Roswell

Crash Retrievals and Reverse Engineering Part 2

Sep 29, 2025

The Roswell Incident is the most famous crash-retrieval case and the subject of dozens of books, involving hundreds of alleged first-, second- and third-hand witnesses. After a day in the news in the summer of 1947, even ufologists forgot about it until Jesse Marcel went public with his personal account in 1978. Briefly, on July 7, 1947, Major Marcel, an intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field, accompanied rancher Mack Brazel, along with counterintelligence officer Captain Sheridan Cavitt, to the Foster ranch, where Brazel had discovered a large field of debris some days prior. Brazel had driven down to Roswell the day before, July 6, to show Sheriff George Wilcox some of the debris, prompting Wilcox to contact the base. After Marcel and Cavitt’s return, the military launched a large recovery effort to retrieve all the material on the ranch and transfer it to various other locations, most notably Wright Field in Dayton, OH.

On July 8, the base’s public information officer Walter Haut issued the famous press release announcing the recovery of a flying saucer. Later that same day, Marcel flew to Fort Worth, TX, with at least some of the recovered debris (prior to its transfer to Wright Field). There, during a press conference, he was photographed with obvious weather balloon debris, which General Roger Ramey announced had been misidentified as a flying saucer. Marcel, and many of the others involved, later claimed the material had been switched out prior to the press conference.

October 7, 1994

Q: (L) Did a spacecraft of the Lizzies piloted by the Grays crash in Roswell?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) What caused the crash?
A: Ionization.
Q: (L) Were the bodies and the craft recovered by the United States government?
A: Yes.

October 22, 1994 (direct channeling)

Q: (L) In discussion of a purported crash of a space craft in Roswell, it was remarked that this crash was caused by ionization. Could you be more specific?
A: […] the bouncing of […] radar beams off of the ions existing in the atmosphere at the time caused electromagnetic disturbance, which interfered [with] the gravitational balancing system of that particular craft.
Q: (L) Why were the ions present at that time and not at other times?
A: The ions were charged at that time because of storm activity.

Researchers have hypothesized lightning and/or radar as a cause of the crash since the first investigations. The famous 1950 memo from Guy Hottel, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office to the FBI Director, mentioning 3 flying saucers recovered by the Air Force, included this: “According to Mr. [redacted] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers.”

In 1980’s The Roswell Incident, Berlitz and Moore quote Norma Gardner, who worked at Wright-Patterson in 1955 with Top Secret security clearances, saying that she heard several rumors at the base suggesting “that the object was brought down by air force action, perhaps accidentally, through radar interference with the operational technology of the disc.” In their book on the Aztec case, the Ramseys quote Aztec resident Lee Crane describing how Air Force personnel at the time would bring “freshly killed ducks that had been knocked out of the air by the powerful micro-wave radar being used at their facility” in the area.

According to Brazel’s son, his father had claimed to have discovered the debris field the morning after a particularly noteworthy thunderstorm with lightning striking the same area multiple times, during which he heard “an odd sort of explosion.” In their 2020 book, Roswell: The Ultimate Cold Case, Carey and Schmitt speculated that the lightning storm “may have totally over-surged” the craft’s metallic skin, if it operated by “drawing electromagnetic energy from the air,” and a second strike may have “exceeded the craft’s tensile strength, causing it to shatter.”

According to Lue Elizondo in Imminent (2024), government scientist Hal Puthoff informed him, in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), that Roswell “was real” and that “four deceased nonhuman bodies” were recovered. Regarding the incident, Elizondo writes:

A UAP fell that day in the vicinity of a government test facility in New Mexico and broke into two crash sites. […] It was hypothesized that the UAP that crashed at Roswell had been conducting some sort of reconnaissance on our budding atomic program when the unexpected happened. An electromagnetic pulse generated from one of the nearby test ranges had inadvertently intervened with the craft’s technology and caused it to crash.

When asked about Roswell, whistleblower Jason Sands, in his January 2025 appearance with UAPTF member Lenval Logan on the Joe Rogan Podcast, said:

The most accurate account is the one where the microwave radar wave form upset the onboard avionics inside these craft that these NHI were flying on that day in Roswell. […] at the very molecular level these things are organized very minutely, so you can imagine what even a flow of electricity, if it affects it wrong or at the right wavelength, it does break down the electrical current and […] whatever drive that they might have.

Logan then says he was told (presumably by a fellow government insider) that the lightning storm may have magnetized the 2 craft, causing them collide with each other and crash. (Note that Frank Scully was the first to suggest publicly that electromagnetic disturbances may disturb the saucers’ propulsion systems.)

