Black Sergeants and Stan Friedman - UPDATED

(Blogger’s Note: I asked Paolo Martinuz for permission to use the material he sent me and he granted. The original emails were sent from Stan Friedman to Paolo.)

In February 1989, I arranged for Don Schmitt and me to meet with Bill Brazel Jr. in Carrizozo, New Mexico (seen below, me, Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt), to discuss his memories of picking up fragments of debris from an alien spacecraft crash. I fully expected to learn that the testimony that had been attributed to him by others to be inaccurate and nowhere nearly as spectacular as reported. To my surprise, he confirmed that he had picked up the debris, which he described in terms that suggested something other than the terrestrial, that he had kept that debris in a cigar box that suggested there wasn’t much of it and it wasn’t very large, and that, finally, Air Force officers and enlisted men from the Roswell Army Air Field eventually visited him and confiscated it.

The substance of that interview was reported first in UFO Crash at Roswell and later in The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. There is one line in that interview that sparked controversy in the early 1990s. Brazel, in describing what happened to the material, said, "I still am not really sure, but I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong. A real nice guy. Now he had a sergeant with him that was real nice. And I think there were two other enlisted men."

Stan Friedman used the same testimony in his Crash at Corona. Though he does not provide attribution, it is clear that he is quoting from the interview that Don Schmitt and I had conducted.

Friedman wrote that Brazel said, "I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong. A real nice guy. Now he had a [black] sergeant with him that was real nice. And I think there were two other enlisted men.

Jerry Clark, writing in the International UFO Reporter, notes this change. Commenting on Crash at Corona, Clark wrote:

In other ways it [Crash at Corona] is a flawed and disturbing work, an object lesson in the consequences of uncritical claimant-advocacy.

The most chilling example of this appears on page 85 [hardback] where we find these words attributed to Bill Brazel, son of Mac [sic] Brazel, the rancher who discovered the debris. Brazel reports four Air Force men called on him after learning that he had kept some of the material. One was an officer named Armstrong. "He had a [black] sergeant with him,’ the book reports, quoting Brazel. The same quote, taken from the same interview (conducted by Randle and Schmitt), appears on page 130 [paperback] of UFO Crash at Roswell, but without the bracketed word.

Brackets are placed inside quotes when a writer or editor wishes to clarify meaning or insert commentary or correction. Brackets are not supposed to be used, as they are here in the Friedman/Berliner book, to put words into someone’s mouth - especially when those words state something contrary to fact. Not only has Brazel never said the sergeant was black, he emphatically denies it.

So why the adjective between brackets? The answer is simple: To make Brazel’s testimony conform to [Gerald] Anderson’s. Anderson already knew of Armstrong and the sergeant from his reading of the Roswell literature. All Anderson did was to add a detail about the sergeant’s racial identity. By dropping in a bracketed word, which not only fails to elucidate but actively misrepresents Brazel’s testimony, Crash at Corona creates corroboration for Anderson’s story where none existed.

Why bring this up now, you might ask. It was discussed in the July/August 1992 issue of the International UFO Reporter. Simply because the issue has been raised again. Italian UFO researcher, Paolo Martinuz, who has been following the Roswell case for years and who is completing his own book about it, wrote to Friedman, asking him about the bracketed word.

According to the information I received from Martinuz, he asked Friedman (through email), "In the book "Crash at Corona" in the interview to Bill Brazel it’s quoted an important note during the talk of Brazel with Armstrong: He had a (black) sergeant with him. Why "black" is between brackets. Really Brazel said that the sergeant was "black"?

Friedman said, "He said... [it begins with an N and is a racially charged word]. I didn’t want to use the word."

This revelation surprised me since I had conducted the interview. After the original controversy erupted, I called Bill Brazel on December 5, 1992 to ask about it, and I recorded the interview (as I had the first). I said to him, "I’ve got one quick question for you if you don’t mind...Remember when we brought Don Berliner by? He’s now saying that you said the sergeant with Captain Armstrong was black."

Brazel said, "No. I didn’t say that. Cause it ain’t right."

"I just wanted to clarify that situation," I said.

"To my recollection anyway, that’s not right. I don’t think there was any colored people in the whole contingent."

One point to note here is that Don Berliner did have an opportunity to interview Bill Brazel in person and that was why I mentioned Berliner to Brazel. But Don Schmitt and I took Berliner to meet Brazel in his home and both Schmitt and I were present at that interview. Had the word come up then, we would have heard it and I certainly would have remembered it, especially in 1992. That was the reason I called Bill Brazel, to get him on tape about the use of the word black... no where had anyone suggested anything else.

So now the question becomes, why, after all these years do we have a new reason for the bracketed word? One that we can demonstrate is inaccurate based on the original 1989 interview, and confirmed by the 1992 interview. And yes, I listened to both tapes again to be sure of these points and I will note that Brazel did use the outdated and possibly offensive "colored" but he didn’t use the more racially charged term and, in fact, I never heard him say anything like that in all my discussions with him.

I emailed Friedman about this, providing him with a copy of the original article and asking if he had a comment. He wrote back that Don Berliner remembered the incident the same way he did. I take this to mean that Berliner remembered that Brazel had used the racially charged word and they had simply substituted the more acceptable term.

So I emailed Don Berliner about this, outlining, briefly what the controversy was about, meaning the insertion of the word into the interview that Schmitt and I conducted and this new allegation that Bill Brazel had used a very derogatory term.

Berliner wrote a brief note back and said, "I have spent very little time on Roswell matters in the past 15 years, and have no clear memory of what you and Stan are discussing."

The bottom line here is still that Brazel never used the word in my presence, never suggested that any of the soldiers who visited were black and, in fact, denied it, all on tape. I have both tapes and can prove that Brazel didn’t say it. There is no proof available that he did, and he, in fact, denies it.

I could say that we’re back to needing a reason to insert the word into the interview, but I think the reason is clear. Jerry Clark explained it. What I don’t know is why we have this latest version for doing that. Bill Brazel never said it and it should not have been included. It merely adds to the already confused picture of the Roswell case and that we don’t need.

Black Sergeants and Roswell

I have thought long and hard about the following. I know that most everyone doesn’t care about the personal squabbles of various researchers. Instead they are interested in the best information available, and these squabbles become tiresome and distracting. Yet sometimes it is necessary to respond to allegations and sometimes it’s necessary to correct inaccurate information. Sometimes the debunkers believe that because you have said nothing about their nonsense they are either right or that you have no response. Sometimes I don’t bother to answer because the stuff is just so ridiculous that I’m sure everyone sees it for what it is.

But, once in a while you run into information that is just too perfect to ignore. Yes, I said that I would ignore Kal Korff but the other night I was looking up something in his poorly researched and misleading book when, on page 89 of the original hardback edition I found a statement that there were no black sergeants at Roswell. He mentioned there that he had proved, in a previous chapter, that there were no black sergeants.

So I looked that up in Chapter Two and on page 55 saw that in recounting what Bill Brazel had said, Korff was making the point that Bill’s testimony could be ignored because Bill had said something about a black sergeant being among the soldiers who had visited him and retrieved the few bits of metallic debris he had recovered. If there were no black sergeants at Roswell, then Brazel, at best, was mistaken. This overlooks the fact that the team who visited Brazel might have come from Albuquerque or Alamogordo and that Brazel wasn’t sure that they were from Roswell.

What Korff should have been able to deduce, and if he couldn’t have deduced it, he should have been able to learn about through some of the published discussions about Brazel, was that Stan Friedman had taken an interview that Don Schmitt and I had conducted with Bill Brazel (recorded on audio tape) and used it in his book. Brazel had told me that the four soldiers who visited him, an officer, a sergeant and two others had been real nice. Friedman, using that quote, inserted the word black, parenthetically, into the quote. There was no justification for that insertion, other than to attempt to corroborate the tales told by Gerald Anderson and Glenn Dennis who talked of a black sergeant. Anderson’s tale has been discredited while Brazel’s has not.

I called Bill Brazel when Friedman’s book first came out and asked him about the racial identity of the soldiers who had visited. He made it clear that they all have been white. So, the mistake here wasn’t Bill Brazel’s, but was Stan Friedman’s. There was no black sergeant with that small group which means that Korff’s criticism of Brazel, on this point, breaks down. We’ll wait for Korff to admit his mistake on the point, though the real criticism here belongs to Friedman for inserting the word.

Now to the other part of Korff’s criticism. The idea that there were no black sergeants in Roswell is also in error. He claims on page 55, "Indeed, a check with Air Force officials revealed there were no black sergeants (emphasis in original) stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947." He said that the services had been segregated in 1947. That was true, but you had units made up of black soldiers. They were mostly in support roles but some found themselves in combat environments and preformed as we have come to expect of all American soldiers. But the point is that there were many black soldiers serving in the military in 1947.

Anyway, Korff said that this information came from Air Force officials. His footnote suggests they were historians at the Pentagon, but by my count, there were, at least, twenty-four black sergeants stationed at Roswell in 1947 and that count might be off slightly. Walter Haut told me that ten to twenty percent of the soldiers assigned to the base did not appear in the Yearbook he produced in 1947 (A page of the Yearbook shown here, including six black sergeants). This means there could have been another four or five. Rather than call someone who wasn’t in Roswell in 1947, Korff should have tried to find something a little more relevant.

As I say, this was such an egregious error, that I thought I should point it out. Maybe if Korff wasn’t attempting to gain the moral high ground by suggesting his book was so far superior to all others, I wouldn’t bother with this. But it does suggest a pattern. One that any information that suggests Roswell can be explained is accepted without verification, or improper verification, and any positive information is attacked without regard to the truth. This is just one of the many examples.

This does go beyond mislabeling the V-2 as a buzz bomb as Korff did. That is a simple mistake. This is one in which he claims that Air Force officials bear out his conclusion, but a single telephone call to the right place would have provided the truth. There were black soldiers assigned to Roswell and, at least, twenty-four were sergeants.

In keeping with this idea that Bill Brazel can’t be trusted, Korff has come up with another horrible mistake but blamed me for it. In one of his YouTube diatribes, Korff said :

"I'm going to read to you a very short sentence that... Randle has printed in his book, and then I'll easily prove how it's just one example of how he keeps telling repeated falsehoods about Roswell... He says here on p. 84: 'Bill Brazel makes one other point that is important. When he read about his father in the Albuquerque newspaper, he knew that his father needed help on the ranch. He knew that no-one would be there to take care of it. When he arrived, he found the place deserted.' What Kevin Randle is referring to folks is the myth that Bill Brazel, Jr. was somewhere in town one day and all of a sudden he reads in the newspaper that his father has recovered some sort of flying saucer and is involved with the Air Force, or something unusual was recovered on the ranch, so he apparently saw his dad on the front page of the paper and ran out to help him. Well, this is a myth because I did one thing Randle didn't bother to do... If you check every issue that's ever been published of the Albuquerque Journal or any newspaper in that area of the time of 1947, you'll find that Mack Brazel's picture didn't appear anywhere in any newspaper at all. It just never happened. And nobody has ever produced a newspaper today that can show
that he ever appeared on the front page. So what is Bill Brazel, Jr. talking about when he says he saw his father on the front page... well, he couldn't be referring to anything that was real or true, because it never happened."

Let’s overlook the typical Korff nonsense of changing the words to suit his perspective (note I said read about his father and nothing about a picture of him), the rest of the statement is wrong as well. First, I did search the Albuquerque newspapers, both of them and have copies of the relevant articles in my files (Which, of course, means Korff is wrong about me not checking the Albuquerque newspapers because I have copies in my files as seen here). On the front page of the Albuquerque Journal of July 9, 1947, we can read, "Sheriff Wilcox said W. W. Brazell [sic], about 50, made the find on the Foster ranch near Corona 85 miles northwest of Roswell..."

In the Albuquerque Tribune (what? There’s another newspaper in Albuquerque?), the headline said, "NM Rancher Sorry He Said Anything about ‘Disc Find’." The lead said, "W.W. Brazel, the New Mexican rancher who was originally thought to have found the nation’s first flying disc..."

The other thing that Korff gets wrong is the idea that Bill Brazel was somewhere in town one day and he suddenly reads the newspaper that his father has recovered some sort of flying saucer. Bill Brazel told me in a personal interview that he actually lived and worked in Albuquerque at the time, so it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to have read one of the two daily newspapers.

And, of course, both mentioned Bill’s father in connection with a flying saucer. Doesn’t matter what the outcome was, whether you want to believe the weather balloon (Mogul) story or it was a flying saucer, the facts are that Brazel’s name appeared in the newspapers including a front page story in the Albuquerque Journal. So, everything I reported in the paragraph is accurate.

By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, here is a picture of Mack Brazel that did appear in newspapers around the country. This one happens to come from the Oregon Journal.

What we see here, is the evidence that Korff has created a non-issue. Clearly I had checked the Albuquerque newspapers and reported, accurately, that Bill Brazel read about his father. Clearly I did this during the investigation because I had copies in my files. And Clearly, Mack Brazel's picture did appear in some newspapers, because I have a copy of that as well.

(Apropos of nothing at all - Have you noticed how some of us engage in intelligent dialogue, arguing points without resorting to name-calling and some of us answer no questions but do attempt to smear those who might disagree?)

We Have the Wrong Roswell Crash Site?

This one is so funny that I have to laugh. I got into a discussion with someone about the location of the debris field as described by Bill Brazel. I was told that I had the wrong location.

How can this be?

