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 disc.
In all probability this announcement – about capturing a flying disc – was the first and last true statement the military made about the event.
Within hours, General Ramey from Ft. Worth announced they had not captured a flying disk; it was just a weather balloon. (Because balloons generally leave debris fields spread over the better part of a square mile, and elite military officers can’t tell the difference.)
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. The station was sending out a teletype message about the events when it was interrupted from an unknown sender, who warned them to stop transmitting. The interview never aired.
What really crashed? Likely possibilities include the most popular idea – the crash of an extraterrestrial craft – or my conclusion – the “alien” idea was government disinformation to mask the fact that the Germans had developed advanced flying disks by 1945, and either: Americans were still experimenting on advanced aircraft designs with their German counterparts when various crashes occurred – or far worse, their was an unknown, independent research project funding Nazi scientists who escaped Germany and continued their work with stolen funds outside of U.S. control.
Pilot Kenneth Arnold, famous for coining the term “flying saucers” in 1947 even though he never said the craft looked round like saucers, just that they skipped like saucers – made a model to show what the craft he saw looked like:
Which looks a lot like some German designs:
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 humans have been crashing prototypes and we haven’t mastered the technology yet?
Wernher von Braun said the last major scheduled deception against the public would claim there is an alien threat and Earth at at risk of invasion. Rumors suggest we are close to being told this is the case. After 76 years of classification, all these questions would normally see answers become public knowledge – but the classification of the events around the Roswell crash was recently extended for another 75 years. Will there soon be disclosure, with our galactic neighbors portrayed as a dangerous threat? Time will tell how this story ends soon enough.
Until then, enjoy this brief deathbed confession from General Dubose who was involved: