UFO Incident - Roswell, New Mexico

The Most Famous UFO Incident in History: Roswell, New Mexico

The alleged UFO crash of an alien aircraft near Roswell, New Mexico is the most famous UFO incident in history.[1]  For this reason only, a little bit of in-depth information needs to be provided on this issue.  Here’s a brief history: On June 14, 1947, after a night of intense thunderstorms,[2] William Brazel saw some strange debris while working on a ranch where he was the foreman.  Brazel’s recollections of what he saw on June 14, 1947, were printed a few weeks later.  They were printed in the Roswell Daily Record, after the paper interviewed Brazel.[3]

Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947: “Brazel related that on June 14 he and his 8-year old son, Vernon, were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.  At the time, Brazel was in a hurry… and he did not pay much attention to it.  But he did remark about what he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon, and a daughter (Bessie, age 14) went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris… When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made 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.  There was no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil.  There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts.  Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction.  No strings or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.”[4]

The day after Brazel discovered the debris, he heard reports of “flying discs.”  He wondered if that was what he had found.  Brazel didn’t even report the event until many days later, after he was able to go into town.[5]  He drove into the town of Roswell to buy a new pickup truck and brought pieces of the debris.  Brazel spoke to the local sheriff about the strange debris.  

The Wyoming Eagle of July 9, 1947, would relate what Brazel said to the sheriff about the debris: “… (Brazel) told the sheriff he didn’t know what the disc was, but that at first it appeared to be a weather meter… The sheriff quoted (Brazel) as saying the object ‘seemed more or less like tinfoil.’  The rancher described the disc as about as large as the safe in the sheriff’s office.  The safe is about three and one-half by four feet.”

After hearing Brazel’s story, the sheriff’s office notified the local Air Force Base.  After being notified, Colonel William Blanchard ordered Captain Sheridan Cavitt and Major Jesse Marcel to view the wreckage.   

Also, at the time of William Brazel’s July 1947 interview with the Roswell Daily Record, the paper reported the following: “… Maj. Jesse Marcel and a man in plain clothes [Sheridan Cavitt] accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the ‘disk’ and went to his [Brazel’s] home to try to reconstruct it.  According to Brazel, they simply could not reconstruct it at all.  They tried to make a kite out of it, but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.  Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell and that was the last he [William Brazel] heard of it until the story broke that he had found a flying disk.”[6]

After viewing the wreckage, Cavitt instantly thought it came from a weather balloon.  In fact, as recently as May 24, 1994, Sheridan Cavitt reaffirmed that the wreckage was from a balloon.  In his official statement, he declared: “I thought at the time and think so now, that this debris was from a crashed balloon… My bottom line is that this whole incident was no big deal and it certainly did not involve anything extraterrestrial.”[7]

But Jesse Marcel had ideas that the remains might be extraterrestrial.  Marcel would later wake his son and wife up to tell them about flying saucers.  The debris was then sent to General Ramey at the regional Army Air Force Command in Fort Worth, Texas for further analysis.

On July 8, 1947, the public information office at the Air Force made an announcement that they recovered a flying disc.  Several newspapers immediately had headlines such as, “Army Reveals It Has Flying Disc Found On Ranch in New Mexico” and “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.”  Shortly after this announcement, however, a press conference was held which included Brigadier General Roger Ramey and Major Marcel.  The General announced the excitement was over nothing more than a weather balloon, pieces of which were shown for the public to see.

