A mysterious crash, dead extraterrestrials littering the landscape, a government cover-up. Today the incident near Roswell, N.M., is an elaborate tale, growing ever more so with time and mythic imagination. But when it happened, it was almost imperceptible:
July 2, 1947
A rancher named Mac Brazel and others hear a loud crash during the night near Corona, New Mexico
July 3, 1947
Mac Brazel discovers some strange crash debris on the Foster Ranch.
July 5, 1947
In the town of Corona Mac Brazel hears about a $3000 reward for the debris of a crashed flying saucer.
July 6, 1947
Mac Brazel showed pieces of the wreckage to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field (AAF) and talked to Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer. Marcel drove to the sheriff's office and inspected the wreckage. William Blanchard, Marcel's commanding officer, ordered Marcel to get someone from the Counter Intelligence Corps, and to proceed to the ranch with Brazel to collect as much of the wreckage as they could.
Soon after this, military police arrived at the sheriff's office, collected the wreckage Brazel had left there, and delivered the wreckage to Blanchard's office. The wreckage was then flown to Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, and from there to Washington. Marcel and Cavitt accompany Brazel back to his car to go to the debris field.
The two deputies return to Sheriff Wilcox, having found an area of blackened ground. Marcel and Cavitt stay at Brazel's ranch and examine the large piece of debris stored in the shed.
July 7, 1947
Marcel and Cavitt collected wreckage from the crash site. After filling Cavitt's vehicle with wreckage, Marcel told Cavitt to go on ahead and he would collect more wreckage, and they would meet later back at Roswell AAF. Marcel filled his vehicle with wreckage. On the way back to the airfield, Marcel stopped off at home at around 1-2 AM to show his wife and son the strange material he had found. Both his wife Viaud and son Jesse Jr. examine the debris Jesse Sr. had brought home. Jesse Jr. remembers there were pink/purple/lavender symbols along the centre sections of some of the small metallic "I" beams in amongst the debris.
July 8, 1947
Blanchard dictates a press release on the recovery of a flying disk to PIO Walter Haut. Haut goes into town to deliver his press release to the radio stations and newspapers. His first is at station KGFL, where he gives the release to Frank Joyce.
Noon: The information is put on the AP wire.
The only newspapers that carried the initial flying saucer version of the story were evening papers from the Midwest to the West, including the Chicago Daily News, the Los Angeles Herald Express, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Roswell Daily Record. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were morning papers and only carried the cover-up story the next morning.
1998: the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago sponsored a team to seek out the crash site, recover any remaining debris and interview surviving "witnesses." Three years later the key members of that team, science-fiction author Kevin Randle and CUFOS investigator Don Schmitt, published their
conclusions in the book UFO Crash at Roswell. In addition to recovering a UFO at Roswell, they charged, the government had found and spirited away the remnants of its crew, several little alien bodies.
Still, as the Roswell controversy becomes more heated, Washington has been under increasing pressure to resolve it. At the urging of New Mexico Representative Steven Schiff, who complained about a government "cover-up" of Roswell and the "runaround" he was getting from the Pentagon, the General
Accounting Office announced in January 1994 that it would launch a hunt for any documents related to the "incident." That announcement was noted in the Washington Post under the headline "GAO Turns to Alien Turf in Probe: Bodies of space voyagers said to have disappeared in 1947."
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