The Roswell Testimony
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Document Description
1.2 Sequence of Events
2 THE CIVILIANS
2.1 Loretta Proctor
2.2 Marian Strickland
2.3 Bessie Brazel Schreiber
2.4 William Brazel Jr
2.5 Glenn Dennis
3 THE COPS
3.1 Barbara Dugger
4 THE PRESS
4.1 Frank Joyce
4.2 Lydia Sleppy
4.3 Walt Whitmore Jr
5 THE MILITARY
5.1 Jesse Marcel
5.2 Jesse Marcel Jr
5.3 Walter Haut
5.4 Bill Rickett
5.5 F.B.
5.6 Robert Porter
5.7 Robert Shirkey
5.8 Robert Slusher
5.9 Robert Smith
5.10 Melvin Brown's Daughter
5.11 Pappy Henderson
5.12 Pappy Henderson's Wife
5.13 Pappy Henderson's Daughter
5.14 Pappy Henderson's Relatives
5.15 Pappy Henderson's Friend #1
5.16 Pappy Henderson's Friend #2
6 PROSAIC EXPLANATIONS
6.1 Weather Balloon
6.2 Secret Rocket or Airplane
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Document Description
A flying saucer crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. This
document contains testimony from people who were closely
associated with this incident.
Most of the testimony in this document is from the 1992 book
"Crash at Corona" by Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner,
published in the United States by Paragon House. That book
contains lots of other interesting material, including material
regarding another crash site in New Mexico. That book is the
source of all testimony in this document except where noted.
1.2 Sequence of Events
On July 2, 1947, during the evening, a flying saucer crashed on
the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico. The crash occurred
during a severe thunderstorm. (The military base nearest the
crash site is in Roswell, New Mexico; hence, Roswell is more
closely associated with this event than Corona, even though
Corona is closer to the crash site.)
On July 3, 1947, William "Mac" Brazel (rhymes with
"frazzle") and his 7-year-old neighbor Dee Proctor
found the remains of the crashed flying saucer. Brazel was
foreman of the Foster Ranch. The pieces were spread out over a
large area, perhaps more than half a mile long. When Brazel drove
Dee back home, he showed a piece of the wreckage to Dee's
parents, Floyd and Loretta Proctor. They all agreed the piece was
unlike anything they had ever seen.
On July 6, 1947, Brazel showed pieces of the wreckage to Chaves
County Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox called Roswell Army Air
Field (AAF) and talked to Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence
officer. Marcel drove to the sheriff's office and inspected the
wreckage. Marcel reported to his commanding officer, Colonel
William "Butch" Blanchard. Blanchard ordered Marcel to
get someone from the Counter Intelligence Corps, and to proceed
to the ranch with Brazel, and to collect as much of the wreckage
as they could load into their two vehicles.
Soon after this, military police arrived at the sheriff's office,
collected the wreckage Brazel had left there, and delivered the
wreckage to Blanchard's office. The wreckage was then flown to
Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, and from there to
Washington.
Meanwhile, Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter Intelligence
Corps drove to the ranch with Mac Brazel. They arrived late in
the evening. They spent the night in sleeping bags in a small
out-building on the ranch, and in the morning proceeded to the
crash site.
On July 7, 1947, Marcel and Cavitt collected wreckage from the
crash site. After filling Cavitt's vehicle with wreckage, Marcel
told Cavitt to go on ahead, that Marcel would collect more
wreckage, and they would meet later back at Roswell AAF. Marcel
filled his vehicle with wreckage. On the way back to the air
field, Marcel stopped at home to show his wife and son the
strange material he had found.
On July 7, 1947, around 4:00 pm, Lydia Sleppy at Roswell radio
station KSWS began transmitting a story on the teletype machine
regarding a crashed flying saucer out on the Foster Ranch.
Transmission was interrupted, seemingly by the FBI.
On July 8, 1947, in the morning, Marcel and Cavitt arrived back
at Roswell AAF with two carloads of wreckage. Marcel accompanied
this wreckage, or most it, on a flight to Fort Worth AAF.
