saw something cross the sky. Back as I was putting together The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, I made an assumption. Frank Kaufmann gave me some documentation that said the craft had fallen near midnight on July 4, 1947. At the time I had no reason to believe that Kaufmann’s documentation was fraudulent so I assumed that the object Pyles saw was the same one that Kaufmann had talked about it. The result was that in the book, I assigned a date and time to the observation, though the best Pyles could do, originally, was tell us he thought he made the sighting in 1947 and that he had the impression that it was in the summer. Hardly a definitive identification.

But there are some facts here that help us determine a time and date. First, according to the notes I have, Pyles had suggested he wasn’t on the main base, but at one of the outlying facilities. Later, talking to Karl Pflock, he said that he, and a friend, were walking across the drill field on the main base, having left the NCO club. He saw the object, which he described to Don Schmitt as something like a shooting star but larger. He said that it was orangish and that it was headed downward.

Significantly, and contrary to what Pflock would later write, Pyles told me, and us, that a couple of days later he had seen the article in The Roswell Daily Record and wondered if what he had seen had anything to do with that. In other words, Pyles couldn’t remember a solid date, or even year, but could relate it to the newspaper articles which does establish a date and a year. It was Pyles who related the sighting of the bright object to the Roswell case and who brought up the articles he’d seen in the newspaper which certainly fixed the date as the first week in July, 1947.

The Debris Field and the Strange Metal

The day after the strange explosion in the thunderstorm, according to most of those same witnesses, meaning here, the Proctors and Mack’s son Bill, Brazel was riding the range, checking on the sheep when he came to a field filled with strange metallic debris. Estimates by others who saw it later suggested that the debris field was about three-quarters of a mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide. According to a man Brazel hired to help with the ranch work, Tommy Tyree, the material was so densely packed that the sheep refused to cross it and that meant that Brazel had to drive them around it to get the sheep to water. Brazel was annoyed because he wanted to know who would clean up the mess probably figuring that it would take several hours, if not days, to do it.

Loretta Procter told me, as she had others on both audio tape and video tape that she, along with her husband, Floyd, had a chance to see a small piece of the debris recovered by Mack Brazel but never bothered to drive down to the debris field. Proctor said that gas was expensive and tires were expensive and they didn’t want to take the time. So, she didn’t see the field then, but there are indications that her young son, William “Dee” Proctor, who was with Brazel on the morning he found the debris, did. In fact, all this might have happened as Brazel took Dee home that day so that he had a chance to talk to the Proctors about the crash.

The debris that Brazel brought with him that day was about the size of a pencil, according to what Proctor told me, and that they couldn’t cut it and they couldn’t burn it. Although light weight, it was extremely strong. She said that neither she nor her husband could identify it and both were surprised by its durability.

Dee Proctor never really talked to investigators about the event. I spoke with him twice, both times briefly and both times by accident. He did confirm that he had been with Brazel and that military authorities had talked to him in the days that followed the discovery. In fact, it was clear that he had not only been there, but he had taken some friends out there with him. He would not say what the military told him, nor would he say much about what he had seen, other than to say that it was a field with metallic debris and the remnants of a craft. It was clear that these experiences with the military left a lasting impression on him which guided what he said for the remainder of his life.

Of course, these vague descriptions tells us nothing of the nature of the object that crashed. He also said that the craft was of extraterrestrial origin, though those words came from the older man fifty years later and not the seven-year-old boy in 1947.

Proctor died in January, 2006 at age 65. He had always been a somewhat reclusive man, quick to anger and reticent to talk about these events. In 1996, he took his mother to a bluff about ten or so miles from their ranch house and about two and a half miles from the debris field. He told her that was the field in which more than just debris had been found. Any trace of the craft or its impact was long gone in 1996.

