Generations and Other True Stories (21 page)

His companion, age seven, was the son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Mr. Brazel's nearest neighbors, who lived on another ranch about ten miles away. Dee loved riding horseback and tagging along with Mr. Brazel, and sometimes he would come and stay overnight at the foreman's headquarters and ride out with him in the morning.

July 3, 1947, must have been a fine morning for riding, for such a storm washes the desert clean. It settles the dust, cools the air, brightens and purifies the sky. The beauty and fragrance of the damp sage and cactus and buffalo grass on such a morning fills the senses with intimations of liberty and joy.

But a few miles south of the house, the riders happened upon something strange. A huge section of pasture was strewn with debris that must have fallen from the sky. Some of the wreckage apparently was dull-finished metal, some was shiny and very thin, resembling aluminum foil. Some looked like transparent plastic string or wire. There were thin sticks, shaped like I-beams, made of some material that Mr. Brazel didn't recognize.

The debris—large and small pieces of it—covered an area estimated by Mr. Brazel to be about three-quarters of a mile long and two hundred to three hundred feet wide, as if something had exploded in the air and its pieces had rained to earth. But it didn't look like the wreckage of an airplane, and there was no sign of a crew.

Mr. Brazel dismounted and picked up some of the fragments. They were extraordinarily lightweight. He put a few of the smaller ones in the pockets of his chaps and remounted. Then he and Dee Proctor continued on their way.

If Mr. Brazel was excited by their discovery, he apparently didn't show it. Young Dee, his mother says, soon forgot it. But Loretta Proctor, now eighty years old, still remembers Mr. Brazel's story and the strange object that he showed her and Floyd later that day when he brought Dee home.

“He had a piece of stuff about five or six inches long that looked like wood or plastic,” she says. “It was a little bit bigger than a pencil and kind of tannish color. I remember Mac and my husband trying to whittle it with a knife and trying to burn it. It wouldn't burn and it wouldn't whittle.”

Mr. Brazel hadn't brought a sample of the foil-like material that he had found, but he told the Proctors about it. “He said you could crunch it in your hand and it would just straighten back out by itself. No creases or wrinkles would stay in it. It wasn't like anything he had ever seen.”

He invited the Proctors to come to his place and see the field of debris, but they declined. “The war hadn't been over long,” Mrs. Proctor says. “Gas and tires was still hard to get. And it was way out in the pasture, away from the roads. About that time, we was hearing a lot about UFOs, and we told Mac, ‘Maybe if you take it in, you might get a reward.' We had heard there would be a ten thousand dollar reward for anybody who brought in a flying saucer.”

The nearest settlement to Mr. Brazel's place was the ranch village of Corona, about thirty miles away. But the nearest authorities to whom Mr. Brazel might report his find were in Roswell, about seventy rough, hot miles to the southeast in neighboring Chaves County. He had no telephone and plenty of work to do, so the reward, if there was one, would have to wait.

On July 6, a Sunday, Mr. Brazel finally drove into Roswell and showed a few pieces of the wreckage to the Chaves County sheriff, George Wilcox. He described what he had seen in his pasture and whispered—“kind of confidential like,” he told reporters later—that he might have found a flying saucer. The sheriff suggested they phone the military authorities at Roswell Army Air Field.

The base, at the south end of Main Street, was the home of the 509th Bomb Group (Atomic), the unit that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki two years earlier. It was the only atomic bomber group in the world, and its base was just one of several top-secret military installations in the area. Not far to the west, near Alamogordo, was the White Sands Missile Range, where scientists were experimenting with German V-2 rockets captured during the war, and Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been tested.

Sheriff Wilcox barely hung up the phone before the base commander, his intelligence officer, and a plainclothes counterintelligence agent drove up to his door.

Congressman Steven Schiff, a Republican from Albuquerque, thought he was making a routine request on March 11, 1993, when he wrote his letter about the Roswell Incident, as it came to be called, to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin.

“Last fall,” the letter began, “I became aware of a strange series of events beginning in New Mexico over forty-five years ago and involving personnel of what was then the Army Air Force. I have since reviewed the facts in some detail, and I am writing to request your assistance in arriving at a definitive explanation of what transpired and why…. ”

The congressman asked for “a full and honest review and reporting of the facts” and a personal briefing about the wreckage that Mac Brazel found in the desert and the widespread belief in New Mexico and elsewhere that the U.S. government had lied to the public about what it was.

“I had received a number of letters from New Mexico and other states alleging cover-up,” Mr. Schiff says. “People who wrote me said that the evidence appears, on its face, to contradict the Department of Defense's official explanation. So wouldn't it be in the interest of the Department of Defense to demonstrate that there was no cover-up? I was really writing from a favorable point of view for the Department of Defense. I was trying to lay out for the secretary: ‘Look what people are saying. Aren't you, the Defense Department, interested in setting the record straight? That you, in fact, did everything as you said you did it? Don't you want to put this to rest?' ”

Even if it was necessary for national security reasons to conceal the truth in 1947, Mr. Schiff reasoned, surely it could be told now, almost a half-century later.

“Instead,” he says, “I got a run-around.”

Secretary Aspin, who since has resigned, never answered the letter. But about three weeks later, Mr. Schiff received a reply from an Air Force colonel in the Pentagon:

“I have received your letter of March 11, requesting information on alleged events which occurred in Roswell, New Mexico.

“In order to be of service to you, I have referred this matter to the National Archives and Record Administration for direct reply to you.

“If I can be of further assistance to you, please do not hesitate to let me know.”