On July 8, 1947, around noon, Colonel Blanchard at Roswell AAF
ordered Second Lieutenant Walter Haut to issue a press release
telling the country that the Army had found the remains of a
crashed a flying saucer. Haut was the public information officer
for the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell AAF. Haut delivered the press
release to Frank Joyce at radio station KGFL. Joyce waited long
enough for Haut to return to the base, then called Haut there to
confirm the story. Joyce then sent the story on the Western Union
wire to the United Press bureau.
On July 8, 1947, in the afternoon, General Clemence McMullen in
Washington spoke by telephone with Colonel (later Brigadier
General) Thomas DuBose in Fort Worth, chief of staff to Eighth
Air Force Commander General Roger Ramey. McMullen ordered DuBose
to tell Ramey to quash the flying saucer story by creating a
cover story, and to send some of the crash material immediately
to Washington.
On July 8, 1947, in the afternoon, General Roger Ramey held a
press conference at Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth
in which he announced that what had crashed at Corona was a
weather balloon, not a flying saucer. To make this story
convincing, he showed the press the remains of a damaged weather
balloon that he claimed was the actual wreckage from the crash
site. (Apparently, the obliging press did not ask why the Army
hurriedly transported weather balloon wreckage to Fort Worth,
Texas, site of the press conference, from the crash site in a
remote area of New Mexico.)
The only newspapers that carried the initial flying saucer
version of the story were evening papers from the Midwest to the
West, including the Chicago Daily News, the Los Angeles Herald
Express, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Roswell Daily
Record. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago
Tribune were morning papers and so carried only the cover-up
story the next morning.
At some point, a large group of soldiers were sent to the debris
field on the Foster Ranch, including a lot of MPs whose job was
to limit access to the field. A wide search was launched well
beyond the limits of the debris field. Within a day or two, a few
miles from the debris field, the main body of the flying saucer
was found, and a mile or two from that several bodies of small
humanoids were found.
The military took Mac Brazel into custody for about a week,
during which time he was seen on the streets of Roswell with a
military escort. His behavior aroused the curiosity of friends
when he passed them without any sign of recognition. Following
this period of detention, Brazel repudiated his initial story.
2 THE CIVILIANS
2.1 Loretta Proctor
[NB: In the sections of this document that contain testimony, all
text not enclosed in brackets, like those that enclose this
sentence, is verbatim testimony.]
[Loretta Proctor, Mac Brazel's nearest neighbor, was one of the
first to see pieces of the wreckage Brazel had found. She was
interviewed in July 1990.]
[Mac] had this piece of material that he had picked up. He wanted
to show it to us and wanted us to go down and see the rest of the
debris or whatever, [but] we didn't on account of the
transportation and everything wasn't too good. He didn't get
anybody to come out who was interested in it. The piece he
brought looked like a kind of tan, lightbrown plastic. It was
very lightweight, like balsa wood. It wasn't a large piece, maybe
about four inches long, maybe just a little larger than a pencil.
We cut on it with a knife and would hold a match on it, and it
wouldn't burn. We knew it wasn't wood. It was smooth like
plastic, it didn't have a real sharp corners, kind of like a
dowel stick. Kind of dark tan. It didn't have any grain, just
smooth. I hadn't seen anything like it.
[The following statement by Loretta Proctor suggests the
possibility that Mac Brazel had been bribed to keep quiet.]
I think that within that year, he had moved off the ranch and
moved to Alamagordo or to Tularosa and he put in a locker there.
That was before people had home freezers, and it was a large
refrigerated building. You would buy beef and cut it up and put
it in those lockers and you had a key to it and you could get
your beef out when you wanted it. I think it would have been
pretty expensive, and we kind of wondered how he could put it in
with rancher's wages.
[Here is what Loretta Proctor said on the American television
program "Unsolved Mysteries".]
