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Roswell) on June 14, 1947 {Time, 1997). He later returned with his family,
gathered the debris, and took it home. On June 24, 1947—just a few days later
and hundreds of miles distant—pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near
Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, when he reported seeing nine disk-like
objects flying in formation at about 1200 miles per hour {Time, 1997). To this
day, skeptics have not come up with a plausible explanation for what he saw.
Arnold’s report seemed to trigger a rash of “UFO sightings” across the country,
and by the Fourth of July newspapers everywhere were printing reports of
“flying saucers.”
Brazel led an isolated life, and kept a separate residence away from his wife
and children, on his ranch with no outside means of communication. Apparently
he had not heard about the UFO furor until July 5, when he went into the nearby
town of Corona and heard the rumors. The next day he reported to Sheriff
George Wilcox, saying he thought he had found a “flying disk.” Wilcox
immediately phoned the Roswell Army Air Field, notifying Major Jesse Marcel,
the group intelligence officer. Marcel and counterintelligence corps officer
Sheridan Cavitt picked up Brazel and headed out to the ranch to retrieve the
debris.
Colonel William Blanchard soon ordered Walter Haut, the 509th’s press
officer to issue a press release, telling him “we have in our possession a flying
saucer. This thing crashed north of Roswell, and we’ve shipped it all to General
Ramey, 8th Air Force at Fort Worth.”
The press release read “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became
a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb
Group.. . was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the
cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriffs office of Chaves
County.” The release went on to say the wreckage had been transferred to
“higher headquarters,” according to the July 9, 1947 edition of the San
Francisco Chronicle. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, making
news in the New York Times, and even the London Times.
Several hours later the military issued a new release that the “flying saucer”
had turned out to be nothing more than a weather balloon. Most of the major
newspapers ran the new slant to the story. A major exception was the
Washington Post. As Berlitz and Moore note in their book, The Roswell Incident
(1980) the Post referred instead to an imposition of a “news blackout.”
In their 1997 book UFO Crash At Roswell (curiously with the same title as
a 1991 book by Randall & Schmitt declaring aliens really did land), Benson
Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore discuss the development of a
modem myth, and how it compares to other classic myths and legends. Ziegler
calls it “a traditional folk motif clothed in modem garb.” They discuss the grain
of truth contained in the “myth,” and tell what they think really happened. Co
author Charles B. Moore was the project engineer for the top-secret Project
Mogul. This involved launching balloon trains each carrying three radar
reflectors. These were kite-like structures made of paper and tinfoil, with frames