After showing the material to the Proctors, Brazel went into Corona and mentioned to friends there that he had found something weird. The exact date can’t be established now, but it seems it would have been on Saturday, July 5. There are those, and I was among them at one time, who suggested that Brazel was told there was a reward for evidence or explanation for the flying saucers. The newspaper articles announcing that didn’t appear until after the July 4 weekend and there is no evidence that Brazel had access to a newspaper. He had no electricity and no radio at the ranch so that he couldn’t have heard about the rewards before he went into Roswell. If he found out about the money, it would have been incidental to his travel to Roswell and given the reporting in the Roswell Daily Record, after he arrived in town the second time.

The next day, Sunday, July 6 (here I accept the reconstruction of various researchers and the information supplied by the United Press), he gathered up a small bit of the debris and took it into Roswell and to Chavez County Sheriff George Wilcox. His real motivation here was probably to find someone responsible for the mess on the ranch and someone to clean it up for him. Clearly, whatever it was, it came from the sky and the Army, at Roswell, was responsible for stuff in the sky.

According to the newspaper, however, Brazel wasn’t all that concerned about the debris and he didn’t come into town until Monday, July 7. The reason this time, according to others, was to sell some wool. Bill Brazel told me later that it was unlikely that his dad would be trying to sell wool in July.

The Chaves County Sheriff and the U.S. Army

Although Wilcox died before researchers could interview him, his daughters, Phyllis McGuire and Elizabeth Tulk could provide information about what happened inside the sheriff’s office back then. McGuire, a teenager at the time, didn’t get to see much before she was chased out of the office. She said there was talk of a trip out to the crash site but she wasn’t sure if the sheriff had gone out himself, or he merely dispatched two of his deputies. She did know that someone with the sheriff’s department did.

This does bring up a question of jurisdiction. Roswell is in Chaves County and Corona is in Lincoln County. It seems strange that the Chaves County sheriff would send his deputies into another county on an investigation. However, according to the witnesses, he did send out deputies and they did find something and later on, it would seem that one of the sites was in Chavez County.

Although the military would have trouble finding the debris field without a guide, the deputies, from that area, believed they could, based on the description given them by Brazel. They left the office and returned much later, McGuire thought it was after dark, saying they had seen no debris field, but had found an area of blackened desert. They said it looked as if something large and circular had landed and then taken off. It had baked the ground to a hardness that surprised them. There would be later, other corroboration for the observation.

Wilcox wasn’t sure what Brazel should do but suggested they call out to the base and talk to them. To Wilcox, as it had to others, the problem seemed to be one created by the military. Wilcox called out to the base and eventually was directed to Major Jesse Marcel, the air intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. Marcel, according to what he would tell interviewers decades later, including Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield, was finishing lunch when the call came into the Officer’s Club.

Marcel said in those later interviews that he had gone to the sheriff’s office to talk to the sheriff and Brazel and then returned to the base. Brazel had said he had some errands and Marcel wanted to coordinate with his fellow officers. Marcel said that he talked to Colonel William Blanchard, his commanding officer, and Blanchard told him to take the new counterintelligence officer with him. Later that day Marcel, and the Counter-Intelligence Corps officer, then Captain Sheridan Cavitt, followed Brazel out to the ranch. They stayed that evening in a small out building, ate cold beans according to Marcel and the next morning were taken to the debris field.

This field was over a ridge line and down in a sort of valley where it was concealed from the roads that Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt took the day before. To the south, the valley opened and someone approaching from that direction would have been able to see the debris field from maybe two or three miles away. From everywhere else, you had to be on top of the low hills or the ridges to see anything.

Marcel, according to the testimony he gave to researchers in the 1980s, was impressed with what he was seeing. Here was a huge field that was filled with strange metallic debris. There was nothing recognizable in it. Just broken metal and something that Marcel described as parchment but that was tough and wouldn’t burn when a match was held to it. He talked of some metallic material that was very thin but so very strong they couldn’t dent with a sledge hammer. He was puzzled by what he was seeing.

Once he had a chance to examine the debris, Marcel was convinced it was nothing like anything he had ever seen. He would later tell researchers and reporters that, “It came to Earth but it was not something from Earth.”

