The Incident at Roswell

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fictions Stories
​Seventy five years ago a New Mexico rancher give a report to the local sheriff which was quite unique. It was something about finding metallic debris on a ranch about 80 miles from Roswell, New Mexico.

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Mack Brazel, a sheep rancher who came across unusual debris in 1947

W. W. "Mack" Brazel (1899-1963) never imagined what would come of that report. He was the foreman of the J.B. Foster sheep ranch, and for a couple of weeks he'd been coming across strange metal debris. Without a telephone or radio he was unaware of a slew of UFO reports from across the country. On July 5, he visited the town of Corona and heard of the so-called "flying saucers."

A little over a week before, Kenneth Arnold, an amateur pilot described seeing unusual flying objects over Mount Rainier, Washington that was reported in different newspapers.

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But, Wednesday, a Boise, Idaho pilot Kenneth Arnold reported he saw '9 bright, saucer-like objects' streaking through the air about 10,000 feet high between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams.
The Seattle Star, ​June 25, 1947

Roswell Daily Record reporting on RAAF disclosure on July 8, 1947

Brazel no doubt wondered if what he found on the ranch was somehow connected to these sightings, and he contacted the Chaves County sheriff on July 7, about what he found.

The sheriff contacted the military, and on July 8, 1947 the public information officer at the base issued a statement that the US Army Air Forces had found a "flying disk" at the Foster ranch. There was a retraction soon after, but that genie could never be put back in its bottle.

The debris was taken to Ft. Worth Army Air Field in Texas, where experts said it was a crashed weather balloon. But before this announcement could be issued, the New Mexico base had put out their version which called it a flying saucer.

Lt. Haut, Roswell's PIO said the commander Col. Blanchard ordered him to use that description.

Orwell had coined the term "Cold War" two years before. WWII was over, but the fear of invasion was still present, which is perhaps why the public was quick to accept that further reports of flying saucers and bright objects from across the country, were just rockets or jets being tested by the military.

The stories eventually faded from the headlines, but the Roswell Incident would be considered the jumping off point for ufology. Myriad stories and movies about men from outer space and alien science fiction were fueled by these stories of flying discs.

Almost five years after the Roswell Incident, UFOs were seen over Washington D.C. Reports came from airline pilots that described flashes of light streaking across the sky.  Air Force jets were scrambled but they found nothing.

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"1947 UFO Crash Site Tours" in Roswell, N.M., c. 1997. (Source - Eric Draper/AP)

Fast forward to 1978, when the National Enquirer picked up the story about what happened that summer day in New Mexico. Only the year before the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been released, and witnesses who stayed quiet back in 1947 stepped forward to tell of a spacecraft and alien bodies, which only meant one thing: the government had covered it up.

The CIA and military's excuse for the coverup were concerns that it was new technology used by the USSR, and not something from outer space.

In 1994, the Air Force issued a 1,000 page report explaining that what was recovered at Roswell was a high-altitude balloon, part of Project MOGUL which was used by the military to intercept Soviet radio transmissions. Eventually they would fall to earth after deflating.

In 1997, Hub Corn now owned the ranch where the famous Roswell crash took place. He charged tourists $15 to take a look at the landscape, and let the viewer fill in the details from their imagination as to what once lay among the red desert rocks. An all night "rave" dance party was scheduled for the anniversary of the Roswell Incident at the Corn ranch.

By then rumors circulated that Brazel was coerced by the government to keep its secrets, not only of the downed craft, but that there had been a recovery of three to five alien bodies which were taken to the Area 51 military base in Nevada.

Many of those who participated, or were witnesses to what occurred in the New Mexico desert in 1947 are now gone, and Roswell's place on the ufology map would not be forgotten again.

Since 1996, a 3-day festival takes place on the anniversary of the discovery on the Foster Ranch, which draws thousands of participants. In 2022, more than 40,000 visitors came to the four-day festival, which ran June 30-July 3. It brought in about $2 million.

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