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By Thomas J. Carey & Donald R. Schmitt
When Corona, N.M., sheep rancher Mack Brazel heard a strange, muffled explosion amid the thunderclaps of a severe lightning storm ("The lightning seemed to be attracted to a single location on the ranch," he later told his son, Bill Jr.) late one evening in early July 1947, he had no idea what it was.
Some of Brazel's neighbors also told of hearing the explosion. The following day, as he gazed upon one of his pastures, he saw that it had been covered by pieces of silvery wreckage — but from what that wreckage had come he had no idea.
Brazel lived without electricity or a radio, and his only source of news was a monthly newspaper; he had not heard about the "flying saucers" that had made such a buzz in the news only two weeks earlier.
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This 1946 photo shows Col. William "Butch" Blanchard (left) and Gen. Roger M. Ramey (right) in a light moment. Blanchard, the Roswell AAF base commander in 1947, made private comments that hinted something unusual had been recovered from rancher Mack Brazel's pasture. Ramey, the architect of the Roswell cover-up, also is believed to have made private statements that the Roswell Incident involved a spaceship.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WALTER HAUT.
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It wasn't until he paid a visit to his close neighbors the following day that he heard about the flying saucers; when he made a trip to a Corona bar a few evenings later, he learned there might be a reward for finding such a craft. Early the next morning, he found something else on his ranch, something that convinced him to drive to Roswell to report his discoveries, thus securing his place in history and sparking one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.
What was the debris that Brazel found deposited in small pieces, concentrated densely in a fan-shaped area covering approximately 1.5 million square feet, in his pasture in July of 1947? From various sources, both military and civilian, who actually saw and handled pieces of wreckage, we know the following were found amid the debris:
- A large amount of small to palm-sized pieces of smooth, very thin, very light but extremely strong "metal" the color of aluminum that could not be cut, scratched, bent or burned. Some of the larger pieces displayed a slight curvature to their surface.
- Many witnesses have described what seems to have been a large quantity of palm-sized and larger pieces of a very thin and very light "metal" or "cloth" with "fluidlike" properties. Though this type of wreckage, as with the material described above, could not be cut, scratched or burned, it could temporarily be deformed. As one of the startled witnesses said, "I wadded up a piece of it in my hand. It felt as though there was nothing in my hand. Then I placed it on a smooth surface, and it unfurled itself and flowed over the flat surface, like liquid mercury, back to its original shape without so much as a crease."
[NOTE: It is this so-called "memory metal" that we refer to today as the "Holy Grail" of our Roswell investigation, because locating even a single piece of it would provide irrefutable proof of the extraterrestrial nature of the "Roswell Incident."]
- A quantity of threadlike, monofilament "wires" that could not be cut, scratched, burned or permanently deformed. These could be coiled, and when a light from a flashlight was shown in one end it could be seen coming out the other end.
- A small, seamless black box that could not be opened.
- A lightweight, seamless, dull-aluminum flange or strut that could not be cut, scratched or burned.
- A number of thin "I-beams" measuring 18 to 30 inches long by half an inch wide by three-eighths of an inch thick. These bore "writing," in the form of unintelligible symbols along their lengths. These "I-beams" were as light as balsa wood, but they could not be cut, scratched or burned; they could be flexed slightly but not broken.
- Several strips of thin, aluminumlike "metal" roughly three to four feet long by three to four inches wide; these also bore hieroglyphic-like "writing" on their surfaces.
It should be noted that debris similar to what has just been described was also found at the impact site, in proximity to where the remainder of the intact craft allegedly crashed — but not in the large quantities found in Brazel's sheep pasture on the Foster ranch.
What are we to make of such items as those described above? Were they truly as exotic in nature and origin as they have been described, or were they simply misidentified everyday items (i.e., tinfoil, sticks and rubber), as the U.S. Air Force would have us believe? To answer that question, let's let the people who actually handled the materials tell us what they found.
We know that Mack Brazel told the Roswell Daily Record on July 8, 1947, that what he found was certainly
"no weather observation balloon."
Later, Brazel told a few of his family members that it was "the strangest stuff he had ever seen" and, according to his son Bill Jr., the Army admitted to his father that they had definitely established that
"It wasn't anything made by us."
We have already seen that the Roswell AAF base chief intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, believed from the moment he first examined the debris to the day he died in 1986 that the wreckage was from an extraterrestrial spacecraft [see our Sept. 19 column, "Nothing Made on This Earth"]. Marcel's son, Jesse Jr., has confirmed to us that his father was already talking about the wreckage in terms of it being from a "flying saucer" when he made an early morning visit home, with some samples from the Foster ranch in hand, before he reported back to Roswell AAF.
What about Marcel's boss, Col. William H. "Butch" Blanchard? What did he have to say about the wreckage? We know from several firsthand sources that, at first, he thought the debris was from a Russian device but later realized that it wasn't. However, when pressed by his family at the dinner table for an answer, he only stared off into space, as if in a trance, and repeated over and over again,
"The Russians have some amazing things."
The former mayor of Roswell, N.M., William Brainerd, told us the story of when William Blanchard returned to Roswell a few years after the event. Brainerd found himself in Blanchard's presence at an official function. Later the same day, he found himself sitting across from Blanchard at dinner. During the course of the meal, he asked Blanchard about the 1947 incident. Blanchard's only comment was that the wreckage was
"The damnedest thing I ever saw."