Cavitt, on the other hand, insisted in our first interviews with him, that he had not been a participant in any such off base activities, contrary to what Marcel said. Cavitt told me that he had never bothered with a balloon recovery and that he, and Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett, the NCOIC (Noncommissioned Officer In Charge) of their office had been too busy with important work to worry about weather balloons falling on ranches nearly a hundred miles from Roswell. In fact, according to Cavitt originally, he hadn’t even been in Roswell when all these events took place and didn’t know why Marcel had said otherwise.

But then his story began to evolve slowly and he even showed me records establishing that he had just finished his counterintelligence training and had been assigned to Roswell in June 1947. Given travel time and leave, he said that he didn’t arrive until the middle of July but his wife had been there in early July to pick out an apartment and get ready to receive him. There was also talk of his wife attending a wedding in Washington, which was why she was in Roswell early, but I never got the details. Apparently, after the wedding, she went to Roswell on her own to await her husband.

Eventually Cavitt admitted that he had been at the base when Brazel went to the sheriff and Marcel went out to the debris field. Eventually he admitted he was the man who accompanied Marcel, though he was vague about the details of that thinking that he had gone only with Rickett. He thought Marcel might have been there, but he wasn’t sure.

Later, in 1994, when the Air Force investigated the Roswell crash, and Colonel Richard Weaver from the Secretary of the Air Force’s office visited Cavitt at his home in Sequim, Washington, Cavitt had a new story. Yes, he had gone out with Marcel and found a field filled with the torn up debris, but he had recognized it immediately. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a weather balloon and, of course, the rawin radar reflector.

Remember here that this was before Lieutenant Walter Haut had been called by the commanding officer of the base at Roswell, Blanchard, and told to create the press release. This was, according to the reconstructions of the time line and given the testimony of Marcel, Monday, July 7, a full day before the newspaper stories broke. No one had heard that something had fallen near Roswell other than the sheriff and, of course, Marcel and Cavitt. No one really knew where the debris field was or how to get to it.

But standing on that sun drenched field with the temperature in the high 90s, Cavitt didn’t say a word about the identity of the debris. Instead, he returned to the base and kept his mouth shut, never telling Blanchard what he had seen, and never telling anyone else that all the fuss was about a balloon. He would suggest, as a counter-intelligence agent, he was outside Blanchard’s chain of command, and while technically correct, it seems that Blanchard would have spoken to both Marcel and Cavitt upon their return from the ranch. Marcel would be enthusiastic about the strange metallic debris and stumped by its identity. Cavitt, however, told Weaver that he knew immediately that it was a balloon. So why didn’t he mention this to Marcel on the field, or to Blanchard when they reported what they had seen? Why allow anything to be misunderstood when he had the solution? The weather balloon is a rather mundane solution for all the excitement, but it would have stopped the press release and we wouldn’t be talking about it sixty years later.

Counter-Intelligence Agents Disagree

Instead, according to Lewis Rickett, interviewed by several investigators in the 1990s, Cavitt returned to the field later, along with Rickett. Rickett would say that they were stopped by the military police who were guarding the site because Cavitt and Rickett were in civilian clothes. Rickett would describe this cordon, mentioned that Major Edwin Easley, the provost marshal (think chief of police here) was there overseeing the security and said that he, Rickett, picked up a lightweight piece of metal that was slightly curved and about eighteen inches long. He first wanted to know if it was hot, meaning radioactive, and then he tried to bend it, but the material was so strong that he couldn’t do it. Very light weight and extremely strong would be the descriptions heard over and over.

Remember here that there are two important parts of that attempt. One is that the metal was light weight and thin. Rickett, as so many others, thought of it as feather light and maybe flimsy because of its light weight. And that he couldn’t bend it, no matter how hard he tried.

The second important piece of Rickett’s story is the military cordon. Military police were guarding access to the site and were requiring everyone to show identification before they were allowed closer. That included those in uniform and those who would be expected at such a location.