May 27, 2000

Q: (L) Now, we have a problem here with Roswell. I just finished reading Kal Korff’s book The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You to Know, and it is pretty much a bashing exposé of lies and confusions spread, supposedly, by the many witnesses who have come forward over the years. He takes Jesse Marcel apart; he takes the fireman’s daughter’s story apart; he rips the undertaker’s story to pieces; he takes Phil Corso’s story apart; you name it, he bashes it to bits. Pretty effectively, too, in my opinion. He seems to have located the origin of the “little sticks” with hieroglyphics on them seen by several of the so-called witnesses. This is a serious problem with this whole story. The problem is that, despite the fact that all the stories have been dissected by this guy so effectively, there are things he cannot account for and explanations that he makes that simply don’t fit his thesis.
On the one hand, he claims that the Roswell base people instituted a cover up of a top-secret balloon project [i.e. Mogul, the Air Force’s 1994 explanation for the case], and on the other hand, he says that the Roswell base did not know about the top-secret balloon project because it was so secret! That is completely irreconcilable.
Then he quotes a general’s [Brig. Gen. Arthur Exon] written statement that something was going on that had something to do with alien interactions and dismisses this signed statement as “hearsay.” The thing that occurs to me is that: a) either we have somebody going back and forth in time, tweaking the facts, such as Marcel’s military records and such things including any records of the nurse that the undertaker claims to have talked to; or b) we have something that did happen and either they went back in time to set a situation up so that people would start remembering something other than what happened, so as to cover up the real event with more or less “false memories” that could be not stand scrutiny; or c) they are just feeding disinformation through all of these people, and have produced a whole scenario with all kinds of witnesses and weird stuff to cover up something that happened. Could you comment on this. […]
A: Try scenario 3.
Q: (L) So, they are feeding disinformation through all the so-called “Roswell witnesses.”
A: Close.
Q: (L) To cover up something that really did happen?
A: Yes.

The question of witnesses is discussed more in the following session, where the issue isn’t so much the bulk of the witnesses themselves, but the debunkers nitpicking their accounts in order to discredit them and therefore their testimony. That said, all the major Roswell researchers take issue with at least some of the witnesses. Stanton Friedman, for example, rejected several of Randle and Schmitt’s sources, e.g. Frank J. Kaufmann (aka McKenzie aka Joseph Osborne), James Ragsdale and Frankie Rowe (the fireman’s daughter). Concerning Pflock’s work, Friedman wrote:

His approach was based primarily on character assassination, though in some cases I have to agree with him. […] Karl and I agreed that Kaufmann’s stories were unbelievable […] in 1999, Kaufmann admitted to me with three witnesses that he had not gone out to the crash site with Colonel Blanchard or Jesse Marcel as previously claimed. A few years later, after Frank’s death, Don Schmitt and Dr. Mark Rodeghier of the Center for UFO Studies discovered that Frank had manufactured some phony documents and agreed, as did Kevin Randle, finally, that Frank was not a witness.

Farrell, as a proponent of the “Nazi technology” theory, rejects all the witnesses of alien bodies (discussed in the next article).

Q: (L) And they are feeding the disinformation through the people so that they will come out with this whole story, make all this big splash, so that it can then be proven false, so that everybody will think that the whole thing was a crock of kaflooey. Is that it?
A: Not quite. Confusing stories and fabrications are used to muddy the waters in anticipation of future disclosures. And beware of authors who cast one stone and hit multiple targets. As with any conspiratorial mystery, keep focused on the earliest entries in the evidentiary train, i.e. “RAAF Recovers Flying Disk in Roswell Region.”

According to the Roswell Daily Record article of July 8, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region,” the saucer was recovered “on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity” and then flown to “higher headquarters”: “The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer’s construction or its appearance had been revealed.” The article also included a possible sighting of the saucer by Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot on the prior Wednesday evening (July 2).

According to Walter Haut, who issued the press release, he attended a regularly scheduled staff meeting the morning of July 8 with base commander Col. William Blanchard, Maj. Marcel, CIC Capt. Cavitt, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey (Blanchard’s boss) and Ramey’s chief of staff, Col. Thomas DuBose, among others. Marcel and Cavitt described their trip to the ranch and displayed samples of the debris. Later that morning, Blanchard phoned Haut’s office and dictated the press release, to be delivered to local papers and radio stations. Haut also stated the when Marcel returned to Roswell from Fort Worth, Marcel described “taking pieces of the wreckage to Gen. Ramey’s officer and after returning from a map room, finding the remains of a weather balloon and radar kite substituted while he was out of the room. Marcel was very upset over this situation.” Col. Dubose also confirmed a cover-up, writing in a 1991 affidavit:

The material shown in the photographs taken in … Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.

The Roswell witnesses’ statements align with these events, filling in the picture with additional details. As Carey and Schmitt write: “we have witnesses along the entire timeline of events: the discovery and recovery of the UFO and its crew at the crash sites, their initial transport to the air base at Roswell where a preliminary autopsy was attempted, the flight to Fort Worth where the cover-up began, and the flight to their final destination at Wright Field.”

