"Something happened at Roswell that has come to symbolize what we don't yet know about the nature of life on other planets, the possibility of inter-galactic travel, the state of national security, and how far the government will go to ensure it." Phil Cousineau, UFOs: A Manual for the Millennium, 1995
On an early July night in 1947, something came falling out of the sky in eastern New Mexico near the small ranching community of Roswell...
Hundreds of books and articles have been written to say what fell and what did not fall. A goodly number of writers have fattened their bank accounts on the subject. Sadly, I'm not likely to be one of those fortunate scribes since I can't tell you what fell even though I'm pretty sure about what happened...
Late June 1947 was a busy time in the sky. A politically conservative businessman with a private pilot's license saw nine unidentified somethings flying in formation near Mount Rainier on June 24. Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho, was participating in a search-and-rescue operation at the time of his sighting. He was experienced and knowledgeable enough to estimate the objects were some 20-25 miles distant and moving at 1200 to 1700 miles per hour...
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| Artist's conception of Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine objects flying over the Cascade Mountains on June 24, 1947 |
Arnold never intended to become publicly known for seeing unusual aerial phenomena. Suspecting he had seen a government project of some sort, he told other fliers about his sighting when he landed at Yakima. They urged him to contact the local FBI office. Arnold found the office closed. He checked with the area's newspaper to see if any similar reports had been filed. Reporter Bill Bequette placed Arnold's story on the AP wire, describing the objects as saucer-like and flying...
The story likely would have enjoyed a day or two's run except for the fact that Arnold wasn't the only one seeing objects unidentified and flying. Within days, newspapers carried reports of sightings by police officers in Oregon, farmers near Milwaukee, and bus drivers in Iowa...
It would be years before the general public learned other witnesses to the elusive flying saucers included military pilots and civilian scientists entrusted with extremely sensitive and highly classified information. On June 28, an Air Force officer observed five or six disks flying at about 6000 feet. He and they were approximately 30 miles north of Lake Meade, Nevada. The following day, White Sands Proving Grounds scientists reported the aerial intrusion of a single, silvery disk moving at 700mph. Yet another military pilot observed two UFOs moving at "incredible" speed near Williams Air Field, Arizona on that same day of June 29...
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| W W "Mac" Brazel |
On July 5th, a rancher living in Lincoln County, New Mexico, inspected his rangeland for injured sheep after a night of violent thunderstorms. William "Mac" Brazel came across some very unusual debris on his rain-ravaged stretch of desert and decided to report his findings to the local sheriff on his next trip into town. He did exactly that. Sheriff George Wilcox thought personnel at Roswell's Army Air Force Base might find Brazel's find of interest. They did. Major Jesse Marcel and an aide accompanied Brazel back to his ranch where they were highly baffled by what lay strewn across the desert. Intelligence officer Marcel collected debris and brought it back to the base for analysis...
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| The site of the Roswell Crash-- a yucca studded stretch of desert grassland on the Foster Ranch where Mac Brazel worked as the outfit's foreman |
The base commander authorized his Public Affairs Officer Walter Haut to inform the public a crashed flying disk had been recovered. Within hours, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air Force, personally intervened with a press release of his own. It essentially said Ramey's 509th Bombardment Group commander and that commander's Intelligence Officer didn't know a weather balloon when they saw one. Major Marcel was instructed to pose with what was purported to be the crashed device, despite the fact that officials had earlier refused requests for pictures on the grounds this was "high security stuff"...
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| Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947 |
[Links to July 1947 newspaper accounts of the Roswell Incident:
Roswell Crash News Reports, July 1947:
http://www.roswellfiles.com/Articles/PressReports.htmRoswell Daily Record Interview with Mac Brazel, 9 July 1947:
http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/brazel.htm ]After General Ramey's intervention, Roswell's flying saucer disappeared from press reports and stayed disappeared until the late 1970s. Unfortunately for the Army Air Force, a 300 mph weather balloon didn't get the news in time and visited White Sands again, roughly an hour and a half before Walter Haut announced the recovery of a crashed disk...
Beyond this point, the Roswell Incident becomes a tangled mess worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winning historian's talent...
The tangled mess began nearly thirty-one years later on February 20, 1978 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who had worked on many highly classified projects, was in town to address an audience of LSU students on a topic of great interests to him-- flying saucers. Friedman was promoting his lecture through a radio interview when casual conversation with the station director changed both his life and the course of the debate about UFOs...
