The Unexplained Database

UFO'S

The Crash Near Roswell

An unidentified flying object crashed on a ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, sometime during the first week of July 1947.

Rancher W.W. “Mack” Brazel said later he found debris from the crash as he and the son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor rode their horses out to check on sheep after a fierce thunderstorm the night before. Brazel said that as they rode along, he began to notice unusual pieces of what seemed to be metal debris scattered over a large area. Upon further inspection, he said, he saw a shallow trench several hundred feet long had been gouged into the ground.

Brazel said he was struck by the unusual properties of the debris and, after dragging large pieces of it to a shed, he took some of it over to show the Proctors.

Mrs. Proctor, who later moved from the ranch to a house closer to town, said she remembers Brazel showing up with the strange material.

The Proctors told Brazel he might be holding wreckage from an alien spacecraft — a number of UFO sightings had been reported in the United States that summer — or a government project, and that he should report the incident to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox.

A day or two later, Brazel drove into Roswell, the county seat, and reported the incident to Wilcox, who reported it to Maj. Jesse Marcel, intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Group, stationed at Roswell Army Air Field.

In their book, A History of UFO Crashes, UFO researchers Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle say their research shows military radar had been tracking an unidentified flying object in the skies over southern New Mexico for four days. On the night of July 4, 1947, radar indicated the object had gone down about 30-40 miles northwest of Roswell.

The book says eyewitness William Woody, who lived east of Roswell, said he remembered being outside with his father the night of July 4, 1947, when he saw a brilliant object plunge to the ground.

The debris site was closed for several days while the wreckage was cleared, and Schmitt and Randle say that when Woody and his father tried to locate the area of the crash they had seen, Woody said they were stopped by military personnel who ordered them out of the area.

Debris

Schmitt and Randle say Marcel, after receiving the call from Wilcox and subsequent orders from Col. William Blanchard, 509th commanding officer, went to investigate Brazel’s report. Marcel and Capt. Sheridan Cavitt, senior Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent, followed the rancher off-road to his place. They spent the night there and Marcel inspected a large piece of debris Brazel had dragged from the pasture.

Monday morning, July 7, Marcel took his first step onto the debris field. Marcel would remark later that “something ... must have exploded above the ground and fell.” As Brazel, Cavitt and Marcel inspected the field, Marcel was able to “determine which direction it came from, and which direction it was heading. It was in the pattern ... you could tell where it started out and where it ended by how it was thinned out …”

According to Marcel, the debris was “strewn over a wide area, I guess maybe three-quarters of a mile long and a few hundred feet wide.” Scattered in the debris were small bits of metal that Marcel held a cigarette lighter to to see if it would burn.

Along with the metal, Marcel described weightless “I”-beam-like structures that were three-eights inch by one-quarter inch, none of them very long, that would neither bend nor break. Some of these “I”-beams had indecipherable characters along the length, in two colors. Marcel also described metal debris the thickness of tinfoil that was indestructible.

After gathering enough debris to fill his staff car, Marcel decided to stop by his home on the way back to the base so he could show his family the unusual debris. He’d never seen anything quite like it.

“I didn't know what we were picking up,” he said. “I still don't know what it was ... It could not have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather balloon or experimental balloon ... I’ve seen rockets ... sent up at the White Sands Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft or missile or rocket.”

Under hypnosis conducted by Dr. John Watkins in May 1990, Jesse Marcel Jr. remembered being awakened by his father that night and following him outside to help carry in a large box filled with debris. Once inside, they emptied the contents of the debris onto the kitchen floor.

Jesse Jr. described the lead foil and “I”-beams. Under hypnosis, he recalled the writing on the “I”-beams as “Purple. Strange. Never saw anything like it ... different geometric shapes, leaves and circles.”

Under questioning, he said the symbols were shiny purple and they were small. There were many separate figures. This too, under hypnosis: [Marcel Sr. was saying it was a flying saucer] “I ask him what a flying saucer is. I don't know what a flying saucer is ... It’s a ship. [Dad’s] excited!”

Marcel reported what he found to Blanchard, showing him pieces of the wreckage, none of which looked like anything Blanchard had ever seen.

Bodies

Meanwhile, Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working at Ballard Funeral Home, received some curious calls one afternoon from the RAAF morgue. The base’s mortuary officer was trying to get hold of some small, hermetically sealed coffins and also wanted to know how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for a few days and avoid contaminating the tissue.

