Marcel returned to the airfield and informed his superiors of the discovery. The 509th’s press officer, Walter Haut, was ordered by his commander, Colonel William Blanchard, to send out a press release to the effect that a flying saucer had been captured.
On July 8, the Roswell Daily Record ran the headline: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region,” announcing the recovery of something by the Roswell Army Air Field. Soon, media were calling the base and Sheriff Wilcox’s office for the real story of what had been found.
The debris was shipped to Brigadier General Roger Ramey of the 8th Air Force at Fort Worth, Texas. There, Ramey called the local media and told them the debris was not of a flying saucer but a weather balloon. The sticks and metallic pieces were actually part of a radar reflector.
On July 9, the newspaper ran a story under the headline “General Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer,” essentially retracting the earlier story. It also ran a story about Brazel, indicating he was mistaken and that he was sorry ever to have caused such a commotion. That seemed to end the affair, and the incident was brushed aside.
After the fact, researchers found evidence that military personnel had visited radio and newspaper offices in the Roswell area, requesting the original copies of the first, erroneous release about the flying saucer. Complicating the story and adding further intrigue, some military personnel later claimed that they witnessed or they themselves loaded very unusual wreckage onto flatbed trucks or transport aircraft destined for Los Alamos or Fort Worth or other classified locations.
It was many years later before anything more was learned about Roswell.
In February 1978, Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and outspoken advocate for the reality of flying saucers from outer space, was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a TV interview. While he was waiting to go on, he was told that a man living not far away was a former Air Force officer who had seen and touched some debris from a crashed flying saucer. Friedman was curious and looked him up: Jesse Marcel, who was then in Houma, Louisiana. Friedman interviewed him at length and learned that there was much more to the story than most people knew.
Friedman reopened the case and found additional witnesses and others who seemed to be able to corroborate the amazing story that an unknown craft of some kind had indeed crashed in the New Mexico desert. His investigations became the basis for a book authored by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, The Roswell Incident (1980).
In October 1978, Friedman was at Bemiji State University lecturing about UFOs and met a couple who told him that a friend of theirs named Barney Barnett, who had since passed away, had described seeing a crashed flying saucer in New Mexico sometime in the 1940s. Barnett was an engineer working for the government, and was deemed very reliable. His story seemed to match that of Marcel, with one added feature: he had seen several small bodies near the crash debris.
While in Minnesota, Friedman talked about this story with William Moore, a high school teacher with a strong interest in UFOs. He suggested to Moore that he research the Barnett story and see if it had any merit. A few months later, Moore discovered newspaper clippings that told the Roswell story. The investigation of the Roswell crash began in earnest.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Weyauwega, Wisconsin February 2003
My son and I were visiting a friend of mine in Weyauwega. My boy was sledding in the snow and I was taking pictures.
It was in the evening and was starting to get dark pretty quickly. My son pointed up to the sky and we noticed some lights coming in from what I believe is the south west. At that point I just pointed the camera up and took the shots. The object really gave me the impression of a balloon — except for the lights. They seemed to cycle all different patterns.
The object passed almost directly overhead and then headed south towards the train tracks. As the object passed I could make out more of a disk shape than a balloon shape. I just remember my son asking me over and over what it was and I didn’t have a clue.
Reported by Anonymous
Source: UFOCasebook.com
Speculation about the incident flourished during the next decade. Friedman found additional witnesses, and in 1988 the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) sponsored a team to locate the crash site. In 1991, author Kevin Randle and CUFOS investigator Don Schmitt published their book UFO Crash at Roswell, claiming that the government had retrieved the debris, cleaned up the site and was covering up its possession of several alien bodies.
One of the new witnesses located was mortician Glenn Dennis. He said he was working in a funeral home in 1947, when he got a call from the base about whether small, child-size coffins were available. As well, he said that when he had been at the base hospital one day in July, he had been ordered to leave after speaking with a nurse who told him she had assisted on autopsies on weird, tiny, childlike bodies.
After the TV show Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode in 1989 about the Roswell incident, a Missouri man named Gerald Anderson called in to say he was rock hunting with his family in New Mexico in 1947, and had also seen the crashed flying saucer. What’s more, he later told investigators that he had seen three alien bodies underneath the hull of the saucer, with a fourth tending to his injured crewmates. But he said military personnel showed up and ordered the rockhounds to go away and never tell anyone what they had seen.
Anderson’s story seemed to be corroborated by another independent witness, Frank Kaufman, who said he was part of a military search party that had found a crashed saucer some distance away from Brazel’s debris site. He too said he had seen a large craft half-buried in sand, as well as a number of small humanoid bodies.
In 1992, another book by Friedman and co-author Don Berliner came out with a new theory — that two crashed saucers were actually recovered in 1947, along with their alien crews. Crash at Corona explained why Anderson’s story was inconsistent with the Brazel discovery: one saucer exploded in midair, leaving only debris, while the other crashed almost intact.
What really happened at Roswell? The case and its numerous investigations have taken on lives of their own, with researchers debating one another on TV shows and in books and magazines. Even those whose new evidence seems to support another writer or investigator seem to be at odds with others’ statements. It is a confusing quagmire of facts, anecdotes, and, very likely, fiction.
FLAPS AND WAVES
Ufologists recognize several periods in history during which there were significant increases in the numbers of UFO reports either throughout the world or in several countries at the same time. These are called UFO waves. These were in the years 1896–1897, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1966–1967, 1973–1975, 1988–1989, 1993, 1996– 1997, 2004 and 2009.
In addition, there are localized or regional increases of UFO reports during short periods of time, usually over a few weeks or months, called UFO flaps. A good example of this was the Stephenville, Texas, UFO flap of 2008, when hundreds of people reported seeing UFOs near this small town over a matter of weeks.
It’s no wonder, then, that skeptics and debunkers have had fun with the Roswell case. The late Philip Klass, who made a name for himself as a UFO arch-skeptic, took great delight in pointing out inconsistencies and problems with various theories. For example, in 1994, when the U.S. Air Force released a report on an internal investigation into the Roswell claims, the controversy reached a new plateau. They claimed that in 1947, a secret program called Project Mogul was conducted by scientist