< CONTENTS
Ever since the summer of 1947, the once-sleepy town of Roswell, New Mexico, has been a Mecca for UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists. In July of that year, during a lightning storm, an alien spacecraft allegedly fell on a remote ranch. The incident sparked a plethora of rumors, speculation, and official denials, fueling a passion for accounts of UFOs and extraterrestrial activity that rapidly spread all over the world.
“It’s a modern myth, a kind of religion.
There is a common human need for salvation,
and it’s always coming from above.”
Robert A. Baker, UFO skeptic and former
psychology professor at the University of Kentucky
At some point during the first week of July 1947 (the date is disputed), Mac Brazel saddled his horse and rode deep into the J. B. Foster Ranch, near the village of Corona, around 75 miles (120km) northwest of Roswell. Brazel worked as a foreman on the ranch and was accompanied by his seven-year-old neighbor, Dee Proctor, who he paid 25 cents per day to help him out in the fields. While going about his duties, Brazel came across a large area of wreckage some 7 miles (11km) from the small wooden ranch house. The wreckage consisted of metal, some of which was dull and some of which was shiny and thin, resembling tinfoil. There was also something that looked like transparent plastic string or wire, and thin sticks shaped like I-beams, made from a material that Brazel was unable to identify. He estimated that the wreckage extended over an area three-quarters of a mile (1.2km) long and 200 to 300ft (60 to 90m) wide. It appeared as though some kind of machine had exploded in midair and wreckage from it had rained down on the earth.
The area had been struck by violent thunderstorms the preceding night and Brazel had heard what he thought sounded like a loud explosion. He picked up several fragments of the wreckage and noticed that they were lightweight but unusually strong. He stuffed them into his pocket and continued with his work. Later that evening, Brazel dropped Proctor off at his home. The little boy showed his mother, Loretta, some of the fragments. Loretta recalled, “He had a piece of stuff about 5 or 6 inches long that looked like wood or plastic. It was a little bit bigger than a pencil and kind of tannish color. I remember Mac and my husband trying to whittle it with a knife and trying to burn it. It wouldn’t burn and it wouldn’t whittle.”11
The discovery of the mysterious wreckage was the climax of several weeks of reports from across the country of strange circular discs seen skimming through the sky at high speed. Around the same time as the debris was discovered, four patients at the US Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque described how they watched a “flying disc” disappear into clouds and then reappear in the sky. The men, John Goyng, Charles Roat, Fred Lucero, and Lorenzo Garcia, described the object thus: “It seemed like a round ball, brighter than any airplane we’ve ever seen, and was going straight . . . not dipping. It had nothing projecting from it that we could see.” Another local, Jess Stathrite, reported that he had witnessed five saucer-shaped objects, one of which appeared to be circling the city.22
After hearing about these sightings, Brazel drove to Roswell to speak with Sheriff George Wilcox, believing that he might receive a reward for his discovery on the J. B. Foster Ranch. He described what he had found and “whispered kinda confidential-like” that he might have found one of these peculiar flying discs people had reported seeing. He had intended to keep fragments of the object until he had heard of recent bizarre sightings in the sky. Sheriff Wilcox contacted the Roswell Army Air Field to report Brazel’s find. The base was the home of the 509th Bomb Group, the unit that had conducted the atomic bombings that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just two years prior during World War II. Roswell was one of several top-secret military installations in the area.
Roswell Army Air Field commander Col. William Blanchard ordered his intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse Marcel, to accompany Brazel to view the debris found on the ranch. Following behind was counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt. They were ordered to collect as much of the wreckage as they could and bring it back to the base. According to First Lt. Walter Haut, Maj. Marcel described some of the material as “foil that you could take in your hand and crumple it up as tight as you could, and it would spring back to its original shape after you released it, without any creases.” He also described “a 30-inch I-beam that they hit with a 19-pound sledgehammer, and it bounced off of it. And transparent wires that resembled today’s fiber optics.” In 1979, Maj. Marcel commented, “It was quite obvious to me . . . that it was not a weather balloon, nor was it an airplane, or a missile. What it was, we don’t know.”33
The following day, two more counterintelligence officers and a number of soldiers arrived and cordoned off the area. While they gathered up the pieces of wreckage, Brazel was asked to accompany them back to Roswell. He was kept there for almost a week. “He would never talk about it after he came back,” said Loretta Proctor. Following his ordeal, Brazel said that he would never report anything again “unless it was an atomic bomb.”44 According to some of Brazel’s neighbors, following his return to the ranch, he was somehow able to purchase a new pickup truck and start a new business in Alamogordo, New Mexico, closer to where his family lived, in Tularosa.
