The Roswell Mystery

An unidentified flying object (UFO) crashed on a ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, sometime during the first week of July, 1947.

W.W. “Mack” Brazel said he found debris from the crash as he and the son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor rode their horses out to check on sheep after a fierce thunderstorm the night before. Brazel said that as they rode along, he began to notice unusual pieces of what seemed to be metal debris scattered over a large area. 

Brazel said he was struck by the unusual properties of the debris and, after dragging large pieces of it to a shed, he took some of it over to show the Proctors

The Proctors told Brazel he might have found wreckage from an alien spacecraft — a number of UFO sightings had been reported in the United States that summer — or a government project, and that he should report the incident to Chaves County Sheriff, George Wilcox.

A day or two later, Brazel reported the incident to Sheriff Wilcox, who reported it to Major Jesse Marcel, intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Group, stationed at Roswell Army Air Field. 

The debris site was closed for several days while the wreckage was cleared. Along with the metal, Marcel described weightless “I” beam-like structures that would neither bend nor break. Some of these “I” beams had unkown characters along the length, in two colours. Marcel also described metal debris the thickness of tinfoil that was indestructible. “I didn’t know what we were picking up,” Major Marcel said. “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.”

Adapted from an article on roswellufomuseum website