Bill Brazel took me there himself.

It was early morning and we, and by we, I mean Don Schmitt and I, meant Brazel at a café in Capitan. He was driving an old red pickup and we left my car at the café. As we drove out of town, Brazel asked us if we wanted a beer. Don said he didn’t and I thought that one of us ought to have one with Brazel so I said, “Sure.”

Ah, there is nothing I like more than warm beer at eight o’clock in the morning.

Anyway, we drove out toward Corona, taking the back roads and arrived at the location where the thing, whatever it might have been, hit.

Brazel got out of the truck and pointed to the ground at his feet... No, there wasn’t a bit of debris there now. He just said that this was where he’d found a couple of the scraps.

I took a couple of pictures with Don and Bill standing there (which might be the only pictures of one of the prime witnesses on the actual debris field... and the pictures have been copyrighted, reproduction is prohibited.)

Brazel then explained where it had hit, how it had scraped along the ground, leaving a narrow neck that widened to about ten feet and then tapered again as if it had skipped. The ground was scraped to about a foot or so deep and Brazel said that it had taken a couple of years to grass back over.

No, I really don’t want to discuss all the variations about this and how Jesse Marcel never said anything about a gouge... Though “Reluctant,” Karl Pflock’s witness who was really Walt Whitmore, Jr., talked about an area of disturbed ground he had seen in one of his versions of events.

Anyway, it was Bill Brazel who showed me the site so I figure that I must have it right. (Please note these are two different pictures, though taken about the same time.)

When CUFOS did their archaeological site survey out there, we planted those little “utility” flags along the ground in a line about a half mile long where it seemed that Brazel had said the thing skipped. When we left, we pulled up all those flags, not wanting to leave anything behind that would annoy the ranch owners who had kindly allowed us to make the survey.



Archaeological dig on the ranch..

Sometime after that, Bud Payne, a Lincoln County judge who said that he had seen the military out there doing something, took us, meaning Don, Paul Davids, Robert Hastings, and me out to the site. As we got out of the truck, I looked down and saw one of the flags we had missed.

In other words, Bud Payne put us on the same stretch of New Mexican desert as did Bill Brazel. That would seem to confirm the location as given to us earlier.

Tommy Tyree, who worked for Brazel, told us of riding the range with Brazel when he pointed down into a sinkhole that had water in the bottom. Floating on it was a bit of debris... and before you ask, no, we didn’t find the sinkhole, Tyree didn’t know precisely where it had been, and the water would have been long gone (and the hole probably filled in). But he gave us directions out there and it was on the same bit of range as that shown to us by Bill Brazel.

(Off on a tangent, because I know people are going to start asking all sorts of questions... We were unable to locate the sinkhole and figured the sides had collapsed in the forty years or so before we got there. When we did the site survey, we dug around the roots of plants that looked old enough to have been there when the crash happened... We looked into animal burrows, hoping to find a scavenger that had found a bit of the debris... We used metal detectors and even tried an aerial survey in a rented plane... and no, we had no success in any of that.)

The real point here is that I’m certain we were in the right place because it is the place the witnesses took us to... independently of one another. True, there could have been some discussion over the years about the location among these various witnesses, but the point is Bill Brazel showed it to Don and me. I am not aware of him showing it to anyone else (though he certainly could have, I’m just not aware of it).

So, when people tell me I’ve got the wrong place, I wonder what is the source of their information. It didn’t come directly from Bill Brazel as did the information that I have. It didn’t come from a first-hand source, as did my information. It might have been derived some something that was told to me, or something that I, or Don, said, or from people we took out there said, but as far as I know, the two of us are the only two Brazel took out there. We have the right place.

Wayne Brazel, Pat Garrett and UFOs

In the search for answers to questions about UFOs and alien spacecraft crashes, you sometimes run into strange information. Because Lincoln County, New Mexico was so large, much had happened there and as I was researching the Roswell UFO crash, I read the history of the county. One of the things that struck me was that the Brazel family had been part of that history some fifty or sixty years before anyone had heard of flying saucers or UFO crashes.

In a couple of books, I learned that Wayne Brazel had killed Pat Garrett but on one seemed to know what happened to Brazel. He disappeared some time after the trial and one of those historians speculated that Brazel had gone to South America and been killed there in a fashion similar to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Well, I was sitting there, in the cab of a pick up truck talking to a Brazel relative, so I asked the simple question and got a somewhat complex answer... Oh, not overly complex, mind you, but certainly not what I had been expecting.

So, here’s what I learned about this case which is related to UFOs, but not really part of the history:

It should have been an open and shut case. Jesse Wayne Brazel confessed within hours of the shooting. Pat Garrett was dead, not all that far from Las Cruces, New Mexico and although Brazel said it was self defense, the evidence suggested that Garrett had died of a bullet wound to the back of the head. The bullet in his stomach, which might have been fatal even with medical treatment, was apparently fired after Garrett was down.

There are those who believe that there was a conspiracy to kill Garrett (Garrett murder site seen here) and Brazel was part of that conspiracy. There are those who believe that the dispute developed over Brazel’s leasing of Garrett’s ranch and Garrett’s desire to sell it. But there is also a history of animosity between the Brazel family and Garrett, which most historians seemed to have missed.

Pat Garrett was born in Alabama on June 5, 1850 and headed west nineteen years later, like so many others, to make a future. He was a cowboy in Lancaster, Texas, a buffalo hunter on the southern plains, a gambler and eventually a lawman. In 1876, while still a buffalo hunter, Joe Briscoe, for some reason, according to Garrett, attacked him with an axe. Garrett shot Briscoe, and then believing that his career choice had been wrong, left buffalo hunting for good and Texas for years.

Or maybe it was in 1878, according to some historians, and the other man, Briscoe, had drawn his pistol first. Garrett was the one who survived, being quicker and the better shot, and then, fearing retribution, fled into New Mexico where he worked first as a cow hand and then opened his own saloon.

In November 1880, George Kimbell, the sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico resigned and Garrett was appointed as his replacement. Garrett promised to end the violence that resulted from to rival factions attempting to control commerce in the area, not to mention two groups of badge carrying law enforcement officers. Billy the Kill, who Garrett would kill months later in July, 1881, with his group of Regulators, who had some kind of semi-official legal standing, had opposed the sheriff and his deputies.

In December, Garrett killed a friend of Billy the Kid named Tom O’Folliard and then, a few nights later the posse killed Charlie Bowdre and captured Billy and other Regulators. They all were taken to Mesilla, New Mexico for trial. Convicted and sentenced to hang, Billy was escorted to Lincoln, New Mexico where the sentence was to be carried out. He escaped from the Lincoln County Court House and the make shift jail, killing guards J.W. Bell and Bob Olinger.

