7. SIZE OF DEBRIS FIELD, QUANTITIES OF DEBRIS ,
GOUGES, AND SIZE OF OBJECT
Major Jesse Marcel: Roswell chief of intelligence; long, narrow debris field. 3/4 mile long; lot of debris
Tommy Tyree: Mack Brazel ranch-hand; sheep detoured a mile around debris field
Bud Payne: Neighboring rancher; got to southern edge of debris field
M/Sgt. Louis Rickett: Roswell Army counterintelligence corp; gouge; large cleanup operation
Sgt. Earl Fulford: New! 2009 Aircraft mechanic; cleanup crew; square mile or 1/4 mile x 900 ft. area
Brig. Gen. Arthur Exon: Former C/O Wright-Patt.AFB; later overflew debris field area; gouges
Robin Adair: Associated Press photographer; tried to overfly debris field; gouge on ground
Jason Kellahin: AP reporter, large balloon crash site at Brazel's place
Bessie Brazel Schreiber: Daughter of Mack Brazel; football field size area
Phyllis Wilcox McGuire: Daughter of Sheriff George Wilcox; large burn area; football field size
Barbara Dugger: Granddaughter of Sheriff Wilcox; large burn area
Sheriff George Wilcox: United Press account of what Brazel reported; small, singular object
Sgt. Robert Porter: Accompanied Marcel to Fort Worth; small quantity of wrapped debris
Lt. Robert Shirkey: Roswell operations officer observed loading of Marcel's plane; boxes of debris
Sgt. Robert Smith: Air transport unit; involved in loading crates of debris into C-54's; debris cleanup
Sgt. Robert Slusher: Roswell B-29 flight engineer, unusual July 9 crate shipment; met by mortician
"Tim": Another crew member with Slusher; same story about crate and mortician
Charles Moore: Former Project Mogul balloon engineer; how balloon crashes spread out
Press reports (Brazel interview; Ramey 25-foot description), FBI telegram, USAF Roswell report
(F&B) "When we [Marcel & Cavitt] arrived at the crash site, it was amazing to see the vast amount of area it covered. It was nothing that hit the ground or exploded [on] the ground. It's something that must have exploded above ground, traveling perhaps at a high rate of speed, we don't know. But it scattered over an area of about three quarters of a mile long, I would say, and fairly wide, several hundred feet wide."
(R&S2) [It was clear to him that ] something ... must have exploded above the ground and fell. [With Cavitt's help he was able to] determine which direction it came from and which direction it was heading. "It was in that pattern ... You could tell where it started and where it ended by how it was thinned out .. I could tell that it was thicker where we first started looking and it was thinning out was we went southwest."
(B&M) "I saw a lot of wreckage but not complete machine. Whatever it was had to have exploded in the air above ground level. It had disintegrated before it hit the ground. The wreckage was scattered over an area of about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. ... We heard about it on July 7 [actually July 6] when we got a call from the county sheriff's office at Roswell. ...The sheriff said that Brazel had told him that something had exploded over Brazel's ranch and that there was a lot of debris scattered around."
(Pflock, 1979 Bob Pratt interview for the "National Enquirer") "[The material was scattered] about as far you could see -- three-quarters [of a] mile long and two hundred to three hundred feet wide. I tell you what I surmised. One thing I did notice -- nothing actually hit the ground, bounced on the ground. It was something that must have exploded above ground and fell. ... [It was] scattered all over -- just like you'd explode something above the ground and [it would] just fall to the ground. One thing that I was impressed with was that it was obvious you could just about determine which direction it came from and which direction it was heading. It was traveling from northeast to southwest. It was in that pattern. You could tell where it started and where it ended by how it thinned out. Although I did not cover the entire area this stuff was in, I could tell that it was thicker where we first started looking, and it was thinning out as we went southwest."
"He [Brazel] took us to that place, and we started picking up fragments, which was foreign to me. I'd never seen anything like that. I didn't know what we were picking up. I still don't know. As of this day, I still don't know what it was. And I brought as much of it back to the base as I could and -- Well, some ingenious young GI thought he'd try to match a few pieces together and see if he could match something. I don't think he ever matched two pieces. It was so fragmented. It was strewn over a wide area, I guess maybe three-quarters of a mile long and a few hundred feet wide. So we loaded it up and we came back to the base."
(Corley) "It was maybe a mile long and several hundred feet wide of debris."