The mysterious sightings and the wreckage led some Roswell citizens to speculate that a UFO had crashed near their little town. Others feared that the objects seen in the sky were something much more sinister—a Soviet secret weapon. A piece in the Fort Lauderdale Daily News, July 7, 1947, voiced this concern: “If the objects aren’t Army or Navy devices then we are faced with a real mystery and one that our officials had better bear down on in a hurry. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable feeling in the world to know that some foreign power has developed a way to penetrate this nation’s skies at will . . .”
On July 8, 1947, a headline in the Roswell Daily Record boldly proclaimed, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”44 Officials at Roswell Army Air Field had issued a news release reporting that they had recovered a crashed disc. It read:
“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group intelligence office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”
Just the next day, however, Fort Worth Army Air Field refuted this announcement and claimed that the unidentified object was nothing more than debris from a crashed weather balloon. Irving Newton, the weather officer at Fort Worth Army Air Field, said that he had been ordered to the base commander’s office to examine the crash debris. “I told them, ‘That’s a bunch of horse puckey—that’s a radar target and a weather balloon. If it’s not, I’ll eat it, without salt and pepper.’ ”55
After being released from military custody, Brazel substantially changed his description of what he had found on the ranch. He now claimed that he had collected all the debris into two bundles that were less than 3ft (0.9m) long and 8in (20cm) thick, weighing around 5lbs (2.3kg). He now described the debris as tinfoil, paper, sticky tape, sticks, and rubber. While Brazel had changed his version of events, in a subsequent interview with the Record and the Associated Press, Brazel potentially hinted at some kind of cover-up when he said that he had found two weather observation balloons in the past and was adamant that whatever this object was, it wasn’t a weather observation balloon.66
Ever since, speculation about extraterrestrials and government cover-ups has become so widespread that the “Roswell Incident” has gained legendary status. According to some, the US military silencing their own reports of a “flying disc,” combined with Brazel’s revised description of what he found, marked the beginning of a government cover-up of evidence that something far more unusual crashed to earth. For skeptics, however, the Roswell Incident is a prime example of how a series of misunderstandings, poor research, and rumors can take on a life of their own and create an entirely false image of what was actually a commonplace event involving a weather observation balloon. “It’s a modern myth, a kind of religion. There is a common human need for salvation, and it’s always coming from above,” said the noted UFO skeptic Robert A. Baker, professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Kentucky.
One of the most startling aspects of the Roswell Incident is the claim made by some Ufologists that the wreckage contained the dead bodies of extraterrestrials, and that these bodies were removed by the military for government study.
Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who worked on government studies for a number of companies, began studying UFOs back in the 1950s. He and his partner, William Moore, came to the conclusion that the debris Brazel found was the remnants of a UFO crash. They deduced that an Army pilot had witnessed the crash and called for soldiers to approach the scene and remove any dead bodies of extraterrestrials. In Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-up of a UFO, a 1992 book Friedman coauthored with science writer Don Berliner, Friedman suggests that a second UFO crashed at Magdalena, a village in New Mexico, around the same time, and that the Army recovered that craft as well, along with several bodies and at least one living extraterrestrial. In his book, Friedman quoted local farmer Barney Barnett, who was present at the alleged crash scene at Magdalena, as saying, “While we were looking at (the bodies), a military officer drove up in a truck with a driver and took control. He told everybody that the Army was taking over and to get out of the way. Other military personnel came up and cordoned off the area. We were told to leave the area and not to talk to anyone about what we had seen . . . that it was our patriotic duty to remain silent.”
