Roswell Incident Essay, Research Paper
Roswell Incident
Almost fifty years ago, an incident occurred in the southwestern desert of
the United States that could have significant implications for all mankind. The
incident was announced by the U.S. military, and denied by the U.S. military,
and has remained covered-up in the government for the past fifty and hopefully
not another fifty years. It is not a hoax or false claim, but rather a known
event that is thoroughly documented. It is the objective here is to summarize
the details of the events and interviews of that event, affirm the right of all
people throughout the world to know the truth about what occurred, and propose
a course of action that will allow the truth to emerge.
It was July 1947, the day started out just like any other day. People
of Roswell were going off to work, going downtown shopping, and the little ones
were at playgrounds with their mothers. Day in and day out townspeople would
drive by the military without giving it much thought. However, this day, in
Roswell, New Mexico would change the course of history, and how the public
thinks of themselves, God and the outer limits of space!
Roswell New Mexico was in the middle of the desert. Here was a vast
open land where one could see miles around. On this afternoon something very
strange was about to happen. In the clear skies of Roswell a very large craft
ended its flight. Was this a weather balloon or an Unidentified Flying Object?
There were many eye-witness reports of alien creatures lying next to
their destroyed crafts. One or two may have survived for a few days. The
military quickly cornered off this area, removing the particles and the bodies.
A local funeral director got a call for numerous child size coffins. He was to
deliver them to the rear of the military base. Major Marcel was an officer on
the scene who took part of the ship home. He spoke to the press about the
crash, but soon told never to discuss it again. What he saw was a weather
balloon. The press received a news release saying that a few officers had
jumped to conclusions.
To this day the government denies the fact that spaceships exists. Is
this a massive cover up or science fiction? My I-Search will delve into these
questions. I will try to obtain the truth and allow my classmates to decide if
we are being visited from other planets or not?
I chose this topic because of my interest in space and whether life
exists on other planets. Is Their technology is far more superior to ours? Why
can’t we work together to solve the mysteries of the planets? I believe these
aliens do exist and I will try to prove it!
This will affect my life, because I’ve always wanted to know if anything
or anyone else exists in the universe. What if the government uncovered the
truth? Would there be total chaos or would we want to meet other space beings?
I hope to find out why the government is continuing to cover up the
Roswell incident. Why haven’t the Presidents told us the truth since 1947? I
will write to Washington and demand an answer.
Happenings in 1947
On July 2, 1947, during the evening, a flying saucer crashed to the
ground at the Foster Ranch near, Corona, New Mexico. The crash occurred during
a severe thunderstorm. ( The military base nearest to the crash site is in
Roswell, New Mexico.) Roswell is more closely associated with this event than
Corona, even though Corona is closer to the crash site.
On July 3, 1947, William ?Mac? Brazel and his 7 year-old neighbor Dee
Proctor found the remains of the crashed flying saucer. Brazel was foreman of
the Foster Ranch. The pieces were spread out over a large area, more than half
a mile long. When Brazel drove Dee back home, he showed a piece of the
wreckage to Dee’s parents, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, they all agreed the piece
was unlike anything they had ever seen.
On July 6, 1947, Brazel showed pieces of the wreckage to Chaves County
Sheriff George Wilcox. He called Roswell Army Air Field (AAF) and talked to
Major Marcel, the intelligence officer. Marcel drove to the sheriff’s office
and inspected the wreckage. Marcel reported to his commanding officer, Colonel
William ?Butch? Blanchard. Butch ordered Marcel to get someone from the
Counter Intelligence Corps, proceed to the ranch with Brazel, and to collect as
much of the wreckage as they could load into their two vehicles.
Soon after this, military police arrived at the sheriff’s office,
collected the wreckage at Blanchard’s office. The wreckage was then flown to
Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, and then to Washington.
Meanwhile, Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter Intelligence Corps
drove to the ranch with Mac Brazel. They arrived late in the evening. They
spent the night in sleeping bags in a small out-building on the ranch. The
next morning proceeded to the crash site.