Q: (L) Terry was saying that he thought the Roswell business was a cover-up for spacetime travel by some secret U.S. group.
A: No.
Q: (L) So, the other information you have already given on Roswell still stands. Is there any other comment you want to add to this information at this time?
A: Roswell did involve evidence of non-human intelligence. [Q: Did this just mean basic information about the reality of alien visitation, or was there some other implied meaning here? A: No implied meaning. (2000-7-15)]
Q: (L) I just can’t understand some things. When these researchers get out there and they start digging into things, and this happens over and over again, they don’t dig deep enough…
A: Kennedy was assassinated by everyone … according to the myriad researchers, so called.
Q: (L) So true. You read one “carefully researched” book, and there is one candidate for the assassin. You read another “carefully researched” book and there is another candidate. By the time you get done reading all the books, everybody in the country is implicated! At the very least, everyone present in Dealey Plaza had the opportunity.

In the case of Roswell, each research or team has their own pet theory, and tends to disregard the evidence supporting other theories. For example, Carey and Schmitt reject San Agustin, Friedman and Berliner reject the crash site north of Roswell, and Redfern and Farrell present scenarios involving strictly human technology, rejecting the witnesses to alien bodies (or their characterization of those bodies as non-human).

Q: (L) Is there any trail we could follow that would enable us to obtain a more definite indication of what really did go on in the Roswell case?
A: There is no “proof” or evidence unless the perceiver is willing.

As Chris Ramsay put it on his Area52 podcast:

I don’t think that any amount of paperwork or witness testimony will convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. I think that people can be shown things and still not believe it. You can be shown a body, dead or alive, and you can be like, “Wow, some crazy animatronics.” And even if they told you, “No, it’s aliens,” and it’s the most trustworthy people, if you’re not ready for that type of disclosure, for that type of shift in your ontology, then you won’t accept it.

July 15, 2000

This and the following questions are in reference to Korff’s above-mentioned debunking:

Q: For example, did the fireman [Dan Dwyer] actually go to a crash site and witness what his daughter [Frankie Rowe] claims he witnessed?
A: Yes.
Q: Was it an alien craft crash site?
A: Yes.

Rowe, who was a 12 years old in 1947, claimed her father, who worked for the Roswell Fire Department, had responded to a call north of Roswell, where he saw what he described as an egg-shaped craft and bodies. She recalls him telling her that he saw three bodies (one of which was alive and walking around as if in a daze) the size of children, with copper-colored skin. Like Korff, Stanton Friedman questioned Rowe’s credibility. Kevin Randle continues to defend her testimony, however, writing in 2009:

Both Tony [Bragalia] and I have interviewed a man who was in the Roswell Fire Department in July 1947. He said that they were told by a military representative […] not to go out there. He said that he was told the base fire department would handle it. He said that he learned, from Dwyer, that the craft was strange... suggesting that it was an unknown object from someplace else.
He has corroborated much of what Frankie Rowe said which means we can dispense with calling her a liar. She might be mistaken, she might be wrong, but she’s not a liar. Others are saying the same things she said so that her story is no longer stand alone (though her sister had corroborated part of it long ago). She has been vindicated.

Rowe also claimed to have handled debris from the crash collected by a state trooper.

Q: Did Jesse Marcel witness a crashed UFO?
A: Pieces of one.

Marcel visited the debris field on the Foster ranch. He described several types of material, including: extremely strong, tinfoil-like metal that could not be bent or broken; “memory metal” that could be folded up and return to its original shape; small, unbreakable, balsa-like beams with what looked like hieroglyphics; parchment-like material that could not be broken or burned with a lighter. While he is not on the record as having seen bodies, three family members claim he told them that this was the case. Overall, the witnesses tend to describe two of the above materials. As Carey and Schmitt describe them in their 2020 book:

A large quantity of small, palm-sized pieces of smooth, very thin, very light but extremely strong “metal” the color of aluminum that could not be bent, cut, scratched, or burned.
A large quantity of palm-sized and larger pieces of very thin and very light “metal” or “cloth” with “fluid” properties. This type of wreckage also could not be cut, scratched, or burned, but it could be temporarily deformed. As one amazed witness told us, “I wadded up a piece of it in my hand, and it felt as though there was nothing there. Then, I placed it on a smooth surface, and it unfurled itself and flowed over the flat surface like liquid mercury back to its original shape without so much as a crease.”

Q: Did Glen Dennis really talk with a nurse who later disappeared?
A: Yes.
Q: How did this woman disappear? Kal Korff could find no record of her existence.
A: Transferred, discharged, records expunged.
Q: Is she dead, so that she doesn’t know all the stories about her experience?
A: Yes.
Q: Did she die under suspicious circumstances?
A: No.

Dennis was an embalmer and ambulance driver at the local funeral home. He claimed that on the morning of July 8, he received telephone calls from the airbase mortuary officer requesting child-sized caskets. Later that day, he drove to the base to pick up an injured serviceman. While there, he says he met a nurse friend at the Officer’s Club who told him about seeing 3 dead “foreign bodies” with an overwhelming odor. He told researcher James Clarkson that she later assisted in the autopsy of a non-human body from the crash. Dennis claimed never to have seen the nurse again; he was told a few months later that she had died in a plane crash after a transfer to England.

Dennis was discredited among some researchers after he admitted to providing a false name for the nurse to Friedman. He told Clarkson this was a mistake on his part, but it was done to protect her identity – something he had promised her to do. “He felt he was being hounded by the researchers.” Carey and Schmitt have tried to identify this nurse and describe several candidates in Witness to Roswell. Dennis may have inadvertently revealed her identity when responding to one of their questions about former Army nurse Mary Lowe, telling them, “Yeah, she knows everything,” and then correcting himself the next day: “About yesterday, forget what I said about Mary Lowe. I was mistaken. She doesn’t know anything!” (Lowe was still alive in 1999 but is now presumed dead.)

Q: Did the little balsa wood piece actually come from a toy company as Korff suggests?
A: No. Kal Korff was paid to mislead, but it is now moot as the military changed its story yet again after his book was published. [In 1997, the year Korff’s book was published, the Air Force released yet another report, this one ascribing the accounts of alien bodies to crash-test dummies dropped from the air in the 1950s.]

Korff quotes sources claiming that the military sourced pieces used in the construction of the Mogul balloon, specifically the radar targets, from a toy company, and utilized a type of pink tape with flowers on it to hold together the balsa wood components – thus allegedly explaining the hieroglyphics.

Q: One of the things that Kal Korff did was to dig into Jesse Marcel’s background, and he claims that Marcel never had any of the background that he claimed, and that Jesse Marcel is basically a liar. He has the military records to back him up on this. Were Marcel’s records altered?
A: Jesse Marcel never claimed to be a military pilot. He was an intelligence officer who held a private pilot’s license.
Q: That’s not what Kal Korff says. He quotes Stanton Friedman and William Moore and all those guys who wrote about Roswell as quoting Marcel to have said he was a military pilot. Korff quotes from their books, and says they wrote these things and didn’t check to find out that Jesse was a liar.
A: Jesse did not lie.

Korff did not quote a primary source where Marcel claimed to have been a pilot. The confusion seems to come from a 1978 interview with Marcel conducted by Bob Pratt, where he discussed his military training and air combat missions (for which he was twice awarded the Air Medal). As Randle writes:

Marcel said he had flown AS a pilot, bombardier and waist gunner, not that he served in any of those positions in any official capacity. For those who have [ever] been in an aviation unit, Marcel’s claim isn’t that farfetched.
Those who have no rating, meaning they are not on flight status, are often provided with an opportunity to fly in aviation positions. I have flown as a helicopter door gunner, but you’ll find nothing in my record to support that. […] The point is that all of us can say, truthfully, that we flew in those positions.

As for Marcel’s claim to have been a private pilot, there is no evidence he had such a license. However, as Randle notes:

This is true because I asked the FAA about it and although their records do go back into the 1920s, when Marcel would have started flying and the government began to attempt to license pilots, this really isn’t the whole story.
If you check out the FAA site and take a look at the licensing history, you’ll learn, as did I, that in the 1920s the forerunner to the FAA tried to induce private pilots to voluntarily get licenses without much success. It wasn’t until the mid-1930s that most pilots were finally licensed and it wasn’t until after the Second World War that there was a real requirement for a license. Even with that many who had started flying in biplanes didn’t bother with the licenses. It could be argued here that Marcel, having no need to fly any more, simply didn’t bother.

Multiple Crash Sites

Researchers disagree over the location of the final impact site, the date of the crash, and even the number of sites, associated with Roswell. Carey and Schmitt have settled on a scenario involving only 1 flying saucer, with a portion creating the debris field and the remaining central pod crashing several miles southeast. Friedman believed there were 2 saucers, one crashing southeast of Corona and the other crashing in the Plains of San Agustin southwest of the town of Magdalena.

Rough locations of proposed crash locations discussed below. Note towns to use as reference points: Magdalena and Socorro upper left, Corona top center, Roswell right center. Holloman AFB (bottom center) is Alamogordo AAF.

September 9, 1995 (direct channeling)

A: The crash did not occur at Roswell. It was in a desert area, approximately 157 miles to the west by northwest of the Roswell location.

This is most likely a reference to the alleged San Agustin crash site, located approximately 175 miles west by northwest of Roswell. (The debris field on the Foster ranch was approximately 75 miles NW of Roswell and 20 miles south of Corona.)

A: The Roswell location that you are familiar with did not include either a craft or any bodies or living beings. It was merely a debris field.