As for Blanchard's boss, Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas, we know from public records that Ramey was the architect of the weather-balloon cover story that chilled press interest for three decades. But what about in less public settings? What did he say about it then?
Two years ago we located a firsthand witness who had been stationed at Fort Worth AAF in 1948. Then an enlisted crewman on a B-29, he was waiting on the tarmac to board his aircraft along with the rest of the crew. Also waiting with the crew that day was Gen. Ramey himself. One of the officers on the crew was overheard asking Ramey about the 1947 Roswell events. "What about it, General?" the officer asked. "What was that stuff?" To which Ramey answered,
"Oh that. It was the biggest lie I ever had to tell."
After a moment Ramey added, "It was out of this world,
son. Out of this world."
We also have two living, secondhand witnesses, with whom we are still in negotiation, who say that, before Gen. Ramey died in 1963, he told his wife that the 1947 Roswell crash involved a "spaceship" and not a weather balloon as he had previously stated publicly.
Retired Gen. Arthur E. Exon, whom we mentioned in a previous column, was a lower-rank officer in 1947 when he was stationed at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
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A recent photograph of Gen. Arthur E. Exon (USAF, Ret.) and his wife. Exon was stationed at Wright Field in 1947 and later was its base commander. He was in position to know the findings of the tests on the recovered Roswell wreckage. Exon claims he was told that the wreckage was extraterrestrial in origin.
PHOTO BY TOM CAREY.
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As a member of the Air Materiel Command, where the Roswell artifacts were sent after their recovery by the Army, and later as the base commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base [1964], Exon was in a position to know things even if he himself did not have firsthand access to the Roswell artifacts; he knew people who did. According to Exon, after conducting a series of metallurgical tests upon the Roswell wreckage, the overall consensus among the scientists involved in the testing was that
"the pieces [of wreckage] were from space."
Master Sgt. Lewis S. "Bill" Rickett, whom we have also mentioned in several previous columns, is one of the key eyewitnesses in the Roswell Incident chain of events. It was Rickett who, before he passed away in the early 1990s, filled in a number of blanks and connected several dots in the Roswell timeline for us. In September of 1947, he was assigned to drive the University of New Mexico's meteorite expert, Dr. Lincoln La Paz, around New Mexico to help La Paz try to ascertain the speed and trajectory of the object that had crashed two months earlier.
During the course of his investigation, La Paz interviewed many local ranchers and ranch hands for any bits of information they might possess. Both Rickett and La Paz submitted separate reports of their findings to their superiors. Some months later, Rickett was requested by La Paz to meet him at the Four Corners Restaurant (now operating as Clines Corners) at the intersection of Rt. 285 and Rt. 40 east of Albuquerque, N.M. During lunch at the restaurant, La Paz reiterated to Rickett his belief that the Roswell crash represented
"...an unmanned, interplanetary probe."
Rickett also related firsthand accounts of several interesting and revealing conversations he had had over the years with fellow counter-intelligence colleagues concerning the 1947 Roswell events. One, a former CIC operative named Claire Miller, actually disbursed the funds for the cleanup of the Roswell crash sites. Rickett ran into Miller years later in Washington, D.C. After exchanging pleasantries, Miller, perhaps anticipating Rickett's question, suddenly blurted out to the startled Rickett —
"The answer's still the same. Don't ask me!"
And that was the end of their conversation and their impromptu reunion. Another former CIC operative whom Rickett knew was a fellow named Joe Wirth. Now presumed dead, no one has ever interviewed Wirth. Rickett recalled, however, a conversation he had had with Worth in the early 1960s in Washington, D.C., when Wirth was then working as a civilian for the local Park Police.
Years earlier, Wirth had rebuked Rickett when Rickett dared to ask him about a box of wreckage Wirth had received from CIC Capt. Sheridan Cavitt. Wirth had escorted the box of wreckage on a flight out of Roswell AAF, presumably to Washington, D.C., where Wirth was then stationed. This time around, Wirth confided to Rickett. However, still wary of government reprisals 15 years after the incident, Wirth suggested to Rickett that the two of them go outside into the parking lot to avoid the risk of being overheard. Once outside, they continued the conversation and Wirth revealed to an astonished Rickett,
"Honest to God, they still haven't found out what
that stuff is."
Rickett, for his part — having been to one of the Roswell crash sites and having handled some of the wreckage himself — had seen and heard enough to reach some conclusions of his own. Although he admitted to not knowing all the facts of the entire Roswell story, he felt that he did know enough to conclude,
"The Air Force's explanation that it was a balloon
is totally untrue. It was not a balloon. I never
did know for sure exactly what its purpose was,
but ... it wasn't ours!"
POSTSCRIPT
Recently, we had a conversation with a gentleman who lives in Dayton, Ohio. His daughter had come home from college for the summer and had taken a job as a lifeguard at a local swimming club.
His daughter told him that she had made the acquaintance of another female lifeguard. While discussing their respective families, his daughter's friend confided that her father was an officer who worked at Wright-Patterson AFB in a scientific capacity, and that he had just received a promotion — to work on a project that was analyzing pieces of metal from a UFO that had crashed in New Mexico back in the 1940s.
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