Garrett eventually tracked Billy to Ft. Sumner, New Mexico (museum seen here) and the home of Pete Maxwell. Billy was supposedly there to visit Maxwell’s sister, Paulita, but when he entered the darkened room, Garrett shot him twice, killing him from ambush.

Garrett had hit the high point of his life. A hastily written book, ghosted by his friend Ash Upson, was published but did little to improve the situation for Garrett. He lost the election for Lincoln County sheriff and in 1884, lost an election for state senator. He then left New Mexico, served briefly as a Texas Ranger. He was elected a county commissioner in Uvalde, Texas in 1889, and in October, 1889, he was appointed sheriff in Dona Ana County, New Mexico. He ran for Chaves County sheriff. Chaves County had once been part of the huge Lincoln County. He lost the election. In 1896 he was again appointed to fill the vacancy of Dona Ana County sheriff and then elected to the post.

During this time, Garrett had been attempting to support his growing family, a wife and nine children. He acquired ranch property around Las Cruces and up into the Organ Mountains between Las Cruces and Alamogordo.

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt appointed Garrett as a Collector of Customs in El Paso, Texas, which is not all that far from Las Cruces. He was not reappointed, however, after he lost favor with the President, apparently introducing Roosevelt to a friend with an unsavory background. With that, Garrett retired to his ranch, but now was in financial difficulty.

To relieve some of those problems, Garrett allegedly leased one of his ranches to a young man named Jesse Wayne Brazel. Not much is known about Brazel, other than he came from a family with a long history in New Mexico. Records show that he was born in 1877, or rather it has been deduced based on court transcripts from the trial.

Others have suggested that Brazel was born in Greenwood City, Kansas but soon moved to Eagle Creek, not all that far from Lincoln, New Mexico. He has been called a "good-natured boy" with blue eyes and who was often seen wearing a Mexican-style sombrero. His father, Jesse M. Brazel (which probably explains why Jesse Wayne Brazel was more commonly called Wayne) moved them off to Gold Camp. This new home bordered the San Agustin Ranch owned by W. W. Cox, where Wayne Brazel found work.

It was in this area that Brazel met Olive Elizabeth Boyd, an eighteen-year-old teacher for the Organ District School and who tutored the children of A.P. Rhode. Brazel was thirty-one as they began to plan their wedding in 1908.

There are those who suggest that trouble erupted between Pat Garrett and Wayne Brazel because of the lease that Brazel had obtained for the Garrett property. Some claim that Pat Garrett had not signed the lease with Brazel. It was Garrett’s son, Poe. Poe probably didn’t care how Brazel planned using the ranch. Payment was to be made in July of each year with ten heifer calves and a horse. Brazel, instead of grazing cattle or horses as Garrett expected, moved in goats. Some said this caused trouble with Pat Garrett who disliked goats and believed that he had been mislead by Brazel and his friends. He wanted the goats gone.

In fact, Garrett filed suit claiming a breach of contract. Garrett insisted that a verbal agreement existed which excluded goats. But verbal agreements are not worth the paper on which they are written (or not written) even with Garrett arguing that the method of payment, cattle and horses implied that these would be the animals using the range.

When that failed, Garrett used a New Mexican law that made it illegal to herd livestock next to a residence. He swore out a complaint and shortly before Christmas, 1907, the trial began. Trial was held in a barbershop, conducted by Organ (New Mexico) Justice of the Peace Charles M. Anthony. There was no jury and Anthony, being a politician of sorts, refused to act as an arbitrator. He recessed court until spring, apparently hoping that everything would work itself out before then.

The truth here seems to be that Pat Garrett had no real legal standing in the dispute. Dona Ana County records show that Poe Garrett was the true owner of the land. But Pat hated goats, as did many cattlemen. Goats, like sheep, ate the grass so short that it was no good for cattle. The cattlemen wanted to keep goats and sheep off the range.

Others suggested that Garrett wanted to sell the ranch to raise money but Poe Garrett had signed a five year lease with Brazel. Brazel was willing to break the lease, but Garrett, or someone, had to buy all the goats. There was trouble with the counting, Garrett insisting that Brazel had hundreds fewer goats than Brazel believed he did. Or Brazel miscounted the first time, telling Garrett there were 1200 but later saying there were 1800. No matter.

Whatever he truth, there was trouble with Brazel. In fact, this was not the first time that Garrett had fought with the Brazel family. According to Bill Brazel, who knew his cousin Wayne and had visited him in Arizona long after the events outside of Las Cruces, Bill Brazel’s grandmother had been alone one night at a Brazel ranch house when a posse led by Garrett arrived. Bill Brazel didn’t tell me who Garrett was hunting, but this might have been in July 1898, as Garrett chased Bill McNew, Oliver M. Lee and Jim Gililland.

Garrett told the woman, who was standing on the porch, that he expected his horses to be fed and watered and that he would be staying the night at the ranch. Brazel held a Winchester, which she cocked and announced that Garrett and his men would not be spending the night and they should get off her property.

Brazel won the stand-off. Garrett and his posse retreated but it became lore in the Brazel family. Garrett (house he built seen here) seemed to be a man who could be intimidated by a lone woman with a rifle and a menacing attitude, but it might be that he had other troubles that night and didn’t need to add this to the growing list. Whatever the reason, Garrett and his posse left.

There are other indications that Garrett knew the Brazels on a more personal level. It was said that he had known Wayne Brazel and his father for years, and that Garrett liked Wayne. Given the circumstances of Garrett’s run in with the family and his death, this seems unlikely.

Garrett would later capture McNew without trouble, but Lee and Gililland didn’t surrender easily. In a gun battle near the little town of Oro Grande, one of Garrett’s deputies, Kurt Kearney was killed. Garrett withdrew, and both Lee and Gililland escaped. Later they would be caught, but not by Garrett. They were acquitted and released.

Which brings us to Alameda Arroyo on February 29, 1908. Garrett sent Brazel a note saying that he would be in Las Cruces the next day. He suggested a meeting, apparently believing that the dispute would be resolved soon. Or maybe, according to the Garrett family, Brazel gave a note to Adamson to suggest some kind of negotiation. Either way, the two men were in communication and knew where the other would be the next day.

Garrett was riding in the buggy rented by and driven by Carl Adamson. They drove through San Agustin Pass and down into the tiny community of Organ. They continued down, toward Las Cruces and near a junction of two roads, both of which headed into Las Cruces, one being slightly longer but smoother and the other, rougher but shorter. They thought they saw Brazel ahead of them, talking with another man. That man rode off without being positively identified, though some would later claim it was Print Rhode, and as the buggy drew close, Brazel fell in with it.