(Associated Press stories, July 9, 1947) "It had been found three weeks previously by a New
Mexico rancher, W. W. Brazell [sic], on his property about 85 miles northwest of Roswell. Brazell, whose ranch is 30 miles from the nearest telephone and has no radio, knew nothing about flying discs when he found the broken remains of the weather device scattered over a square mile of his land. He bundled the tinfoil and broken wooden beams of the kite and the torn synthetic rubber remains on the balloon together and rolled it under some brush, according to Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, Houma, La., 509th Bomb Group intelligence officer at Roswell, who brought the device to Fort Worth."
(Stringfield, SR #2, 1980, based on phone interview with Marcel) "The debris of an apparent metallic aerial device, or craft, that had exploded in the air or crashed, was first made known by a sheep rancher who found fragments of metal and other material on his 8000 acre property. When he informed the Air Force base in Roswell of his discovery, Major J. M. and aides was dispatched to the area for investigation. There he found many metal fragments and what appeared to be 'parchment' strewn in a one mile square area."
(F&B) [Describing the quantity of debris he transported by B-29 to Fort Worth] "[There was] half a
B-29 full."
TOMMY TYREE
(Tyree was a ranch-hand hired by Mack Brazel soon after the incident)
(R&S1) [Tyree said that] Brazel was angry about the debris because the sheep wouldn't cross the field. Brazel had to drive them around the field to get them to water. It took him a mile or more out of the way.
(R&S2) [Tyree] said that Brazel had been annoyed because the material formed a barrier that the sheep refused to cross. Brazel had to drive them around the debris field to get them to water.
BILL BRAZEL JR.
(B&M) "...a terrible lightning storm came up. He [Brazel Sr.] said it was the worst lightning storm he had ever seen...--strike after strike. He said it seemed strange that the lightning kept wanting to strike the same spots time and again, almost as if there was something attracting it to those spots--he thought underground mineral deposits or something. Anyway, in the middle of this storm there was an odd sort of explosion, not like the other thunder, but different. ...he just guessed it was some freak lightning strike. ...the next morning while riding out over the pasture to check on some sheep, he came across this collection of wreckage scattered over a patch of land about a quarter mile long or so, and several hundred feet wide. He said to me once that it looked that whatever this stuff had come from had blown up. He also said that from the way this wreckage was scattered, you could tell it was traveling "an airline route to Socorro," which is off to the southwest of the ranch. ...He showed me the place where this stuff had come down, but of course you couldn't see anything there since the Air Force had had a whole platoon of men out there picking up every piece and shred they could find."
(R&S1) They came out on the side of a hill. In front of them was a shallow, narrow valley with a rounded, rocky area at one end. The other end opened gradually until it was nothing more than a pasture sloping down into another, bigger valley. "The gouge started up there and moved down in that direction," said Brazel. He described the gouge as running from the northwest to the southeast. It looked as if the thing had hit and bounced, scattering debris in the field. The gouge wasn't very deep but was about ten feet wide in places. The whole thing was about five hundred feet long.
BUD PAYNE
(Payne was a neighboring rancher. Payne said he tried to get on the debris field, but was turned away at the periphery by guards.)
(R&S1) Payne took them directly to the crash site. Bill Brazel had taken Schmitt and Randle to the northern end of it and Payne drove to the southern end. In fact, the expedition in September hadn't removed all the flags they had planted. Payne stopped inside those flags, on the same three-quarter mile strip of New Mexico. It was further confirmation of the exact location of the debris field.
M/SGT. LEWIS RICKETT
[Arrived at the debris site on July 8, after much of it had been cleaned up.]
(Pflock) Rickett remembered seeing only the foil-like debris and mentioned its peculiar characteristics of unusual lightness and strength. He also said, "There wasn't very much of it, maybe 40 or 50 small pieces."
(R&S1, Mark Rodeghier interview) "The MP's, four or five in the first group, were close to the gouge. There were 25 or 30 others scattered around the perimeter. The Provost Marshall didn't want anyone just wandering up on it."
SGT. EARL FULFORD (New! 2009)
[Aircraft mechanic at Roswell base; part of mop-up clean-up crew of 12-15 men plus several MPs, the Provost Marshall, and Roswell intelligence chief Marcel, who returned from Fort Worth the night of July 9. Probably at debris field area on July 10, after most of the debris had already been cleaned up.]
(New, 2010! Interview UFO Hunters, aired 4/9/09; 6:00 into video) "[We] picked up some debris of very unusual shape and feel and appearance... We picked up some material here [debris field] in a one square mile area... [for] the bigger part of a day. [a fan-shaped area spreading out over one square mile] ...The vehicles all drove up and like formed a circle. We started walking in one direction. We went about 10, 12, 15 [feet] apart where you could see what I could see and I could see what you could see, so we weren't missing anything. ...I would say I picked up 10, 12, maybe 15 pieces, but once it went into those bags, we never seen it again. [Who took possession of the bags?] They were military police. ...They told me up there if I showed anyone or told anyone, I was in deep trouble. (see also Fulford's "memory foil" descriptions and Fulford's multi-saucer sighting over Roswell base late June or early July 1947)
(Interview, OpenMinds forum, 2/10/2008) "They sent us out there and we lined up across an area of, I’d say eight or nine hundred feet wide ,and walked through in a straight line so you could always see the man on your left and the man on your right, and picked up everything that was there that didn’t look like it belonged there. ...I believe it was close to a quarter of a mile. It was up an arroyo and we went up one side of it, and then down the other side. I believe it was close to a quarter of a mile in length that we walked, I would say a total of a quarter of a mile wide. [Asked about wind maybe blowing very lightweight material around] ...Well, it probably had blown around, and that was probably why we policed-up a big area."
"...I don’t think anyone had a sackful of anything, but everyone picked up whatever he seen, which was for the most part very small and you could just drop it in a sack. ...I would guess [that I personally picked up] maybe half a dozen pieces, maybe as much as 8 or 10. ...We handed them [the sacks] to the MPs and they threw them in the back of a carry-all. A couple of the MPs rode back there, got in the back, and a couple of them got in the front with the driver and another guy."
"[I thought there were previous clean-up crews] because when [his friend] George [Houck] went up there to pick up the so-called crash [with a low-boy flat-bed truck], there was a crew that went up there with him who Major Marcel took up there. And I don’t know what all they got that day, but I think by the next day they figured we’d better go back and really police the area up real good. ...I think anything solid was picked up the day before and was on that truck. But as soon as the truck was back, the thing started getting out of hand and they started trying to put a lid on it and I think they sent us back up there just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything that might get to the media."
"We knew we were getting something, but we already heard the rumors start at the base. We thought that these were just the pieces of some kind of a craft that had crashed up there. But now I will say this. I don’t remember seeing that many human tracks across the area where we were policing. ...There was some tire tracks which we took to be the low-boy and Marcel’s jeep from the day before ...that is pretty hard surface. And it doesn’t make much impression, you know, when you walk on it or drive on it. It seemed obvious to me that it was something of weight there."
[Asked about possible gouges or scrape marks from an accident] "I don’t remember seeing anything, any markings on the ground, or anything there."
WALT WHITMORE JR.
(B&M, 1980) Several days later [after the military had left], Whitmore, Jr., ventured out to the site and found a stretch of about 175-200 yards of pastureland uprooted in a sort of fan-like pattern with most of the damage at the narrowest part of the fan. He said that whatever it was "just cleaned it [the area] out ... The Army Air Force searched around out there for two days and cleaned out everything."
"RELUCTANT" [WALT WHITMORE JR.]
(Pflock, Oct. 1992) "...Brazel sketched a map for me, showing which roads to take and how to find the site. I drove there [from Roswell] along in my 1946 Chevrolet, a distance of 65 to 70 miles. No one was there when I arrived, I do not remember seeing any sign that anyone had been on the site, and I saw no one else while I was there. Although I now believe the Army was already aware of Brazel's find at the time, I am certain I was on the site before any military personnel got there. The site was a short distance from a ranch road. The debris covered a fan- or roughly triangle-shaped area, which was about 10 to 12 feet wide at what I thought was the top end. From there it extended about 100 to 150 feet, widening out to about 150 feet at the base. This area was covered with many, many bits of material. The material was very light. I could see it blowing in the wind. Many pieces had been blown out of the main area, and I could see them stuck to bushes as far as a city block away."
(Exon, stationed at Wright Field, flew over the site of the debris field in Nov., 1947. He became commanding officer of Wright-Patterson AFB in 1964.)
(R&S2) "[It was] probably part of the same accident, but [there were] two distinct sites. One assuming that the thing, as I understand it, as I remember flying the area later, that the damage to the vehicle seemed to be coming from the southeast to the northwest, but it could have been going in the opposite direction, but it doesn't seem likely. So the farther northwest pieces found on the ranch, those pieces were mostly metal. ...I remember auto tracks leading to the pivotal sites and obvious gouges in the terrain."
