The debris that Brazel brought with him that day was about the size of a pencil, according to what Proctor told me, and that they couldn’t cut it and they couldn’t burn it. Although light weight, it was extremely strong. She said that neither she nor her husband could identify it and both were surprised by its durability.
Dee Proctor never really talked to investigators about the event. I spoke with him twice, both times briefly and both times by accident. He did confirm that he had been with Brazel and that military authorities had talked to him in the days that followed the discovery. In fact, it was clear that he had not only been there, but he had taken some friends out there with him. He would not say what the military told him, nor would he say much about what he had seen, other than to say that it was a field with metallic debris and the remnants of a craft. It was clear that these experiences with the military left a lasting impression on him which guided what he said for the remainder of his life.
Of course, these vague descriptions tells us nothing of the nature of the object that crashed. He also said that the craft was of extraterrestrial origin, though those words came from the older man fifty years later and not the seven-year-old boy in 1947.
Proctor died in January, 2006 at age 65. He had always been a somewhat reclusive man, quick to anger and reticent to talk about these events. In 1996, he took his mother to a bluff about ten or so miles from their ranch house and about two and a half miles from the debris field. He told her that was the field in which more than just debris had been found. Any trace of the craft or its impact was long gone in 1996.
After showing the material to the Proctors, Brazel went into Corona and mentioned to friends there that he had found something weird. The exact date can’t be established now, but it seems it would have been on Saturday, July 5. There are those, and I was among them at one time, who suggested that Brazel was told there was a reward for evidence or explanation for the flying saucers. The newspaper articles announcing that didn’t appear until after the July 4 weekend and there is no evidence that Brazel had access to a newspaper. He had no electricity and no radio at the ranch so that he couldn’t have heard about the rewards before he went into Roswell. If he found out about the money, it would have been incidental to his travel to Roswell and given the reporting in the Roswell Daily Record, after he arrived in town the second time.
The next day, Sunday, July 6 (here I accept the reconstruction of various researchers and the information supplied by the United Press), he gathered up a small bit of the debris and took it into Roswell and to Chavez County Sheriff George Wilcox. His real motivation here was probably to find someone responsible for the mess on the ranch and someone to clean it up for him. Clearly, whatever it was, it came from the sky and the Army, at Roswell, was responsible for stuff in the sky.
According to the newspaper, however, Brazel wasn’t all that concerned about the debris and he didn’t come into town until Monday, July 7. The reason this time, according to others, was to sell some wool. Bill Brazel told me later that it was unlikely that his dad would be trying to sell wool in July.
The Chaves County Sheriff and the U.S. Army
Although Wilcox died before researchers could interview him, his daughters, Phyllis McGuire and Elizabeth Tulk could provide information about what happened inside the sheriff’s office back then. McGuire, a teenager at the time, didn’t get to see much before she was chased out of the office. She said there was talk of a trip out to the crash site but she wasn’t sure if the sheriff had gone out himself, or he merely dispatched two of his deputies. She did know that someone with the sheriff’s department did.
This does bring up a question of jurisdiction. Roswell is in Chaves County and Corona is in Lincoln County. It seems strange that the Chaves County sheriff would send his deputies into another county on an investigation. However, according to the witnesses, he did send out deputies and they did find something and later on, it would seem that one of the sites was in Chavez County.
Although the military would have trouble finding the debris field without a guide, the deputies, from that area, believed they could, based on the description given them by Brazel. They left the office and returned much later, McGuire thought it was after dark, saying they had seen no debris field, but had found an area of blackened desert. They said it looked as if something large and circular had landed and then taken off. It had baked the ground to a hardness that surprised them. There would be later, other corroboration for the observation.
Wilcox wasn’t sure what Brazel should do but suggested they call out to the base and talk to them. To Wilcox, as it had to others, the problem seemed to be one created by the military. Wilcox called out to the base and eventually was directed to Major Jesse Marcel, the air intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. Marcel, according to what he would tell interviewers decades later, including Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield, was finishing lunch when the call came into the Officer’s Club.
Marcel said in those later interviews that he had gone to the sheriff’s office to talk to the sheriff and Brazel and then returned to the base. Brazel had said he had some errands and Marcel wanted to coordinate with his fellow officers. Marcel said that he talked to Colonel William Blanchard, his commanding officer, and Blanchard told him to take the new counterintelligence officer with him. Later that day Marcel, and the Counter-Intelligence Corps officer, then Captain Sheridan Cavitt, followed Brazel out to the ranch. They stayed that evening in a small out building, ate cold beans according to Marcel and the next morning were taken to the debris field.
This field was over a ridge line and down in a sort of valley where it was concealed from the roads that Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt took the day before. To the south, the valley opened and someone approaching from that direction would have been able to see the debris field from maybe two or three miles away. From everywhere else, you had to be on top of the low hills or the ridges to see anything.
Marcel, according to the testimony he gave to researchers in the 1980s, was impressed with what he was seeing. Here was a huge field that was filled with strange metallic debris. There was nothing recognizable in it. Just broken metal and something that Marcel described as parchment but that was tough and wouldn’t burn when a match was held to it. He talked of some metallic material that was very thin but so very strong they couldn’t dent with a sledge hammer. He was puzzled by what he was seeing.
Once he had a chance to examine the debris, Marcel was convinced it was nothing like anything he had ever seen. He would later tell researchers and reporters that, “It came to Earth but it was not something from Earth.”
Cavitt, on the other hand, insisted in our first interviews with him, that he had not been a participant in any such off base activities, contrary to what Marcel said. Cavitt told me that he had never bothered with a balloon recovery and that he, and Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett, the NCOIC (Noncommissioned Officer In Charge) of their office had been too busy with important work to worry about weather balloons falling on ranches nearly a hundred miles from Roswell. In fact, according to Cavitt originally, he hadn’t even been in Roswell when all these events took place and didn’t know why Marcel had said otherwise.
But then his story began to evolve slowly and he even showed me records establishing that he had just finished his counterintelligence training and had been assigned to Roswell in June 1947. Given travel time and leave, he said that he didn’t arrive until the middle of July but his wife had been there in early July to pick out an apartment and get ready to receive him. There was also talk of his wife attending a wedding in Washington, which was why she was in Roswell early, but I never got the details. Apparently, after the wedding, she went to Roswell on her own to await her husband.