It has been 72 years since the Roswell UFO Crash hit the news. For all those years, the U.S. Military and Government have maintained that it was nothing worthy of so much interest, “It was nothing but a weather balloon!” So why was and is there such effort to maintain a veil of secrecy and coordinated effort to suppress the original story and carry on with such a history of deception and misdirection?
If you haven’t heard of or read about the Roswell UFO Crash, then you have probably not heard of the many-layered cover-up carried out by the Government to hide the truth and mislead the public. You would think that all that effort by the authorities was carried out because they must have believed that the witnesses involved were a bunch of dumb, uneducated yokels who couldn’t identify cow dung, even if they had stepped in it.
Well, let me start with the very first witness, Mac Brazel, an old cowboy who was well acquainted with manure of the bovine variety. In his later years, he confessed that had he to do it all over again, he probably wouldn’t have told anybody, and most certainly, not the authorities, about what he found and would have kept the evidence and the story all to himself. But thanks to him, the Roswell UFO Crash became a worldwide sensation that is still floating around, waiting for a final verdict, thanks to the multi-layered cover-up that the U.S. Military and Government concocted.
I will try to unravel this dark web of secrecy and see what we find.
On Friday, July the fourth, 1947, Mac Brazel was sitting inside his small shack on the Foster sheep ranch where he was foreman, listening to claps of thunder. In the midst of all that clattering, he heard something that didn’t quite fit the pattern—a splintering boom, like some sort of explosion. The ranch was about thirty miles from the Roswell Army Airbase, and some distance further from the White Sands Testing Grounds. If you looked at a map of New Mexico, the ranch, the Roswell Army Airbase. and White Sands, form a perfect triangle.
On July the 4th 1947, the Military was already aware of the crashed UFO and the Alien occupants. They had actually been aware of the UFO since July the 2nd. As a matter of fact, a fellow named Ragsdale and his girlfriend had decided to go camping in the hills which just so happened, were overlooking the crash site. When they noticed the military caravan of trucks and 50 or so men, they decided to beat a hasty retreat, back through the hills and away from any roads. They didn’t tell their story for several years later.
Mac figured that a plane might have crashed, or the people at White Sands had exploded another one of their bombs. Although, at the time, he had thought that the explosion had to have been a lot closer by the clarity of the sound. In the darkness outside, he couldn’t see any signs of an explosion, so he decided to wait until morning before venturing outside and investigating the source of the late-night racket.
A neighbor kid, William Proctor, showed up the next day, July 5, 1947 and he and Brazel rode out in the general direction the sound of the explosion had come from. They didn’t have to ride very far because they soon discovered that the ground in front of them was littered with dull and shiny, metallic looking debris, extending about three quarters of a mile in front of them, in the direction of some hills. The debris field was also about half a mile wide, or so they guessed. Mac figured, some fairly large object, had blown into pieces, to cover such a large area. What could it have been? Brazel couldn’t even imagine. He picked up some of the strange metallic pieces and broken balsawood-light metal beams and discovered that although they were light weight, he could not break or bend them, nor could he burn them with his lighter. Even the thin foil-like strips were impossible to cut with his pocketknife.
The next day, July the 6th, Brazel drove his pickup to the sheriff’s office in Roswell and showed the box of debris to Sheriff George Wilcox, who then suggested that maybe, they should contact someone at the Roswell Army Airbase.
The call was forwarded to Major Jesse Marcel. When Sheriff Wilcox explained to Major marcel that an old cowboy named Mac Brazel had come across a field practically covered in strange metallic looking debris, Marcel decided that he had better head out to Brazel’s place for a look-see. So, the Major and another man from the base drove out to Brazel’s place and the next day, July the 7th, both men loaded up their vehicles with all the strange debris they could fit into them and drove back to Roswell Army Airbase.
Now, you and I know that the news media have a way of sniffing out stories, so Frank Joyce, a reporter for radio station KGFL in Roswell, got a whiff of Brazel’s tale from Sheriff Wilcox. Joyce and the station owner, Walt Whitmore, got Brazel to do an interview, which they recorded on a wire-recorder and were going to put it on the air the next morning. Unfortunately for them, the Military showed up and the whole idea was nixed, when the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) threatened Whitmore and Joyce by telling them that if they wanted to keep the radio station and their license, they had better not air that interview. Back then, the government had the power to muzzle the news media. The recorded interview was also confiscated.
To keep anyone from talking with Brazel, the US Military kept him incommunicado for seven or eight days, in one of the base barracks, under lock and key. The Military claimed that it was for his own good. Even once, when he was allowed to return home, the Military kept an eye on him, to make certain that he wouldn’t tell his story, to anyone. He did tell family members, behind closed doors, some of the details that had gone onto the wire recorder. The irony of Brazel’s story was, he never actually got to see the crashed UFO up-close, nor did he know where it had crashed, because by the time he was able to return home, all the evidence had been gathered up and flown away to parts unknown.