ROBIN ADAIR
(Adair was an Associated Press teletype operator sent to Roswell from El Paso to cover the story. Chartering a plane, Adair flew over the debris field on July 8.)
(R&S2) "We could make out a lot of stuff ... looked like burnt places ... You could tell that something had been there. [The field was large and] I remember four indications ... It was rather hard to line them up from the plane ... I wanted to find out if they ran east to west or north to south. I never did get it square in my mind. [Adair could see the gouge and tracks on the ground] You couldn't see them too good from the air ... Apparently the way it cut into [the ground], whatever hit the ground wasn't wood or something soft. It looked like metal. [Adair didn't think that it had skipped as it hit the ground. It was his impression that it had come down flat.] Right straight down and right straight back up when it left. It took off the same damned way. It didn't side off or slide off. It went straight up just like it came straight down. [Adair said that he saw two sites] One of them wasn't very distinctive. The other was plainer."
(AP reporter Kellahin was dispatched from Albuquerque to Roswell to cover the story. He had insufficient time to make it to Brazel's place as claimed, and may be describing some other site with a balloon crash near the main highway leading into Roswell. Contrast with Adair's story above, where Adair said he flew in from El Paso and wasn't with Kellahin.)
(Pflock, affidavit, 9/20/93) "Brazel took Adair and me to the pasture where he made his discovery. When we arrived, there were three or four uniformed Army officers searching some higher ground about a quarter to a half mile away. Apparently, they had been there for some time. There was quite a lot of debris on the site -- pieces of silver colored fabric, perhaps aluminized cloth. Some of the pieces had sticks attached to them. I though they might be the remains of a high-altitude balloon package, but I did not see anything, pieces of rubber or the like, that looked like it could have been part of the balloon itself. The way the material was distributed, it looked as though whatever it was from came apart as it moved along through the air."
BESSIE BRAZEL SCHREIBER
(B&M) [She described the wreckage as] so much debris scattered over pastureland. "There was what appeared to be pieces of heavily waxed paper and a sort of aluminum-like foil. ...Some of the metal-foil pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them...It was very light in weight, but there sure was a lot of it. ...We never found any other pieces of it afterwards -- after the military was there. Of course we were out there quite a lot over the years, but we never found so much as a shred. The military scraped it all up pretty well."
(Pflock, affidavit 9/22/93) "In July, 1947, right around the Fourth, dad found a lot of debris scattered over a pasture . . . Dad was concerned because the debris was near a surface-water stock tank. He thought having it blowing around would scare the sheep and they would not water. . . . We went on horseback and took several feed sacks to collect the debris. . . There was a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seems to me now to have been about the size of a football field. There may have been additional material spread out more widely by the wind, which was blowing quite strongly. . . . [I do not] remember seeing gouges in the ground or any other signs that anything may have hit the ground hard. . . We spent several hours collecting the debris and putting it in sacks. I believe we filled about three sacks, and we took them back to the ranch house. We speculated a bit about what the material could be. I remember dad saying, "Oh, it's just a bunch of garbage. . . . I do remember they [the military] took the sacks of debris with them."
PHYLLIS WILCOX McGUIRE
(daughter of Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox and wife Inez Wilcox)
(VIDEO1) [quoting her father when Brazel first came to his office]: "He had some material with him ... which I did not know what it was. ...He said that he had sent some deputies out there and they had seen some things. They had seen a corral that had some of the material in it and they had seen a large burnt spot on some grass about the size of a football field."
BARBARA DUGGER
(granddaughter of George and Inez Wilcox)
(F&B) "[My grandmother told me that my grandfather] went out there to the site; there was a big burned area and he saw debris. It was in the evening."
SHERIFF GEORGE WILCOX
(From United Press teletype message, about 4 PM, MDT, July 8, 1947. Note: The first press release about the recovery of a Roswell flying disc was at 3:26 PM, MDT. By the time of the following wire message, Wilcox was already giving out a debris description matching the military's radar target story. When pressed at some other time by an Associated Press reporter for details on what Brazel had found, Wilcox begged off and said that he was "working with those fellows at the base." The Wilcox family later claimed that the military threatened the entire family with death and the following reported statements, like Brazel's, were coerced. See also above contradictory account of Wilcox's daughter, Phyllis McGuire, of her father telling her of a large burned area, and in the memory foil section that Brazel actually brought in some of the strange "memory foil" that resembled "tinfoil" but wasn't. )
(R&S2, Pflock, UP stories) Sheriff George Wilcox quoted Brizell [sic] as saying that "it more or less seemed like tinfoil." Wilcox said that Brizell related that the disc was broken somewhat--apparently from the fall. The sheriff said that Brizell described the object about as large as a safe in the sheriff's office. He added that the safe was about three and one-half by four feet.
