The heads were very much larger than the body. Glenn Dennis, Roswell mortician
What I seen, it wasn’t made in this world. George Newling, former Aircraft mechanic 509th B-29 Bomb Group
My dad came home from work. He was really excited. You’re not going to believe what we saw when we got there. But we saw a crash of one of the flying saucers. And he said, One of them was still alive. And it was walking around. And he said, There were two other bodies. But they were in body bags. Frankie Rowe, daughter of firefighter called to second crash site, interview Unexplained Mysteries
And I remember on the phone he [Brazel] told me he’d got some dead aliens out there. Frank Joyce, former radio reporter KGFL Radio
Roswell, New Mexico: location of the most famous UFO sighting of all time. In July 1947 a violent electrical storm swept over the desolate plains of south-central New Mexico. Unsolved Mysteries
The military also discovered the second crash site after an aerial search but they arrived too late to secure the area. Barney Barnett and his students had a clear and detailed look at the craft and its occupants. ibid.
A roll of film arrives in the mail. There is no name and no return address. When developed it reveals a conspiracy that reaches all the way up to the president of the United States. That’s what happened to Jaime Shandera. Unexplained Mysteries: The Majestic 12 documents
The documents were part of a 1952 briefing to President Eisenhower. They told of an alien spaceship crashing in Roswell, New Mexico. And the twelve men whose job it was to keep it a secret. Their code name was Majestic or MJ12. When Shandera received these explosive documents, he didn’t believe they were real. ibid.
Roswell, New Mexico: This sleepy town in the American south-west was once best known for its military air base. But that changed in 1947 when a local rancher reported that a spaceship had crashed on his property. Ancient Aliens: The Visitors, History 2010
A fiery object crashes into the Earth and ignites the modern UFO era. For over seven decades the army has denied what it initially reported: that it had recovered a flying disc, but could evidence of such a disc still exist? Ancient Aliens s12e25: The Relics of Roswell
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 1989 Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment about a mysterious 1947 crash of a UFO near Roswell, New Mexico. Unsolved Mysteries s5e4: Roswell, Netflix 2024
The very first network show that presented Roswell as an historic event. ibid. Don Schmitt & Kevin Randle
The late evening of July 2nd 1947 there was a severe lightning storm that came off of the Capitan Mountains in New Mexico. Ranchers described that between thunderclaps, they heard what sounded like an explosion. ibid.
The media in Roswell were threatened with the loss of their licences. ibid.
He [Jesse Marcel senior] told the truth. Marcel shared details of his experience in the TV series In Search of in an episode. ibid.
To date we have interviewed over 600 witnesses. ibid.
If it was just a weather balloon, why was there the need for the security in the first place? ibid. Kevin
Everyone agrees something fell, but what was it? ibid.
What about all the rumours about bodies? ibid. Don
They feel for example that the Pentagon has used their family. ibid. Don, re relatives of witnesses
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