In the summer of 1947, there were a number of UFO sightings in the
                 United States. Sometime during the first week of July 1947, something
                 crashed near Roswell New Mexico.
.
                 W.W. "Mac" Brazel, a New Mexico rancher, saddled up his horse and
                 rode out with the son of neighbors Floyd and Loretta Proctor, to check on
                 the sheep after a fierce thunderstorm the night before. As they rode
                 along, Brazel began to notice unusual pieces of what seemed to be metal
                 debris, scattered over a large area. Upon further inspection, Brazel saw
                 that a shallow trench, several hundred feet long, had been gouged into
                 the land.

                 Brazel was struck by the unusual properties of the debris, and after
                dragging a large piece of it to a shed, he took some of it over to show ,the
                 Proctors.  Mrs. Proctor  has recently ( as of June 1997) moved from the
                 ranch into a home nearer to town, but she remembers Mac showing up
                 with strange material.

                 The Proctors told Brazel that he might be holding wreckage from a UFO
                 or a government project, and that he should report the incident to the
                 sheriff. A day or two later, Mac drove into Roswell where he reported the
                 incident to Sheriff George Wilcox, who reported it to Intelligence Officer,
                 Major Jesse Marcel of the 509 Bomb Group, and for days thereafter, the
                 debris site was closed while the wreckage was cleared.

                 On July 8, 1947, a press release stating that the wreckage of a crashed
                 disk had been recovered was issued by the Commander of the 509th
                 Bomb Group at Roswell, Col. William Blanchard.

                 Hours later the first press release was rescinded and the second press
                 release stated that the 509th Bomb Group had mistakenly identified a
                 weather balloon as wreckage of a flying saucer.

                 Meanwhile, back in Roswell, Glenn Dennis, a young mortician working at
                 the Ballard Funeral Home, received some curious calls one afternoon
                 from the morgue at the air field. It seems the Mortuary Officer needed to
                 get a hold of some small hermetically sealed coffins,and wanted
                 information about how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the
                 elements for a few days, without contaminating the tissue.

                 Glenn Dennis drove out to the base hospital later that evening where he
                 saw large pieces of wreckage with strange engravings on one of the
                 pieces sticking out of the back of a military ambulance. Upon entering the
                 hospital he started to visit with a nurse he knew, when suddenly he was
                 threatened by military police and forced to leave.

                 The next day, Glenn Dennis met with the nurse. She told him about the
                 bodies and drew pictures of them on a prescription pad. Within a few
                 days she was transferred to England, her whereabouts still unknown.

                 According to the research of  Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, in their
                 book, A History of UFO Crashes, from which the following account of the
                 Roswell Incident , in part, is based, the military had been watching an
                 unidentified flying object on radar for four days in southern New Mexico.
                 On the night of July 4, 1947, radar indicated that the object was down
                 around thirty to forty miles northwest of Roswell.

                 Eye witness William Woody, who lived east of Roswell, remembered
                 being outside with his father the night of July 4, 1947, when he saw a
                 brilliant object plunge to the ground. A couple of days later when Woody
                 and his father tried to locate the area of the crash, they were stopped by
                 military personnel, who had cordoned off the area.

                 Acting on the call from Sheriff Wilcox, Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse
                 Marcel was sent by Col. William Blanchard, to investigate Mac Brazel's
                 story.

                 Marcel and Senior Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent, Captain
                 Sheridan Cavitt, followed a rancher off-road to his place. They spent the
                 night there and Marcel inspected a large piece of debris that Brazel had
                 dragged from the pasture.

                 Monday morning, July 7, 1947, Major Jesse Marcel took his first step onto
                 the debris field. Marcel would remark later that "something... must have
                 exploded above the ground and fell." As Brazel, Cavitt and Marcel
                 inspected the field, Marcel was able to "determine which direction it came
                 from, and which direction it was heading. It was in the pattern... you could
                 tell where it started out and where it ended by how it was thinned out..."

                 According to Marcel, the debris was "strewn over a wide area, I guess
                 maybe three-quarters of a mile long and a few hundred feet wide."
                 Scattered in the debris were small bits of metal that Marcel held a
                 cigarette lighter to, to see if it would burn. "I lit the cigarette lighter to some
                 of this stuff and it didn't burn", he said.

                 Along with the metal, Marcel described weightless I-beam-like structures
                 that were 3/8" x 1/4", none of them very long, that would neither bend nor
                 break. Some of these I-beams had indecipherable characters along the
                 length, in two colors. Marcel also described metal debris the thickness of
                 tin foil that was indestructible.