[M/Sgt Robert Porter was a B-29 flight engineer with the 830th Bomb Squadron. He happens to be Loretta Proctor's brother. Porter accompanied Marcel from Roswell Army AAF to Carswell AAF, Fort Worth, Texas, in the early afternoon of July 8. The material he refers to is probably the crash debris gathered by Marcel and Cavitt on July 7.]
(F&B) "We flew these pieces. [Some officers in the crew] told us it was parts of a flying saucer. The packages were in wrapping paper, one triangle-shaped about two and a half feet across the bottom, the rest in smaller, shoebox-sized packages. [They were in] brown paper with tape. It was just like I picked up an empty package, very light. The loaded triangle-shaped package and three shoebox-sized packages would have fit into the trunk of a car. On board were Lieutenant Colonel Payne Jennings [deputy commander of Roswell] and Major Marcel. Captain Anderson said it was from a flying saucer."
(Pflock, FUFOR, Affidavit 6/7/91) "On this occasion, I was a member of the crew which flew parts of what were told was a flying saucer to Fort Worth. The people on board included ... and Maj. Jesse Marcel. Capt. William E. Anderson said it was from a flying saucer. After we arrived, the material was transferred to a B-25. I was told they were going to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. I was involved in loading the B-29 with the material, which was wrapped in packages with wrapping paper. One of the pieces was triangle-shaped, about 2 1/2 feet across the bottom. The rest were in small packages, about the size of a shoe box. The brown paper was held with tape. The material was extremely lightweight. When I picked it up, it was just like picking up an empty package. We loaded the triangle shaped package and three shoe box-sized packages into the plane. All of the packages could have fit into the trunk of a car. ...When we came back from lunch, they told us they had transferred the material to a B-25. They told us the material was a weather balloon, but I'm certain it wasn't a weather balloon..."
(B&M) ...She [Loretta Proctor] recalls Porter [her brother] saying that he had asked several of the other men on the flight what all the secrecy was about and whether the material they had under wraps in the cargo hold was really a flying saucer. He was told: "That's just what it is and don't ask any more questions." He added that he didn't know for sure whether it was Brazel's material or something else. Porter confirmed his sister's account via a telephone interview in mid-July 1979 and also added that whatever was in the cargo hold was escorted by an armed guard which had been assigned to it at Roswell.
(As the acting operations officer on the afternoon of July 8, 1947, Shirkey saw the loading of the B-29 flying Marcel and the debris he collected to Gen. Ramey at Fort Worth.)
(Pflock) He remembers standing in the operations office doorway with Blanchard, watching Major Marcel and several others quickly pass through the building to the waiting B-29. ...Marcel and another member of the group carried open cardboard boxes filled with debris, including what appeared to be pieces of metal, "brushed stainless steel in color," and an "I-beam" about two feet long with peculiar markings on it. One of the other men carried a piece of metal-like material, measuring about 18 by 24 inches. Shirkey also recalls he saw packages wrapped in brown paper being loaded from a staff car directly into the aircraft on the ramp. Shirkey says he later heard all the material was from a crashed flying saucer.
(Pflock, FUFOR, Affidavit 5/30/91) "Several days later, a B-25 was scheduled to take something to Ft. Worth. This was the second flight during this period: the third was a B-29 piloted by Oliver W. "Pappy" Henderson directly to Wright-Patterson. I learned later that a Sergeant and some airmen went to the crash site and swept up everything, including bodies. The bodies were laid out in Hanger 84. Henderson's flight contained all that material.
(Shirkey, p. 72) With this, Colonel Blanchard stepped into the hallway and waved his arm to several men who had been waiting outside the street-side door to come on through the building. ...As the men walked along the hall, I could see that most of them carried cardboard boxes. ...Standing only three feet from the passing procession, we saw boxes full of aluminum-looking metal pieces being carried to the B-29. Major Marcel came along carrying an open box full of what seemed to be scrap metal. It obviously was not aluminum: it did not shine nor reflect like the aluminum on American military airplanes. And sticking up in one corner of the box being carried by Major Marcel was a small "I-beam" with hieroglyphic-like markings on the inner flange, in some kind of weird color, not black, not purple, but a close approximation of the two. Next, a man in civilian dress who was carrying a piece of metal under his left arm... This piece was about the size of a poster drawing board -- very smooth, almost glass-like, with torn edges. After passing the boxes up to someone inside the plane, they all climbed the ladder inside the wheel well.