“It was that simple,” Mr. Schiff says. “With the implied words, ‘Go look it up yourself.' ”

The letter stung the third-term congressman, who numbers among his House committee assignments both Government Operations and Science, Space and Technology, and who serves as a colonel in the New Mexico Air National Guard. “I'm not hung up on protocol,” he says, “but that was a bit terse, I thought. So I contacted the Department of Defense again and got a more protocol-oriented letter from a special assistant to the secretary that said basically the same thing: ‘Go to the National Archives and look it up yourself.' So OK, if that's the way it is. I went to the National Archives. And someone there wrote to me and said: ‘We don't have anything on the Roswell Incident.' And then he went on to say, kind of humorously, I think: ‘We've gotten a lot of requests for information here on that.' And I'm thinking, ‘I'm not terribly surprised. The Department of Defense is sending the whole world to you.' ”

The congressman wondered: “Why was the Department of Defense sending me to an agency for my request, when they ought to have known that agency didn't have any information?”

So in October 1993 he asked the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to help him. “What I asked them was: Can we account for the records that I'm sure would have existed at the time? And if the records no longer exist, what happened to them? I'm positive that at the very least there had to be some kind of ‘Oh my gosh' memorandum from one Army Air Force headquarters to another when they found out that they had put out a press release saying they had picked up a flying disc.”

Sometimes they were called “flying discs,” sometimes “platters,” sometimes “flying saucers.” In late June and early July of 1947, they seemed to be everywhere. By July 7, newspapers were headlining sightings in thirty-nine states, Mexico, and Canada.

“Folks sitting on front porches or out driving see them dash teasingly across the sky,” the Associated Press reported in Texas. “ ‘There one goes,' the delighted witness cries. But in a twinkling of an unbelieving eye the disc is spinning out of sight, leaving a bewildering puzzle in its wake.”

Rewards of one thousand dollars—not the ten thousand dollars that Mrs. Proctor thought—were being offered in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Spokane to anyone finding a genuine flying saucer.

On July 6, after examining what Mac Brazel had brought to town and hearing the story of his find, the Roswell Army Air Field commander, Col. William Blanchard, ordered his intelligence officer, Maj. Jesse Marcel, to accompany the rancher back to the debris field. According to several authors who have written about the Roswell Incident, the major drove his own car, a Buick convertible. A counterintelligence agent followed in a jeep carry-all. By the time they reached the ranch house, it was too dark to continue on to the wreckage site, so they spent the night. The next morning, Mr. Brazel led them into the pasture, showed them the wreckage, and left them.

Major Marcel and the counterintelligence agent spent most of the day examining the debris and loading pieces of it into their vehicles. Near nightfall, they told Mr. Brazel they were returning to Roswell, but that someone would come later to gather the rest of the wreckage.

The next morning, July 8, two counterintelligence agents and a contingent of military police arrived and cordoned off the debris area. While the MPs were gathering the rest of the wreckage, the agents asked Mr. Brazel to accompany them back to Roswell, which he did.

“They kept him down there right close to a week,” says his neighbor, Mrs. Proctor, who remembers that Mr. Brazel was morose and uncommunicative when he returned home. “He was real unhappy about that. He never did say why they did it. He never would talk about it after he come back.”

Sometime around noon on July 8, the Roswell Army Air Base public information officer, 1st Lt. Walter Haut, began making his rounds of the town's two newspapers and two radio stations, distributing one of the most extraordinary news releases in the history of the armed forces. It was only three paragraphs long:

“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.

“The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group intelligence office.

“Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

Mr. Haut, who still lives in Roswell, says he doesn't remember exactly how Colonel Blanchard broke this extraordinary news to him. “I can't say specifically, ‘This is the way it happened,' ” he says. “But if Colonel Blanchard said a flying disc crashed out there, then as far as I was concerned, a flying disc crashed out there. He was a colonel. I was a first lieutenant. First lieutenants weren't paid to think, They were paid to do. And I did what the colonel told me to do.”

The colonel's news didn't particularly amaze him, he remembers. “It wasn't that big a shock. There had been I don't know how many reports of flying saucers prior to that time. And when you're following orders, you don't ask a lot of questions.”

After he delivered his release to the news media, Mr. Haut says, he went home for lunch. That afternoon, the
Roswell Daily Record
and several other evening newspapers in the western United States ran the story on their front pages, and several radio stations put it on the air.

“I didn't return to the office until about two o'clock,” Mr. Haut says. “The phone was ringing. I picked it up. It was a call from London. They wanted to know more about the disc. I didn't have anything more to tell them. I got a lot of calls that afternoon. I got home at 5:30 or six o'clock. I sat down and ate, played with my daughter for a while, then started doing things around the house. We had moved to that house only a couple of months before, and there were lots of things that needed to be done. We didn't turn the radio on that night. The next morning, I went out and picked up the morning newspaper. That's when I saw the story that it wasn't a flying saucer. It was a mere weather balloon.”

The pieces of wreckage that Mac Brazel brought to the sheriff and the pieces that Major Marcel and the counterintelligence agent hauled to town had been boxed up and flown to Fort Worth Army Air Field (later Carswell Air Force Base), headquarters of the 8th Air Force. On the evening of July 8, only a few hours after Lieutenant Haut distributed his press release, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commander of the 8th, showed reporters the pieces of a weather balloon and the radar reflector that it had carried. This, he said, was the wreckage that Mr. Brazel had found.

The next day, Mr. Brazel, who had been in the custody of the army since the MPs arrived at his ranch, changed his description of what he had found. The huge field of wreckage that he had described to the Proctors and Sheriff Wilcox shrank dramatically. He told the local press that he had gathered all the debris he found into two bundles less than three feet long and eight inches thick, weighing maybe five pounds. It consisted, he said, of tinfoil, paper, cellophane tape, sticks, and rubber. He said he thought the object might have been “about the size of a table top” before it was wrecked.