Dennis later said that evening he drove to the base hospital, where he saw large pieces of wreckage with strange engravings on one of the pieces sticking out of the back of a military ambulance. He entered the hospital and was visiting with a nurse he knew when suddenly he was threatened by military police and forced to leave.

The next day, Dennis met with the nurse, who told him about bodies discovered with the wreckage and drew pictures of them on a prescription pad. Within a few days she was transferred to England; her whereabouts remain unknown.

Roswell Army Air Field Press Release

At 11 a.m., July 8, 1947, Lt. Walter Haut, RAAF public information officer, finished a press release Blanchard had ordered him to write, stating that the wreckage of a crashed disk had been recovered.

He gave copies to the two radio stations and both of the local newspapers. By 2:26 p.m., the story was on The Associated Press wire:

“The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disk had been found.”

As calls began to pour into the base from all over the world, Lt. Robert Shirkey watched as MPs carried loaded wreckage onto a C-54 from the First Transport Unit.

To get a better look, Shirkey stepped around Col. Blanchard, who was irritated with all of the calls coming into the base. Blanchard decided to travel out to the debris field and left instructions that he'd gone on leave.

Headquarters Gets Involved

Blanchard had sent Marcel to Fort Worth Army Air Field (later Carswell Air Force Base) to report to Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force.

Marcel told Haut years later that he’d taken some of the debris into Ramey's office to show him what had been found. The material was displayed on Ramey's desk for the general when he returned.

Upon his return, Ramey wanted to see the exact location of the debris field, so he and Marcel went to the map room down the hall — but when they returned, the wreckage that had been placed on the desk was gone and a weather balloon was spread out on the floor. Maj. Charles A. Cashon took the now-famous photo of Marcel with the weather balloon in Ramey's office.

It was then reported that Ramey recognized the remains as part of a weather balloon. Brig. Gen. Thomas DuBose, the chief of staff of the 8th Air Force, said, “[It] was a cover story. The whole balloon part of it. That was the part of the story we were told to give to the public and news and that was it.”

Later that afternoon, Haut’s original press release was rescinded and an officer from the base retrieved all of the copies from the radio stations and newspaper offices. The next day, July 9, a second press release was issued stating that the 509th Bomb Group had mistakenly identified a weather balloon as wreckage of a flying saucer.

On July 9, as reports went out that the crashed object was actually a weather balloon, cleanup crews were busily clearing the debris. Bud Payne, a rancher at Corona, was trying to round up a stray when he was spotted by the military and carried off the Foster ranch. Broadcaster Judd Roberts and Walt Whitmore were turned away as they approached the debris field.

As the wreckage was brought to the base, it was crated and stored in a hangar.

Back in town, Walt Whitmore and Lyman Strickland saw their friend, Mack Brazel, who was being escorted to the Roswell Daily Record by three military officers. He ignored Whitmore and Strickland, which was not at all like Mack, and once he got to the Roswell Daily Record offices, he changed his story. He now claimed to have found the debris on June 14. Brazel also mentioned that he’d found weather observation devices on two other occasions, but what he found this time was no weather balloon.

The Las Vegas Review Journal, along with dozens of other newspapers, carried the AP story:

“Reports of flying saucers whizzing through the sky fell off sharply today as the Army and the Navy began a concentrated campaign to stop the rumors.”

The story also reported that AAF Headquarters in Washington had “delivered a blistering rebuke to officers at Roswell.”

The military has tried to convince the news media from that day forward that the object found near Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon.

THE RENDLESHAM FOREST LANDINGS

One of the most compelling accounts of UFO landings comes to us from England. The joint air bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge, located within the vast Rendlesham Forest, would be literally invaded by unidentified flying objects over a period of several nights in late December, 1980.

The amazing accounts of the twin air bases would be replete with descriptions of Alien beings, anomalous radar readings, electromagnetic effects, and surreal atmospheric conditions. Still investigated by Ufologists today, the almost unbelievable eyewitness accounts by credible professionals make the events of Bentwaters and Woodbridge Air Force Bases a cornerstone of belief among many UFO proponents.

