The year is 1947 and sometime around July 4^th the anniversary of the birth our nation, when a mysterious event took place. For weeks prior major US Air Force Bases from Arizona to New Mexico to south Texas were ordered on alert for unidentified aerial objects. Interceptors stood poised on the runways ready to scramble while radar technicians were ordered never to take their eyes off their radar screens! Something was up, but word had not reached the ground crews advised to watch the skies. A severe summer thunderstorm accompanied by a radar screen blip flashed across the high desert sky. Some people would later claim to have heard strange cries coming from the desert plains that stormy night.

The following morning the 509^th Bomb Group received information that rancher, Mac Brazel, had reported a strange debris field on his land, and thought it might be pieces of a flying disk that rumors has hinted at. Major Jesse Marcel along with intelligence officer, Captain Cavitt, left Walker Air Base for Brazel’s ranchland some 75 miles north from Roswell. They followed Brazel in his aging ford pickup to the spot. At the same time, according to General Exxon, the air reconnaissance flight in the area would report a huge debris field below that left a gouge that had been cut into the desert floor. What appeared to be sheet metal, shining in the sunlight like aluminum along with beams of a balsa wood-like material with some type of inscriptions imprinted across them lay scattered across the grazing land.

Mac Brazel had heard that a reward was being offered to anyone who could recover or direct authorities to the location of any crashed disk. As he described the wreckage, he made note that his livestock would not approach or cross the debris field which was 300 yards long. Although it was common for the locals to find weather balloons fallen from the sky, this crashed object was no weather balloon. Marcel, Cavitt, and the local rancher investigated the foreign appearing material on the ground and collected samples. It was local Sheriff Wilcox who had originally alerted the 509^th Bomb Group about the discovery that Brazel had alerted them over thinking that it was an aircraft operated by the US air Force.

They stayed overnight at Brazel’s before returning the next day. Marcel stopped by his home and allowed his son to handle some of the recovered material. Jesse Jr. would later testify that the sheet metal could be crumbled like a wad of paper and then would restore its shape perfectly-a memory metal! As Jesse Senior would testify many years later, a TV repairman, dying of lung cancer with nothing to lose, would say that these paper thin scraps of metal could not be cut or burned! They were of a substance that was unearthly in origin! Having prepared a manual of all the known atomic arsenals in the world for President Truman, chances are Major Marcel knew damn well what he was talking about!

Once the samples recovered by Captain Cavitt and Marcel were brought in for examination, Base Commander Butch Blanchard, ordered Lieutenant Walter Haute to send a news memorandum to the local radio station stating that the 509^th Bomb group were in possession of a captured flying disk! Almost immediately Sheriff Wilcox’s office was flooded with calls as was the Walker Air Base switchboard. People from all over the world were excitedly trying to get more information on the flying disk from another world! As a large recovery operation by the Army Air Corps was conducted and the debris field cordoned off by military police, suddenly, news of the entire incident was quickly squelched under a veil of secrecy! Townspeople and local ranchers were threatened with orders of national security silence or be jailed and even much worse! Mac Brazel was held in communicado and interrogated as though he were an enemy or a spy!

The Coroner, who operated a funeral home in Roswell would later admit that when he when he visited Walker Air Field, the base was on some kind of emergency alert! He tried to find out if a plane wreck had occurred, but was ordered off the base by an angry Captain who threatened him and had an MP practically drag him to his car! He had managed to speak to a young nurse that he knew who said something terrible had happened and she couldn’t talk about it then and there! They would later meet at a local tavern where she nervously sketched the drawing of a small humanoid being that had tiny suction cups on its fingertips, and that 4 of these entities had died in the accident! The decomposition of the corpses had been suffocating!

Funeral home coroner, Glen Dennis testified that he had gotten a call from Walker Air Base asking for hermetically sealed child sized coffins, how soon could he get them if he didn’t have them on hand, and what chemical could be used to preserve the bodies? Glen advised either ice or formaldehyde as preservative, but when Glen asked what had happened he got no answers! The bodies would be sealed in a special container with a blue chemical preservative in gel form, and sent by rail car to Ft. Riley, Kansas while the complete debris collected by the recovery operation at the Brazel ranch would be loaded onto a B-29 and flown to Carswell Air Base in Ft. Worth, Texas per orders by General Roger Ramey, who had angrily dressed down base Commander Butch Blanchard for releasing the story to the public.

It was at Ft. Riley that Captain Philip J. Corso, a World War II veteran and later scientific adviser for the Eisenhower Administration who made an unauthorized observation of the alien bodies recovered from the Roswell crash. Against orders and in danger of being charged for insubordination, Captain Corso viewed the forbidden knowledge that had arrived at an unusual hour hidden beneath tarps on a rail car in the middle of the night.

Committed to defusing the sensation of a crashed alien disk, General Roger Ramey killed the whole story with his public announcement that the Roswell crash had simply been a misidentified weather balloon, and that Major Jesse Marcel had made a mistake in determining what had been recovered. Marcel would be forced to ride along with the B-29 crew to Ft. Worth for photos with the debris that had been switched from the Roswell crash site material to an actual torn up conventional weather balloon! Cameraman, J. Bond Johnson of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram Newspaper would be assigned to do the photo shoot, and the veil of secrecy was now slammed shut over the incident! Major Marcel would go onto to be further decorated for his work and not demoted or penalized for the misidentification that one might suspect would occur if he had failed in his duty. Why? Because he had not failed and what he handled was indeed extraterrestrial in origin!

In Part II we will further investigate one of the most controversial events in the history of mankind that led to many implications for the American government and its intelligence agencies.