I will note here that others, such as George “Judd” Roberts, who owned part of local radio station KGFL in 1947 said that he, along with the other owner, Walt Whitmore, also ran into the military cordon and were turned back. Remember that William Woody talked of a heavy cordon along highway 285 with armed men. In the early 1990s, I talked with a vertebrate palaeontologist, Bertrand Schultz, University of Nebraska, who told me that he too, had seen the military cordon. Other witnesses said that they had seen military vehicles parked on dirt roads leading to the site, controlling the access into the desert. That there were military out there turning back traffic seems to be well documented by multiple witnesses.

Cavitt, however, during his interview with Weaver for the new Air Force investigation, would say that there weren’t any guards and that he wasn’t sure who he had accompanied out to the site. He thought it was Rickett and he wasn’t sure that Marcel had gone with him or not. He told Weaver, “There were no, as I understand, check points or anything like that (going though guards and that sort of garbage…”

So, we have a number of witnesses telling us contradictory stories. How do we decide who is telling us the truth? We simply take those stories told by the most witnesses and look at them. If one tells us something, and everyone else has a different version which is told in a similar way, then the single witness is probably inaccurate.

In the interviews I conducted with Cavitt, I only saw him nervous once. We were discussing the idea of alien bodies. He looked at me, leaned forward, picked up a magazine as if suddenly interested in it, tossed it down and leaned back. He asked, “Bill Rickett tell you that?”

Although it was Rickett, I didn’t want to identify the source of it. I said, “No,” and Cavitt relaxed. I now wish that I had said something like, “That’s not all he told us,” but I let Cavitt off the hook.

The important point here, however, was Cavitt’s reaction to the fact we had talked with Bill Rickett. It suggests that Rickett had the same sort of inside knowledge that we suspect Cavitt had. And, Cavitt was worried about Rickett providing us with some of that information. He just didn’t know what we might know from Rickett and what we might be guessing about. It also seems to underscore the veracity of what Rickett told us, like being stopped by a military cordon and suggesting that Cavitt’s comment about no military cordon is in error.

The Press Release

In Roswell, on July 8, after Blanchard had talked to Marcel and probably to Cavitt, Blanchard told Haut, the Public Information Officer, to alert the local media. Later Haut would not remember if Blanchard gave him the details of the crash for him to write the release, or had dictated the entire press release to him over the telephone. However it happened, Haut ended up with a short press release that said the many rumors about the flying saucers had ended when members of the 509^th Bomb Group, there in Roswell, had recovered the wreckage of one. Haut, according to what he told me, took the press release into town, delivered it to both newspapers and radio stations, and then went home for lunch and to mow the lawn.

It was a simple and short press release, mentioning that a flying saucer had been captured. No real details available, other than a local rancher had told Sheriff Wilcox who in turn had told Jesse Marcel. Marcel was on his way to his higher headquarters with the wreckage. The article appeared in the Roswell Daily Record, then an afternoon newspaper.

Hours later Brigadier General Roger Ramey, photographed in front of some debris in his office at Eighth Air Force Headquarters, said that all the excitement was not warranted. All that had been found was a weather balloon with a rawin radar target. It was made of aluminum foil, balsa, twine and some fancy tape. The officers at Roswell had been caught up in the growing flying saucer hysteria. That is not exactly what I’d want to hear about the men who were members of the only nuclear strike force in the world. Instead, I wanted to hear about calm, cool professionals doing an important job, not hysterical men who couldn’t tell the difference between a rather common weather observation balloon and an alien spacecraft.

Reporters searched for some of those involved in the story. Haut reported that he received telephone calls from around the world, as well as post cards and letters. The phone lines to the base were tied up with incoming calls. Haut said that Blanchard told him to make the telephone calls stop, but there was nothing that he could do about it.

Brazel, however, was in custody at the base thanks to the station owners of KGFL who had taken him into Roswell for an interview. Marcel was ordered to Fort Worth with some of the debris to show it to the Eighth Air Force commander, Ramey and therefore, wasn’t in Roswell to respond to reporters or their telephone calls. And the sheriff, who also reported calls from around the world, refused to answer any questions from anyone, telling those who called him to contact the base.