Warrant Officer Irving Newton also examined the wreckage that day and identified the object as being a weather balloon and its kite.[8]  In a July 21, 1994 affidavit, Irving Newton reconfirmed his position on what happened.  He stated: “… I walked into the General’s office where this supposed flying saucer was laying all over the floor.  As soon as I saw it, I giggled and asked if that was the flying saucer.  I was told it was… the material I saw in General Ramey’s office was the remains of a balloon and a Rawin target.”[9]

In the 1990s, Newton told investigators: “I remember Major Marcel chased me all around that room… He also kept saying things like, ‘Look how tough that metal is.  Look at the strange markings on it.’  While examining the debris, Marcel was picking up pieces of the radar target sticks and trying to convince me that some notations on the sticks were alien writings.  But I was adamant that it was a weather balloon with a RAWIN [radar-wind] target.  I think he was embarrassed as crazy, and he would like to do anything to make that turn into a flying saucer.”[10] 

The particular radar targets which were used on the Air Force weather balloons were new, and not in the general use in the U.S. at the time.  Also, “Major Marcel was never trained in the identification of weather balloons, especially those with radar reflectors…”[xi]

In addition to all of this, Marcel was even quoted in 1947, at the time of the discovery of the Roswell debris, saying: “… we spent a couple of hours Monday afternoon looking for any more parts of the weather device.  We found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber.”[12]  The July 9^th 1947 Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper quoted Marcel as saying the debris consisted of “tinfoil and broken wooden beams of the kite and the torn synthetic remains of the balloon…”[13]  His own words therefore proved that it was a weather balloon.

In the July 9, 1947 edition of the Carlsbad, New Mexico newspaper, Daily Current-Argus, William Brazel was quoted as saying he “was amazed at the fuss made over his discovery.”[14]

The Roswell incident was quickly forgotten and almost entirely ignored even by UFO researchers for more than 30 years.  But in 1978 things changed when ET believer Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel.  If this interview had not occurred, the public probably wouldn’t have heard again about the Roswell incident.  Jesse Marcel now claimed      (31 years later) that the balloon material was substituted for alien flying saucer wreckage during the famous 1947 press conference.  But when Marcel was asked when the recovery of the crashed alien aircraft occurred, he couldn’t even remember the month or even the year the event happened!  Marcel’s answer was only “in the late forties.”[15] So Marcel was claiming to have come across the greatest discovery in human history (the discovery of an alien craft) and he didn’t even remember or bother to write down the year it happened!

The National Enquirer publicized its own interview with Marcel. This gave worldwide attention to the Roswell event.  But then Marcel seemed to contradict his new story, that the debris was from a crashed alien aircraft but had been replaced by balloon material in the press conference.  This contradiction happened when he admitted that the material he appeared with in the 1947 press conference was indeed part of the debris he recovered from the original “alien crash site.” UFO skeptics and UFO advocates both agree that this debris from the 1947 photos and press conference is debris from a balloon device![xvi]  Major Marcel’s admission: “They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less interesting metallic debris… The stuff in that one photo was [sic] pieces of the actual stuff we found.  It was not a staged photo.”[17] 

The Lies and Exaggerations of Major Jesse Marcel

Jesse Marcel had a history of exaggeration and embellishment in order to make himself famous.  Investigators checked into claims which Marcel made about himself.  They independently obtained Jesse Marcel’s nearly 200-page long military service file.[18]  Major Jesse Marcel told book authors that he was a pilot with over 3,000 hours of piloting experience.  He told them that he shot down five enemy planes during World War II.  These statements were not true.  The FAA, which possesses complete records going back to 1928, has no record of a pilot named Jesse Marcel.[19]  Marcel claimed that he had a bachelor’s degree in physics from George Washington University (GWU).  GWU doesn’t have any records of Marcel ever attending GWU, or with a degree in physics.[20]  Marcel also claimed to have attended LSU, yet LSU could find no record of Marcel.[21]  Marcel also claimed:  “I wrote the very report President Truman read on air declaring that Russia had exploded an atomic device.”  Harry Truman never read any report on radio concerning this.[22]  These are a few of the lies and exaggerations told    by Major Jesse Marcel from 1979 until his death.[23]  Marcel’s Air Force efficiency report (performance review) from July 1, 1947, to April 30, 1948, also noted Marcel as having “an inclination to magnify problems he is confronted with.”[24] 