[Robert Smith was a member of the First Air Transport Unit, which operated Douglas C-54 Skymaster four-engined cargo planes out of the Roswell AAF. He was interviewed in 1991.]
(F&B) A lot of people began coming in all of a sudden because of the official investigation. Somebody said it was a plane crash, but we heard from a man in Roswell that it was not a plane crash, it was something else, a strange object. There was another indication that something serious was going on. One night, when we were coming back to Roswell, a convoy of trucks covered with canvas passed us. When they got to the [airfield] gate, they headed over to this hangar on the east end, which was rather unusual. The truck convoy had red lights and sirens. My involvement in the incident was to help load crates of debris into the aircraft. We all became aware of the event when we went to the hangar on the east side of the ramp. There were a lot of people in plain clothes all over the place. They were inspectors, but they were strangers on the base. When challenged, they replied they were here on Project So-and-So, and flashed a card, which was different from a military ID card.
We were taken to the hangar to load crates. There was a lot of farm dirt on the hangar floor. We loaded [the crates] on flatbeds and dollies. Each crate had to be checked as to width and height. We had to know which crates went on which plane. We loaded crates on three [or] four C-54s. We weren't supposed to know their destination, but we were told they were headed north. . . .There were armed guards around during loading of our planes, which was unusual at Roswell. There was no way to get to the ramp except through armed guards. There were MPs on the outskirts, and our personnel were between them and the planes. The largest [crate] was roughly twenty feet long, four to five feet high, and four to five feet wide. It took up an entire plane. It wasn't that heavy, but it was a large volume. The rest of the crates were two or three feet long and two feet square or smaller. [. . . All I saw was a little piece of material. . . .] The sergeant who had the piece of material said [it was like] the material in the crates. The entire loading took at least six, perhaps eight hours. Lunch was brought to us, which was unusual. The crates were brought to us on flatbed dollies, which was also unusual. Officially, we were told it was a crashed plane, but crashed planes usually were taken to the salvage yard, not flown out. I don't think it was an experimental plane, because not too many people in that area were experimenting with planes. I'm convinced that what we loaded was a UFO that got into mechanical problems. Even with the most intelligent people, things go wrong.(R&S1) Once the field had been photographed, the troops who had been brought in to search moved in. According to Robert Smith, a member of the 1st Air Transport Unit at Roswell, the soldiers walked across the field, one side to the other, collecting the biggest, easiest to spot pieces. Some of the men had wheelbarrows, and once they were loaded they were pushed to a central collection point near one of the sentries.
(S/Sgt Robert Slusher was assigned to the 393rd Bomb Squadron. He was interviewed in 1991)
(F&B) [On or about July 9, 1947... he was aboard a B-29 that taxied to the bomb-loading area, located far from the main part of the base for safety reasons. There they loaded a single crate he estimated was twelve feet long, five feet wide, and four feet high. There were MPs on board, Slusher said, and they were armed, suggesting the crate contained something more exciting than canned hams or office supplies.] ... There was a rumor that the crate had debris from the crash. Whether there were any bodies, I don't know. The crate had been specially made; it had no markings.
(Pflock, FUFOR, Affidavit, 5/23/93) "On July 9, 1947, I boarded a B-29 which taxied to the bomb area on the base to get a crate, which we loaded into the forward bomb bay. Four armed MPs guarded the crate, which was approximately four feet high, five feet wide, and 12 feet long. We departed Roswell at approximately 4:00 PM for Fort Worth [later Carswell AFB]. ... On arrival at Fort Worth we were met by six people, including three MPs. They took possession of the crate. The crate was loaded on to a flatbed weapons carrier and hauled off. Their MPs accompanied the crate. One officer present was a major, the other a 1st lieutenant. The sixth person was an undertaker who had been a classmate of a crewman on our flight, Lt. Felix Martucci. ... After returning to Roswell, we realized that what was in the crate was classified. There were rumors that they had carried debris from a crash. Whether there were any bodies, I don't know. The crate had been specially made; it had no markings.