At first the men didn’t say much to each other. Brazel rode by the side of the buggy where the road was wide enough, or in front or behind it when the road narrowed. Garrett finally asked Brazel why he said there were twelve hundred goats when he had so many more. Brazel said simply, he had miscounted. The argument grew heated at points but all parties seemed to have calmed down by the time they reached the Alameda Arroyo, about four miles east of Las Cruces.
Adamson stopped the buggy and climbed down to relieve himself. Garrett followed, holding the shotgun he carried. Or maybe he climbed down and reached for his shotgun. Brazel, apparently believing that Garrett was going to kill him, drew his revolver and fired twice, hitting Garrett in the head and in the stomach or so the story goes.

Garrett dropped his shotgun and fell. He died there. Adamson and Brazel left him, heading on into Las Cruces. At the sheriff’s office, Brazel turned over his pistol to Deputy Felipe Lopez and admitted that he had shot Garrett. He said it had been in self-defense.

A sheriff’s posse was dispatched and found Garrett lying on his back, a bullet hole in his face where the round had exited and another in his stomach. The fatal bullet had entered the back of Garrett’s head, suggesting he was facing away from Brazel when he was shot.

The shotgun was about a yard from Garrett’s body, but it looked as if it had been set there rather than dropped. The shotgun was in it’s scabbard and it was not loaded. Or, maybe it was loaded with bird shot. The testimony on this is somewhat muddled. No matter.

Garrett’s fly was unbuttoned, and it looked as if he had been occupied with that, rather than threatening Brazel when he was shot. The evidence as described certainly didn’t support the claim of self-defense.

W.C. Field, a Las Cruces doctor, as well as a farmer, examined Garrett at the murder site and later performed an autopsy. He said that the wound showed that Garrett had been shot in the back of the head and that the bullet’s trajectory took it through his brain and exited on the right eyebrow. The wound, according to the doctor, was consistent with a shot fired from a man on horseback, into the head of a man who was standing with his head slightly bowed. In other words, a man in the process of relieving himself.

The second wound had been fired into Garrett’s stomach and had traveled upward, stopping behind Garrett’s shoulder. Field found a .45 caliber slug there. The wound suggested it was caused by a man standing on the ground, shooting into a man already down. Field concluded that both wounds were from a .45, though he didn’t find the slug that had hit Garrett in the head.

Many years later, James Hervey, the New Mexico attorney general in 1908 said that he had visited the murder site with Captain Fred Fornoff of the New Mexico Mounted Police and Carl Adamson on the day of the killing. About fifty feet from the murder site, they found a Winchester cartridge and a cigarette butt though some have claimed there were two cartridges. There were hoof prints around that suggested someone might have waited in ambush to shoot Garrett.

Fornoff thought that Garrett had been shot from two directions by two different weapons, which might be true. But it also seems true that the shot to the head was the first fired and that came from a man on horseback, near Garrett. If true, then there was no reason for the second shot from ambush. None of that mattered, really, because Brazel had confessed to the crime. Adamson said nothing about another shooter, and he had, in effect, endorsed Brazel’s story. Adamson, it might be said, was a disinterested third party and his version of the events could be considered the most accurate.

Brazel’s trial began on Monday, April 19, 1909. It was a short trial, and the only witness to the crime, Carl Adamson, who had supported Brazel’s version of events at the preliminary hearing, was not called to testify. The prosecutor, Mark B. Thompson didn’t present any evidence to show that Garrett had been shot in the back of the head, or that his weapon might have been unloaded. He presented almost no evidence at all. It was almost as if he was on the side of the defense.

The defense was short and claimed the shooting was in self-defense. This hung on a claim that Garrett had told Brazel that he would get him off the ranch one way or another. Not much of a treat, but given Garrett’s history, it certainly could have been intimidating.

There was apparently no one to dispute the claim of self-defense and the jury got the case at 5:45 p.m. By 6:30, Brazel had been acquitted and was free. That ended any official attempt to learn what happened, or to find others who might have been implicated in the killing.
William W. Cox, the local and powerful rancher, had supported Brazel through the trial and when the verdict was announced, invited everyone to a barbecue at his ranch. This was, of course, the same Cox that had a long relationship with Brazel, who had loaned him money in the past and who would loan him more money in the future.

Although Bill Brazel (seen here) told me that Wayne had been ordered out of New Mexico after the acquittal, the records seem to indicate that he acquired the Harrington Well and then homesteaded a small ranch near Lordsburg, New Mexico and in 1910, he finally married Olive Boyd. He had a son in 1911. By 1915, his wife was dead, and Brazel sold his ranch. The government now filed perjury charges against Brazel because of some irregularity in the homesteading. When the charges were dropped, Brazel disappeared.

In 1935, an El Paso attorney was hired by Brazel’s son to find his father. The best that H. L. McCune could do was suggest Brazel went to South America and died in a shootout like that which killed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They believe he died around 1915.

But the truth is something less than spectacular. Though I don’t know why Brazel’s son couldn’t find his father, I asked Bill about that and mentioned South America. He laughed and said, "No. He went to Arizona. My Dad and I visited him there."

Wayne Brazel was still alive in the 1930s when his son began looking for him. Brazel said that he worked on a ranch there, doing the same things that he had done before. No one really knew about Pat Garrett or the murder charges that had been filed against him or any of his later trouble with the government.

People knew who Pat Garrett was because of Billy the Kid. Many of them thought Garrett was guilty of murder because of the way Garrett had ambushed the kid. Few knew that Garrett himself had been murdered.

Wayne Brazel lived out the rest of his life in obscurity. Attempts shortly after Garrett’s murder to learn where Wayne Brazel was failed and the family encouraged some of the rumors. But, when I talked to Bill Brazel some eighty years after the murder, with Wayne dead, he told me where he had gone when he left New Mexico. Bill knew that no one was searching for his cousin now and the information couldn’t hurt him. Wayne Brazel quietly passed from the public spotlight, and unlike Pat Garrett, that suited him just fine.

Baker Overland "Finds the REAL Roswell Crash Site," or How to Pretend to Investigate the Case

 

Normally, I ignore many of these analyses of the Roswell case. Baker Overland just posted “I Found the REAL Roswell Crash site.” I was interested in the real crash site but all he did was trespass on private property and cross Bureau of Land Management land (BLM) without permission. The real site he found, was the one that Don Schmitt and I located in 1989 with the help of Bill Brazel.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the "Real" crash site in 1989 They are standing

near the spot where Baker Overland stood to make his video. Photo by Kevin

Randle.

Let me back up a moment. He tells us about Mac Brazel, not realizing he was really Mack Brazel. He mispronounces Brazel and Carey, gives us pictures of people who were in Roswell at the time, but the pictures not of those people. We get plenty of video of him driving around in New Mexico that has little to do with the topic. Although he talked of doing a deep dive, it was into the shallow end of the pool.

