Always Roswell: Not Just Another Day in the Desert
Even the date of the onset of the Roswell mystery is a topic of debate.
June 14, 1947, is the earliest among many. It was on that day—or perhaps three weeks later, on July 7—that ranch foreman William “Mac” Brazel, with his young son Vernon in tow, stumbled upon a debris field some thirty miles north of Roswell, New Mexico. Brazel worked for the J. B. Foster ranch, and was driving sheep on the day of his discovery. According to some accounts, the debris field was just a smidgen of a thing, hardly bigger than the footprint of an automobile.
Other accounts say that debris lay strewn across a section of rough earth about two hundred feet in diameter. And still other versions describe the debris field as an impressive three-quarters of a mile long and about two hundred yards across. (The “big debris” theory is supported by claims that Brazel grew angry because his sheep refused to walk over the oversized area, forcing him to march the animals all the way around the debris to reach water.) During the course of a newspaper interview Mac Brazel granted on July 8, he recalled the mess as “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks.”
A Possible Chronology
Despite the remoteness of the area, debris and other junk—at least in small to moderate amounts—was not uncommon. And anyway, no one paid Brazel to linger and speculate; the sheep and many other chores demanded his time.
Whatever the extent of the debris, Brazel couldn’t spare more than a few minutes to stare. When he finally went back for a second look nearly three weeks later, on the Fourth of July (according to the timeline that begins on June 14), he and his wife and young daughter gathered about five pounds of various pieces and left. The following day, July 5, Brazel went to nearby Corona, New Mexico, where chitchat informed him that some locals had seen “flying discs” in the sky.
Brazel knew about the Japanese “balloon bombs” that had landed here and there on the Pacific coast in 1945, and he was aware (like everyone else in the area) that Roswell Army Air Field conducted secret flight experiments. Although the flying-disc reports caught Brazel’s attention, he felt no particular urgency to find someone to talk to at the airfield, partly because Roswell was seventy-five miles from Corona. So Brazel waited until Monday, July 7, when he had business that was going to take him into Roswell anyway.
Roswell’s sheriff, George Wilcox, took a look at what Brazel had brought into town, and sent a pair of deputies to locate the site. Wilcox also contacted the airfield. A pair of base personnel, Maj. Jesse Marcel and counterintelligence officer Capt. Sheridan Cavitt, came out to retrieve what Brazel had salvaged.
Nobody at Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) could identify the stuff Marcel and Cavitt presented (members of the base’s Balloon Group were at Alamogordo, unavailable to take a look). Although the pieces seemed earthly enough, even the small portion retrieved by Brazel included more rubber than would be found in a typical experimental weather-observation balloon.
A day later, July 8, the front-page headline of the Roswell Daily Record read, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” In its bid to attract readers, the paper obviously played on the two-week-old “flying saucer” phenomenon begun by the Kenneth Arnold story, but to this day, accounts of Mac Brazel’s role in the headline and accompanying story differ. In some tellings, Brazel simply assumed he had found pieces of typical RAAF work— pieces that the Army would like to have back. But other accounts suggest that Brazel described to reporters the wreckage of a flying disc—not from another planet (that sort of speculation came from others, and much later) but from a foreign power. Although the USSR was still two years away from an atomic bomb, the postwar Cold War was already growing warm, making the U.S. military uneasy. Many secret tests occurred above the New Mexico desert. What if the Soviets had been monitoring that work?
Just hours after that day’s Roswell Daily Record made its way to Roswell Army Air Field, RAAF public information officer, Lt. Walter Haut, issued a press release. Career-minded PI officers never act on their own; when Lieutenant Haut prepared the release, he did so at the request of the base commander, Col. William Blanchard. The release rather casually refers to the debris as a “flying disc” that “landed”—as opposed to “crashed”—on a local ranch. Haut, Blanchard, and many in-between caught hell for the “flying disc” angle, which was quickly walked back.
Although lame, the July 8 press release marked the beginning of official damage control. Step two became apparent on July 9, when the Roswell Daily Record meekly accepted the weather-balloon line. What became of the captured “flying saucer” of the previous day’s headline? Well, the paper’s editor, and perhaps its owner, as well, received communication from RAAF that essentially went like this: Kill the saucer angle.
Step three, as suggested above, mandated that “balloon” become the new word for “disc.”
Intriguingly, the initial release dates Mac Brazel’s discovery to “last week,” or around July 1—more than two weeks after the foreman’s first look at the wreckage. Questions persist as to why the Army wished to take mid-June off the table. One possible answer is that the thing that crashed had been American- designed to monitor nuclear testing. If that were the case, the Army would have been naturally inclined to describe the object in benign, knowable terms: a weather balloon.