Frank Kaufmann, who died in 2001, was a former government intelligence agent.  Kaufmann has been one of the most frequently quoted “authorities” on the Roswell event.  In a book that was considered by many to be the definitive version of the “Roswell crash,” Kaufmann was considered the lynch-pin witness to the veracity of the story[25] that an alien saucer crashed near Roswell.  Kaufmann claimed that he was part of a secret military team called “The Unholy 13”[26] which recovered the UFO near Roswell in 1947.  However, a major problem with the story is that Kaufmann was recently discovered to have been discharged from the military in 1945, two years before the incident took place.[27]  He claims he saw a crashed flying disc and aliens near Roswell.  He  even claimed: “I’m sure I saw those aliens.”  He also described the  aliens as “good looking people.”[28]  After Frank’s death in 2001, his widow allowed researchers access to his private papers, and researchers discovered that Frank was guilty of lies and forgeries.[29] 

In a 1989 Unsolved Mysteries show on Roswell, a new group of “witnesses” came forward with strange tales of alien sightings.  One magazine commented on this new group: “No one in this second group has told a plausible or consistent story.  Jim Ragsdale, for one, said he spotted four alien bodies near a spaceship.  Later he asserted that he    saw nine alien bodies, from which he removed gold helmets, and that    he buried the aliens in the sand.”[30] Concerning what he “saw,” Jim Ragsdale also said: “I’m sure that [there] were bodies, either bodies or dummies.”[31]  Later on, Ragsdale changed his story. 

Another “key witness” is Gerald Anderson. He made his first claims about what he saw in interviews done in the 1990s - 43 years after the event he claimed to witness.  He claimed that, when he was about 5 years old, his brother, father, and cousin (all of whom were dead at the time of his interview) came across a spaceship and four aliens.  It’s a fact that five year olds cannot remember an event in extreme detail[32] - especially 43 years after the event.  Gerald Anderson has also recently been proven to be a liar and a forger of documents.[33]  Also, the total number of aliens that were seen by the “witnesses” of the Roswell event has been different.  Further, many of the witnesses that have come forward have declared, as fact, that the material from the crashed saucer, which they handled, was “extraterrestrial.”  Yet none of them ever decided to keep any of this alien material for a souvenir or for any other reason.[34]

Bessie Brazel was a key witness to what actually crashed near Roswell. She was with her father and her mother when they picked up the debris the first time.  On September 22, 1993, Bessie gave a sworn personal affidavit which described the material which was found at the Foster ranch.  She stated: “The debris looked like large pieces of a balloon which had burst… Most of it was kind of a double-sided material, foil-like on one side and rubber-like on the other… Sticks, like kite sticks, were attached to some of the pieces…”[35]  

In a letter on Jan 10, 1994, Bessie described, once again, what she remembered about the original crashed debris: “The debris looked like pieces of a large balloon which had burst.  The pieces were small, the largest I remember measuring about the same as the diameter of a basketball.  Most of it was a kind of double-sided material, foil-like      on one side and rubber-like on the other… Sticks, like kite sticks, were attached to some of the pieces with a whitish tape.  The tape was about two or three inches wide… We spent several hours collecting the debris and putting it into sacks.  I believe we filled about three sacks… We speculated a bit about what the material could be.  I remember dad (William Brazel) saying ‘Oh, it’s just a bunch of garbage.”’[36]

The Air Force conducted its own investigation of the Roswell incident.  In two investigative reports, which were completed in the 1990s, the   Air Force concluded that the strange debris found near Roswell was the remains of a top secret military program called Project Mogul.  Project Mogul was a program which tracked, with radar equipment on high-altitude balloons, the United States’ ability to detect Soviet nuclear tests and ballistic missiles.[37]  The radar equipment on the Mogul balloons would detect sound waves generated by Soviet nuclear detonations.  In 1947 the U.S. was in the opening stages of a cold war with the Soviet Union.  This resulted in many secret military programs geared toward gaining intelligence on the Soviets, especially concerning their nuclear programs.  In the 1940s, discovering whether the Soviets were testing nuclear devices was considered to be of the highest national priority.[38] 