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| Bitter Lake recreation area near Roswell, New Mexico |
The director knew a former Air Force officer, a retiree named Jesse Marcel. The two gentlemen were good friends, sharing an interest in short-wave radio communications, a fancy way of saying they were ham radio operators...
Friedman sipped coffee and listened to the station director explain that Marcel knew flying saucers were real because he had, in the course of his military duties, handled debris from one that had crashed somewhere in the southwestern desert country...
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| Missile Park at the White Sands museum. In late June and early July, 1947, a number of apparently manufactured and intelligently controlled objects of unknown origin appeared over this important national defense site. |
Before leaving Baton Rouge the next day, physicist Friedman decided to call Marcel. He expected a person of dubious reliability and found himself surprised when he spoke with a person who told a straightforward story about an incident that occurred at a specific place. Marcel didn't remember the exact dates but said the information had been reported in the local press. He did say that he knew for a fact that he hadn't handled a busted-up weather balloon and implied General Ramey knew for a fact the crashed object wasn't a busted-up weather balloon. He said little else over the phone other than he still didn't know what he had handled but was still sure it wasn't a busted-up weather balloon...
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| Jesse Marcel poses with weather balloon debris as the official attempt to cover-up the Roswell Incident begins. The Army Air Field base where Marcel served as Intelligence Officer was the home to the only tactical nuclear bomber group in the world at the time of the incident. |
Stanton Friedman found the story interesting. He also suspected he would waste his time looking for more information. That soon changed-- a conversation with fellow UFO buff, Bobbi Gironda, revealed another name that might have something to do with Marcel's story. Ms Gironda, a writer based on the West Coast, had spoken with a forest ranger named Sleppy who suggested Gironda speak with his mother...
Lydia Sleppy, the ranger's mother, worked at a radio station in Albuquerque in the 1940s when a reporter with the Roswell affiliate phoned in a story about a crashed flying saucer. Mrs Sleppy claimed she'd just started transmitting a report over the teletype when her machine went dead. The interruption was immediately followed by an anonymous teletyped message: DO NOT COMPLETE THIS TRANSMISSION...
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| UFO Museum at Roswell, New Mexico: a once sleepy desert town saw its economy improve greatly as the general public became more curious about the 1947 incident. |
Friedman and Gironda followed the Sleppy lead and listened to her story which hinted that government officials had monitored civilian communications into and from Roswell after Brazel reported his find. Working uncredited, Friedman provided background material for Charles Berlitz and William L Moore who published The Roswell Incident in 1980. This was the first book on the subject and its contents appealed to Berlitz' legion of loyal readers who had, since 1969, followed his explorations of lost continents, the Bermuda Triangle, and alleged government time-travel experiments...
An even larger audience for the Berlitz book was assured when the National Enquirer tabloid published its interview with Jesse Marcel in February, 1980...
Let us step back and ask why the Roswell Incident is the mystery that it is. To start with, even the few "facts" listed so far have been disputed. A Roswell Daily Report story of July 9, 1947, supports an argument Brazel found the wreckage on July 5th, possibly a day or two earlier or later, by stating the rancher's discovery occurred "several days" earlier. However, a second story on the subject in the same day's paper, quotes Brazel as saying he and his son Vernon discovered the unusual material on June 14th...
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| Mac Brazel and Jesse Marcel (with a man sometimes identified as Sheridan Cavit, in the background) inspect and collect the debris field on the Foster Ranch. Brazel reportedly noticed the material when his sheep refused to cross the area. |
There is a substantial difference between several days and several weeks. Brazel died in 1963. He is not available to explain or clarify his account. Many years later, Frank Joyce, who worked at Roswell radio station KGFL at the time, claimed he'd confronted Brazel about the time line inconsistency since it didn't match the story Brazel told him the previous day. The foreman of the Foster Ranch, Joyce said, became agitated and said "it would go hard with him" if he said too much more on the subject...
It becomes obvious fairly quickly to a serious researcher that investigating the Roswell Incident requires a historian's skepticism and a lawyer's cynicism. My personal brief summarizing the various claims and counterclaims extends to more than fifty pages-- and it is simply a chronology of what allegedly happened when and who said that it did with a source citation...
As things stand today, there are two major theories about what happened at Roswell. One group of researchers believes an extraterrestrial craft crashed in a remote section of New Mexico in the late spring or early summer of 1947. Another camp argues the wreckage Mac Brazel found belonged to a Project Mogul weather balloon. Both agree the military went to extraordinary lengths to keep the nature of the wreckage secret...