Trouble is, a cover-up involving more than one person is almost invariably exposed. Unknown for forty years (until UFOlogist Kevin Randle began to locate witnesses and dig into Roswell documents) is that the RAAF’s “first responders,” Major Marcel and Captain Cavitt, visited the crash site on July 7, very shortly after visiting Sheriff Wilcox. This was a day before the Daily Record “flying disc” headline, and a day before the RAAF press release. The officers would not have done on-site investigation without clearance from the base. Such permission would have come from Colonel Blanchard, or someone very close to him.
When, in later years, Marcel described the crash site, he recalled seeing mainly metallic debris. The metal was, he said, thin but very strong, and could not be dented by a sledgehammer’s blow. He was especially interested in nearly weightless metal members reminiscent of I-beams but shorter, and measuring just three-eighths-inch by one-quarter inch. He was unable to twist or bend them.
Lying amidst the twisted metal were pieces of a parchment-like material that did not burn under direct flame. None of that is part of the official story.
Some sources claim that Marcel filled his staff car with debris.
In 1994, when the USAF decided to once again investigate the Roswell event, Col. Richard Weaver interviewed Captain Cavitt, who related impressions quite different from Marcel’s. According to Cavitt, the debris was easily recognizable as pieces of a weather balloon, specifically, a destroyed radar deflector of the type commonly used with weather radar wind targets (RAWINs). A typical deflector shows multiple square corners, constructed from heavy paper and reflective foil, and hung below the balloon on a balsa wood stick frame attached to a triangular base. Cavitt’s description of a RAWIN falls neatly in line with the military’s “weather balloon” explanation of what came down near Roswell. (Indeed, as the Roswell story unfolded in 1947, the military released photographs of RAAF personnel kneeling next to the crumpled remains of a balloon with a RAWIN setup.) Weather balloons are tracked by radar, which utilizes waves that reflect back to the source from square corners. In other words, the square-cornered construction ensures continual radar monitoring.
The official 1947 explanation had grown threadbare by 1994, but Cavitt stuck to it.
Even from the beginning, RAAF personnel offered divergent stories. Some enlisted men recalled being sent to establish armed checkpoints on the main north-south route, U.S. Highway 285, to deter civilians. Other former soldiers recall that numerous military officers were halted at checkpoints. Civilians (including at least one located by Kevin Randle) remembered being stopped.
Numerous dirt roads going east and west branched off from the highway, and every one, the civilian witnesses recalled, was blocked by soldiers in jeeps or other military vehicles. No civilians, and only selected military personnel, were going to be allowed to see the “weather balloon.” If all of that sounds like a lot of effort to prevent access to something very mundane, you may be on to something.
Ripening the tale further are accounts of non-military witnesses other than the Brazels. On July 2, a Roswell resident named Dan Wilmot observed an object cross the evening sky, headed northwest. The historian Randle notes that this sighting has encouraged many to believe that the Wilmot object is the one that crashed seventy-five miles away, and was discovered by Brazel. And multiple witnesses in and near Roswell described peculiar-sounding thunder on or about the second of July, climaxed by a distant “explosion.” In a 1993 affidavit, a man named William Woody recalled witnessing “something in the sky” during the summer of 1947, probably in early July.
Woody was fourteen at the time, and lived on a farm three miles south of Roswell. (Woody still lived there in 1993.) Sunset had come and gone, and the summer sky was dark. As they stood outside, Woody and his father watched “a large, very bright object in the southwestern sky, moving rapidly northward.” The object threw off an intense, white light, and was trailed by a long tail that Woody described as “a blowtorch flame fading down into a pale red.” Father and son tracked the lighted object until it disappeared beneath the distant horizon.
The younger Woody made a point in the affidavit to emphasize that the object did not “wink out” like a meteorite, but simply flew until obscured by the curvature of the Earth. Other witnesses claimed to have seen the object crash into the ground, but Woody said nothing like that in 1993.
The older Woody guessed that the object landed about forty miles north of Roswell. When father and son set out in the family truck to search a day or two later, they saw armed guards along Highway 285. Consistent with other eyewitness accounts, east-west egress off of 285 was blocked by random guards and more formal sentry posts. The important east-west route in the area, State Highway 247, had also been closed off by soldiers.
Near the end of his affidavit, William Woody said that his family, as well as neighbors, digested the weather-balloon story, which “seemed reasonable to us at the time.”