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One of Roswell New Mexico's Now-Major
Industries:
THE
ROSWELL INCIDENT
by Jan Girand
The incident referred to--the alleged UFO crash--did not occur
in or near Roswell; facts tend to get skewered.
The old news of this happening became new news in the
1990s.
It began with a bang in early July 1997, with great fanfare and
publicity, on the 50th anniversary of the alleged incident
celebrated in Roswell. Ever since, word of the incident has
continued to reach larger international audiences. The plot--like
crowds visiting Roswell--thicken.
People love intrigue and unsolved mysteries. And many Americans
and foreigners love to hate the U.S. government. A governmental
cover-up they said? That fueled the curiosity of the
multitude.
The first well-known book on this subject, UFO CRASH AT
ROSWELL, written by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, was
published by Avon Books in 1991. The title of that book may have
been where the confusion began, since the crash was not at
Roswell, but was, instead, 75 miles away. Also, little green men
weren't found at that crash site. The story says those unique guys
were found at a site even further away, in southwest New Mexico.
However, the alleged cover-up did occur near Roswell, at the RAAF
(Roswell Army Air Force) base a few miles south of the community.
With Randle's and Schmitt's book in 1991, and the subsequent
internationally publicized UFO Festival in 1997, a legend and an
industry were born.
Randle and Schmitt interviewed hundreds of people; from facts
gathered, they wrote their book. Soon others conducted their own
investigations, also wrote about it and produced movies and
made-for-TV specials. This phenomenon and related incidents at
other New Mexico sites in the summer of 1947 began to be broadcast
world-wide in the 1990s.
The 1947 Roswell Incident, silenced for decades and called a
governmental cover-up by many, was finally brought out into the
open for the world to see and analyze for themselves.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Roswell's economy ebbed.
Main Street businesses closed, residential properties languished
on the market, the area's oil and gas industry barely
flowed.
Three local, well-known Roswellites--Walter G. Haut, W. Glenn
Dennis and J. Max Littell, two of whom were directly involved in
the 1947 Roswell Incident--joined together to establish the
International UFO Museum and Research Center at Roswell. Other
city fathers, including the mayor, knew a good thing for the
community when they saw it. The first annual UFO Festival landed
in Roswell July 5, 1997, launching Roswell's soaring UFO Tourism
Industry.
Here's the real deal (allegedly):
July 3, 1947, Mac Brazel, a ranch hand at the Foster Ranch near
Corona in Lincoln County, 75 miles northwest of Roswell, found a
large area of strange debris in his pasture after hearing what
sounded like a crash the previous night. With him on horseback
that day of discovery was a young neighbor boy, Timothy D.
Proctor. There were no bodies, only a wide-spread area of unusual
material. At first, Brazel and his neighbors assumed a
governmental experimental craft had crashed.
Sunday, July 6, Brazel made the trip into Roswell to report his
find. It was a long journey for those days of post- World War II
when gas and other aspects of transportation were scarce and
costly. He first stopped at the Chaves County Sheriff's Office,
and showed a sample of the debris to Sheriff George A Wilcox. The
sheriff suggested he report it to the nearby Army Air Base south
of town.
While Brazel was still at the station, a local radio announcer,
Frank Joyce, happened to call the sheriff's office looking for
news items to broadcast. Wilcox put Brazel on the phone and Joyce
interviewed him. Wilcox called the air base to report a rancher in
his office with parts of a flying saucer. Soon military officers,
including air intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, and USA
Colonel William Blanchard, arrived to examine the unique debris
and question Brazel.
Col Blanchard ordered Marcell and other military men to
accompany Brazel to the ranch and crash site. Additional military
personnel soon arrived to guard the large site, and to remove all
traces of the debris.
Marcel contacted 8th Air Force commander, USA Brigadier General
Roger Ramey. On July 8, Blanchard, acting on orders from
Washington DC, ordered the PIO (public information officer) Walter
Haut to issue a press release announcing the discovery of a
"flying disc." This official news release, published in
30 newspapers and broadcast on numerous radio stations on July 8,
said the finding of the 509th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force,
Roswell Army Air Field, was debris from the crash of a flying
disc.
Later, Brazel was held by the military for up to a week at the
RAAF base. He changed the story he told to the media. Others,
including the military, also changed their stories. Military
spokesmen and the government claimed the debris was from a weather
balloon, and they showed the public some weather balloon material
as proof. It was a cover-up, privately said witnesses then, and
later publicly proclaimed UFO historians.
UFO historians learned that another debris field had been
discovered a day earlier than the one near Corona. That one was
found near Magdalena, New Mexico, on the Plains of St. Agustin. It
had a more intact wrecked disc-shaped craft and also alien bodies.
Glenn Dennis, then a Roswell mortician, much later claimed he
was contacted by the RAAF asking about child-size coffins and
wanting advice on how to preserve bodies. He said that when he
went to the base hospital to deliver the small coffins, he
encountered a tense and strange atmosphere. While he was there, a
nurse he knew told him about an amazing but frightening autopsy on
an alien she had observed, and told him it was a dangerous,
closely guarded secret. According to Dennis, she seemed to have
disappeared soon after her mystifying encounter with him. However,
records later never proved this woman existed..
People later interviewed by authors Kevin Randle and Donald
Schmitt and others said alien bodies were secretly flown out of
the Roswell Army Air Field sometime during those early July 1947
days and nights. Some say those bodies were flown, for closer scrutiny,
to a top-secret military installation in Nevada called Area 51.
There is no Area 51 in New Mexico, much less around Roswell,
except in imaginatively named stores and on merchandise for the
public that loves mysteries and government cover-ups.
Which was it? Weather balloon, or a flying disc or similar type
UFO containing aliens that crashed on the Plains of St. Agustin, a
portion of which came to earth in a cow pasture near Corona? Will
we ever know for sure? There are credible people who believe they
do know. Regardless, the 1947 Roswell Incident has grown into an
important tourism industry for this community. The International
UFO Museum and Research Center was incorporated in 1991; since
then, several million people have passed through its doors.
 Entrance
of the UFO International Museum and Research Center--the horseback
figure greeting visitors is Mac Brazel, the cowboy who found
debris in his pasture July 5, 1947.
Also visit:
— An
overview of a new publishing company in Albuquerque.
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