We get him standing at the northwest corner of the Debris Field. Bill Brazel took Don and me there. Baker Overland talks of it being a crater. His analysis of the size of the saucer based on the size of the crater is utter nonsense. According to Bill Brazel, who was on the site within days of his father reporting it to the Army in Roswell, said there was a gouge. It was narrow at the top, spread out to about ten feet across at the center and then narrows at the other end. In other words, the object skipped along the ground before becoming airborne again. He never made it to the impact site where the craft and bodies were found. He apparently never made it that far in his Internet research.

He travels over to the VLA, the Very Large Array, radio telescope facility. He hints that it might have been built in New Mexico because of the Roswell crash… no, it was the isolation of the area and the terrain that helped isolation that was the reason for the location of the VLA. Nice pictures but it has nothing to do with Roswell.

The VLA near Magdalena, New Mexico. Photo by Kevin Randle.

He mentions Mogul, telling us the ultimate purpose of it but fails to mention that what was going on in New Mexico was unclassified. The balloon arrays were long but there was nothing on them that would have fooled anyone. And, the culprit in this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. It never flew.  Charles Moore, one of the engineers on Mogul, told me that Flight No. 4 was configured the same as Flight No. 5, but there were no rawin targets on Flight No. 5. I suppose this is somewhat confusing, but I’ve made this argument on this blog several times and in one of those posts, are reference to several of the others. You can access that information here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/coast-to-coast-mogul-and-updates.html

Charles Moore, champion of the Mogul theory. His analysis of the
information is a complete invention not based on the facts of the case.
Photo by Kevin Randle 

I guess the point is that he didn’t find the Roswell crash site because Don and I had already located it with the help of Bill Brazel. He provides a brief history that is untrue. Had he tried a little harder he would have learned more about the case. He never made it to the impact site, though Don and I were there in 2023 when Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries spent an hour on the case. He brought in a lot of material that wasn’t even good speculation. It was one of the worst examples of putting Roswell in the title as click bait, implying he had found the real site, but Don and I had been there decades earlier.

Don and me on the impact site about thirty miles southeast of the Debris
Field, the real crash site. Photo taken in July 2023 for the Netflix Roswell story.

This is the problem with the Internet. There is a great deal of information on about any topic you care to research. But this also takes time to understand how that information fits together. This was just a reason to use Roswell in the title and spend a little time in New Mexico. Real research requires due diligence. That didn’t happen here.

Chasing Footnotes, Jesse Marcel and the Gouge

In the last few days I have been in communication with a number of friends about the Roswell case and what I have discovered in my reinvestigation of it. At one point I had mentioned that the description of the gouge on the debris field was problematic because there was only Bill Brazel who had reported it. The response was there were three other witnesses who had described the gouge complete with a list of sources for the information.

Bill Brazel stands on the Debris
Field. Photo copyright by Kevin
Randle,

Switching gears now, I mention that as you all know, I have been chasing footnotes to see if we can reduce it to the original source as a way of confirming that the information has been accurately reported. I have done this to several others and now it seems that it is my turn.

To bring those two divergent thoughts together, it was pointed out that Jesse Marcel had talked about the gouge and a friend quoted UFO Crash at Roswell, page 50 as his source. It said, “Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet across with a gouge at the top end of it that was about five hundred feet long and ten feet wide.”

Len Stringfield

The footnote took me to Len Stringfield’s UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome which was published by MUFON in 1980. The footnote didn’t give a page number in that document but I found it was entry Case A-10 on page 16. Stringfield does name Marcel and tells us that Stringfield and Marcel had served in the same areas in the Pacific Theater during the WW II.

He then wrote, “The debris of an apparent metallic aerial device, or craft, that had exploded in the air, or crashed, was first made known by a sheep rancher… There he had found many metal fragments and what appeared to be ‘parchment’ strew in a 1-mile-square area.”

A very liberal interpretation of that could be that there had been some sort of disturbance to the soil, and when connected to what Bill Brazel had said, might be an accurate description. Marcel never actually said anything about seeing a gouge, so this is apparently a little of that literary license that has no place in this sort of report.

Looking at the newspaper articles published in 1947, there are a variety of sizes given for the debris field and Brazel, in one of those news stories agreed with the size as given by Marcel. While all that is interesting, it doesn’t give us a gouge in the middle of the field.

Robin Adair, who worked for the Associated Press in 1947, and in opposition with what Jason Kellahin claimed in a separate interview of what the two of them had experienced, said that he had flown over the area. Adair said that they were kept at a distance by soldiers waving them off and feared that those on the ground might fire on their aircraft if they got too close. He did, however, suggest a gouge without actually using that term. He said there were burned places and added, “I remember four indications… it was rather hard to line them up from the plane.”

He said, “It wasn’t too distinct – one – among the grass that was about a foot high or maybe a little more it wasn’t too distinguishable but you could tell something had been there.”

Later he said, “You couldn’t see them too good from the air – how deep they were or anything but apparently the way it cut into them whatever hit the ground…”

According to the taped interview, conducted by Don Schmitt, Adair never said that he’d seen a gouge in the sense that Brazel has seen one. To him it looked as if something had skipped creating a series of depressions (I’m trying to avoid the word gouge here to provide a somewhat more neutral impression) that, looked at from ground level would have resembled a longer cut in the soil. Frankly, it seems that he was talking about something that could be interpreted as a gouge.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon said that he had flown over the locations some months after the event. I’m not sure why he would have done that or why he would remember, but he did talk about seeing the crash sites. He wrote to me in November, 1991, that he remembered “auto tracks leading to the pivotal sites and obvious gouges in the terrain.”

He wrote about them as “gouges” which seems to confirm what Adair had said and both men were flying over the area which might explain why they used the plural when Brazel spoke in the singular.

Bud Payne describing his observations on the same bit
of high desert as identified by Bill Brazel.

Finally, there was Bud Payne who eventually became a judge in Lincoln County. He blundered into the area chasing some livestock that gotten away from him. In an interview with him in January 1990, he took a number of us including Don Schmitt, Paul Davids and me to the debris field that he had seen. Although the interview was not recorded, my notes say that he did say there had been a gouge, and we were standing on the same bit of New Mexico high desert that Bill Brazel had pointed out to us some months earlier.

In looking back through my notes, transcripts, and other documentation, I found references to a gouge or gouges in the terrain that seemed to back up the original descriptions given by Bill Brazel. Granted, the interviews were conducted decades after the event, and the survey of newspaper articles which sometimes provided a description of the debris field did not seem to mention a gouge or gouges. The point here is that there are multiple sources for the idea of a gouge, even if that description wasn’t universal.

This was also about chasing footnotes, and the reference I used as a source for the information about Marcel came from the monograph that Len Stringfield published in 1980. The important sentence here said, “The area was thoroughly checked, he [Marcel] said, but no fresh impact depressions were found in the sand.”

Bob Pratt interviewed Marcel about a year later, in December 1979 and while his interest was in talking about debris, Marcel did say, “One thing I did notice – nothing actually hit the ground, bounced on the ground. It was something that must have exploded above the ground and fell.”