Floyd [Loretta's husband] and a neighbor was in Roswell and saw
Mac surrounded by some of the Air Force people. And they walked
right by them and Mac wouldn't speak to them. They thought it was
kind of funny, I guess, really wondered what he'd got into. And
Mac, he wouldn't talk about it after he come back home. But he
did say if he ever found something else he wouldn't report it.
2.2 Marian Strickland
[Marian Strickland was a neighbor of Mac Brazel. She was
interviewed in 1990.]
[Mac] made it plain he was not supposed to tell that there was
any excitement about the material he found on the ranch. He was a
man who had integrity. He definitely felt insulted and mis-used,
and disrespected. He was worse than annoyed. He was definitely
under some stress, and felt that he had been kicked around.
He was threatened that if he opened his mouth, he might get
thrown in the back side of the jail. He gave that impression,
definitely.
2.3 Bessie Brazel Schreiber
[Bessie Brazel Schreiber is Mac Brazel's daughter. Here is her
description of wreckage from the crash.]
[The material resembled] a sort of aluminum-like foil. Some of
[these] pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them. Even though the
stuff looked like tape, it could not be peeled off or removed at
all. Some of these pieces had something like numbers and
lettering on them, but there were no words we were able to make
out. The figures were written out like you would write numbers in
columns, but they didn't look like the numbers we use at all.
[There was also] a piece of something made out of the same
metal-like foil that looked like a pipe sleeve. About four inches
across and equally long, with a flange on one end. [Also] what
appeared to be pieces of heavily waxed paper.
2.4 William Brazel Jr
[William Brazel Jr is Mac Brazel's son. Here is his description
of wreckage from the crash.]
[One of the pieces looked like] something on the order of
tinfoil, except that [it] wouldn't tear.... You could wrinkle it
and lay it back down and it immediately resumed its original
shape... quite pliable, but you couldn't crease or bend it like
ordinary metal. Almost like a plastic, but definitely metallic.
Dad once said that the Army had once told him it was not anything
made by us.
[There was also] some threadlike material. It looked like silk,
but was not silk, a very strong material [without] strands or
fibers like silk would have. This was more like a wire, all one
piece or substance.
[There were also] some wooden-like particles like balsa wood in
weight, but a bit darker in color and much harder.... It was
pliable but wouldn't break. Weighed nothing, but you couldn't
scratch it with your fingernail. All I had was a few small bits.
[There was no writing or markings on the pieces I had] but Dad
did say one time that there were what he called
"figures" on some of the pieces he found. He often
referred to the petroglyphs the ancient Indians drew on the rocks
around here as "figures", too, and I think that's what
he meant to compare them with.
[Here are other remarks by William Brazel Jr.]
My dad found this thing and he told me a little bit about it, not
much, because the Air Force asked him to take an oath that he
wouldn't tell anybody in detail about it. He went to his grave
and he never told anybody.
He was an oldtime Western cowboy, and they didn't do a lot of
talking. My brother and I had just went through World War II (him
in the Army and me in the Navy) and needless to say, my dad was
proud. Like he told me, "When you guys went in the service,
you took an oath, and I took an oath not to tell." The only
thing he said was, "Well, there's a big bunch of stuff, and
there's some tinfoil, some wood, and on some of that wood there
was Japanese or Chinese figures."
[At the time of the crash, William Brazel Jr had been living and
working in Albuquerque, but returned when his father was taken
into custody and thus there was no one to run the ranch.]
I rode out there [the field where the wreckage was found] on the
average of once a week, and I was riding through that area, I was
looking. That's why I found those little pieces.
Not over a dozen pieces. I'd say maybe eight different pieces.
But there was only three [different] items involved: something on
the order of balsa wood, something on the order of heavy-gauge
monofilament fishing line, and a little piece of -- it wasn't
tinfoil, it wasn't lead foil -- a piece about the size of my
finger. Some of it was like balsa wood: real light and kind of
neutral color, more of a tan. To the best of my memory, there
wasn't any grain in it. Couldn't break it, it'd flex a little. I
couldn't whittle it with my pocket knife.
