Kevin D. Randle
Roswell Revisited
Chapter One: The Beginnings
At first, and for nearly forty years afterwards, the Roswell case, when it was mentioned at all, was concluded to be a hoax or a misidentification with a weather balloon as the most likely solution. Among the few exceptions were a couple of paragraphs in Frank Edwards’ 1966 book Flying Saucers Are Serious Business. Almost everything he wrote about the case was wrong, other than his suggestion that something had crashed and that the Air Force attempted to explain it away but he did mention Roswell and the crash of something unusual. Harold T. Wilkins, in his 1954 book Flying Saucers on Attack mentioned it once in the same inaccurate vein.
The Roswell story as we now understand it, begins when Mack Brazel, a hired hand and ranch foreman living near Corona, New Mexico, drove into Roswell in early July 1947 with samples of strange metallic debris. The date of this event has always been in dispute. The some of the news reports suggest Brazel went to Roswell on Monday, July 7, yet there are other stories, such as one attributed to the United Press quotes Wilcox as saying that it had been the day before yesterday, or, in this case, Sunday. Time lines constructed by researchers and based on the testimony of various participants seems to corroborate the Sunday, July 6 date for Brazel’s trip into Roswell.
Adding to the confusion is the article that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on July 8. According to that story, Dan Wilmot of Roswell had seen something flying to the northwest on the evening of July 2. When the rest of the story was told, some researchers believed that the object Wilmot saw that evening was the same one that crashed some 75 miles to the northwest.
Brazel, then, sitting in his ranch on that evening, or possibly a day or two later, heard the rumblings of a distant thunderstorm. There was a sound, an explosion that didn’t sound like thunder, that caught his attention. In the weeks that followed, Brazel would tell some of his neighbors about this. One of those, Marian Strickland, in a video-taped interview, told it to me. Others, such as Loretta Proctor told a similar tale, also on video tape and to others so that a wide range of testimony about the thunderstorm and the strange explosion was available for independent review. This, of course, doesn’t suggest proof, merely corroboration of an observation.
The Object in the Air
There were those, however, who did see something in the sky. William Woody was a young man in 1947. Later he would sign an affidavit for the Fund for UFO Research attesting to the veracity of his claim. He told me, he and his father were working outside when something seemed to light up the ground around them. Woody said that the object had a bright white intensity and that it had a long, flame-like tail with bright colors like a blow-torch flame fading down into a pale red. This tail, according to Woody, was very long.
They watched it travel across the sky, appearing in the south and moving to the north, vanishing below the horizon. He said that he thought it had been in view for as long as half a minute and that his father thought that it was a big meteorite that might have fallen to the ground north of Roswell.
The object was of enough interest to Woody and his father that they decided to go look for it a couple of days later. Woody was not sure of the exact timing of the drive, but did say that as they drove north, out of Roswell on the main highway, they saw military vehicles off to the west. He wrote in his affidavit, signed on September 28, 1993, “We headed north through Roswell on U.S. 285. About 19 miles north of town, where the highway crosses the Macro Draw, we saw at least one uniformed soldier stationed beside the road. As we drove along, we saw more sentries and Army vehicles. They were stationed at all places — ranch roads, crossroads, etc. where there was access to the highway and drive east or west, and they were armed, some with rifles, others with sidearms… We stopped at one sentry post, and my father asked what was going on. The soldier, who’s [sic] attitude was very nice, just said his orders were not to let anyone leave 285 and go into the countryside.
“As we drove north,”he continued, “we saw that the Corona road (State 247), which runs west from Highway 285, was blocked by soldiers. We went on as far as Ramon, about nine miles north of the 247 intersection. There were sentries there, too. At Ramon we turned around and headed south and home… I remember my father saying he thought the Army was looking for something it had tracked on its way down.”
On the Roswell base, Corporal E. L. Pyles, thought that he saw something cross the sky. Back as I was putting together The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, I made an assumption. Frank Kaufmann gave me some documentation that said the craft had fallen near midnight on July 4, 1947. At the time I had no reason to believe that Kaufmann’s documentation was fraudulent so I assumed that the object Pyles saw was the same one that Kaufmann had talked about it. The result was that in the book, I assigned a date and time to the observation, though the best Pyles could do, originally, was tell us he thought he made the sighting in 1947 and that he had the impression that it was in the summer. Hardly a definitive identification.
But there are some facts here that help us determine a time and date. First, according to the notes I have, Pyles had suggested he wasn’t on the main base, but at one of the outlying facilities. Later, talking to Karl Pflock, he said that he, and a friend, were walking across the drill field on the main base, having left the NCO club. He saw the object, which he described to Don Schmitt as something like a shooting star but larger. He said that it was orangish and that it was headed downward.
Significantly, and contrary to what Pflock would later write, Pyles told me, and us, that a couple of days later he had seen the article in The Roswell Daily Record and wondered if what he had seen had anything to do with that. In other words, Pyles couldn’t remember a solid date, or even year, but could relate it to the newspaper articles which does establish a date and a year. It was Pyles who related the sighting of the bright object to the Roswell case and who brought up the articles he’d seen in the newspaper which certainly fixed the date as the first week in July, 1947.
The Debris Field and the Strange Metal
The day after the strange explosion in the thunderstorm, according to most of those same witnesses, meaning here, the Proctors and Mack’s son Bill, Brazel was riding the range, checking on the sheep when he came to a field filled with strange metallic debris. Estimates by others who saw it later suggested that the debris field was about three-quarters of a mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide. According to a man Brazel hired to help with the ranch work, Tommy Tyree, the material was so densely packed that the sheep refused to cross it and that meant that Brazel had to drive them around it to get the sheep to water. Brazel was annoyed because he wanted to know who would clean up the mess probably figuring that it would take several hours, if not days, to do it.
Loretta Procter told me, as she had others on both audio tape and video tape that she, along with her husband, Floyd, had a chance to see a small piece of the debris recovered by Mack Brazel but never bothered to drive down to the debris field. Proctor said that gas was expensive and tires were expensive and they didn’t want to take the time. So, she didn’t see the field then, but there are indications that her young son, William “Dee” Proctor, who was with Brazel on the morning he found the debris, did. In fact, all this might have happened as Brazel took Dee home that day so that he had a chance to talk to the Proctors about the crash.