Little green men in Roswell, New Mexico? Saucers flying above mountain tops at twice the speed of sound? Aliens invading our planet? Unsolved History: Roswell
June of 1947 when Farmer Mac Brazel discovered strange debris in a remote pasture: rubber strips, tapes, sticks and tin foil ... He gathered the strange debris and the following day took it to the Roswell sheriff’s office ... A local reporter shot five pictures of the evidence ... Public reaction was understandably less than calm. ibid.
Major Jesse Marcel was the original army investigator on the case in 1947. And it was Marcel who stirred it up again in 1978 claiming a government cover-up. Once he went public with his story, others began to come forward and embellish the reincarnated legend. ibid.
A US National Security Project codenamed Mogul sent high-altitude balloons aloft to spy on the Russians. These carried acoustic devices into the stratosphere to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. These were no weather balloons. ibid.
The Roswell crash happened within flying distance of White Sands – the Air Force Base where the Horten brothers’ Nazi Flying Wing was first taken. Roswell was just two weeks after Kenneth Arnold had seen the world’s first widely reported UFO. Is this what the Air Force was trying to cover up? An American-built Flying Wing prototype based on Nazi technology? ibid.
In the summer of 1947 rancher Mac Brazel came across some unusual debris in one of his fields. Brazel loaded his truck with some of the material and drove a hundred and twenty kilometres to Roswell in New Mexico. He planned to show the debris to Sheriff George Wilcox. While he was there a local radio reporter Frank Joyce called in to see if the sheriff had any good stories. The officer passed the phone to Brazel who told Joyce that he might have found the remains of a flying saucer. History’s Conspiracies: The Roswell Incident
Frank Joyce drew one conclusion. Joyce broadcast the extraordinary story to his local audience. It was possibly the biggest news scoop of all time. The release revealed few other details: it said a local couple had seen an unusual craft in the sky on the 2nd July. Major Jesse Marcel had recovered the debris. And it was not being taken to higher military headquarters. The incredible story was quickly picked up by the Associated Press and released around the world. ibid.
The mystery material was flown to Fort Worth in Texas for analysis. Four hours later a press conference was called by Base commander General Roger Ramey. He told the media that contrary to earlier reports the debris was from nothing more than a weather balloon and certainly not a flying saucer. Major Marcel who had collected the material posed with the mundane-looking debris. The public quickly accepted the military’s explanation. ibid.
In late 1978 UFO researcher Stanton Friedman was introduced to retired Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who had collected the debris from the original crash site. Marcel declared that there had been a cover up. He said that the weather balloon material shown to the press had been switched, and that what he’d found in Roswell in 1947 was not from this planet. The interview first came out in the National Enquirer. But Jesse Marcel was certainly no crank. Friedman followed up by finding more eye-witnesses. ibid.
On Independence Day 1947 the rancher who found the debris – Mac Brazel – recalled there being a violent electrical storm, and between the thunder-claps, he told friends, he might have heard some kind of explosion. The Roswell story tells that one of the alien space-ships was struck by lightning causing major damage. Debris fell on to Mac Brazel’s field before the stricken spaceship crashed into the ground fifty-five kilometres away. Once the story reached the Roswell Army Air Field two intelligence officers were dispatched to evaluate and collect the debris. Major Jesse Marcel and plain-clothes officer Captain Sheridan Cavitt filled several sacks with the material. ibid.
A now dead witness, Jim Ragsdale, professed to have been with his girlfriend when he saw the spaceship crash eighty kilometres north-west of Roswell. In an affidavit he told how the military quickly arrived and removed both the crashed alien spaceship and its dead crew. According to Ragsdale’s testimony, four extraterrestrial bodies were found in the wreckage. The aliens were said to be small with large heads and huge eyes. Frank Joyce remembers that Mac Brazell told him there were alien bodies at the first debris site. ibid.
Roswell defenders also claim that as part of the cover up the military ransacked media offices. ibid.
He [Jesse junior] describes small metal-like I-beams with hieroglyphic symbols. While Marcel junior describes metal I-beams, his father remembers them as not being like metal, it looked more like wood ... Almost all the key witnesses made reference to seeing unusual markings. Jesse Marcel described seeing alien hieroglyphs on small metal I-beams. The Marcels both think they saw alien writing. But other witnesses testified to seeing nothing more than flowered patterns. ibid.
In 1947 testing began on a secret spying program called Project Mogul. This highly classified mission was set up to listen out for any Soviet atomic tests. In fact Mogul was classified as 1A, the same as the H-bomb program. Project Mogul would use around fifty large rubber balloons which would carry listening devices called transponders into the higher atmosphere. Up here sound moved much more quickly, and a nuclear explosion could in theory be detected, even on the other side of the world. ibid.