While all this was going on, the U.S. Military actually knew of the crash and the alien bodies and had already dispatched a convoy of vehicles and men to start gathering up all evidence of the crash as they had been monitoring the UFO (s) at several radar stations. In addition, an MP on guard duty had actually witnessed the flash of the explosion. One of the MPs on the recovery team got there just in time to rescue the one living member of the alien UFO crew. Interestingly enough, the MP, a Sgt. Gonzales, claimed that the alien had communicated with him, get this, in English. (More on this, later.)
Here is how the whole story started. Unbeknownst to the local population, a UFO or Unidentified Flying Object of some sort, had been picked up on radar at Roswell Army Airfield, White Sands testing grounds, Alamogordo, and Albuquerque, on or about July the second 1947. This piqued the interest of various high-ranking military officers, as the object was flitting about in an area that was classified as a no-fly zone for civilian and even commercial aircraft.The radar operators, at the time weren’t even certain of what exactly they were tracking. They tracked the UFO until the night of the fourth of July, when the object disappeared after a big blip on the radar screens in the middle of that nasty and unexpected electrical storm. The Military had a general idea of where the object had had gone down, and a convoy of Jeeps and trucks loaded with servicemen was immediately dispatched to the scene, which was about 35 miles north to northwest of the Roswell Airbase.
A number of civilians living in the general area who had also heard or seen the object flying overhead, then heard the crash itself, decided to go see what it was, but were escorted back to the main road and prevented by the military to get near the site. Of course, by this time, they had actually caught a glimpse of the crashed UFO and even the dead aliens. Some of the civilians who got a glimpse of the crashed flying vehicle, claimed that it was not round or saucer shaped, rather it looked more like a spaceship with bat-like wings.
Now, the reason that there was so little detail available about what exactly had crashed, for twenty to thirty years, was that the military had surrounded the crash site with all the trucks and jeeps, all facing out, with their headlights turned on. This ring of vehicles was in turn surrounded by armed MPs (Military Police), who had, in turn, been ordered to face away from all the action, to make certain that nobody without the proper clearance would get through and, they themselves wouldn’t see all that was going on. After a few hours, the MPs were relieved by a new unit and returned to base. This is how, when some had been found many years later, they were unable to give many details about the crash, even though they had been there.
One of those MPs, a Sergeant Gonzales, who had been at the crash site with the initial unit, claimed many years later that he had actually helped out of the crashed UFO, the only live Alien. Sgt. Gonzales also claimed that he communicated with the alien being, in English. I will try to explain in my conclusions, why this may be a curious little factoid.
While the recovery effort was on the way, the Military was already working on setting up two fake debris fields, close enough to some dirt roads, so that onlookers would be able to view the field before the MPs would push them back to the roads. They wanted the civilians to get close enough to be able see the balloon pieces and even allowed a photographer to take some shots from the road; close enough, but not too close.
The core group of 10 to 12 high-ranking military, some from Washington, some from White Sands, a couple of staff scientists, and two photographers, were the only ones allowed to get anywhere near the crashed UFO. This was the group that saw not only the craft, but the diminutive occupants. At first sight, observers thought they were looking at midgets; about four and a half to about five feet tall, with larger than human heads. This is when the stunned group realized that the occupants, four dead and one mortally wounded, were actually otherworldly, humanoid beings. The one ET that was alive, was actually seen walking into the base hospital, under his (her?) own power. He/she is the reason why, after many years, several witnesses were able to confirm that the crashed flying object from Roswell, New Mexico, had not in fact been one of our airplanes.
The gathering at the crash site had the flying object (which by the way, at this point turned out not to be a Flying Saucer, rather, it was more of an oval shaped Omnidirectional Flying Object), and all the debris from the site, packed up into the trucks and taken back to the Roswell Army Airbase, where they were immediately, on orders from Washington, packed into a B-25, B-26 or possibly a B-29 and flown to Andrews Army Airfield and then to Patterson Army Airfield (now Wright-Patterson Airforce base). The crates containing the five bodies (the fifth, the one ambulatory alien crew member, eventually succumbed to his injuries) were loaded onto a Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport aircraft and flown to Andrews as well. According to witnesses, this was done on the orders of Army Chief of Staff, Dwight Eisenhower, so that he would get his first look at an extraterrestrial entity. From Andrews, that crate was also flown to Patterson, although, the military threw up so many misdirections, the crates could have ended up somewhere else altogether, perhaps Area-51 or Hangar 18.
This is when, the misinformation campaign went into full swing.
First came “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region” on the front page of the Roswell Daily Record’s, Sunday edition of July 6th 1947, because that is what Major Jesse Marcel, the Intelligence officer of the 509th Roswell Bomber Group had determined, upon his initial inspection of the recovered debris. Within a few hours however, this story fell apart when Brigadier General Roger Ramey and Colonel Thomas J. DuBose pulled a switcheroo by substituting damaged weather balloon parts and pieces for the original pile of debris that Marcel had collected, and which had been confiscated and flown to parts unknown. According to multiple sources, a photographer for The Daily Record, J. Bond Johnson, was only able to take four photos of Ramey’s phony display, because in his hurry to get the shots, he had only brought along two photo plate holders (you can take two shots on each one of these old-fashioned photo plates) for his Speed-Graphic camera.
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Catch part II in the December 2019 issue of ALIVE Magazine.
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