On July, 7, 1947, Marcel and Cavitt collected wreckage from the crash
site. After filling Cavitt’s vehicle with wreckage Marcel told Cavitt to go on
ahead, that Marcel would collect more wreckage, and they would meet later back
at Roswell AAF. Marcel filled his vehicle with wreckage. On the way back to
the air field, Marcel stopped home to show his wife and son the strange
materials he had found.
Soon after, at about 4:00 p.m., Lyndia Sleppy at Roswell; radio station
KSWS began transmitting a story on the teletype machine regarding a crashed
flying saucer out on the Foster Ranch. Transmission was interrupted,
presumably by the FBI.
The next day, July, 8, 1947, in the morning, Marcel and Cavitt arrived
back at Roswell AAF with two carloads of wreckage. Marcel accompanied this
wreckage, or most of it, on a flight to Fort Worth AAF.
Later that day, around noon, Colonel Blanchard at Roswell AAF ordered
Second Lieutenant Walter Haut to issue a press release telling the country that
the Army had found the remains of a crashed flying saucer. Haut was the public
information officer for the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell AAF. Haut delivered
the press release to Frank Joyce at radio station KGFL. Joyce waited long
enough for Haut to return to base, then called Haut there to confirm the story.
Joyce then sent the story on the Western Union wire to the United Press bureau.
July 8, 1947, in the afternoon, General Clemence McMullen spoke by
telephone from Washington with Colonel DuBose in Fort Worth. DuBose was Chief-
of-staff to Eighth Air Force Commander General Roger Ramey. McMullen ordered
DuBose to tell Ramey to squash the flying saucer story by creating a cover story,
and to send some of the crash material immediately to Washington.
On July 8, 1947, in the afternoon, General Roger Ramey held a press
conference at the Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth. He announced
that what had crashed at Corona was a weather balloon, not a flying saucer. To
make this story convincing, he showed the press the remains of a damaged
weather balloon that he claimed was the actual wreckage from the crash site. (
The obliging press did not ask why the Army hurriedly transported weather
balloon wreckage to Fort Worth, Texas, from the remote area of New
Mexico.[Jaworski interview])
The only newspapers that carried the initial flying saucer version of
the story were evening papers from the Midwest to the West, including the
Chicago Daily News , The Los Angeles Herald Express, the San Francisco
Examiner, and the Roswell Daily Record. The New York Times, the Washington Post,
and the Chicago Tribune were morning papers and so carried only the cover-up
story the next morning.
At some point, an ample amount of soldiers were sent to the debris field
on the Foster Ranch, including a lot of MPs whose job was to limit access to
the field. A wide search was launched well beyond the limits of the debris
field. Within a day or two, a few miles from the debris field, the main body
of the flying saucer was found, and a mile or two from that several bodies of
small humanoids were found.
The military took Mac Brazel into custody for about a week, during which
time he was seen on the streets of Roswell with a military escort. His
behavior aroused the curiosity of friends when he passed them without any sign
of recognition. Following this period of detention, Brazel discarded his
initial story [Internet UFO.COM].
The Civilians
Loetta Proctor (Interview held in 1990)
Loretta Proctor, Mac Brazel’s nearest neighbor, was one of the first people
to see pieces of the wreckage Brazel had found. She was interviewed in 1990.
?Mac had this piece of material that he picked up. He wanted to show it
to us and wanted us to go down and see the rest of the debris or whatever, but
we didn’t on account of the transportation and everything wasn’t too good. He
didn’t get anybody to come out who was interested in it. The piece he brought
looked like a kind of tan, lightbrown plastic. It was very lightweight, like
balsa wood. It wasn’t a large piece, maybe about four inches long, maybe just
a little longer than a pencil.
We cut on it with a knife and would hold a match on it and it wouldn’t
burn. We knew it wasn’t wood. It was smooth like plastic, it didn’t have a
real sharp corners, kind of like a dowel stick. Kind of dark tan. It didn’t
have any grain, just smooth. I hadn’t seen anything like it before in my life.?