While technically true, a second site only 2.5 miles east/southeast of the debris field – the so-called Dee Proctor site, named for Brazel’s 7-year-old neighbor who later claimed to have discovered it with Brazel – is said to be where the 4 bodies were found. This secondary site is mentioned in the MJ-12 “Briefing Document” prepared for President-Elect Eisenhower in 1952, which states:

On 07 July, 1947, a secret operation was begun to assure recovery of the wreckage of this object for scientific study. During the course of this operation, aerial reconnaissance discovered that four small human-like beings had apparently ejected from the craft at some point before it exploded. These had fallen to earth about two miles east of the wreckage site. All four were dead and badly decomposed due to action by predators and exposure to the elements during the approximately one week period which had elapsed before their discovery.

Carey and Schmitt believe that the final impact site associated with the debris field was an additional 25 miles southeast of that, closer to Roswell, and reject the San Agustin testimony.

A: The actual crash occurred some distance away, the crash site, a desert location, closer to Los Alamos, [New] Mexico, and there, the craft, which had malfunctioned over Roswell, thus leaving behind the debris field, […] crashed. This is where the bodies and living beings were recovered along with what was remaining of the craft.

This description contradicts that just given above (“157 miles to the west by northwest”). Los Alamos is 200 miles away from Roswell, in the northern part of the state. There are no proposed locations that far north associated with the Roswell case, though some of the wreckage is said to have been sent there for study. (As UAP Gerb observes, Los Alamos comes up in practically all of his crash retrieval and reverse engineering investigations.)

October 21, 1995

Q: (L) OK, was this two craft striking each other, or was it one craft malfunctioning?
A: Two.
Q: (L) OK, it was two craft hitting each other? Is that correct?
A: No. [Contrary to what some in the government have speculated, according to Lenval Logan above and an MJ-12 document cited below.]
Q: (L) There were two complete craft that came down?
A: Bouncing off ionized waves between two craft traveling in tandem.
Q: (L) OK, was one of these craft totally destroyed?
A: Yes. [Note previous session, where it was 1 craft which had malfunctioned over the Foster ranch, then crashed farther west.]

July 15, 2000

The following statement is in response to a question about various contradictions in the sessions dealing with the question of the Roswell bodies, which will be covered in the next article. Here, we will focus only on the question of locations and dates.

A: There was more than one “crash in the vicinity” of Roswell, and at different times.

Of the 100+ accounts Ryan Wood collected in Majic Eyes Only, 13 are alleged to have occurred in New Mexico between 1945 and 1963, with a handful in bordering states like Texas and Arizona. As Carey and Schmitt observe, “According to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, there were more UFO sightings in New Mexico at that time than anywhere else in the country.” Several researchers and insiders have commented on this apparent statistical oddity.

June Crain, a Wright-Pat employee in the late 1940s, told James Clarkson that she was aware of 3 crashes in the area during that time period (1947 to the early 1950s): “See the thing of it is, all these crashes, for some mysterious reason were always right around this Roswell area.” She also noted the nuclear connection (the proximity to White Sands and the Trinity Site, and the fact that Roswell hosted the only nuclear arsenal at the time).

Stringfield quotes John Reynolds, an old NICAP researcher, describing a 1990 conversation he had with a military officer source: “When I first brought up the Roswell crash, Jack immediately said, ‘Which one?’ He was very evasive after that statement.” Stringfield also writes: “there were three other crashes in New Mexico during the same time-frame in 1947. Tim Cooper [more on whom below] in his research named three locations.” One of Cooper’s sources, “Bob” (a retired USAF master sergeant who had been stationed at Alamogordo Army Air Field, part of the White Sands Proving Ground, in July 1947) told him: “Roswell is only part of the UFO crash/landings in New Mexico.”

The C’s go on to describe 3 separate events: one in “early June” (June 4, “approximately 100 miles further west of the Roswell area”) and others on July 1 and July 4. At least one of these involved 2 UFOs (see 1995-10-21 just above). Note that the San Agustin location is roughly 100 miles west of the Foster ranch debris field. The Trinity Site is around 100 miles west of Randle and Schmitt’s proposed impact site. Both of these will be relevant below.

Q: The July 1st incident, where did that occur?
A: 67 miles southeast of White Sands.
Q: And the third crash was the Plains of San Agustin crash that you have already given figures on, correct?
A: Yes.

There are no reports of a crash 67 miles southeast of White Sands, if measured from its southern border, which would place it in northwest Texas, due east of Fort Bliss. However, measuring from the northern border would place it around 40 miles east of Alamogordo. One of Timothy Cooper’s alleged MJ-12 documents from his source “Thomas Cantwheel” (a “Memorandum for the Military Assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee” dated Sept. 19, 1947) says:

The recovery of unidentified planform aircraft in the state of New Mexico on 6 July 1947, ten miles northwest of Oscura Peak, and a debris field 75 miles northwest of the Army’s 509th Atomic Bomb Group, Roswell Army Air Field, is confirmed. A subsequent [sic?] capture of another similar craft 30 miles east of the Army’s Alamogordo Army Air Field on 5 July 1947, has convinced the Army Air Forces S-2, Army G-2 and Navy ONI, that the craft and wreckage are not of U.S. manufacture.

