The Roswell Encounter |
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Sometime during the first week of July 1947, a local New Mexico rancher, Mac Brazel, while riding out
in the morning to check his sheep after a night of intense thunderstorms, discovered a considerable amount
of unusual debris. It had created a shallow gouge several hundred feet long and was scattered over a
large area. Some of the debris had strange physical properties. After taking a few pieces to show his
neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel drove into Roswell and contacted the sheriff, George Wilcox.
Sheriff Wilcox notified authorities at Roswell Army Air Field and with the assistance of his deputies,
proceeded to investigate the matter. Shortly after becoming involved, the military closed off the area
for a number of days and retrieved the wreckage. It was initially taken to Roswell Army Air Field and
eventually flown by B-29 and C-54 aircraft to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
Roswell Army Air Field
was the home of the 509th Bomb Group, which was an elite outfit -- the only atomic group in the world.
On the morning of July 8, 1947, Colonel Blanchard, Commander of the 509th Bomb Group, issued a press
release stating that the wreckage of a "crashed disk" (UFO) had been recovered. The press release was
transmitted over the wire services in time to make headlines in over thirty U.S. afternoon newspapers
that same day.
Within hours, a second press release was issued from the office of General Roger
Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas, 400 miles from the crash
site. It revoked the first press release and, in effect, claimed that Colonel Blanchard and the officers
of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell had made an unbelievably foolish mistake and somehow incorrectly identified
a weather balloon and its radar reflector as the wreckage of a "crashed disk."
One of those two
press releases had to be untrue. There is now solid testimony from numerous credible military and civilian
witnesses who were directly involved, that the "crashed disk" press release issued by Colonel Blanchard
was true and that the subsequent "weather balloon" press release from Eighth Air Force Headquarters in
Fort Worth, Texas, was a hastily contrived cover story.
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