Witness accounts indicate that the 1947 Roswell Incident was spread across three separate sites:
- #1: The debris field site – lots of thin metallic debris
- #2: The crashed craft site – a Volkswagen Beetle-sized ‘alien’ capsule + dying little people
- #3: The Dee Proctor site – ummmmm, Mack Brazel found “something” here
Sites #1 & #3 were fairly close together on the J. B. Foster ranch (where Mack Brazel worked as the ranch supervisor), while site #2 was several miles east-southeast of them. I have seen no indication whatsoever that Mack Brazel went to site #2 (several sources say explicitly that he never went there).
As has been extensively described in the literature, site #1 contained nothing more than a large scattering of curious metallic debris, a burned section of land, and a scraped trail. (For decades, it was widely presumed / believed that the supposedly alien craft ‘skipped’ off the ground at site #1, before supposedly crashing at site #2, which is why you may occasionally still see this referred to as the “skip site“.)
Honestly, there was nothing much physically on site #1 that might cause anyone to lose a great deal of sleep, except possibly a cipher mysteries blogger trying to cross-reference all the stories of alien writing on the debris found there. So I find it hard to believe that site #1 was the cause of Mack Brazel’s belief.
Take away sites #1 and #2, then, and you’re left with site #3. Even today, nobody wants to talk about site #3, but in many ways this is the most intriguing of the three. What on earth did Mack Brazel see at site #3 that caused him and his family decades of anguish?
The Obviously Missing Next Paragraph
This is the point where an AI would insert a load of eye-pleasingly plausible nonsense, because there’s such a gigantic hole in every single account here that it simply begs to be filled. But the simple truth is: nobody knows what was at site #3.
Pretty much all UFO researchers have had a shot at filling this gap. One of the most well-used attempts asserts that Brazel was so traumatised by his encounters with the military (Brazel’s family was living in Tularosa at the time, and he spent several days detained on the Army camp in what must have felt like a prison) that he somehow ended up convinced that the whole thing was some alien craft phenomenon.
But read that back again: none of it is an actual explanation: rather, it explains away what happened, and without proof or evidence. And I’d add that I think most other attempts people have made here quickly cross the line into Explain-Away-Land, somewhere I try to avoid where possible.
The only non-explain-away account I can see here is to wonder whether it was in fact the “something” that Brazel found at site #3 (as Dee Proctor told his mother) that convinced him that aliens were involved. And that’s still far more of a question than an answer.
Having said that, when Brazel went back (with a military escort) to talk with Frank Joyce at KGFL, at the end of the interview the journalist light-heartedly referred to “little green men”. As the famous story goes, Brazel angrily muttered “They weren’t green!”
So riddle me this: why did Brazel say that if he hadn’t been to the crash site (site #2)?