Shortly after midnight on December 27, 1980, radar screens at RAF Watton in Norfolk showed an uncorrelated object which suddenly disappeared in the vicinity of the Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. The object was also tracked on radar at Bentwaters RAF, which was located north of the forest. Woodbridge was south of the forest.

The bases were reported to have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and Woodbridge was the home of the 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron. The unit was subject only to the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. The sister bases were leased to the United States Air Force.

Mal Scurrah, radar operator that night, stated:

"We didn't have the faintest idea what it was. We checked through the air traffic agencies. There should have been nothing in that area at the time. The only thing we could do was send a jet aircraft in to find out what it was. They got to within about a quarter of a mile and the pilot suddenly started reporting that they could see a very bright light in the sky in front of them.

It was stationary on the screen and then, in seconds, it moved off at a fantastic rate of speed. Within the space of five minutes, it was reaching 90,000 feet and higher and we lost it off the top end of the radar scope. There's nothing we have in this day that can perform those kind of maneuvers, the pilots wouldn't be able to take it."

The extraordinary events of Woodbridge/Bentwaters would begin with the sighting of a gigantic glowing object by three security guards patrolling the twin bases. Receiving permission to check out the strange sightings, they followed the lights into the forest. Their initial interpretation was that a military or commercial aircraft had made a crash landing.

The patrol was shocked and frightened to see a saucer-like craft with small, large-headed beings, which seemed to be suspended from the bottom of the craft by a type of beam. The beings appeared to be busy, possibly affecting some type of repair to their craft. The beings seemed at first to be unaware of the three men watching their activities.

The guards, maintaining a safe distance from the craft and beings, were almost transfixed by the activities at the glowing object. They radioed to the base headquarters, reported what they were seeing, and requested emergency help.

Almost immediately assistance arrived, with a fully equipped armed unit, which included senior officers of the base. Later, there would be reports, off the record, that witnesses who ventured closest to the craft encountered strange anomalies. Among these were "reality bending" effects, like time displacement, and surreal atmospheric conditions.

Also, there were allegations that some of the senior officers were able to communicate with strange, alien beings, which floated in bubbles around a triangular-shaped craft. The craft was said to have appeared from a type of low-lying cloud. ("Left At East Gate") I must state that neither of these facts has been established officially.

    
Colonel Halt, called out on the second night of the sightings, was one of a group of senior officers to chase the eerie, glowing object into the forest. He would become a key figure in the Rendlesham investigation. He made a cassette of the details of his trek into the woods, and a transcription is given later in this article.

Also a copy of the memorandum Halt sent to the British Ministry of Defense is included.

Some of the most revealing details of the events of Rendlesham would be given by patrolmen Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Larry Warren, who would later co-write a book on the incident, "Left at East Gate."

Halt was a career Air Force officer, serving in Vietnam and on various bases before arriving at Bentwaters in 1980. He was promoted to base commander in 1984. Halt later served as base commander at Kunsan Air Base, Korea, and was director of the inspections directorate for the Department of Defense inspector general. He retired in 1991.

Though Halt was forthcoming with his accounts of Rendlesham, his life was complicated by constant demands by UFO investigators for more information on the Rendlesham events.

    
There were many stories told by the men who were present on the nights of the strange events at Rendlesham. One of the most remarkable concerned an underground theater where soldiers were interrogated, debriefed, sworn to secrecy, and threatened.

The morning after the most pronounced activity, a type of men-in-black scenario had occurred.

Several of the men were whisked away by the official-looking gentlemen, and escorted to the underground facility. Oddly enough, they were shown a number of motion picture films of different UFO recoveries around the world. It was also said that an Alien being was present at one of the meetings.

The spectacular events of late 1980 were kept out of the public knowledge for the most part, at least until 1983. An early UFO magazine article about the events brought only a passing interest, yet the story survived on rumor and speculation until Robert Todd of the Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) secured a copy of an official report of the events through the Freedom of Information Act in 1983. The paper was dated 1-13-81, and had been sent to the British Ministry of Defense by Halt.

The events of Rendlesham have been published in numerous newspapers, magazine articles, and several television shows, including "Unsolved Mysteries," "Sightings," and the British program "Strange But True," among others.

The case, in some respects, is similar to the famous Roswell, New Mexico incident in that its investigation involved almost exclusively military personnel. Though the two incidents occurred in totally different countries, both involved United States manned installations, and were close to top secret military bases.