Around six months after the incident, GI John Tilley arrived in Roswell. He later became an Air Force master sergeant and co-authored with Larry Tilley a book titled Expose: Roswell UFO Incident in 2007. While at Roswell, Tilley heard an unnerving tale that was swirling around the base: “The scuttlebutt at the base was that something had escaped from the military, and that whatever had escaped had left the base and was peering through windows and scaring the heck out of people. That didn’t mean anything to an 18-year-old kid from West Virginia. But four or five years ago, I met a UFO historian who told me that in UFO circles there has always been a whispered rumor that one of the four extraterrestrials that crashed at Corona was alive and that it escaped. And when the military located it near the base gate, they killed it. They were afraid of it. So you take that and put it together with what I heard, and what have you got?”77
In his book, Tilley writes that his brother-in-law, James Storm, was working as a member of the RAAF base fire department when he was involved with transporting the wreckage from the Roswell crash site back to the airbase. Storm claimed they were ordered to park off-road, out of sight, and wait. After several minutes, a “snub-nosed tractor and lowboy flat trailer showed up.” He described how on the back of the trailer was a tarp covering an object. In Storm’s own words to Tilley, it was “a saucer part so big that it [the trailer] was covered.”88
In 1989, former US military intelligence officer Leonard H. Stringfield revealed that, four years earlier, he had spoken with Chris Coffey, a close friend of NASA astronomer Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka. Allegedly, Onizuka told Coffey that, while serving at McClellan Air Force Base in 1973, he was shown black-and-white footage of “alien bodies on a slab.” Coffey claimed that Onizuka had intended to speak with Stringfield because he was a known Ufologist. However, before he could do so, Onizuka died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986.99
It later transpired that, shortly after he arrived at Roswell airbase to report his findings, Brazel himself had suggested that there were extraterrestrial bodies among the wreckage. The following excerpt is from a telephone conversation Brazel had with Frank Joyce, then an announcer on KGFL Radio, on July 6, 1947:
Brazel: “Who’s gonna clean all that stuff up? That’s what I wanna know. I need someone out there to clean it up.”
Joyce: “What stuff? What are you talking about?”
Brazel: “Don’t know. Don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s from one of them ‘flying saucer’ things.”
Joyce: “Oh really? Then you should call the air base. They are responsible for everything that flies in the air. They should be able to help you or tell you what it is.”
Brazel: “Oh, God. Oh, my God. What am I gonna do? It’s horrible. Horrible. Just horrible.”
Joyce: “What’s that? What’s horrible? What are you talking about?”
Brazel: “The stench. Just awful.”
Joyce: “Stench? From what? What are you talking about?”
Brazel: “They’re dead.”
Joyce: “What? Who’s dead?”
Brazel: “Little people. Unfortunate little creatures . . .”1010
KGFL had planned to run with the story and bring Brazel in for an interview, but before they had the chance, soldiers took Brazel to Roswell Army Air Field. KGFL was threatened that if they released any portion of the recording, they would lose their broadcasting license.
The widespread belief of a cover-up led US Rep. Steven Schiff of New Mexico to request information from the Pentagon about the Roswell Incident. The Pentagon’s lackluster response encouraged Schiff to accuse the authorities of stonewalling. In 1993, Schiff asked the federal government’s General Accounting Office for a full and honest investigation into the Roswell Incident. In a letter to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, he wrote:
“Last fall, I became aware of a strange series of events beginning in New Mexico over 45 years ago and involving personnel of what was then the Army Air Force. I have since reviewed the facts in some detail, and I am writing to request your assistance in arriving at a definitive explanation of what transpired and why.”
The Air Force allegedly launched an official inquiry before releasing a report. The report claimed that the debris found near Corona was related to Project Mogul, a top-secret program aimed at using balloons to spy on Soviet nuclear tests. They claimed that the wreckage was part of a 600-ft (183m) balloon train that was used to detect Russian nuclear blasts and reflect signals back to tracking stations. The report introduced Charles Moore, a scientist who worked on Project Mogul, as its key witness. Moore claimed that the balloons were equipped with corner reflectors that were put together with beams made from balsa wood and coated with synthetic resin glue similar to that made by Elmer, to strengthen them. They claimed that this was the peculiar material found at the crash site that neither Maj. Marcel or Brazel could identify.
The report also noted that “many of the persons making the biggest claims of alien bodies make their living from the ‘Roswell Incident.’ ” The Air Force later released another statement that suggested that the so-called extraterrestrial corpses that were allegedly seen at the crash site were likely “a combination of innocently transformed memories of military accidents involving injured or killed personnel, innocently transformed memories of the recovery of andromorphic dummies in military programs like Operation High Dive conducted in the 1950s, and hoaxes perpetrated by various witnesses and UFO proponents.”1111
Despite these reports, rumors about extraterrestrials and UFOs connected to Roswell still had plenty of traction both in the US and around the world. Many people refused to accept the official version and dismissed it as a new and improved whitewash. “It doesn’t wash. I think the Air Force is truly getting desperate,” said Stanton Friedman. “None of that work (with test dummies) was done before the 1950s.”1212
In 1995, the Fox Network aired a documentary titled Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? The program featured a grainy 17-minute film that, it was claimed, depicted surgeons performing an autopsy on one of the extraterrestrials recovered from the wreckage. A British businessman, Ray Santilli, said that he had purchased the film from a former US Army photographer while on a trip to Cleveland in 1992. Many people—including scientists and movie special-effects artists—were unconvinced by the footage and labeled it a hoax. Around the same time, however, a CNN/Time poll revealed that the majority of people interviewed still believed that extraterrestrials had visited Earth but that the government was covering it up. In 2006, Santilli confessed that the footage was a reconstruction. He still claimed that he had seen real footage of the autopsy but that most frames had been destroyed and then lost, so he decided that he would recreate the footage.
