Reporters searched for some of those involved in the story. Haut reported that he received telephone calls from around the world, as well as post cards and letters. The phone lines to the base were tied up with incoming calls. Haut said that Blanchard told him to make the telephone calls stop, but there was nothing that he could do about it.
Brazel, however, was in custody at the base thanks to the station owners of KGFL who had taken him into Roswell for an interview. Marcel was ordered to Fort Worth with some of the debris to show it to the Eighth Air Force commander, Ramey and therefore, wasn’t in Roswell to respond to reporters or their telephone calls. And the sheriff, who also reported calls from around the world, refused to answer any questions from anyone, telling those who called him to contact the base.
On July 9, the Roswell Daily Record ran follow up stories about the crash. In one story General Ramey explained that debris was merely the remains of a weather balloon that had been misidentified. In another, Mack Brazel told how he had found the object, not a couple of days earlier, but a couple of weeks earlier. He said that the wreckage was made up of “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.” Two weeks after the initial find, he, his wife, a son Vernon and his daughter Bessie, went back out to the field and cleaned it all up.
Brazel, according to the interview, had not seen anything fall from the sky and there was no talk of a strange explosion during a thunderstorm. At least he didn’t mention those things while he was talking to the press. He said he didn’t know what size or shape it had been, but thought it must have been about 12 feet long. The rubber was smoky gray and scattered over an area of about 200 yards.
According to the article, “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks made up a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.”
Brazel also said, in a comment that is often overlooked, that he had found weather balloons on two other occasions but what he had found this time didn’t resemble them in any way. He added, “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”
Flying Saucer Crashes Disappear from the Literature
And that is pretty much where it ended. Other than an occasional mention in a UFO book, without much in the way of facts, the case was seen as a misidentification of a weather balloon. Of course, there had been rumors of UFO crashes afterwards, but then Frank Scully wrote, Behind the Flying Saucers and the landscape of UFOs changed significantly. Scully was reporting on a series of flying saucer crashes that took place in the desert southwest, each of which resulted in the recovery of a craft and the bodies of the alien creatures that began months after the Roswell case. Scully was sure of his facts because he had them verified by a government scientist who was in charge of the investigative project.
Within months of publication, Scully’s story was discredited. Nearly everyone inside the UFO research community, and those who would join it over the next couple of decades, rejected, out of hand, other tales of spaceship crashes. Scully’s downfall, along with revelations about his main sources, both of whom were later charged with fraud in a case that had nothing to do with flying saucers, ended interest in such claims. The theory seemed to be that if the extraterrestrial beings could build a ship to cross interstellar distances, they wouldn’t make mistakes that would cause them to crash once they arrived on Earth. Besides, no story of a crash had ever withstood a serious and competent investigation.
The story stayed that way for decades. Brief mentions of it in some obscure publications, or brief mentions in books that reached a wider audience, but always with Behind the Flying Saucers in the background. And always with the note that Roswell have been identified as a weather balloon. No one was interested.
Except Len Stringfield, a UFO researcher from Ohio who began to collect tales of flying saucer crashes. Some of them were single witness and many of them made no logical sense, but Stringfield’s purpose was to put the stories out there in case there were other witnesses, or maybe a researcher interested enough to follow up on a case. Stringfield believed there was something to some of these tales though not necessarily to all of them. His ideas were radical, even in the fringe world of UFO research.
Then Jesse Marcel, no longer in the Army, living in Houma, Louisiana, and retired from repairing TVs and radios, began to tell friends and ham radio operators that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucers many years earlier. One of those was a station manager in New Orleans who mentioned it to Stan Friedman, who was being interviewed about his UFO research at that New Orleans station. The station manager suggested that maybe he should talk to Marcel.
Marcel said that he couldn’t remember the exact date, but provided enough details, and sounded credible enough, that research could begin. Friedman told both Len Stringfield and William L. Moore, a fellow investigator. The research began with the newspapers in June 1947 and worked on from there. On July 9 there were pictures of Jesse Marcel, in Brigadier General Ramey’s office, holding the remains of what looked exactly like what Ramey said it was, a rawin target and a neoprene weather balloon.
But it gave them a date and a location and confirmed some of what Marcel was saying. It was clear from the newspaper stories that for a few hours anyway the world thought a flying saucer had crashed and the U.S. Army had recovered it. Now the search for confirmation could begin.
Unlike the tales of the past, this one didn’t evaporate when people started looking at it. Marcel had confirmed that he had picked up a flying saucer and gave descriptions of debris that resembled, in a gross respect, the paper, parchment and metallic material mentioned in the newspaper and the remnants of a weather balloon and rawin target. More important, there were names attached and places to go for corroboration.
Chapter Two: Talk of the Bodies
A number of years ago I believed that I had interviewed more than a half dozen people who had seen the bodies of the alien creatures killed in the Roswell UFO crash. These were men who claimed to have first-hand knowledge, had been stationed in Roswell at the time, or who lived in Roswell at the time, and who seemed to be telling me the truth. One by one I learned that they hadn’t seen alien bodies and their stories, while quite exciting, were not based in reality. They had been less than candid in their responses to my questions.
That seemed to set the investigation back to its original point, meaning we had only the testimony of those who had seen the strange metallic debris, who had walked the Debris Field on the Foster Ranch, or had seen something in the air that might have been the craft just prior to the crash. While that is enough to get us started with the investigation again, it certainly doesn’t take us to the extraterrestrial. But today, we have new testimony from witnesses who seem to be more honest, suggesting alien creatures were killed and their bodies were recovered. Some of that testimony is second hand, but it does provide us with a glimpse of what those creatures might have looked like and what the situation in Roswell might have been in July 1947. In reviewing this testimony, we must keep in mind that it is second hand.