Loretta said.
The following statement by Loretta Procyor suggests that Mac Brazel was
bribed to keep quiet. [UFO.COM]
“I think within that year, he had moved off the ranch and moved to
Alamagordo or to Tularosa and he put something in a locker there. That was
before people had home freezers, and it was a large refrigerator building. You
would buy beef and cut it up and put it into those lockers and you had a key to
it and you could get your beef out when you wanted it. I think it would have
been pretty expensive, and kind of wonder how he could pay on rancher’s wages.?
Marian Strickland (Interview held in 1990)
Marian Strickland was a neighbor of Mac Brazel.
?Mac made it plain he was not supposed to tell that there was any
excitement about the material he found on the ranch. He was a man who had
integrity. He definitely felt insulted and mis-used, disrespected. He was
worse than annoyed. He was definitely under some stress, and felt that he had
been kicked around. He was threatened that if he opened his mouth he may get
thrown into the back side of the jail. He gave that impression, definitely,?
Strickland insisted.
Bessie Brazel Schreiber
Bessie Brazel Schreiber is Mac Brazel’s daughter. This is her description of the
crash site.
“The material resembled a sort of aluminum-like foil. Some of these pieces
had sort of tape stuck to them. She also said, ?it was unable to be peeled off
or removed at all.? Some of the pieces had something like lettering and numbers
on them, but, were unable to be made out. ?The figures were written out like
you would write numbers in columns, but they didn’t look like the numbers we
use at all.? she exclaimed. Also she said there was something that looked like
heavy waxed paper [Randle 31].
William Brazel Jr.
William Brazel Jr. is Mac Brazels son. Here is his description of the wreckage
from the crash site.
“One of the pieces looked like something on the order of tinfoil, except
that it would not tear… You could wrinkle it and lay it back down and it
immediately resumed its original shape.. quite pliable, but you couldn’t crease
or bend it like ordinary metal. Almost like a plastic, but definitely metallic.
His dad once said that the Army had once told him it was not anything made by
us.”
“There was also some threadlike material. It looked like silk, but was not
silk, a very strong material without strands or fibers like silk would have.
This was more like a wire, all one piece or substance.
There were also some wooden-like particles like balsa wood in weight,
but a bit darker in color and much harder… It was pliable but would not break.
Weighed nothing, but you could not scratch it with your fingernail. All he
had was a few small bits. There was no writing or markings on the pieces he had,
but his dad did say one time that there were what he called ?figures? on some
of the pieces he found. He often referred to the petroglyphs the ancient
Indians drew on the rocks around here as ?figures?, too, and I think that’s
what he meant to compare them with.
His dad found this thing and he told him a little bit about it, but not
too much, because the Air Force asked him to take an oath that he would not
tell anybody in detail about it. He went to his grave and he never told
anybody.?
At the time of the crash, William Brazel Jr. had been living and working
in Albuquerque, but returned when his father was taken into custody to run the
ranch.
Glenn Dennis
Glenn Dennis was a mortician in Roswell in 1947. His boss provided
mortuary services for Roswell Army Air Field. Dennis drove a combination
hearse and ambulance for both civilian and military assignments. On July 9 or
10, 1947, Dennis got several phone calls from Roswell AAF mortuary officer, who
was more of an administrator than a mortuary officer. The officer wanted to
know about hermticall sealed caskets (?What was the smallest one they could get?
[Randle 11] ), and about chemical solutions. Dennis was interviewed in August
1989 by Stanton Friedman.
“This is what was so interesting. See, this is why I feel like there was
really something involved in this, because they didn’t want to do anything that
was going to make an imbalance. They kept saying, “OK, what’s this going to do
the blood system, what’s this going to do to the tissue [Alien.Com]?” Then
when they informed me that these bodies had laid out in the middle of July, in
the middle of the prairie, I mean that body’s going to be as dark as your blue
blazer, and it’s going to be in bad shape. He was the one who suggested dry
ice. He’d done that a time or two before.”