While it could be argued, somewhat lamely, that those impact depressions aren’t the same thing as a long gouge, Marcel seemed to be telling both Stringfield and Pratt that he had seen no gouge.

I don’t know how that line “Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet across with a gouge at the top end of it that was about five hundred feet long and ten feet wide,” got inserted into the text. It’s not in quotation marks which means it was an interpretation of what Marcel had said. The probable answer is that it was a combination of what both Brazel and Marcel had said, which means the description is somewhat correct, based on those testimonies, but it isn’t accurate.

A better statement might have been “Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet across and Brazel mentioned a gouge at the top end of it that was about five hundred feet long and ten feet wide.”

It turns out that the statement attributed to Marcel is one that is not found in the source I quoted. In fact, it’s not found in any of the sources I was able to access here over the last few days. The information attributed to Marcel is incorrect and the footnote is inaccurate.

I have now found references to disturbances to the soil, and I have found that Marcel never talked about a gouge. The information here is now accurate and the sources are attributed properly. I can only hope that these clarifications will make their way into the Roswell discussions.

The New Jesse Marcel Interview

Periodically, I’m asked if there is anything new to be found about the Roswell crash. I believe that all the first-hand witnesses to those events in July 1947 have died. The last first-hand witness I interviewed was Stanley Muelling on January 18, 2012 when he was 87 years old.

He made it clear that he had been told to never talk about what he had seen. He said, “If I did, I already forgot about it. I’m supposed to forget.”

At that point, meaning in 2012, we realized that there were very few left who would have been in Roswell at the right time. Although today Muelling would be 100, it is certainly possible for him to still be alive, but I know of no one still alive who could provide a first-hand account that would add to our basic knowledge of the case.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other means of gathering first-hand testimony. Just this week, we learned from David Marler at the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque that Lee Speigel had interviewed Jesse Marcel, Sr. about Roswell in the early 1980s. That interview was recorded and is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC3Ln3-tyds

He asked Marcel about the beginnings of the tale and Marcel provided us the details of how he learned about the crash site and his meeting with Mack Brazel. Marcel gathered Sheridan Cavitt to follow Brazel back to the ranch. This is slightly interesting because Bessie Brazel Schreiber who had talked about accompanying her father into Roswell to report what he had found isn’t mentioned. Bill Brazel has disputed Bessie’s claim and here is Marcel, talking about following Brazel to the ranch, stopping at what he called a shack where the ate beans and rice but no mention of Bessie Brazel being there. That takes her out of the picture and her claims that it was a huge balloon, are negated. I mention this so we don’t get bogged down in a discussion about her role in this and point out that she later repudiated her claim that she was there.

The Debris Field. Brazel took Don Schmitt and me to the top
of the rise and pointed down. You can see that a gouge
should have been visible to Marcel.

And listening to this, I think that Marcel has gotten the timeline wrong. He told Speigel, “And by the time I got back home, my wife, is what happened to you? There’s been a bunch of news reporters out here wanting a picture of you and I said, ‘For what.’’’

There would have been no reporters interested in Jesse Marcel on July 7 when he returned from the debris field. The only people who knew what had been found were Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt. Naturally, when Cavitt returned, he would have notified his superior in Albuquerque since Cavitt’s chain of command was different than Marcel’s. It is probable that Cavitt, out of courtesy, would have told Blanchard, but there was no requirement for that. Cavitt might just have waited for Marcel to return to tell Blanchard about the crash.

The point is, that the press release wasn’t issued until the afternoon of July 8, at which time the reporters would have learned about Marcel. At that point they certainly could have arrived at his house to ask questions. Marcel was in Fort Worth at the time and wouldn’t return until July 9.

Major Jesse Marcel with the balloon debris in 
General Ramey's office in Fort Worth.

   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

In this interview, Marcel reconfirms the size of the debris field being ¾ of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. He suggested there was quite a bit of metallic debris. He talked about filling the jeep carry all with debris and that he, Marcel, filled his Buick as well. He said there was quite a lot of it left behind. The real point here is that a Mogul array, would not have filled the jeep carry all. And, since it is clear from the testimony of Charles Moore, an engineer with the balloon project in Alamogordo, that Flight #4, the culprit in this, did not have rawin targets. The remains of the balloon array would have fit into the Marcel’s car trunk. These facts rule out Mogul.

Marcel said that he sent Cavitt back to the base with a truckload of debris and that he, Marcel, stayed on quite a bit. He then drove home, arriving about eight that evening.

There is one point that I’m sure the skeptics will seize on, if they are paying attention. Asked about when he was getting curious about flying saucers, Marcel said:

On thing I wanted to explore, I wanted to find out if it was an object that hit the ground. And obviously it was not because no scar on the ground anywhere. Something obviously exploded in the air and fragments scattered all over the place… Well, this is what happened. I scoured the ground. I looked all over the place to see if I could see any scare one the ground, if something had fallen our of the sky and hit the ground. But that was not in evidence at all. It was obviously something that exploded while in flight and scattered fragments on the ground as it traveled.

This is in direct conflict with what Bill Brazel told both Don Schmitt and me, as we stood on the debris field. Brazel said it was about five hundred yards long and about ten feet wide at its widest. He said that it took about two years before is was completely grassed over.

Bill Brazel on the Debris Field with Don Schmitt.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

We also interviewed Bud Payne a retired judge who escorted us to the debris field in the early 1990s. Payne pointed to the same areas as had Bill Brazel, telling us about a gouge in the ground.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who flew over the area in the months that followed mentioned two crash sites. He was referring to the debris field near Corona, and another site closer to Roswell. He mentioned seeing vehicle tracks in the area and a gouge, confirming what Brazel had told others several months earlier.

This is something of a conundrum. According to Brazel, the gouge was obvious, but Marcel doesn’t mention it. He talks about the size of the debris field and says the object exploded in the air. Don, Tom Carey and I have all stood on the raised ground at the beginning of the debris field and from that vantage point, we can see to the point that Brazel indicated was the end of the gouge. I have no idea why Marcel said that he didn’t see it.

There are many other gems in the Speigel interview. He asked Marcel about any personal UFO sightings. Marcel talked about seeing a strange formation of lights prior to the events of July 1947. According to Marcel, he had been called by the provost marshal and told to hurry out to the base. Marcel told Speigel, that this was something that he had never mentioned to anyone.

Marcel said, “And while going out there as fast as my car could run, I saw some lights in the sky, but it was a defined formation. It is a perfect “V” formation.”

He said that the formation was visible from overhead to the horizon, and suggested the formation was moving faster than any aircraft in the military inventory of 1947.

He did mention it to Major Edwin Easley who was the provost marshal at the time. Easley said that some of the boys over here saw that too.

Marcel said, “What it was, I still don’t know.”