Note that 10 miles northwest of Oscura Peak is within White Sands, just a few miles from the Trinity Site (more on which below).

The Corona Crash

Beginning with Berlitz and Moore in The Roswell Incident (1980), most researchers believe the Corona crash on the Foster ranch occurred the night of July 2 and was discovered by Mack Brazel the following day, July 3. However, this date was inferred based upon the fact that Brazel claimed to have gone to check on the field the day after a large thunderstorm. Searching old records in 2013, Dr. David Rudiak identified July 2 as the only possible date for this storm, according to Carey and Schmitt. However, Rudiak may have put too much faith in the accuracy and comprehensiveness of those records, especially for an area as remote as the Foster ranch. Additionally, Randle and Schmitt write that according to Brazel, the last time he had checked that section of the ranch was 4 days prior, so even if were to know the date he found the debris, it is possible it crashed any time in that 4-day period.

After his initial interrogation by the Army, Brazel was escorted to the local radio station to provide a new version of events, published in the local paper on July 9. In it, Brazel claimed he had only found mundane items consistent with a weather balloon, and he had found them on June 14. (A feature on Marcel, published July 12, implies a date of late June, but may have been influenced by Brazel’s revised testimony.) Brazel was then detained by the Army at the Roswell base for five full days without due process or the ability to call his family. He never again spoke of the events and was reportedly watched closely by military for years after.

In The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994), Randle and Schmitt proposed that the Corona crash actually occurred two days later, on July 4, with Brazel discovering the debris on July 5. Randle came to believe that a recovery operation began as early as July 5 (before Marcel and Cavitt’s visit to the debris field on July 7) at the location 35 miles north-northwest of Roswell – a narrative Friedman and Pflock both rejected due to the quality of the witnesses on which it was based. (Schmitt, in his work with Carey, would later revert back to the July 2 date.) Carey and Schmitt assert, without citing a source, that debris fragments from the Foster ranch were passed around at the Fourth of July rodeo in Capitan. If true, that would mean the Corona crash had to have occurred prior to July 4.

Carey and Schmitt believe that the final impact site north of town was discovered on July 7, just west of Highway 285. The alleged witnesses who discovered it were a team of archeologists, including Dr. William Holden and his students. A colleague, Dr. C. Bertrand Schultz, encountered the military cordon at the site when he attempted to meet up with Holden at the site, about which Holden later told him.

The Plains of San Agustin

Berliner and Friedman believe a second crash occurred around the same time (an unspecified date in “early July”) in this area southwest of Socorro and Magdalena. Oddly, the testimony supporting this site also features archeologists happening upon the crash.

The first testimony came to Friedman secondhand from Vern and Jean Maltais, who were close friends of Grady Barnett, a civil engineer doing survey work for the Soil Conservation Service at the time. Before his death in 1969, he told them of discovering a large, crashed saucer with 4-5 bodies. A dozen other people, including archeologists, were at the site, which the military soon evacuated. An archeological team, including Herbert W. Dick, are on record as conducting a stratigraphic survey of the area in the first 2 weeks of July, but all living members of the team later denied this to researchers.

Friedman also heard of the story from an old neighbor of Barnett’s, Harold Baca; a retired military officer, William Leed, to whom Barnett told his story; as well as a rancher, Marvin Ake, and a retired postmistress in the area. Lydia Sleppy, a teletype operator in 1947, claimed she received a report from radio station owner Merle Tucker, who had interviewed witnesses who “insisted” the UFO had come down in the area of Socorro.

Gerald Anderson, 5 years old at the time, also claimed to have been at the site, but his testimony was discredited after he presented forged documents to support it (though a lie detector test found no signs of deception in his recollections). Friedman, despite coming to reject Anderson’s testimony for this reason, remained convinced of the reality of this crash site and believed it likely that it was taken to Alamogordo after recovery.

One of Cooper’s “Cantwheel” documents makes reference to an “unidentified aerodyne found on July 5, 1947, south of Socorro, New Mexico, by military and civilian members of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project,” which was sent to Alamogordo.

This is also allegedly the site visited by Diana Pasulka, Garry Nolan and Tim Taylor, described in Pasulka’s book American Cosmic (2019).

White Sands Proving Ground

Least discussed is an alleged crash or landing within the White Sands Proving Ground (now Missile Range). Already mentioned above, it is also referenced in another of Cooper’s Cantwheel documents (the 6-page “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Intelligence Assessment,” dated July 22, 1947):

At 2332 MST, 3 July 1947, radar sta[t]ions in [west] Texas and White Sands Proving Ground, N.M., tracked two unidentified aircraft until both dropped off radar. [Later, the document says: “SCEL [Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories] antennas had locked onto a flight of three objects on 3 July and lost them around 2330 MST on 4 July.] Two crash sites have been located close to the WSPG. Site LZ-1 was located a ranch near Corona, approx. 75 miles northwest of the town of Roswell [i.e. the Foster ranch site]. Site LZ-2 was located approx. 20 miles southeast of the town of Socorro, at Lat. 33-40-31, Long. 106-28-29, with Oscura Peak being the geographic reference point.