On July 9, the Roswell Daily Record ran follow up stories about the crash. In one story General Ramey explained that debris was merely the remains of a weather balloon that had been misidentified. In another, Mack Brazel told how he had found the object, not a couple of days earlier, but a couple of weeks earlier. He said that the wreckage was made up of “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.” Two weeks after the initial find, he, his wife, a son Vernon and his daughter Bessie, went back out to the field and cleaned it all up.

Brazel, according to the interview, had not seen anything fall from the sky and there was no talk of a strange explosion during a thunderstorm. At least he didn’t mention those things while he was talking to the press. He said he didn’t know what size or shape it had been, but thought it must have been about 12 feet long. The rubber was smoky gray and scattered over an area of about 200 yards.

According to the article, “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks made up 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, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.”

Brazel also said, in a comment that is often overlooked, that he had found weather balloons on two other occasions but what he had found this time didn’t resemble them in any way. He added, “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Flying Saucer Crashes Disappear from the Literature

And that is pretty much where it ended. Other than an occasional mention in a UFO book, without much in the way of facts, the case was seen as a misidentification of a weather balloon. Of course, there had been rumors of UFO crashes afterwards, but then Frank Scully wrote, Behind the Flying Saucers and the landscape of UFOs changed significantly. Scully was reporting on a series of flying saucer crashes that took place in the desert southwest, each of which resulted in the recovery of a craft and the bodies of the alien creatures that began months after the Roswell case. Scully was sure of his facts because he had them verified by a government scientist who was in charge of the investigative project.

Within months of publication, Scully’s story was discredited. Nearly everyone inside the UFO research community, and those who would join it over the next couple of decades, rejected, out of hand, other tales of spaceship crashes. Scully’s downfall, along with revelations about his main sources, both of whom were later charged with fraud in a case that had nothing to do with flying saucers, ended interest in such claims. The theory seemed to be that if the extraterrestrial beings could build a ship to cross interstellar distances, they wouldn’t make mistakes that would cause them to crash once they arrived on Earth. Besides, no story of a crash had ever withstood a serious and competent investigation.

The story stayed that way for decades. Brief mentions of it in some obscure publications, or brief mentions in books that reached a wider audience, but always with Behind the Flying Saucers in the background. And always with the note that Roswell have been identified as a weather balloon. No one was interested.

Except Len Stringfield, a UFO researcher from Ohio who began to collect tales of flying saucer crashes. Some of them were single witness and many of them made no logical sense, but Stringfield’s purpose was to put the stories out there in case there were other witnesses, or maybe a researcher interested enough to follow up on a case. Stringfield believed there was something to some of these tales though not necessarily to all of them. His ideas were radical, even in the fringe world of UFO research.

Then Jesse Marcel, no longer in the Army, living in Houma, Louisiana, and retired from repairing TVs and radios, began to tell friends and ham radio operators that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucers many years earlier. One of those was a station manager in New Orleans who mentioned it to Stan Friedman, who was being interviewed about his UFO research at that New Orleans station. The station manager suggested that maybe he should talk to Marcel.

Marcel said that he couldn’t remember the exact date, but provided enough details, and sounded credible enough, that research could begin. Friedman told both Len Stringfield and William L. Moore, a fellow investigator. The research began with the newspapers in June 1947 and worked on from there. On July 9 there were pictures of Jesse Marcel, in Brigadier General Ramey’s office, holding the remains of what looked exactly like what Ramey said it was, a rawin target and a neoprene weather balloon.

But it gave them a date and a location and confirmed some of what Marcel was saying. It was clear from the newspaper stories that for a few hours anyway the world thought a flying saucer had crashed and the U.S. Army had recovered it. Now the search for confirmation could begin.

Unlike the tales of the past, this one didn’t evaporate when people started looking at it. Marcel had confirmed that he had picked up a flying saucer and gave descriptions of debris that resembled, in a gross respect, the paper, parchment and metallic material mentioned in the newspaper and the remnants of a weather balloon and rawin target. More important, there were names attached and places to go for corroboration.