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By Thomas J. Carey & Donald R. Schmitt
From the very beginning of the Roswell investigation by civilian researchers more than two decades ago and until quite recently, the role played in the Roswell Incident by the sheep rancher who started it all, William W. "Mack" Brazel, had pretty much remained unchanged.
Specifically, sometime during the first week of July 1947,
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Mack Brazel, ca. 1951. For years, Roswell investigators associated him with finding only strange wreckage on his ranch. We now have reason to believe that he found something else as well.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL BRAZEL JR.
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in the course of his duties as the foreman of the J.B. Foster ranch, located 33.2 miles southeast of the small New Mexico town of Corona, Brazel discovered pieces of strange silvery wreckage littering a pasture the morning after a severe thunder-and-lightning storm, during which he had thought he heard an explosion. After consulting with neighbors and relatives about his discovery, he took their advice and drove 75 miles in his ancient pickup truck to the town of Roswell, which is located in the southeastern quadrant of New Mexico.
Brazel had been told about a $3,000 reward offered by a newspaper for pieces of a "flying saucer." The strange "discs" had been driving the country crazy for two weeks after a Boise, Idaho, businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold had spotted nine "disc-shaped" objects. He claimed he had seen them on June 24, flying in echelon formation near Mt. Rainier in Washington state, while he was piloting his small plane.
Brazel had never before heard of the strange alien craft, but $3,000 was $3,000. Furthermore, he found it extremely odd that his sheep, even though they were in need of water, would not cross the pasture where he had found the wreckage to reach their regular watering hole. There was too much debris for Brazel to clear by himself, so he was forced to seek outside assistance.
Upon his arrival in Roswell, Brazel reported his find to the sheriff's office but could not seem to get Sheriff George Wilcox interested enough to take action. Brazel even showed Wilcox some samples of the wreckage that he had brought with him in a box, but the sheriff remained nonplussed.
Fortunately for Brazel, Wilcox, whose eyes had long since
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Chaves County Sheriff George M. Wilcox did not believe Mack Brazel's story of a crashed UFO when he handed him off to KGFL announcer Frank Joyce. Wilcox later worked closely "with the boys over at the base" to intimidate local witnesses into silence.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PHYLLIS McGUIRE.
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glazed over with boredom, then received a phone call from Frank Joyce, a young announcer from Roswell radio station KGFL. Joyce was looking for any local tidbits of news that he might put on the air to pad out a slow news day. The call had come not a minute too soon for a thankful Wilcox, who passed Brazel off to Joyce, saying, "Well, there's somebody here right now with a story you might be interested in."
Wilcox handed the phone to Brazel. After some back-and-forth between Brazel and Joyce, the announcer curtly suggested to Brazel that he should contact the Army Air Force base in town and then hung up. With the proverbial ball once again in his court, Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field and was put in touch with the base's chief intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, who was eating lunch. After he finished his lunch, Marcel drove out to the sheriff's office to talk with Brazel and to view the debris samples Brazel had brought with him.
Sufficiently impressed with the samples, Marcel reported back to his commanding officer at Roswell AAF, Col. William "Butch" Blanchard, who then ordered Marcel to follow "the rancher" [Brazel] to his ranch ASAP, take a firsthand look at the "stuff" and report back. Marcel and counterintelligence corps Capt. Sheridan Cavitt accompanied Brazel back to the Foster ranch, but they arrived too late after sunset to make a meaningful survey of the site. The following day, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt reached the debris field to see a fan-shaped spread of wreckage strewn about an area the size of 20 football fields. Brazel, an old-time cowboy, still didn't know what he was looking at, but he knew that it wasn't anything with which he was familiar. Marcel thought immediately that the debris was extraterrestrial in origin; Cavitt, who never spoke on the record about what was found on the Foster ranch, took his observations and opinions with him to the grave.
We knew that the following day, July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record ran the banner headline that stunned the world, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region," only to retract it the next day when the Army Air Force claimed that the "flying-saucer wreckage" was really just the misidentified remains of a crashed weather balloon.
We also knew from Mack Brazel's family members and friends that during this period he had been taken into custody and detained at Roswell AAF for the better part of a week or more. He also seemed to have changed his story from that of the previous day, as evidenced by a front-page interview with Brazel that appeared in the July 9, 1947, Roswell Daily Record. In this later article, he described his find in terms consistent with the Army's official explanation of a rubber weather balloon and a tinfoil radar target. At that point, the press lost interest in the story. Brazel was permitted to go home a few days later, but he was left forever bitter about having been treated so badly by his country when he had done what he thought was his "patriotic duty."
When William Moore and Charles Berlitz published The Roswell Incident in 1980, this was pretty much all that we knew about Mack Brazel. He found the wreckage. He reported it. He was detained, he changed his story and then he was sent home. And that was it. Nothing more. Moore and Berlitz had to look 150 miles to the west, to the plains of San Agustin, to "find" bodies that might fit into the Roswell scenario: the account of a federal soil-conservation engineer named Grady L. "Barney" Barnett [dec. 1969] who told his relatives and close friends that he had come upon a crashed flying saucer — complete with its deceased, diminutive crew — in the course of his work out "on the Flats" [as the plains of San Agustin were known by locals] near Magdalena, N.M.