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| Desert plains near Roswell |
One thing that we can say is the matter stayed secret for a very long time. Dozens of books about unidentified flying objects were published between the late 1940s and 1980. The only reference to an unusual incident at Roswell in any of them seems to be in Frank Edwards' 1966 best-seller, Flying Saucers--Serious Business...
In Edwards' version of the story, an unnamed rancher observes a flaming disk crash into a mountainside during a violent thunderstorm at an unspecified date near Roswell. His dramatic tale, which does not agree with the published reports in the Roswell Daily Record, was intriguing. It also lacked useful data for other researchers. The Roswell Incident remained basically forgotten until Stanton Friedman met Jesse Marcel...
[Edwards' knowledge of the Roswell Incident likely came from his memory of the initial 1947 press reports. He is known to have mentioned the crash in lectures about flying saucers as early as the mid-1950s. Among the nation's first radio broadcasters with a career dating to the early 1920s, Edwards was hired by the Treasury Department as a celebrity War Bonds salesman during World War II. He enjoyed an audience of millions as a news commentator for the Mutual Broadcasting Network from the end of the war until his abrupt firing in 1954.
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| Broadcaster Frank Edwards (right) with former President Harry S Truman |
Conspiracy theorists claim Edwards lost his job because he mentioned UFOs in his broadcasts. It is more probable a dispute with the show's sponsor, the American Federation of Labor, over Edwards' favorable reporting about its rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations led his firing.]
Perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding the Roswell Incident is one that has received little attention in the many books and articles on the subject. Despite multiple readings, I can find no direct mention of the Roswell Incident in The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J Ruppelt. Any input from readers who are able to cite a chapter in this book with any such reference would be greatly appreciated...
Captain Ruppelt headed the Air Force's Projects Grudge and Blue Book investigations from 1951 to 1953. An engineer by training, he refused to simply explain away reports of UFOs and is generally acknowledged (even by critics) to have been an honest man constrained by limited funding and a small albeit capable staff. His Report has limits in its value to researchers but Ruppelt acknowledges the role national security concerns play in some of his reporting. Overall, the book can be seen as a remarkable document graphically outlining very real confusion and occasional panic in military circles caused by unidentified flying objects during the late 1940s and early 1950s...
Ruppelt goes into very considerable detail about the summer of 1947. He lists major sightings and the consternation each caused to the Pentagon. Yet, he remains silent on the Roswell Incident, despite the fact that a general officer personally and publicly intervened in a way that left egg on the faces of his subordinates. Is it possible that Captain Ruppelt did not know about Roswell? Given his position, it seems unlikely but there may have been something about the incident that called for extremely limited access to the data. Perhaps, he avoids mentioning it out of respect for the feelings of the officers who had been publicly humiliated by their boss...
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| Edward J Ruppelt, trained as an engineer, headed the Air Force's Project Blue Book investigation of UFOs. His writings suggest he privately believed at least some of the unknown objects were likely of extraterrestrial origin. |
I personally do not believe Captain Ruppelt had any personal knowledge of a crashed flying saucer. His writings and job performance bespeak a man of integrity. He officially remained an agnostic on questions of the nature of the mysterious objects in our skies. He privately argued at least once that they were likely manufactured craft and extraterrestrial in origin...
Writing in the May, 1954, issue of True, Ruppelt categorically denies that the Air Force had wrecked UFOs or alien bodies in its possession. He reminds readers there is no proof flying saucers came from space, commenting this lack of wreckage may support the theory that they are "not of this world"...
As for whatever it was that fell out of the sky 65 years ago near Roswell, it could collect a Social Security pension with full benefits if it were a tax paying citizen. But it wasn't. It was just a mystery to the rancher who found it and the first military men to examine it...
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| Roswell UFO Museum display. Were "they" here? |
Links of Interest:
Edward Ruppelt, "What Our Air Force Found Out About Flying Saucers," True, May 1954:
A military officer drove up and ordered everyone to leave, swore them to the silence that was their patriotic duty... the Roswell Incident in song:
Suzanne McDermott, The Roswell Incident:NEWS CORRAL:
An article about a particularly low form of life, two-legged parasites for which I can find no possible use. I suspect they are like pedophiles-- so foul that even the residents of Hell would prefer not to have them as neighbors:
LRNARTS MARKETPLACE
Artwork by Louis R Nugent now available: For fine art prints and greeting cards, visit:
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Fine Art America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas, Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:
This week's featured artist: Ken Brown Pioneer:
Fine Art America also features work by Susan Bordelon and Lawrence Scott:
CREDITS
Note: All photographs and other images for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: none
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