He talked to them four or five times in the afternoon. They would keep
calling back and asking him different questions involving the body. What they
were really after was how to move those bodies. They didn’t give me any
indication they even had the bodies, or where they were. All I knew was one of
the bodies was in pretty good shape.
When he went to the AAF there were two MPs standing right there and
started to go in. He would have gotten as far as he did if he didn’t park in
the handicap parking space. He saw all the wreckage. He didn’t know what it
was, but he knew there was something going on. ?It looked like stainless steel
when it is put on heat,? he said.
[UFO Technology ?Sightings?]
When he got inside, he noticed there was quite a bit of activity. When
he went back into the lounge, there was high ranking officers that he didn’t
recognize. He wanted to know ?who the heck I was? and how the heck I got in??
Any way he got past that and met a nurse. She was involved in this thing, she
was on duty. She told him ?How the heck did you get in here?? He said ?I just
walked in.? ?My god you’re going to get, yourself killed.? she said ?They
didn’t stop me? he said. He was going to the Coke machine to get a Coke, and
this big red-headed colonel said ?What’s this son of a gun doing here?? [Randle
72-73]
He hollered at the MPs and they came running over and grabbed him by the
arms and carried him clear outside. And they told him to get my butt out of
there. (They followed him back to the funeral home.)
About three hours later they called me and said, ?if you open your mouth
you’ll be so far back in the jug they’ll have to shoot pinto beans into you with
a bean shooter.? He just laughed and said, ?Go to heck.?
The nurse told Dennis the next day that there were three little bodies,
two of them were dead, and the third was in pretty good condition.
The Police
Barbara Dugger- is the grand daughter of George and Inez Wilcox. George was the
sheriff who Mac Brazel contacted after discovering the crashed flying saucer.
Barbara’s grandmother said, ?Don’t tell anybody. When the incident
happened, the military came to the jailhouse and told George and I that if we
ever told anything about the incident, not only would we be killed, but our
entire family would be killed [Randle 72].?
They called her grandfather and someone came to the house and told him
about the incident. He went out to the site and he saw a large burned area
with lots of debris and three small bodies of space beings. Their heads were
large and wore silk like suits. One of the little space beings were still alive.
After the death threat she never talked about the incident to anybody ever.
The Press
Frank Joyce- worked at the radio station KGFL. He got a phone call from Mac
Brazel, who reported the wreckage on his ranch.
Mac called Joyce and asked him, ?What to do about it? He recommended
that he go to the Roswell Air Base [Randle 55].
The next thing he found out was that PIO, Walter Haut, came into the
station some time after he got the call. He handed him a news release printed
on onionskin stationary and left immediately. He called him back at the base
and said, ?I suggest that you not release this type of story that says you have
a flying disk or flying saucer.? He said, “No it’s OK.”
He sent the release to the Western Union wire to the United press
bureau. After he returned to the station, there was a flash on the wire with
the story: ?The U.S. Army Air Corps says it has a flying disk.? They typed a
paragraph or two, and then other people got the wire and asked for more
information. Then the phones started going berserk, He referred them to the
airfield
The wire just stopped and just hummed. Then a phone call came in for him
and \ the caller identified himself as an officer at the Pentagon, this man said
some very bad things about what would happen to him. He was really pretty
nasty. Finally, Frank got through to him. Frank said, ?You’re talking about a
release from the U.S. Army Air Corps [UFO.Com].? Bang, the phone went dead,
and the man from the Pentagon was gone.
The next significant thing that happened in the evening was that he got
a call from Mac Brazel. He said, ?we haven’t got the story right.? Frank
invited him down to the radio station. Mac arrived not long after sunset. He
was not alone, but he had a feeling that they were being watched. He said
something about a weather balloon. Frank said ?Look, this is completely
different than what you told me on the phone the other day about little green
men,? and that’s when Mac said ?No, they weren’t green.? Frank had a feeling
that Mac was under a lot of pressure. Mac Brazel said, ?Our lives will never be
the same again. [Sightings]?