The "string", I couldn't break it. The only reason I
noticed the tinfoil (I'm gonna call it tinfoil), I picked this
stuff up and put it in my chaps pocket. Might be two or three
days or a week before I took it out and put it in a cigar box. I
happened to notice when I put that piece of foil in that box, and
the damn thing just started unfolding and just flattened out.
Then I got to playing with it. I'd fold it, crease it, lay it
down and it'd unfold. It's kinda wierd. I couldn't tear it. The
color was in between tinfoil and lead foil, about the [thickness]
of lead foil.
I was in Corona, in the bar, the pool hall. Sort of the meeting
place, domino parlor.... That's where everybody got together.
Everybody was asking, they'd seen the papers (this was about a
month after the crash) and I said, "Oh, I picked up a few
little bits and pieces and fragments." So, what are they?
"I dunno."
Then lo and behold, here comes the military out to the ranch, a
day or two later. I'm almost positive that the officer in charge,
his name was Armstrong, a real nice guy. He had a [black]
sergeant with him that was real nice. I think there was two other
enlisted men. They said, "We understand your father found
this weather balloon." I said, "Well yeah."
"And we understand you found some bits and pieces." I
said, "Yeah, I've got a cigar box that's got a few of them
in there, down at the saddle shed."
And this (I think he was a captain), and he said, "Well, we
would like to take it with us." I said, "Well..."
And he smiled and he said, "Your father turned the rest of
it over to us, and you know he's under an oath not to tell.
Well," he said, "we came after those bits and
pieces." And I kind of smiled and said, "OK, you can
have the stuff, I have no use for it at all."
He said, "Well, have you examined it?" And I said,
"Well, enough to know that I don't know what the hell it
is." And he said, "We would rather you didn't talk very
much about it."
2.5 Glenn Dennis
[Glenn Dennis was a mortician in Roswell in 1947. His employer
provided mortuary services for Roswell Army Air Field. Dennis
drove a combination hearse and ambulance for both civilian and
military assignments. On July 9 or 10, 1947, Dennis got several
phone calls from the Roswell AAF mortuary officer, who was more
of an administrator than a mortuary technician. The officer
wanted to know about hermetically sealed caskets ("What was
the smallest one they could get?"), and about chemical
solutions. Dennis was interviewed in August 1989 by Stanton
Friedman.]
This is what was so interesting. See, this is why I feel like
there was really something involved in this, because they didn't
want to do anything that was going to make an imbalance. They
kept saying, "OK, what's this going to do to the blood
system, what's this going to do to the tissue?" Then when
they informed me that these bodies [had] laid out in the middle
of July, in the middle of the prairie, I mean that body's going
to be as dark as your [blue] blazer there, and it's going to be
in bad shape. I was the one who suggested dry ice. I'd done that
a time or two.
I talked to them four or five times in the afternoon. They would
keep calling back and asking me different questions involving the
body. What they were really after was how to move those bodies.
They didn't give me any indication they even had the bodies, or
where they were. But they kept talking about these bodies, and I
said, "What do the bodies look like?" And they said,
"I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing: This happened
some time ago." The only thing that was mentioned was that
they were exposed to the elements for several days.
I understand these bodies weren't in the same location as where
they found some of the others. They said the bodies weren't in
the vehicle itself; the bodies were separated by two or three
miles from it. They talked about three different bodies: two of
them mangled, one that was in pretty good shape.
[That evening, Dennis took a GI accident victim to the base
infirmary, which was in the same building as the hospital and the
mortuary. He walked the injured GI inside, then drove around to
the back to see a pretty young Army Air Forces nurse he had
recently gotten to know.]
There were two MPs standing right there, and I got out and
started to go in. I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did if I
hadn't parked in the emergency area. They probably thought I was
coming after somebody. The doors were open to the military
ambulances and that's where some wreckage was, and there was an
MP on each side. I saw all the wreckage.