Barnett told his family and friends that he had seen a team of archaeologists arriving on the scene after him, only to be closely followed by the military, who then rounded up all the civilians, threatened them, swore them to secrecy and then released them. Unfortunately, even after years of effort, no one has been able to locate a single firsthand witness who could corroborate Barnett's story.
Returning to Mack Brazel, there were several things about his account that always bothered us. One was the persistent claim by some of his neighbors that, shortly after he was released from the clutches of the military, he somehow procured enough cash to purchase a brand-new pickup truck and then abruptly resign from his Foster ranch employment and start his own business, closer to his home in Tularosa, N.M. A new truck and a new business? Not bad for someone who was barely making a living off the land and was known for never having "two nickels to rub together." In short, Brazel's new life after the Roswell Incident bore all the earmarks of a bribe.
Another mystery was the fact that the military took Brazel into "custody" for a week or more and basically "worked him over." After his release, Brazel bitterly told his family that he had felt like he was in jail and that he would never again report anything to our government "unless it was an atomic bomb."
We could not understand why the military would treat Brazel so harshly, much more so than any other witness, if he had discovered only pieces of weather-balloon wreckage, no matter how bizarre. Certainly, Brazel could have been convinced in short order that it was from a secret project or some such cover story, and he could have gone on his way sworn to secrecy for the good of his country. Instead, the military resorted to brutal intimidation. Something was missing, it seemed to us, in Brazel's story.
The first hint at an answer to our questions was provided in a series of Roswell update articles written by William Moore in the 1980s.
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Former KGFL (Roswell) radio announcer Frank Joyce interviewed Mack Brazel over the telephone on July 6, 1947. Years later, he revealed to investigators Carey and Schmitt that there had been much more to his story.
PHOTO BY TOM CAREY.
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He had located and interviewed Frank Joyce, the KGFL announcer who had spoken with Mack Brazel on the telephone when Brazel first reported his find to authorities in Roswell. By that time, Joyce had left Roswell and had become a well-known radio-and-television personality at KOB in Albuquerque. Joyce told Moore that he had had not one but four conversations with Brazel.
We knew about the first conversation between Brazel and Joyce on the telephone, but their subsequent contacts were new information to us. It turned out that, two days after Joyce's first conversation with him, Brazel had called Joyce again at radio station KGFL to tell Joyce that he [Brazel] "didn't have his story quite right the first time."
Joyce invited Brazel to the station to talk it over. After Brazel arrived — accompanied by a military escort, according to Joyce — Brazel told him a story that was quite different from the one he had told him over the phone a few days earlier; this time Brazel was telling the weather-balloon cover story in perfectly rehearsed detail. On his way out of the station, Brazel answered Joyce's inquiry about "little green men" by saying, "They weren't green."
For years we asked ourselves, "How could Brazel have known that for a fact?" We concluded that, at some point during his "protective custody" by our military, they must have shown him the bodies recovered from the crash site near Roswell, perhaps to show him the seriousness of the situation in order to enlist his cooperation.
That was what we had thought.
In the spring of 1998, we paid a visit to Frank Joyce in his Albuquerque home. He had recently retired from KOB and from public life, and he seemed that day to be in a talkative mood. He told us that he had not spoken to anyone about his 1947 Roswell experiences for more than 20 years after the event. When he finally did start to talk about the incident, he always stated that there was more to his story but that he did not want to talk about it at the time. Now, after his retirement, he felt differently.
He told us that he was going to reveal to us something that he had never shared with anyone. "Don't stop me once I get started," he said, "or I might realize what I am doing and shut up." We were only too happy to oblige.
The following is our transcript of Frank Joyce's account of his initial conversation with Mack Brazel on the afternoon of July 6, 1947, shortly after Brazel had arrived in Roswell to report his discoveries, as revealed for the first time to us by Frank Joyce.
BRAZEL: [angrily] Who's gonna clean all that stuff up? That's what I wanna know. I need someone out there to clean it up.
JOYCE: What stuff? What are you talking about?
BRAZEL: [somberly] Don't know. Don't know what it is. Maybe it's from one of them 'flying saucer' things.
JOYCE: Oh, really? Then you should call the air base. They're responsible for everything that flies in the air. They should be able to help you or tell you what it is.
BRAZEL: [At this point, according to Joyce, Brazel really started "losing it."] Oh, God. Oh... my... God. What am I gonna do? It's horrible. Horrible. Just horrible.
JOYCE: What's that? What's horrible? What are you talking about?
BRAZEL: The stench. Just awful.
JOYCE: Stench? From what? What are you talking about?
BRAZEL: They're dead.
JOYCE: Who? Who's dead?
BRAZEL: Little people.
JOYCE: [Joyce said that at this point, he thought to himself, "This is crazy!" He decided to play the role of Devil's Advocate to a story he did not believe.] What the...? Where? Where did you find them?
BRAZEL: Someplace else.
JOYCE: Well, you know, the military is always firing rockets and experimenting with monkeys and things. So, maybe —
BRAZEL: [shouting now] Goddammit! They're not monkeys, and THEY'RE NOT HUMAN!
At that, Brazel angrily slammed down the phone and ended the conversation.
Because of this single conversation, we have had to reassess the roles and subsequent actions, not only of Mack Brazel, but of everyone involved in the Roswell events of 1947. This investigation is still a work in progress even as this column is being written.
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