Page 15 - 200808 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - August 2008

15 ROSWELL UNRAVELLED 15 ROSWELL UNRAVELLED ROSWELL ROSWELL UNRAVELLED UNRAVELLED On the evening of July 2, 1947, several witnesses in and near Roswell, New Mexico, observed a disc shaped object moving swiftly in a northwesterly direction through the sky. The following morning, Mac Brazel, foreman of a ranch located near tiny Corona, New Mexico, rode out on horseback to move sheep from one field to another. Accompanying him was a young neighbor boy, Timothy D Proctor. As they rode, they came upon strange debris - various-size chunks of metallic material - running from one hilltop, down an arroyo, up another hill, and running down the other side. To all appearances some kind of aircraft had exploded. In fact Brazel had heard something that sounded like an explosion the night before, but because it happened during a rainstorm (though it was different from thunder), he had not looked into the cause. Brazel picked up some of the pieces. He had never seen anything like them. They were extremely light and very tough. By the time events had run their course, the world would be led to believe that Brazel had found the remains of a weather balloon. For three decades, only those directly involved in the incident would know that this was a lie. And in the early 1950s, when an enterprising reporter sought to reinvestigate the story, those who knew the truth were warned to tell him nothing. The cover-up did not begin to unravel until the mid-1970s, when two individuals who had been in New Mexico in 1947 separately talked to Stanton T Friedman about what they observed. One, an Albuquerque radio station employee, had witnessed the muzzling of a reporter and the shutting down on an in- progress teletype news story about the incident. The other, an Army Air Force intelligence officer, had led the initial recovery operation. The officer, retired Maj. Jesse Marcel, stated flatly that the material was of unearthly origin. The uncovering of the truth about the Roswell incident - so called because it was from Roswell Field, the nearest Air Force base, that the recovery operation was directed - would be an excruciatingly difficult process. It continues to this day, even after the publication of several This is a photograph of Major Jesse Marcel holding fragments of the debrison July 8, books and the massive documentation gleamed 1947. On that historical day, newspaper photographer James "Bond" Johnson was from interviews with several hundred persons as hastily dispatched from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper to take photographs of well as other alleged evidence. Besides being the Major posing with the unknown debris for the newspaper. the most important case in UFO history - the one with the potential not to settle the issue of UFOs but to identify them as extraterrestrial thing, there was far too much of it. For another, hieroglyphics because I could not understand spacecraft - the Roswell incident is also the it was not remotely like weather balloon. Maj. them… They were pink and purple. They looked most fully investigated. The principal Marcel described it: like they were painted on. The little numbers investigators include Stanton Friedman, “[We found] all kinds of stuff - small could not be broken, could not be burned… William L Moore, Dr Kevin Randle and Donald beams about 3/8 or half-inch square with some wouldn't even smoke.” Schmitt. sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could The metallic material not only looked Eighth Air Force Commander Brig. decipher. They looked something like Balsa but acted strange. It had memory. No matter General Roger Ramey, acting under orders from wood and were of about the same weight, how it was twisted or balled up, it would return Gen. Clements McMullen at the Pentagon, although flexible, and would not burn. There to its original shape, with no wrinkles. One allegedly concocted the weather balloon story to was a great deal of an unusual parchment like woman, who allegedly saw a rolled-up piece "put out the fire," in the words of retired Brig. substance which was brown in color and tossed onto a table watched in astonishment as Gen. Thomas DuBose, who in July 1947 was extremely strong, and a great number of small it unfolded itself until it was flat and as wrinkle- serving as adjutant to Ramey's staff. The actual pieces of metal like tin foil, except it wasn't tin free, as the table top. material, all who allegedly saw it agreed, could foil… [The parchment writing] had little not possibly have come from a balloon. For one numbers and symbols that we had to call ROSWELL UNRAVELLED Continued on Page 16