                 After gathering enough debris to fill his staff car, Maj. Marcel decided to
                 stop by his home on the way back to the base so that he could show his
                 family the unusual debris. He'd never seen anything quite like it. "I didn't
                 know what we were picking up. I still don't know what it was...it could not
                 have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather balloon or
                 experimental balloon...I've seen rockets... sent up at the White Sands
                 Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft or missile or
                 rocket."

                 Under hypnosis conducted by Dr. John Watkins in May of 1990, Jesse
                 Marcel Jr. remembered being awakened by his father that night and
                 following him outside to help carry in a large box filled with debris. Once
                 inside, they emptied the contents of the debris onto the kitchen floor.

                 Jesse Jr. described the lead foil and I-beams. Under hypnosis, he
                 recalled the writing on the I-beams as "Purple. Strange. Never saw
                 anything like it...Different geometric shapes, leaves and circles." Under
                 questioning, Jesse Jr. said the symbols were shiny purple and they were
                small. There were many separate figures. This too, under hypnosis:
                 [Marcel Sr. was saying it was a flying saucer] "I ask him what a flying
                 saucer is. I don't know what a flying saucer is...It's a ship. [Dad's]
                 excited!"

                 At 11:00 A.M Walter Haut, public relations officer, finished the press
                 release he'd been ordered to write, and gave copies of the release to the
                 two radio stations and both of the newspapers. By 2:26 P.M., the story
                 was out on the AP Wire:

                 "The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disk had been
                 found"

                 As calls began to pour into the base from all over the world, Lt. Robert
                 Shirkey watched as MP's carried loaded wreckage onto a C-54 from the
                 First Transport Unit.

                 To get a better look, Shirkey stepped around Col. Blanchard, who was
                 irritated with all of the calls coming into the base. Blanchard decided to
                 travel out to the debris field and left instructions that he'd gone on leave.

                 On the morning of July 8, Marcel reported what he'd found to Col.
                 Blanchard, showing him pieces of the wreckage, none of which looked
                 like anything Blanchard had ever seen. Blanchard then sent Marcel to
                 Carswell [Fort Worth Army Air Field] to see General Ramey,
                 Commanding Officer of the Eighth Air Force.

                 Marcel stated years later to Walter Haut that he'd taken some of the
                 debris into Ramey's office to show him what had been found. The
                 material was displayed on Ramey's desk for the general when he
                 returned.

Major Jessie Marcel died in 1986 believing what he found was NOT a weather balloon.

                 Upon his return, General Ramey wanted to see the exact location of the
                 debris field, so he and Marcel went to the map room down the hall - but
                 when they returned, the wreckage that had been placed on the desk was
                 gone and a weather balloon was spread out on the floor. Major Charles A.
                 Cashon took the now-famous photo of Marcel with the weather balloon, in
                 General Ramey's office.

                 It was then reported that General Ramey recognized the remains as part
                 of a weather balloon. Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, the chief of
                 staff of the Eighth Air Force said, "[It] was a cover story. The whole
                 balloon part of it. That was the part of the story we were told to give to the
                 public and news and that was it."

                 The military tried to convince the news media from that day forward that
                 the object found near Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon.

                 July 9, as reports went out that the crashed object was actually a weather
                 balloon, clean-up crews were busily clearing the debris. Bud Payne, a
                 rancher at Corona, was trying to round up a stray when he was spotted
                 by military and carried off the Foster ranch, and Jud Roberts along with
                 Walt Whitmore were turned away as they approached the debris field.
                 As the wreckage was brought to the base, it was crated and stored in a
                 hangar.

                 Back in town, Walt Witmore and Lyman Strickland saw their friend, Mac
                 Brazel, who was being escorted to the Roswell Daily Record by three
                 military officers. He ignored Witmore and Strickland, which was not at all
                 like Mac, and once he got to the Roswell Daily Record offices, he
                 changed his story. He now claimed to have found the debris on June 14.
                 Brazel also mentioned that he'd found weather observation devices on
                 two other occasions, but what he found this time was no weather balloon.

                 Later that afternoon, an officer from the base retrieved all of the copies of
                 Haut's press release from the radio stations and newspaper offices.
                 The Las Vegas Review Journal, along with dozens of other newspapers,
                 carried the AP story:

                 "Reports of flying saucers whizzing through the sky fell off sharply today
                 as the army and the navy began a concentrated campaign to stop the
                 rumors."

                 The story also reported that AAF Headquarters in Washington had
                 "delivered a blistering rebuke to officers at Roswell."