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Article/Document:

Roswell - The Facts, Truths and Eyewitness Accounts

Richard Dean

original source |  fair use notice

Summary: 



Regarding all the speculation lately of the Roswell film release in August of the crash site and President Truman walking through the debris etc etc, I have typed the transcript of the actual events surrounding the Roswell incident for those people among us who don't really know what happened,or those who are after the facts surrounding the incident - not the rumours.

I decided to post this because a guy named Alastair Carter requested the information and it took me a while to type it so I thought alot of other people might benefit from this posting as well. Anyway here it is.

The facts, not the story (this viewpoint is quite skeptic actually. It takes into account all of the possibilities):

One of the most contentious aspects of the UFO enigma is the allegation that a number of flying saucers have actually crash-landed and been recovered by the military in great secrecy. The claim has been generally dismissed for lack of proof, yet the evidence is compelling. Former US Air Force intelligence officer Leonard Stringfield, for example, has now collected at least forty such accounts, some of them from first-hand witnesses. One incident that now seems indisputable - in the sense that anomalous wreckage was recovered - occurred within a few days of the United Airlines sighting, and has been the subject of one of the most thoroughly documented investigations on record.

On the evening of 2 July 1947 a bright, disc-shaped object was seen flying over Roswell, New Mexico, heading north-west. The following day widely scattered wreckage was discovered about seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell by a local ranch manager, William Brazel, together with his son and daughter. The authorities were eventually alerted and a quantity of wreckage was recovered by Major Jesse Marcel, a staff intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office at the Army Air Forces base at Roswell Field, together with a Counter-Intelligence Corps officer. Once the officers had returned to the Roswell base, an official press statement was released, authorised by Colonel William Blanchard, confirming that the wreckage of a flying disc had been recovered. Marcel was ordered to load the debris on a B-29 and fly it to Wright field (now Wright-Patterson AFB) at Dayton, Ohio, for examination.

On arrival at an intermediate stop at Carswell Army Air Forces Base, Fort Worth, Texas (headquarters of the Eight Air Force), General Roger Ramey took charge and ordered Marcel and others on the plane not to talk to reporters. A second press statement was issued which stated that the wreckage was nothing more than the remains of a weather balloon and it's attached tinfoil radar target, and this was prominently displayed at the press conference. Meanwhile, the _real_ wreckage arrived at Wright Field under armed guard; Marcel returned to Roswell, and Brazel was held incommunicado for nearly a week while the crash site was stripped of every scrap of debris.

A news leak via press wire from Albuquerque describing this fantastic story was interrupted and the radio station in question, and another, were warned not to continue the broadcast:


'ATTENTION ALBUQUERQUE: CEASE TRANSMISSION. REPEAT. CEASE TRANSMISSION. NATIONAL SECURITY ITEM. DO NOT TRANSMIT. STAND BY....'
The unidentified wreckage, scattered over an area three-quarters of a mile long by several hundred feet wide, consisted of various types of material, which according to Major Marcel was like nothing he had seen before or since:


"There was all kinds of stuff - small beams about three eights or a half inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. These looked something like balsa wood, and were of about the same weight,except that they were of about the same weight, except that they were not wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible, and would not burn. There was a great deal of unusual parchment-like substance which was brown in color and extremely strong, and a great number of small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn't tinfoil."
Marcel added that one piece of metal foil, two feet long and a foot wide, was so durable that it could not be dented with a sledgehammer, despite its being incredibly light. Marcel was absolutely convinced that the material had nothing to do with a weather balloon or a radar target. His testimony cannot be dismissed, owing to his background in aviation: he had served as a bombardier, waist-gunner and pilot, had logged 468 hours of combat flying in B-24 aircraft, and was awarded five air medals for shooting down enemy aircraft in World War II. Towards the end of the war he was attached to 509th Bomb Wing, an elite military group for which all those involved required high-security clearances. Following the Roswell incident he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and assigned to a Special Weapons Program that specialised in analysing air samples to discover if the Russians had detonated their first nuclear bomb.

Marcel was quite certain that no bodies were among the debris, and that whatever the object was it must have exploded above ground level. But the evidence suggests that there was _another_ crash site, in an area west of Socorro, New Mexico, known as the Plains of San Agustin, where witnesses discovered not only a damaged metallic 'craft' resting on the flat desert ground, but also dead bodies.

The first witness on the scene was Grady L. 'Braney' Barnett, a civil engineer with the US Soil Conservation Service who was on a military assignment at the time. He told some friends that in July 1947 he had encountered a metallic,disc-shaped 'aircraft' about twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter. While he was examining it, a small group of people arrived who said they were part of an archaeological research team from the University of Pennsylvania. Barnett recalled:


"I noticed that they were standing around looking at some dead bodies that had fallen to the ground. I think there were others in the machine, which was a kind of metallic...disc. It was not all that big. It seemed to be made of metal that looked like dirty stainless steel. The machine had been split open by explosion or impact."
"I tried to get close to see what the bodies were like. They were all dead as far as I could see and there were bodies inside and outside the vehicle. The ones outside had been tossed out by the impact. They were like humans but they were not humans. The heads were round, the eyes were small, and they had no hair. The eyes were oddly spaced. They were quite small by our standards and their heads were larger in proportion to their bodies than ours. Their clothing seemed to be one-piece and grey in colour. You couldn't see any zippers, belts or buttons. They seemed to be all males and there were a number of them. I as close enough to touch them but I didn't - I was escorted away before I could [do so]."

"While we were looking at them a military officer drove up in a truck with a driver and took control. He told everybody that the Army was taking over and to get out of the way. Other military personnel cam up and cordoned of the area. We were told to leave the area and not to talk to anyone whatever about what we had seen...that it was out patriotic duty to remain silent."

Regrettably, this account cannot be regarded as reliable since it was related to friends of the witness in 1950: Barnett died in 1969 and the authors of "The Roswell Incident" a book which examines the evidence then available, were therefore unable to interview him. But those who knew 'Barney' Barnett described him as the very model of a respectable and honest citizen - hardly likely to invent such a fantastic tale. Members of the University of Pennsylvania team have yet to come forward or be located, although William Moore has established the the University was involved in archaeological digs in the area at that time.

It is not known for certain if the craft and occupants allegedly witnessed by Barnett were connected with the Roswell Wreckage. The Plains of San Agustin, near Magdalena, New Mexico, are about 150 miles west of Brazel's ranch site. Was the wreckage recovered there part of the same craft that had somehow managed to remain airborne for that distance before crashing on the Plains, or was it another craft that had also come to grief? We may never know the full story, but Bill Moore, in one of his updated research papers on the Roswell incident, concludes that while there is insufficient evidence to substantiate Barnett's story or to justify linking it with the proven recovery of anomalous wreckage at Brazel's ranch site, this is no reason to dismiss the account out of hand. there is also the intriguing hypothesis that the first press release, announcing the recovery of a crashed disc, was a counter-intelligence ploy to deflect attention from the craft and bodies bear Magdalena. If so, it worked.

Leading investigators Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman (the latter a nuclear physicist as well as a UFO researcher) have interviewed no less than ninety-two witnesses who provide information about this sensational incident, of who thirty were involved with the discovery, recovery or subsequent official cover-up, and ten of the original witnesses have identified the object as non-terrestrial in origin.

This is the exact transcript from what I have from Timothy Good's book - "Above Top Secret". It also goes on to say the the Majestic Twelve documents contain the quote "the remains of four alien bodies were recovered two miles from the Roswell wreckage site."

Read more articles on this topic:

The Roswell Incident