However, controversy concerning the Roswell Incident did not end there. In 1999, former Deputy Sheriff Charles H. Forgus made a shocking revelation about the wreckage. According to Forgus, he had been driving from Texas to Roswell with Sheriff Jess Slaughter to pick up a prisoner on the night of the crash near Corona when they heard reports of a crashed aircraft over their radio. The two sheriffs decided to investigate. Forgus claimed that he saw bodies of at least four extraterrestrials at the crash site. He described them as being approximately 5ft (1.5m) tall with large eyes and feet not dissimilar to those of humans. He also said that they had brownish skin and that he saw no blood.1313
Forgus claimed that there were around three to four hundred soldiers in the area but he could not identify them as Air Force personnel. “When we got there, the land was covered with soldiers,” he recollected. “They were hauling a big creature.” Shortly afterward, the soldiers told Forgus and Slaughter to leave the area. Forgus said that, following this bizarre encounter, he was approached by the government and told to keep quiet. Forgus’ testimony wasn’t revealed until 2017 when it was released at the same time as the book UFOS Today: 70 Years of Lies, Disinformation, and Government Cover-up by Dr. Irena Scott. “The Great Father didn’t just make this planet . . . He made all of them. He put beings on these planets just like he put us on this one. They’re smarter than we are,” remarked Forgus. “They can get from there to here, but we can’t get from here to there.”
That same year—2017—a CIA agent suffering from kidney failure made a deathbed confession to Richard Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up, 1941–1973 in 2017. Dolan’s interview with the agent was recorded; but the agent himself, who claimed that he had previously served in the Army and also worked on a US Air Force official investigation into UFO activity, Project Blue Book, was never publicly named. The agent claimed to have seen the crashed UFO and the bodies of extraterrestrials. He also said that the UFO was kept in the top-secret Area 51 facility of the USAF base at the Nevada Test and Training Range for quite a while.
The same book by Dolan features an account by Glenn Dennis, a mortician in Roswell at the time. According to Dennis, in early July 1947, he received several phone calls from the Roswell AAF mortuary officer inquiring about embalming chemicals and their effects on internal organs. Dennis was also asked about hermetically sealed caskets and how small they came. “He also wanted to know about procedures for picking up bodies that had been left in the elements for several days, possibly mutilated by predators. I asked if I could help. He declined.”1414
The Ballard Funeral Home, where Dennis worked, also functioned as an ambulance service. Later that same evening, Dennis drove to the base infirmary a GI who had been in an accident. After dropping the soldier inside, Dennis walked around back to see a nurse that he was friendly with. She warned him that he shouldn’t be there and even told him that he was going to get himself killed. Moments later, “a big, red-headed colonel” said, “What’s that son of a bitch doing here?” The colonel then escorted Dennis off the base and told him to keep his mouth shut. The next day, Dennis spoke with the nurse again and she told him that she had seen three little bodies—two of which were badly mangled while the other was in good condition. “She also said on one gurney were two crash bags with two mutilated bodies inside. She said they had a horrible smell,” recollected Dennis. The nurse was never identified, but shortly afterward, she was transferred to England. She later died in a plane crash.1515
Despite the fact that the debris was found closest to the village of Corona, it is the city of Roswell that has become forever linked to these extraordinary events. When visitors enter Roswell, stickers or figures of little green extraterrestrials peer from windows and storefronts. Two UFO museums—the International UFO Museum and Research Center and The Roswell UFO Spacewalk opened in the town and were instant hits. “Since I got involved here, a lot of my personal pursuits have taken a back seat. This thing has taken off so fast,” said former Roswell mortician Glenn Dennis, who became vice president of the International UFO Museum and Research Center before his death, aged 90, in 2015.1616 Each year the city holds a weeklong UFO Festival that contributes millions of dollars to the local economy.
The Roswell Incident mesmerized the world and remains a cornerstone of UFO lore. Whatever may have transpired in 1947 offers genuine hope to those seeking to prove that extraterrestrials not only exist, but have visited this planet.