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Roswell, New Mexico - UFO Capital of the World!
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About Roswell
1947 UFO Crash
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The Events
1947 UFO Crash near Roswell, New Mexico
These are some of the stories that have been told over the years
about the Roswell Incident.
Numerous additions, contradictions, refutations, revisions, and denials
have surfaced since 1947. Stop in at the UFO Museum to see which have
been most recently supported or debunked —or whether new ones have
appeared.
Public interest in UFOs peaked during the summer of 1947. Although World
War II was over, Cold War tensions were escalating and sightings of
strange objects in the sky grabbed headlines around the country. In
early July radar operators around New Mexico began reporting strange
objects on their screens and unusual malfunctions in their equipment.
~ ~ ~
Several people saw a crashed saucer containing dead aliens on the Plains
of San Augustin near Magdalena, New Mexico, 200 miles (320 km) west of
Roswell in July 1947.
~ ~ ~
In early July 1947 Roswell Army Air Field workers were sent to a
desolate rocky site about 25 miles (40 km) north of Roswell now owned by
the Corn family where they found a crashed saucer-shaped aircraft and
dead aliens. They were ordered to close off the area, gather up all the
debris and bodies, and return everything to the Army Air Field in
Roswell.
~ ~ ~
In early July 1947 Glenn Dennis, a mortician at Ballard Funeral Home,
received two telephone calls from the RAAF Mortuary Officer. In his
first call the officer asked Dennis if the funeral home stocked
child-sized caskets that could be hermetically sealed. During the second
call he asked about preparing and preserving tissue. Both times he
indicated that his questions were just routine, for future reference.
Later that same day, Dennis received a call to transport an injured
airman to the RAAF, as Ballard’s also operated the town ambulance. When
he delivered the airman to the RAAF hospital he noticed strange debris
inside another ambulance parked beside the entrance. As he entered the
building, Dennis encountered a nurse he knew, Naomi Selff, who looked
shaken. She told him to leave quickly, and two other military men
reinforced the command, even threatening him.
The next morning Dennis and Nurse Selff met for coffee at the RAAF
Officer’s Club where she told him that she had assisted in autopsies on
three small gray bodies. She sketched a picture on a napkin of the
creatures with large heads, large slanted eyes, and four fingers on each
hand, adding that the bodies had smelled so bad that they were
eventually moved from the hospital to Hangar 84 out by the airstrip. A
few days later Nurse Selff was transferred and later word came that she
had died in an airplane crash.
~ ~ ~
On the evening of July 3, 1947, as Roswell hardware store owner Dan
Wilmot and his wife Grace sat on their front porch hoping for a cool
breeze, a huge, glowing, saucer-shaped object zoomed overhead flying in
a northwesterly direction. The Wilmots ran into their yard and watched
the saucer for 40 to 50 seconds until it disappeared in the direction of
Six-Mile Hill west of town.
~ ~ ~
Trucker Jim Ragsdale took a lady friend to Boy Scout Mountain, 45 miles
(70 km) west of Roswell, for an amorous encounter on the evening of July
4, 1947. There they saw a strange object fly over, then saw the flash
from an explosion behind a hill. When they went to investigate, rough
terrain kept them from getting close but at a distance they spotted
wreckage of a disk-shaped object and alien bodies. They left when they
saw military vehicles approaching.
~ ~ ~
Mother Superior Mary Bernadette and Sister Capistrano of the Catholic
nursing order Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother saw appeared to be like an
explosion in the sky to the north of Roswell as they were looking out a
third-floor window of St. Mary’s Hospital late on the evening of July 4,
1947.
~ ~ ~
When cowboy W.W. “Mack” Brazel (cousin of the man acquitted of
murdering Sheriff Pat Garrett in 2908) and foreman of the Foster Ranch
near Corona, 75 miles (120 km) north of Roswell, rode out to check on
his sheep the morning after a particularly violent thunderstorm in early
July 1947, he and young neighbor boy Dee Proctor found a wide swath of
strange debris spread across the prairie. Brazel collected several
pieces of wood, metal, and foil that he later showed the parents of his
young friend. They urged him to report his find to the authorities.
On Sunday July 6, Brazel drove into Roswell bringing his story and some
of the debris to Sheriff George Wilcox in his office next to the jail at
the back of the Chaves County Courthouse. The sheriff was not
particularly interested, but did telephone the Roswell Army Air Field in
case this indicated a crashed airplane. He was put in touch with RAAF
Intelligence Officer Major Jesse Marcel who agreed to come into town to
talk to Brazel.
After Major Marcel interviewed Mack Brazel at the Sheriff’s Office he
reported back to his commanding officer, Colonel William “Butch”
Blanchard, who sent him and another officer out to the debris field with
Brazel to investigate. They arrived late in the day, spent Sunday night
on the Foster ranch, then Major Marcel and the other officer spent
Monday July 7 gathering up pieces of the strange foil and metal
inscribed with odd symbols. Major Marcel returned to Roswell late Monday
evening and spent the night at home where he showed the debris to his
wife and son.