Lyndia Sleppy- was a teletype operator at Roswell radio station KSWS. The event
about to be described took place around 4:OO p.m. on July 7, 1947.
?If they had anything newsworthy, we would put it on the teletype
machine, to Mutual Broadcasting and ABC.? She was the one who did the
teletyping.
?Mr. Tucker (the station owner) called for Lyndia and said ?I have a
huge story for you, I will send it via teletype.? But right after he started
sending, it got disconnected and intercepted. The message read, ?This is the
FBI, you will cease transmitting.? She knew whatever it was, it was a huge
story. She was upset and didn’t get all the way through transmission.
The Military
Jesse Marcel- Major Jesse Marcel was one of the first two military people to
visit the Corona crash site. The other was Sheridan Cavitt, who to this day
has refused to even acknowledge that he was there on the ranch with Marcel.
Jesse Marcel died in 1982.
When they arrived at the crash site, it was amazing to see the vast
amount of area it covered. It was nothing that hit the ground or exploded on
the ground. It’s something that hit that must have exploded above ground,
traveling above at a high rate of speed, they didn’t know. But it scattered
over an area of about three quarters of a mile long, he said and several
hundred feet wide. So he proceeded to pick up fragments that they could fit in
their Jeep Carry-All. It was quite obvious to him, familiar with air activities,
that it was not a weather balloon, nor was it a missile or an airplane. It was
something he had never seen before. They loaded the Jeep Carry-All but he
wasn’t satisfied. He told Cavitt, ?You drive this vehicle back to the base and
I’ll go back out there to pick up as much as could put in the car,? which he
did. But he only picked up a small portion.
One thing that impressed him about the debris was that it looked like
parchment. A lot of it had a lot of little members with symbols that they had
to call hieroglyphics because he could not interpret them, they could not be
read, they were just symbols, something that meant something but they were all
not the same. The segments that this were painted on had symbols that were
pink and purple. Actually the color was lavender. These little segments could
not be broken, and could not be burned. He even tried to burn it, and it
wouldn’t burn.
But something that is more astounding is that a piece of metal they
brought back was so thin, just like tinfoil in a cigarette paper. He didn’t
pay too much attention to that at first, until one of the GIs came to me and
said, ?You know the metal that was in there? I tried to bend that stuff, it
wouldn’t bend. I even tried it with a sledge hammer. You can’t even make a
dent on it.? All of the material that they found they weighed almost nothing.
This particular piece of metal was about two feet long and perhaps two
feet wide. That stuff weighed nothing, so thin it wasn’t any thicker than
tinfoil from the bottom of a cigarette box. So Jesse Marcel tried to hit it
with a 16-pound sledgehammer, and still there was not any dent on it. He knew
much about the U.S. military materials that were used in weather balloons and
this stuff was not even close to it. Jesse Marcel he died and still had no
idea of what it was. So that’s how it stands!
Jesse Marcel Jr.- is Major Jesse Marcel’s son. major Marcel after he collected
the debris he came back to his house to show his 11 year old son and his wife
what he had found. Jesse Marcel Jr. is now a doctor and a reserve helicopter
pilot who served in Vietnam.
?The crash and remnants of the device that I happened to see have left
an imprint on my memory that can never be forgotten.? Jesse Marcel Jr. stated.
When his dad came back to the house he had a bunch of wreckage with him
at the time, and brought the wreckage into the house. Actually wakened my
mother and myself out so they could view this, because it was so unusual. This
was about two o’clock in the morning as he recalled, and he spread it out so we
could get some basic idea what it looked like.
They were all amazed by this debris that was there, primarily because we
didn’t know what it was, you know, it was the unknown. Years after this
incident we would talk privately among themselves about what the possibilities
of this, what this thing was. And they feel that it was not of earthly origin.
Walter Haut- was the public information officer at Roswell AAF in 1947.