I don't know what it was, but I knew there was something going
on, and that's when I first got an inclination that something was
happening. What was so curious about it, was that in two of those
ambulances was a deal that looked like [the bottom] half of a
canoe. It didn't look like aluminum. You know what stainless
steel looks like when you put heat on it? How it'll turn kinda
purplish, with kind of a blue hue to it? [Dennis later said that
he saw a row of unrecognizable symbols several inches high on the
metal devices.] I just glanced in and kept going.
When I got inside, I noticed there was quite a bit of activity.
When I went back into the lounge, there were "big
birds" [high-ranking officers he didn't recognize, though he
was familiar with all the local medical people] everywhere. They
were really shook up. So I went down the hall where I usually go,
and I got down the hall just a little way and an MP met me right
there. He wanted to know who the hell I was and where I was from,
and what business did I have there? I explained who I was.
Evidently he was under the impression that they called me to come
out.
Anyway, I got past that and I went on in and then this is where I
met the nurse. She was involved in this thing, she was on duty.
She told me, "How in the hell did you get in here?" I
said, "I just walked in." She said, "My God, you
are going to get killed." And I said, "They didn't stop
me." I was going to the Coke machine to get us a Coke, and
this big red-headed colonel said, "What's that son of a
bitch doing here?"
He hollered at the MPs and that's when it hit the fan. These two
MPs grabbed me by the arms and carried me clear outside. They
carried me to the ambulance. I didn't walk, they carried me. And
they told me to get my ass out of there. [They followed him back
to the funeral home.]
About two or three hours later, they [called] and told me,
"You open your mouth and you'll be so far back in the jug
they'll have to shoot pinto beans [into you] with a bean
shooter." I just laughed and said, "Go to hell."
[Dennis spoke with the nurse again the following day.]
She said there were three little bodies. Two of them were just
mangled beyond everything, but there was one of them that was
really in pretty good condition.
And she said, "Let me show you the difference between our
anatomy and theirs. Really, what they looked like was ancient
Chinese: small, fragile, no hair." She said their noses
didn't protrude, the eyes were set pretty deep, and the ears were
just little indentations. She said the anatomy of the arms was
different, the upper arm was longer than the lower. They didn't
have thumbs, they had four different, she called them
"tentacles", I think. Didn't have any fingernails. She
then described how they had little things like suction cups on
their fingertips.
I asked her were these men or women? [Were their] sex organs the
same as ours? She said, "No, some were missing." The
first thing that decomposes on a body would be the brain, next
the sex organs, especially in women. But she thought there had
probably been something, some animals. Some of these bodies were
badly mutilated.
She said they got the bodies out of those containers [the ones he
had seen in the backs of the ambulances, on the way into the
hospital]. See, they weren't at the crash site, they were about a
mile or two from the crash site. She said they looked like they
had their own little cabins. She said the lower portion, the
abdomen and legs, was crushed, but the upper portion wasn't that
bad. She told me the head was larger and it was kind of like, the
eyes were different.
[A few weeks later, Dennis heard from his father.]
"What the hell'd you get into? What kind of trouble are you
in?" I said, "I'm not in any trouble." And he
said, "The hell you're not. The sheriff [an old friend of
the elder Dennis] said that the base personnel have been in and
they want to know all about your background."
3 THE COPS
3.1 Barbara Dugger
[Barbara Dugger is the granddaughter of George and Inez Wilcox.
George was the sheriff who Mac Brazel contacted after discovering
the crashed flying saucer. Barbara Dugger was interviewed in 1991
by Kevin Randle.]
[My grandmother said] "Don't tell anybody. When the incident
happened, the military police came to the jailhouse and told
George and I that if we ever told anything about the incident,
not only would we be killed, but our entire family would be
killed."
They called my grandfather and someone came and told him about
this incident. He went out there to the site. There was a big
burned area and he saw debris. It was in the evening. There were
four space beings. Their heads were large. They wore suits like
silk. One of the little men was alive. If she [Inez] said it
happened, it happened.
[Regarding the death threat, Barbara said Inez said:] "They
meant it, Barbara. They were not kidding."
She said the event shocked him. He never wanted to be sheriff
again after that. Grandmother ran for sheriff and was defeated.
