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 Alien spaceship that crashed in Roswell, USA
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While the public excitement over such amazing UFO sightings was reaching epic proportions, something crashed landed near the town of Roswell in New Mexico, sometime during the first week of July 1947.
W.W. "Mack" Brazel, a New Mexico rancher, saddled up his horse and rode out leisurely with the son of neighbours Floyd and Loretta Proctor, to check on the sheep, because there had been a fierce thunderstorm the night before.
As they rode along, Brazel began to notice unusual pieces of what seemed to be metal debris, scattered over a large area.
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Upon further inspection, Brazel saw that a shallow trench, several hundred feet long, had been gouged into the land.
Brazel was struck by the unusual properties of the debris, and after dragging a large piece of it to a shed, he took some of it over to show the Proctors, his neighbours.
Though Mrs. Proctor moved subsequently from the ranch into a home nearer to town, she remembers Mack showing up with strange material.
On the advice of his neighbours, Brazel reported the incident to Sheriff George Wilcox, who in turn reported it to Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel of the 509 Bomb Group, and for days thereafter, the debris site was closed while the wreckage was cleared.
On July 8, 1947, a press release stating that the wreckage of a crashed disk had been recovered was issued by Lt. Walter G. Haut, Public Information Officer at RAAB under orders from the Commander of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell, Col. William Blanchard.
Hours later the first press release was rescinded and the second press release was released on July 9, 1947, stating a contradictory story to the effect that the 509th Bomb Group had mistakenly identified a weather balloon as a wreckage of a flying saucer.
Meanwhile, back in Roswell, Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working at the Ballard Funeral Home, received some curious calls one afternoon from the morgue at the air field.
It seems the Mortuary Officer needed to get a hold of some small hermetically sealed coffins, and wanted information about how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for a few days, without contaminating the tissue.
Dennis drove out to the base hospital later that evening where he saw large pieces of wreckage with strange engravings on one of the pieces sticking out of the back of a military ambulance.
Upon entering the hospital he started to visit with a nurse he knew, when suddenly he was threatened by Military Police and forced to leave.
The next day, Dennis met with the nurse. She told him about the bodies and drew pictures of them on a prescription pad. Within a few days she was transferred to England, her whereabouts remain unknown.
According to the research of Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, in their book, "A History of UFO Crashes", from which this account of the Roswell Incident, in part, is based, the military had been watching an unidentified flying object on radar for four days in southern New Mexico.
On the night of July 4, 1947, radar indicated that the object was down around thirty to forty miles northwest of Roswell.
Eye witness William Woody, who lived east of Roswell, remembered being outside with his father the night of July 4, 1947, when he saw a brilliant object plunge to the ground.
A couple of days later when Woody and his father tried to locate the area of the crash, they were stopped by military personnel, who had cordoned off the area.
Acting on the call from Sheriff Wilcox, Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel was sent by Col. William Blanchard, to investigate Mack Brazel's story.
Marcel and Senior Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent, Captain Sheridan Cavitt, followed the rancher off-road to his place. They spent the night there and Marcel inspected a large piece of debris that Brazel had dragged from the pasture.
Monday morning, July 7, 1947, Major Jesse Marcel took his first step onto the debris field. Marcel would remark later that "something... must have exploded above the ground and fell."
According to Marcel, the debris was "strewn over a wide area, I guess may be three-quarters of a mile long and a few hundred feet wide." Scattered in the debris were small bits of metal that Marcel could not burn with his cigarette lighter. Marcel also described metal debris the thickness of tin foil that was indestructible.
After gathering enough debris to fill his staff car, Maj. Marcel decided to stop by his home on the way back to the base so that he could show his family the unusual debris. He had never seen anything quite like it.
"I didn't know what we were picking up... It definitely was not part of an aircraft or missile or rocket," said Maj. Marcel. Under hypnosis conducted by Dr. John Watkins in May of 1990, Jesse Marcel Jr. remembered being awakened by his father that night and following him outside to help carry in a large box filled with debris.
Once inside, they emptied the contents of the debris onto the kitchen floor. Jesse Jr. described the lead foil and I-beams. Under hypnosis, he recalled the writing on the I-beams as "Purple. Strange. Never saw anything like it... Different geometric shapes, leaves and circles."
At 11 a.m. Walter Haut, public relations officer, finished the press release he had been ordered to write, and gave copies of the release to the two radio stations and both of the newspapers. By 2.26 p.m., the story was out on the AP Wire: "The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disk had been found".
As calls began to pour into the base from all over the world, Lt. Robert Shirkey watched as MPs carried loaded wreckage onto a C-54 from the First Transport Unit.
To get a better look, Shirkey stepped around Col. Blanchard, who was irritated with all of the calls coming into the base. Blanchard decided to travel out to the debris field and left instructions that he had gone on leave.
On the morning of July 8, Marcel reported what he had found to Col. Blanchard, showing him pieces of the wreckage, none of which looked like anything Blanchard had ever seen.
Blanchard then sent Marcel to Carswell (Fort Worth Army Air Field) to see General Ramey, Commanding Officer of the Eighth Air Force.
Marcel stated years later to Walter Haut that he had taken some of the debris into Ramey's office to show him what had been found. The material was displayed on Ramey's desk for the general when he returned.
Upon his return, General Ramey wanted to see the exact location of the debris field, so he and Marcel went to the map room down the hall - but when they returned, the wreckage that had been placed on the desk was gone and a weather balloon was spread out on the floor. Major Charles A. Cashon took the now-famous photo of Marcel with the weather balloon, in General Ramey's office.
It was then reported that General Ramey recognised the remains as part of a weather balloon. Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, the chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force said, "(It) was a cover story. The whole balloon part of it. That was the part of the story we were told to give to the public and news and that was it."
The military tried to convince the news media from that day forward that the object found near Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon.
Back in town, Walt Whitmore and Lyman Strickland saw their friend, Mack Brazel, who was being escorted to the Roswell Daily Record by three military officers.
He ignored Whitmore and Strickland, which was not at all like Mack, and once he got to the Roswell Daily Record offices, he changed his story.
He now claimed to have found the debris on June 14. Brazel also mentioned that he had found weather observation devices on two other occasions, but what he found this time was no weather balloon.
Later that afternoon, an officer from the base retrieved all of the copies of Haut's press release from the radio stations and newspaper offices.
The Las Vegas Review Journal, along with dozens of other newspapers, carried the AP story: "Reports of flying saucers whizzing through the sky fell off sharply today, as the army and the navy began a concentrated campaign to stop the rumours."
The story also reported that AAF headquarters in Washington had "delivered a blistering rebuke to officers at Roswell."
The Roswell incident paved the way for setting up the first UFO museum and research centre in the USA, or anywhere else in the world.
On September 27, 1991, the International UFO Museum and Research Center at Roswell, New Mexico became incorporated. Soon thereafter, the Internal Revenue Service approved the museum as a 501 (c) (3) designated Tax Deductible Non-Profit Organisation.
During the first four years the museum was open, it welcomed 144,997 curious and inquisitive visitors. In December 1996, the Tourism Association of New Mexico awarded the IUFOMRC its coveted "Top Tourist Destination of New Mexico" award.
In 2002, Haut was inducted into the New Mexico Department of Tourism Hall of Fame. In February 2003, the museum was named New Mexico Main Street Business of the Year. Today the museum continues to grow and prosper.
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