Project Mogul was being conducted in New Mexico.  The Mogul Air Force balloons were sent into the air from Alamogordo, New Mexico.  Several of the balloons got lost in June and July of 1947, the same time as the Roswell incident.  At the same time the balloons disappeared, reports and press coverage of UFOs increased significantly.  853 UFO reports were tallied in the area during June and July of 1947.  Many, including the Air Force at that time, speculated that many sightings of UFOs at this time were simply misidentified weather balloons.[39] 

Professor Charles Moore headed the Project Mogul team which operated at the Alamogordo New Mexico Army Air Field during June and July 1947.  He believes that the debris found by Brazel came from a train of balloons which were carrying several radar targets.  These balloons were launched on June 4, 1947 to test the Project Mogul tracking radar.  Moore said that before contact was lost, the June 4 launch was tracked to within 17 miles of where William Brazel discovered the debris.  When the balloons were discovered by Brazel’s family in early July, it would have been exposed to the sunlight for almost a month.  This would have resulted in the deterioration of the neoprene (rubber-like) material.  When Moore examined the balloon remnants, which were visible in the photographs taken, he informed a Roswell researcher that the appearance was consistent with the material being exposed to the sunlight for around a month.[40]

A significant amount of UFO researchers now do not believe that any alien aircraft crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.  So why do people make up stories that they have seen aliens or crashed UFOs?  They do it out of a desire for money, fame, and fortune.

Endnotes:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident, p. 1.

[2] Berlitz & Moore, The Roswell Incident, 1980, Grosset & Dunlap, p. 85.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident, p. 3.

[4] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/brazel.htm

[5] Dr. Jacques Vallee, Revelations,  5150 Broadway #108, San Antonio, TX, 1991 (2008 printing), p. 21.

[6] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/brazel.htm

[7] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, Dell Books, New York, NY, pp. 52, 145-148.

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident, p. 4.

[9] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, pp. 140-142.

[10] http://www.csicop.org/si/9707/roswell.html

[11] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, p. 144.

[12] http://roswellproof.homestead.com/FortWorthST_July9.html

[13] Phillip Klass, The Real Roswell Crashed – Saucer Coverup, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, p. 38.

[14] Phillip J. Klass, UFOs, The Public Deceived, p. 280.

[15] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, p. 31. Also see Phillip Klass, The Real Roswell Crashed – Saucer Coverup, pp. 24-25.

[16] The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Col. Richard Weaver and 1st Lt. James McAndrew, Headquarters United States Air Force, 1995.

[17] http://www.roswellfiles.com/FOIA/majestic12.htm

[18] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/MarcelMyths.htm

[19] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/MarcelMyths.htm, p. 1.

[20] Karl Pflock, Roswell, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, p. 178.

[21] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, p. 63.

[22] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/MarcelMyths.htm, p. 2.

[23] More details on Marcel’s lies can be found in Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, pp. 56-66.

[24] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, Figure 13.

[25] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/Kaufmann.htm

[26] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, p. 100.

[27] Art Levine, A Little Less Balance Please, U.S. News and World Report, July 14, 1997, p. 56. Also see Frank Kaufmann Reconsidered by Kevin Randle, IUR, Fall 2002 letter, p. 17.

[28] http://www.pecos.net/news/arch97/063097p.htm

[29] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/Kaufmann.htm, pp. 1 & 2.

[30] Art Levine, A Little Less Balance Please, U.S. News and World Report, July 14, 1997, p. 56. Also see http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/ragsdale.htm

[31] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, p. 103.

[32] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, p. 78.

[33] http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/anderson.htm and see http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/glenndennis.htm, p. 2.

[34] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, pp. 109, 115.

[35] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, pp. 154-155.

[36] http://www.csicop.org/klassfiles/SUN-32.html & http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/Bessie.htm & see Pflock, Roswell, p. 24.

[37] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident, p. 10.

[xxxviii] Kal Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash, pp. 269, 265.

[39] http://www.roswellfiles.com/storytellers/RandleSchmitt.htm

[40] http://www.csicop.org/klassfiles/SUN-32.html