("Tim" was on the same B-29 flight as Robert Slusher. He was with the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron,)
(SR#6, 1991) "The sergeant in charge of the range asked us if we had heard about the "flying disc" that had crashed out in the desert. Twice more before leaving the skeet range, we heard reports of a spaceship with bodies inside that had been found on a ranch in the area. ... We were positioned so the front bomb-bay was directly over the pit which was covered with a large tarp. But no atomic bomb was in the pit that afternoon. When the canvas was removed by the loading crew, all we could see was a very large wooden box. ( [The box] was made of wood ... and was unpainted and unmarked as though hastily constructed. Fitting snugly into the bomb-bay, its approximate size: 5 ft. high, 4 ft. wide and about 15 ft. long.) ... Once the load was secured in the bomb-bay, four military policemen went inside and took positions at each corner of the box. I think two of them were majors, and one a lieutenant. The fourth man was an NCO. ... One of the crew, a very outspoken individual, said on the way home, that we were now a "part of history." He went on to say, he knew it was the disc and remains of the flight crew because he had seen a man he recognized in the reception group. This man was a mortician by military specialty."
CPT. SHERIDAN CAVITT
(Head of the Army Counter-Intelligence Corp at Roswell, he accompanied Marcel to the debris field. Cavitt told a highly inconsistent story, originally claiming to never being at Roswell or never being involved. His following account of the tiny crash site is contradicted by everybody else including Mack Brazel's account, and is in stark contradiction to the A.F.s present-day giant Mogul balloon theory. Cavitt basically retold the original 1947 weather balloon cover story.)
(USAF, Atch. 17, Affidavit, typed by USAF OSI counterintelligence officer, Col. Richard Weaver), "The area of this debris was very small, about 20 feet square, and the material was spread on the ground, but there was no gouge or crater or other obvious signs of impact. I remember recognizing this material as being consistent with a weather balloon. We [Marcel and Cavitt] gathered up some of this material, which would easily fit into one vehicle."
(USAF, Atch. 18, Interview with Weaver) "We [Rickett and Cavitt] went out to this site. There went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil, something of that type. And we gathered up some of it. I don't know whether we even tried to get all of it. It wasn't scattered .... extensively. Like it didn't go along the ground and splatter off some here and some there. We gathered up some of it and took it back to the base and I remember I had turned it over to Marcel."
Q: When you said the wreckage wasn't very much ... was it as long as your house here, or just a small little clump.
A: Maybe as long as this room is wide.
Q: So, twenty feet maybe?
A: Some here, some here, some here. No concentration of it. No marks in the ground, dug up, anything hidden, or anything like that...
Q: Is this about the extent of the material? [showing photos of weather balloon in Gen. Ramey's office]... Or was there large...could you fill up an airplane with it?
A: Oh, good God! You couldn't fill up (unintelligible) with it.
CHARLES B. MOORE
(Moore isn't a direct Roswell witness, but an expert on Mogul balloons, being one of the original engineers. He has recently been caught hoaxing a trajectory calculation to take his hypothesized lost Mogul to the Brazel ranch crash site.)
(B&M, 1979) [When asked whether the Roswell device might have been a weather or other scientific balloon, Moore replied] "Based on the description you just gave me [large gouge, large debris field, large quantities of debris], I can definitely rule this out. There wasn't a balloon in use back in '47, or even today for that matter, that could have produced debris over such a large area or torn up the ground in any way. I have no idea what such an object might have been, but I can't believe a balloon would fit such a description."
(USAF, Interview, 1994) "...It's my opinion that the thing that caused the debris that was picked up was probably from a cluster of meteorological balloons carrying a cluster of [radar] targets. When something like the idea of a cluster balloon was not only to carry the weight, but was also to keep the target in the air for a long time. If one balloon burst, we still would have enough buoyancy for awhile to keep the thing airborne. When it would come to the ground, this would drag along the ground and get shredded, but this would still be carried downwind until another balloon would burst, whereupon this one would start getting shredded. So I think the explanation of why things were over such a large area was, indeed, because it was a cluster, it was multiple targets and cluster balloons.
Q: Of course the issue of the large area has been different in different reports. Different people have stated the 200 yards, Cavitt in his descriptions, described it in terms of his living room, which was not that large.
A: Even a single target, if it came down, wouldn't have filled a single living room, but a multiple target, if dragged sideways and then blown transversally by any later winds, could have filled a reasonable area.