These coordinates indicate a location 35 miles southeast of Socorro and around 6 miles west of Oscura Peak: the Trinity Site within White Sands Proving Ground. A source also provided Cooper with an aerial photograph of Trinity showing what appears to be a circular, burned area at precisely these coordinates (included in Wood’s book MAJIC Eyes Only).

According to the alleged “1st Annual Report” of MJ-12, dated Fall 1952, the L-2 site at Trinity “yielded the most material for analysis.” They believed both sites may have been connected, with the object hitting the ground near Corona at a sharp angle and continuing to remain airborne “until coming to rest at Site L-2” (matching the scenario given in 1995-9-9). The document also mentions a “second craft that impacted at Site L-3 that yielded little evidence “as the impact was vertical in nature and at very high speed”:

It is believed that the debris discovered on 2 July 1947, by a local rancher was the result of a mid-air collision […] Radar film and tower logs do not explain the merging of three radar targets prior to collision and subsequent crashes. [Possibly a description of the Proctor site or the site closer to Roswell.]

Stringfield includes Cooper’s interviews with the above-mentioned source “Bob” in his Status Report #6 (1991). “Bob” was in fact Cooper’s own father, Harry B. Cooper, who told his son that while stationed at Alamogordo in 1947, he had read a detailed report, with high-quality photographs, about a UFO recovered within White Sands. The elder Cooper said that according to the report, the UFO had either crashed or landed. It was an “almost egg-shaped disc with a flat bottom,” about 100 feet wide and 15-20 feet high in the center, “shiny and metallic with no apparent markings nor any visible propulsion system.” (The UFO reportedly had within it the remains of an ancient “Bible” written in paleo-Hebrew, which was provided to experts like William Foxwell Albright to study. The Aztec craft was similarly reported to have contained a book of some sort.) It had been tracked by radar and filmed flying over the North Range (“near Tularosa, but inside the range”).

Cooper was certain of the date of the event: July 4, 1947. The base was “sealed for a week or so” after the event. When asked by his son if he knew “about the Roswell base finding and transporting unidentified wreckage,” Harry responded:

Not at first. Remember, White Sands and Alamogordo reported to the AMC [Air Material Command, headed by Maj. Gen. Twining] at Wright-Pat. Roswell was a SAC [Strategic Air Command] base and reported to Offut Field, so we did not work together. I did not know of any of the alleged activity until after July 8, 1947 when our base went on a security alert until the 16th. [As discussed below, Twining had arrived at the base on the 7th.]

(There are also sources describing a 1948 crash near or within White Sands. See case #26 in Wood’s book, culled from Stringfield’s case A-4 in Status Report #3 [1982]; in The Armstrong Report [1988], Virgil Armstrong describes a report he received while stationed at Fort Bragg of what appears to be the same event.)

In summary, we have a number of potential sites, some discovered through interviews with witnesses, others within alleged leaked documents:

Up to 3 Corona/Roswell sites: multiple witnesses, referred to as LZ-1 and LZ-3 in the MJ-12 documents, discovered as early as July 2 (“1st Annual Report”), recovery began July 7 (witnesses and documents)
East of Alamogordo: crash/discovery dates unknown, recovered July 5 (“Memorandum”)
Plains of San Agustin: one main witness (Barnett), possibly crashed July 4, recovered July 5 (Cantwheel document)
Trinity Site (White Sands Proving Ground): one main witness (Cooper), referred to as LZ-2 in the MJ-12 documents, crashed on July 4 (“IPU Assessment”), recovered July 6 (“Memorandum”)

Another potential crash from late May or early June will be discussed in the next article.

July 15, 2000 (cont’d)

Q: Which one of these crashes had the 21 bodies?
A: Second. This explains the famous news release because the base was abuzz due to all these occurrences.

Of all the military Roswell witnesses to go on the record, none have indicated any buzz prior to learning of the Brazel debris and recovery operation. As far as they were concerned, the Corona crash was the main event. There is also a question of proximity. Any crash near or west of White Sands probably would have alerted Alamogordo, not Roswell. However, while the base might not have been abuzz, that does not necessarily apply to high-ranking officers.

At this time, the U.S. military at large was “abuzz” due to the flying saucer wave that had begun in June. In fact, the Roswell announcement on July 8 came the day after the peak of the wave, as Richard Geldreich shows:

As Project Blue Book head Captain Edward Ruppelt would later write:

By the end of July 1947 the UFO security lid was down tight. The few members of the press who did inquire about what the Air Force was doing got the same treatment that you would get today if you inquired about the number of thermonuclear weapons stock-piled in the U.S.’s atomic arsenal. […] The paper work of that period also indicated the confusion that surrounded the investigation; confusion almost to the point of panic.