~ ~ ~
While Mack Brazel had been waiting for Major Marcel in Sheriff Wilcox’s
office on Sunday July 6, Roswell Radio Station KGFL reporter Frank Joyce
called the Sheriff’s Office on a routine newsgathering mission. Sheriff
Wilcox let him speak to Brazel. Monday morning when Joyce told Radio
Station KGFL owner Walt Whitmore, Sr. about Brazel, Whitmore drove to
the Foster Ranch, picked up Brazel, and brought him back to his house in
Roswell. There he conducted and recorded an interview with Brazel who
then spent Monday night at Whitmore’s house.
~ ~ ~
On Tuesday morning July 8, Major Marcel returned to the RAAF and showed
the strange material he had found on the Foster Ranch to Colonel
Blanchard. The colonel immediately ordered out a force of men to cordon
off the debris area, pick up everything they could find, and return it
to the RAAF where they would store it all under guard in Hangar 84 along
the airstrip. Colonel Blanchard sent Major Marcel to Fort Worth Army Air
Field, along with some of the debris, to see General Roger Ramey, head
of the Eighth Air Force. He also ordered Lt. Walter Haut, RAAF
Information Officer, to distribute a press release about the crash. At
lunchtime on Tuesday July 8, Lt. Haut delivered the first two copies of
his press release about the crashed flying saucer to the two town radio
stations, KGFL and KSWS, then delivered two more to the two town
newspapers, the Roswell Morning Dispatch, a morning paper, and
the Roswell Daily Record, an evening paper.
As soon as Reporter Frank Joyce at KGFL read Lt. Haut’s press release he
put the story on the United Press wire. The news flashed around the
world Tuesday afternoon and was even picked up by the London Times.
At KSWS, Station Manager George Walsh put the crashed-saucer story on
the Associated Press wire while station owner John McBoyle called their
sister station in Albuquerque, KOAT, and asked them to send the story to
their affiliated ABC and Mutual Radio Networks. However when KOAT
teletype operator Lydia Sleppy started her transmission to the networks,
the FBI interrupted it with orders to kill the story.
When Walt Whitmore contacted the RAAF that afternoon for more
information about the crash, the military appeared at Whitmore’s home to
pick up Brazel and the recording of his interview. That same afternoon
Whitmore received telephone calls from an FCC representative and from
New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez’ office telling him not to run the
flying saucer story, saying that it was a matter of national security
and the radio station would lose its license if he did not cooperate.
Later that Tuesday afternoon Colonel Blanchard rescinded the flying
saucer story and sent men to the radio and newspaper offices to retrieve
the press releases. But it was too late to suppress the story. The
headline in the Roswell Daily Record for Tuesday evening July 8
read, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”
~ ~ ~
Wednesday July 9, the day after the Roswell Daily Record printed
its famous headline, General Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force,
released information to the press in Fort Worth that the debris
recovered near Roswell had come from the crash of a weather balloon.
~ ~ ~
Several days later, the military escorted Mack Brazel to the offices of
the Roswell Daily Record for an interview in which he changed his
story, claiming to have found debris from a weather balloon on June 14.
Brazel then went to see Frank Joyce at KGFL, again accompanied by
military escort, and repeated his story that the debris had come from a
weather balloon. At the end of that interview, Joyce jokingly referred
to Brazel’s first story of “little green men.” Brazel responded
muttering angrily, “They weren’t green!”
~ ~ ~
By the second week of July 1947 the materials from Hangar 84, now
described as debris from a crashed weather balloon, had been flown to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The excitement in Roswell was
over. Everyone involved, from military personnel to civilians, were
ordered not to discuss the incident further. And they didn’t, not until
thirty years later.
~ ~ ~
In 1980, after reviewing available records and interviewing as many of
the participants as they could find, Charles Berlitz and William Moore
published The Roswell Incident, describing the events of that
July in 1947. They concluded that something not-of-this-earth had
crashed northwest of Roswell and that the government had worked hard to
cover up the facts. Initially their book attracted little attention
outside of UFO circles, even in Roswell, until a 1989 episode of the TV
show Unsolved Mysteries featured the 1947 Roswell Crash.
Interest began to grow.
Walter Haut, Glenn Dennis, and Roswell realtor Max Littell founded the
UFO Museum in 1991. Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt published UFO
Crash at Roswell that same year. The TV movie Roswell aired
in 1994 and more books about the incident began to appear, including a
series of teen novels (and a TV show) about aliens attending Roswell
High School. The 1947
Roswell UFO Crash had taken off!
Publicity surrounding the 1997 UFO Festival on the 50th Anniversary of
the Crash attracted worldwide attention. Since then the number of books,
movies, TV shows, websites, blogs, and controversies has continued to
grow, until today “Roswell” is one of the best known names around the
globe—and who knows where else? As the marker at the Corn
Ranch Crash Site reads:
We don’t know who they were.
We don’t know why they came.
We only know they changed our view of the universe.
To learn more about the Roswell Incident . . .
BUY the paperback version
(single copies or in bulk) of Lynn Michelsohn's guidebook
Roswell,
Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World!
also $9.99 on
Kindle
and available from other online booksellers, through your local
bookstore, or on
NOOK.
Also available . . .
Roswell, NM: The Ten Best FREE Things To Do (Plus a Few More)
Your Brief Travel Guide to Fun in the UFO Capital of the World!
$2.99 on
Kindle
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