One of the other criticisms of the Marcel testimony was his suggestion that he didn’t know what it was but he was sure that while it came to Earth, it was not from Earth. Skeptics wondered how he made this leap because, in 1947, there were tales of spaceships in the Buck Rogers’ comic strip and Flash Gordon was battling Ming the Merciless, but no real suggestion of alien visitation.

An interesting point, but Brazel’s arrival in Roswell was about two weeks after Kenneth Arnold made his sighting. Newspapers of the time were filled with stories about other flying saucer reports, not to mention the Foo Fighters of World War II and the Ghost Rockets seen over Scandinavia in 1946. Marcel, as the intelligence officer would have been aware of all these things so that when he was confronted with metallic debris that was so foreign to him, he recognized none of it and when he saw the size of the debris field, the conclusion that it was something off world wasn’t that radical. Speculations in the newspapers of the time ran the gambit from spots before the eyes, war hysteria, outright hoxes to creatures from Mars and Venus. Marcel didn’t grab the idea out of thin air; it was floating right there in front of him

There are additional questions that need answers in this newly retrieved interview. There are other points that seem to be contradictory. All this must be examined with an unbiased and dispassionate eye. And we need to put it into the context of the time, remembering that some memories fade and others are modified when new information is encountered. Sometimes the witnesses don’t lie, but are telling the truth as they remember it. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes they just want their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

If Marcel was a stand-alone witness on the Roswell crash, we would be right rejecting all that he says as delusion or confabulation. But every member of Colonel Blanchard’s staff we interviewed, with one exception, suggested the extraterrestrial as the ultimate solution. And there were dozens of others who had a small piece of the pie that when added to other pieces suggests something other than a weather balloon. 

A Roswell Chronology

The chronology of the events outside of Roswell is sometimes very confusing, as bob koford noted in his questions about the Bessie Brazel involvement in the recovery of what she said was a weather balloon. The problem is that we must base some of the chronology on speculation because there are discrepancies in the published record, there are conflicting statements made by witnesses, and there is a confusion caused by the personal agendas of Roswell authors and the point of view of the Air Force.

If we are dealing with a Project Mogul explanation, we probably should start the chronology before Mack Brazel finds anything on his ranch. We need to start with the balloon experiments in Alamogordo.

June 4, 1947 - According to the diary kept be Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the balloon experiments in New Mexico: Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds. Flew regular sonobuoy up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on ground but poor on plane. Out with Thompson pm. Shot charges from 1800 to 2400.

So we have contradictory accounts here in the only documented source. Charles Moore, who was with Crary on these tests wrote, "My examination of his original handwritten entries suggests that he copied from other notes; the entries from June 2 through the first half of June 5 appear to have been written in one sitting with the same pencil and without any corrections or false starts."

This is really unhelpful because the key Mogul launch is that of Flight No. 4, that is, the June 4 launch. The remains of the other balloon launches were recovered or spotted. The next possible culprit, Flight No. 9, turns out was not a viable alternative, leaving, for the Project Mogul crowd, only Flight No. 4.

What this means is that the flight, which Moore said he remembered got close to Arabella, NM, and which he used winds aloft data to attempt to plot a course some fifty years later, might have come down on the Brazel (Foster) ranch. It would have fallen late on June 4 or early on June 5. It must be stated here that Moore’s calculations take it no closer than 17 miles of the recovery area which, of course, only puts it in the area and not down where Brazel found debris.

June 14, 1947 - According to the article published in the Roswell Daily Record, Brazel said that he and his 8-year-old son were on the range some seven or eight miles from the ranch house when they found the debris.

This suggests that Brazel discovered the material three weeks before he reported it to the sheriff. What doesn’t make sense here is why he would leave it in the field for three weeks, then clean it up himself and then report it to the sheriff.

July 4, 1947 - Brazel, quoted in the Roswell Daily Record, said that he, his wife, son Vernon and 14-year-old daughter Bessie (identified as Betty in the newspaper) went out to the range and cleaned up the debris.

Bill Brazel, who at the time lived in Albuquerque says that the family was in Tularosa because when he arrived at the ranch, no one was there. He was there for a couple of days or so before his father returned from Roswell.

July 6, 1947 - Brazel traveled to Roswell and told local authorities of the debris, according to the time lines developed by various UFO researchers. According to wire service stories dated July 8, "Sheriff [George] Wilcox [Chaves County Sheriff] says the rancher does not have a telephone, and that he did not report finding the disc until the day before yesterday [meaning July 6 here].

This seems to document the Sunday trip by Brazel into Roswell even though later newspaper articles suggest that he didn’t drive into town until Monday, July 7.

July 6, 1947 - Major Jesse Marcel is called by the sheriff and eventually drives out to the ranch with Brazel to see the debris. Marcel would say that he went out with Captain Sheridan Cavitt, who would deny this and then confirm it.Marcel would later say he didn’t know what it was.

July 8, 1947 - Walt Whitmore, Sr., majority owner of KGFL apparently drove out to find Brazel and took him back to Roswell. There he was interviewed at length.

Jud Roberts, the minority owner of the station told various investigators and researchers that they had an hour long recording of Brazel, but before they could broadcast it, they were ordered not to. That recording has long since disappeared.

July 8, 1947 - There are a number of wire service stories. Frank Joyce, who worked at KGFL radio in Roswell at the time, kept teletype messages so that we can see what was being said over the wire.

July 9, 1947 - the Roswell Daily Record supplies office space so that two reporters from the Associated Press can interview Brazel.

Here are the problems. According to ranchers, they wouldn’t leave the debris in the field once they found it because the livestock would eat it and that could prove fatal. They would have picked it up. So, if Brazel had found it on June 14 (which, BTW negates Mogul Flight No. 9), he would have had it cleaned up around that date.

There is conflicting data about the timing of Brazel’s first trip into Roswell. This really isn’t a major concern. We have the story, told by Marcel, of remaining overnight at the Brazel ranch. Bessie Brazel said no to that. Mary Cavitt said no, basing that on her opinion that if her husband had just arrived in Roswell and then was gone overnight, she’d remember.

Clearly Brazel was in Roswell on the evening of July 8 and on July 9. He provided his story to the reporters in Roswell, there are pictures of him there, and there are witnesses to his presence there. There is no reason to reject this idea even though Bessie said that her father did not remain overnight in Roswell.

Both Bill Brazel, who drove from Albuquerque to Corona, and Major Edwin Easley, the provost marshal, said that Mack remained at the base for a number of days. Neighbors report that Mack complained about being held on the base.

This then, provides a chronology of events that might help put it all into perspective. We all can see the problems. We have conflicting data from documents, from witnesses, and from various investigators, researchers and governmental officials. It seems that everyone who comments on this has some sort of agenda so all we can do is attempt to put together the best information we can.

(Be sure to watch for Roswell Revisited, coming from Fate this summer.)