Major General Nathan Twining, then chief of Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, and who would go on to become a member of MJ-12, was reportedly at Kirtland Airbase (Albuquerque, NM) on July 8, where he told reporters by telephone that flying saucers were not the result of U.S. Army experiments and that the Army Air Force was “investigating” the matter. Korff cites documents alleging that Twining attended a “Bomb Commanders Course” from July 8 through 11, at Sandia Base (later merged with Kirtland). However, Friedman acquired Twining’s personal flight logs, which show he flew from Wright Field to Alamogordo on Monday, July 7. On July 11, he flew back, with stops at White Sands and Albuquerque. Additionally, on July 17, he cancelled a long-planned trip to Boeing in Seattle, telling a Boeing executive that “a very important and sudden matter” had come up.

Some of the alleged MJ-12 documents support this, e.g. identical directives from Eisenhower and Truman (dated July 8 and 9) to visit White Sands (to assess the “reported unidentified objects being kept there”), as well as Sandia and Los Alamos. Another document, dated July 4, makes reference to an Estimate of Situation made the day before, July 3. In yet another, dated July 16, Twining summarizes his findings on a “flying disc” recovered “near Victorio Peak and Socorro” (i.e. the Trinity Site crash) and “remains of a possible second disc.” The above-mentioned “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Intelligence Assessment” states that Twining arrived at Alamogordo on July 7 “to view recovered remains of craft from LZ-2 [Trinity],” flew to Kirtland on the 8th “to inspect parts recovered from powerplant” (from where he spoke to reporters), then to White Sands on July 9 “to inspect pieces of craft being stored there,” then flew back to Wright Field (presumably on the 11th) after inspecting pieces at Alamogordo on the 10th.

Q: It seems to me that if the base was already abuzz with these occurrences, they would already have had their cover organized and their stories straight! In such a case, the famous news release would never have happened.
A: No.

According to Walter Haut’s final Roswell affidavit, the press release and later retraction were a deliberate strategy to contain publicity:

One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting [on July 8] was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated with his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed.

According to Col. Dubose, Ramey’s chief of staff, the cover-up was ordered by their superior, Major General Clements McMullen, then Deputy Chief of Staff of Strategic Air Command. Dubose says that McMullen told him: “You are not to discuss this … this is more than top secret.”

Q: Previously, I asked about this Kal Korff book, and essentially you said that my scenario about the different stories, the various witnesses, whoever is behind the cover-up is just feeding disinformation through all of these people. They are capitalizing on all kinds of witnesses and so forth that then get “exposed as frauds,” are just part of the cover-up. You said that this was correct. So, I said that “they are feeding disinformation through all of the so-called Roswell witnesses,” and you said “close.” I would like to know how close, and just how they are feeding disinformation through all of these witnesses. Obviously, these people believe what they are saying.
A: They do.
Q: They believe. Why do they believe?
A: They are telling what they remember, but it is soaked in twisting parallels.
Q: Are the people doing this themselves?
A: No. Event mixture.
Q: But they all seem to remember this July 4th crash [i.e. the Corona crash], or so they say.
A: Yes.
Q: I don’t get what you are saying here.
A: Events were intertwined. [Randle and Schmitt, for example, originally assumed Barnett must have been describing the Corona crash, not a crash at San Agustin, and presented it as such.]
Q: So, some may have witnessed different events?
A: Parts of…
Q: Have they also been tampered with in terms of abduction or having implanted memories or screen memories?
A: No.
Q: Have they, in any way, been exposed to something that was falsely staged by the government in order to make them think…
A: No.
Q: So, they are all sincere and honest witnesses, but they are witnesses to different events, and they all think that they are witnesses to the same event?
A: The so-called suspicious circumstances are merely a patchwork, cleverly used by those who wish to conceal.

Aside from the Air Force, the main Roswell debunkers were Kal Korff, who at one time claimed to have been a colonel for Israel’s Mossad, and Karl Pflock, a former CIA officer who wrote Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe in 2001.

June 24, 2023

Q: (lainey) With regards to the Roswell crashes on June 4, July 1 and July 4, I was wondering if it was possible that these were three versions of the same crash. That is, was there a time loop, and three different crashes were perceived, but it was the same ship crashing with a slightly different outcome? Or was it three separate ships that all happened to crash around the same area and time?
A: Latter.
Q: (L) Could it have been the former? That is, the same crash happening multiple times in time loops?
A: Could have indeed.

Since at least one of these events involved at 2 UFOs flying in tandem, it is possible the same might be the case for the others. With as many as 6 potential crash sites, we can construct a hypothetical scenario using the 3 dates from the C’s:

June 4: Crash near Socorro (see next article)
July 1: Crashes at Corona and east of Alamogordo (and potentially north of Roswell)
July 4: Crashes at Trinity and San Agustin (and potentially north of Roswell)

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