(Article by John G. Norris) Army Air Force officials here were as flabbergasted as the rest of the world. But under the personal direction of Lieut. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, acting AAF chief, who dropped into the Washington AAF public information headquarters in the midst of the excitement, they burned up the wires to Texas and New Mexico...
They got from Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, Eighth Air Force Commander, a description of the object. It was "of very flimsy construction -- almost like a box kite", made of wood and with a cover "like tinfoil"...
Ramey said he hadn't actually seen it himself as yet. He went to take a look, and called back that it was about 25 feet in diameter. He said he was shipping it on to Wright Field, Ohio, but would have one of the meteorological officers look at it first.
AAF headquarters later revealed that a "security lid" has been clamped on all but the sketchiest details of the discovery.
AAF spokesmen would say only that the "saucer" was a flimsily-constructed, kite-like object measuring about 25 feet in diameter and covered with a material resembling tinfoil
A telephonic report from Brig. Gen. Roger B. Ramey, commander of the eighth air force at Fort Worth, Tex., said the purposed "saucer" was badly battered when discovered by a rancher at Corona, 75 miles northwest of Roswell, N.M.
Ramey scoffed at the possibility that the object could have been piloted or that it could have obtained the supersonic speeds credited to the "flying saucers" allegedly spotted in recent weeks.
He reported that the object was too lightly constructed to have carried anyone and that there was no evidence that it had had a power plant of any sort.
It bore no identification marks, and Ramey emphasized that no one had seen it in flight.
AAF sources ruled out the possibility that it might have been an army weather-kite. Helium balloons have been used for weather recording for the past seven or eight years.
They said it had been sent to Fort Worth by superfortress for trans-shipment to the AAF experimental center at Dayton.
AAF commanders in New Mexico refused to permit the object to be photographed on the grounds that it was "high level stuff," although Ramey indicated he was not attaching too great importance to the find pending investigation.
The Roswell announcement came from Col. William H. Blanchard, commanding officer of the Roswell army air base, who specifically described the discovery as "a flying disc."
(10:00 PM, July 8, 1947)
(R&S2) ...General Ramey described the object as being of flimsy construction, almost like a box kite. He says that it was so battered that he was unable to determine whether it had a disk form, and he does not indicate its size. Ramey says that so far as he can determine, no one saw the object in the air, and he describes it as being made of some sort of tinfoil. Other army officials say that further information indicates that the object had a diameter of 20 to 25 feet, and nothing in the apparent construction indicated any capacity for speed, and there was no evidence of a power plant...
(7:17 PM, EDT, July 8, 1947, based on information provided by Fort Worth intelligence officer Maj. Edwin Kirton, probably from Gen. Ramey)
(B&M, R&S2, Pflock) ...The disc was hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a balloon by cable, which balloon was approximately twenty feet in diameter. Major Curtan [sic] further advised that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out this belief..."
(Information provided by Mac Brazel, interviewed the evening of July 8, after being detained by military.)
(F&B, USAF) "[Brazel thought that the material]...might have been as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that is how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds."
(The following account of Brazel's interview was written by A.P. reporter Jason Kellahin, dispatched from Albuquerque to cover the story)
"He described his find as consisting of large numbers of pieces of paper covered with a foil-like substance, and pieced together with small sticks much like a kite. Scattered with the materials over an area about 200 yards across were pieces of gray rubber. All the pieces were small."
USAF REPORT
(Note: The following statement was apparently based on statements given by Mac Brazel and printed in Roswell Daily Record article above. In this article, he recanted much of the story previously given to friends and the media. He was being illegally detained by the military and was apparently under a lot of pressure.)
From the rather benign description of the "event" and the recovery of some material as described in the original newspaper accounts, the "Roswell Incident" has since grown to mythical (if not mystical) proportions in the eyes and minds of some researchers, portions of the media and at least part of the American public. There are also now several major variations of the "Roswell story." For example, it was originally reported that there was only recovery of debris from one site. This has since grown from a minimal amount of debris recovered from a small area to airplane loads of debris from multiple huge "debris fields." [Note: No accounts describe "multiple huge debris fields"--only one, but with a separate main craft crash site. This is a good example of the lying and inaccuracy found in the AF's propaganda report.]
1st-LT. JAMES McANDREW (Air Force researcher)
(USAF, Atch. 32) "The balloon that was found on the Foster Ranch consisted of as many as 23 350 gram balloons spaced at 20 foot intervals, several radar targets (3 to 5), plastic ballast tubes, parchment parachutes, a black "cutoff" box containing portions of a weather instrument and a sonabuoy."