The Mogul team began to gather the materials needed. They farmed out the making of some kite-like radar reflectors called Raywin targets to a Brooklyn toy manufacturer. ibid.
On the 4th June Test Flight Number 4 was launched in mid-afternoon. But due to cloud cover the Mogul Team soon lost it on both radar and spotter-plane as it drifted north-east towards Roswell. The free-trailing device was around 180 meters long. With up to 50 large balloons, 9 shiny Raywin targets, ballast controls and transponders, the contraption would have borne little resemblance to a weather balloon. Eventually the neoprene rubber balloons disintegrated showering the desert below. Although the mission was top secret the equipment itself was of little value, and the Mogul team deemed its recovery low priority. ibid.
The paperback foil needed to be secured to the balsa frame with both glue and adhesive tape. The toy company in Brooklyn commissioned to make the Raywin targets used what it had to hand, and that included some decorative children’s tape with flowered patterns set in a purple dye. After a few days in the desert sun, the tape would have peeled off and blown into the desert. But in the heat the purple dye impregnated the wood leaving flowered patterns on the balsa-wood frame. ibid.
They were just fragments scooted all over an area of about three-quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. So we proceeded to pick up the parts. I tried to bend this stuff. It would not bend. I even tried to burn that; it wouldn’t burn. It weighs nothing ... It was not a weather balloon. Major Jesse Marcel senior, televised interview
When [Major Marcel senior] he came back to the house he had a bunch of [Roswell] wreckage with him. He brought the wreckage into the house. Actually awakened my mother and myself out so we could view this because it was so unusual. It was about two o’clock in the morning. And spread it out so he could get some basic idea of what it looked like, what it was. We were all amazed by this debris that was there. Probably because we didn’t know what it was. It was just the unknown. This writing could be described as Egyptian-type hieroglyphics but not really. The symbols and I-beams were more of a geometric-type configuration in various designs. It had a purple-violet colour. Jesse Marcel junior, televised interview
When I walked in I thought, Why are you waking me up to look at some garbage here? He says, No, look at this carefully because this is not something you’ll ever see again. And he said, I think this is parts of what they call flying saucers. Jesse Marcel junior
A metal beam like a small miniaturised I-beam and it had these purplish-violent symbols on the inside edge of it. Jesse Marcel junior
The skies over New Mexico were full of unidentified flying objects during the last week of June 1947. Over two hundred sightings were reported that week throughout the United States. The Roswell Conspiracy
Suddenly Dan [Wilmot] noticed a big glowing object coming from a south-easterly direction at a very high speed. He called it to the attention of his wife saying, Look, darling, what is that? Wilmot described the object as oval-shaped like two saucers put together. ibid.
William M Woody of Roswell declared in a sworn affidavit that on that hot night of July 3rd 1947 both he and his father saw a large very bright object in the south-western sky moving rapidly northward. The object had the intensity of a blowtorch. ibid.
On July 4th three Franciscan nuns who served as nurses at St Mary’s hospital noted in their log-book that on the night of July 4th between 11:15 and 11:30 they saw a flying object on fire that came down in a curve north of Roswell. ibid.
Rancher Mac Brazel and his neighbours heard a loud explosion around 11:30 p.m. At the same time Jim Ragsdale and his girlfriend Trudy were camping in the desert some forty miles north-west of Roswell. Suddenly they observed a bright flash and what appeared to be a bright light source falling from the sky and moving toward the south-east. ibid.
Then there it was: a downed craft of unknown origin. They radioed Roswell Army Air Field of their find; they asked for a chemical team to be dispatched to the site to determine the safety of approaching the wreckage. The chemical crew arrived and examined the craft and gave clearance for the recovery to begin. Five alien bodies were discovered. One of the bodies was thrown free of the craft. One was found half in half out of the craft. And the other three were still inside. They were all dead. ibid.
Early on the morning of July 5th rancher Mac Brazel accompanied by Dee Proctor, the son of a neighbour, rode out to see the damage the storm from the previous night had done. The sight that met their eyes stunned them. There before them about five miles from the ranch-house was a debris-field some two hundred yards wide and over three-quarters of a mile long. Fragments of metallic parts lay everywhere. Something must have crashed there. A plane? Must have exploded. A weather balloon? Impossible. Brazel had already found over a dozen weather and test balloons on his land. It was clear to him this was something different. ibid.