On July 6, 1947, Rancher William “Mack” Brazel contacted Chaves County Sheriff Wilcox and described the unusual debris from something that crashed on his ranch. Wilcox called the local Roswell Army Air Force Base and Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer for the 509th Bomber Group (the only bomber group on Earth with atomic bombs) joined Wilcox in checking out Brazel’s ranch. Marcel soon called base commander Colonel Blanchard, who sent Marcel back with the base’s new CIC (Army Counterintelligence officer) Sheridan Cavitt. The pair of intelligence officers arrived just before dusk on July 6, and camped there to spend the 7th collecting debris from a field hundreds of yards wide and 3/4 of a mile long. On July 8, Colonel Blanchard announced to the world they had captured a flying disk.
Within hours, General Ramey from Ft. Worth announced they had not, and it was just a weather balloon.
On July 9, the local paper quoted Brazel saying he had helped collect weather balloons before and this was no weather balloon. The 509th bomber group had also repeatedly helped recover downed weather balloons, and should have recognized one – whenever they saw one. The owner of the local radio station, after interviewing Brazel for an hour, was told if he aired the interview his station would lose its FCC broadcasting license. It never aired. What really crashed? Likely possibilities include the most popular idea – the crash of an extraterrestrial craft – or my conclusion – the Germans had developed advanced flying disks by 1945, and Americans were still experimenting on advanced aircraft designs with their German counterparts when various crashes occurred. What’s more likely, that aliens with the technology to cross the stars to get to Earth keep crashing when they get here – or that we have been crashing prototypes and we haven’t mastered the technology yet?
After 75 years of classification, all these questions should become public knowledge – but the classification of the events around the Roswell crash was recently extended for another 75 years. Hmmmm. I’ll be covering the topic in much greater detail in an upcoming book I’m working on with Jay Wentz. We expect to have a few dozen chapters on various topics that are strange, mysterious, taboo, weird, or unsolved. The working title for our book, to watch for later this year:
The Schizophrenics Guide to the Real World, Volume 1
Until then, enjoy this brief deathbed confession from General Dubose who was involved:
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