My grandmother was a very loyal citizen of the United States, and
she thought it was in the best interest of the country not to
talk about it.
4 THE PRESS
4.1 Frank Joyce
[Frank Joyce worked at the radio station KGFL. He got a phone
call from a man, presumably Mac Brazel, who reported wreckage on
his ranch.]
He asked me what to do about it. I recommended he go to Roswell
Army Air Base [sic].
The next thing I heard was that the PIO, [Lieutenant] Walter
Haut, came into the station some time after I got this call. He
handed me a news release printed on onionskin stationary and left
immediately. I called him back at the base and said, "I
suggest that you not release this type of story that says you
have a flying saucer or flying disk." He said, "No,
it's Ok. I have the OK from the C.O. [Colonel Blanchard]."
I sent the release on the Western Union wire to the United Press
bureau. After I returned to the station, there was a flash on the
wire with the story: "The U.S. Army Air Corps [sic] says it
has a flying disk." They typed a paragraph or two, and then
other people got on the wire and asked for more information. Then
the phone calls started coming on, and I referred them to [the
airfield].
Then the wire stopped and just hummed. Then a phone call came in,
and the caller identified himself as an officer at the Pentagon,
and this man said some very bad things about what would happen to
me. He was really pretty nasty. Finally, I got through to him: I
said, "You're talking about a release from the U.S. Army Air
Corps." Bang, the phone went dead, he was just gone.
Then [station owner Walt] Whitmore called me and said,
"Frank, what's going on down there?" He was quite
upset. He asked, "Where did you get this story?" In the
meantime, I got this [USAAF news] release and hid it, to have
proof so no one could accuse me of making it up. Whitmore came in
to the station and I gave him the release. He took it with him.
The next significant thing occurred in the evening. I got a call
from [Mac] Brazel. He said we haven't got this story right. I
invited him over to the station. He arrived not long after
sunset. He was alone, but I had the feeling that we were being
watched. He said something about a weather balloon. I said,
"Look, this is completely different than what you told me on
the phone the other day about the little green men," and
that's when he said, "No, they weren't green." I had
the feeling he was under tremendous pressure. He said, "Our
lives will never be the same again."
4.2 Lydia Sleppy
[Lydia Sleppy was a teletype operator at Roswell radio station
KSWS. The event she describes below took place around 4:00 pm on
July 7, 1947. She was interviewed in October 1990 by Stanton
Friedman.]
We were Mutual Broadcasting and ABC, and if we had anything
newsworthy, we would put it on the [teletype] machine, and I was
the one who did the typing. It was in my office. Mr Tucker [Merle
Tucker was the station owner] was in Washington DC trying to get
an application approved for a station in El Paso, when this call
came from John McBoyle [another KSWS staffer]. He told me he had
something hot for the network. I said, "Give me a minute and
I'll get the assistant manager," because if it was anything
like that, I wanted one of them there while I was taking it down.
I went back and asked Mr [Karl] Lambertz (he came up from the big
Dallas station) if he would come up and watch. John was dictating
and [Karl] was standing right at my shoulder. I got into it
enough to know that it was a pretty big story, when the bell came
on [signaling an interruption]. Typing came across: "This is
the FBI, you will cease transmitting."
I had my shorthand pad, and I turned around and told [Karl] that
I had been cut off, but that I could take it in shorthand and
then we could call it in to the network. I took it in shorthand,
as John went on to give the story. He had seen them take the
thing away. He'd been out there [presumably at the Foster ranch]
when they took it away. And at that time, if I remember
correctly, John said they were gonna load it up and take it to
Texas. But when the planes came in, they were from Wright Field.
4.3 Walt Whitmore Jr
[Walt Whitmore Jr was the son of the owner of Roswell radio
station KGFL. Here is his description of wreckage from the
crash.]
[It was] very much like lead foil in appearance but could not be
torn or cut at all. Extremely light in weight. Some small beams
that appeared to be either wood or woodlike had a sort of writing
on it which looked like numbers which had either been added or
multiplied [in columns].