Colonial Blanchard ordered Haut to issue a press release to tell the country
what the Army had found a flying saucer. Here is the text of Haut’s press
release [UFO.Com].
[?The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday
when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth 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 Major Jesse
Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group intelligence Office.?]
F.B.- was an Army Air Force photographer stationed at Anacostia Navel Air
Station in Washington DC when he and fellow photographer A.K. were flown abroad
a B-25 bomber to Roswell Air Field sometime during the second week of July 1947.
One morning his superior said, ?Pack you bags and we’ll have the cameras
there, ready for you.? They didn’t know where they were going.
After a few hours flight they got to Roswell and got in a staff car with
some gear they had brought along in the trucks, and they headed out. After
about a hour and a half we got there and there were a lot of people out there.
They said ?Set you cameras up to take a picture fifteen feet away.? They were
telling them what to do. Shoot this shoot that.
They told them to go into the tent to take some more pictures. What they
saw were alien bodies. All he remembered was that they had a dark complexion
and that they were thin and had big heads. He took about thirty pictures of
the aliens and he said, ?It smelled funny in the tent [Alien.com]?
A.K. came back in a truck that was loaded with debris. On the way back
to Washington DC the Lieutenant Commander made it clear to them that what they
had seen in Roswell, New Mexico, they hadn’t seen.
Earthly Explanations
Weather Balloon
* If what had crashed was a weather balloon, there would have been no need of
secrecy. According to the testimony, military officers admonished subordinates
and civilians not talk about what they saw.
* If what crashed was weather balloon, Major Marcel would have recognized the
material Mac Brazel showed him as weather balloon material, and would hove
journeyed far out on a remote sheep ranch with an officer from Counter
Intelligence Corps to examine the crash site.
* The wreckage described by Marcel and others was too voluminous, and spread
out over too large of an area, to have been the wreckage of a weather balloon.
* There is no reason the Army would transport the wreckage of a weather balloon
from the remote desert outside Cornona first to Roswell and then to Fort worth.
* Most of the witnesses who saw or handled the wreckage would have recognized
the remains of a crashed weather balloon.
Secret Rocket or Airplane
* If what crashed was any kind of secret military apparatus, one would expect
at least some of the pieces to have recognizable letters or numbers on the them.
Many of the witnesses say that some of the wreckage bore a very strange kind of
writing, but not one witness has said that any of the wreckage bore any
recognizable symbols.
* If what crashed was any kind of secret military apparatus, the Army would
have said simply, ?This is secret, and no more questions will be answered,
period.? The Army would not have concocted the flying saucer and weather
balloon stories. In 1947, Americans were less skeptical about the motives of
their government, and the people of New Mexico, including journalists and other
civilians, were dependent for their livelihood on secret military projects.
* If what crashed was any kind of secret military apparatus, the Army would not
have waited for a rancher to inform them of the crash before sending military
personnel to examine the wreckage, five days after the crash.
* Rockets and airplanes that were secret in 1947 are not secret now. If what
crashed was a secret rocket or airplane, it would have been revealed as such
years ago. (Incredibly, the Army is sticking to its weather balloon story, even
though nobody believes it anymore.)
* By July 1994, rockets launched from White Sands were fitted with self-
destruct mechanisms so that an errant rocket could be destroyed before leaving
the test range. The Corona crash site is about 75 miles from the nearest border
of the test range.
* They did not fly secret airplanes in New Mexico in 1947. There was plenty
of room for that in California, where all the secret airplane projects were
carried on.
* There is no reason the Army would transport the wreckage of a crashed
rocket or airplane to Fort Worth AAF, then to Wright AAF in Ohio. The wreckage
of a secret rocket would stay in New Mexico, and the wreckage of a secret
airplane would be sent back to California, if anywhere.
* Most of the witnesses who saw or handled the wreckage would have recognized
the remains of a crashed rocket or airplane.
MY CONCLUSION OF THE ROSWELL INCIDENT
As I embarked on this project I was not sure what I would find. I have
always had an interest in U.F.O’S sin