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)?

It’s easy to explain away a heap of lightweight debris in a scraggy field in the middle of nowhere as, oh, it’s just a weather balloon (as the US Army tried in 1947) or possibly as oh, it’s just a Project Mogul balloon (as they also tried, decades later), even if the resemblance was only superficial at best. But, as Walter Haut’s affidavit makes clear (Witness To Roswell (2009), p.285), the task was to explain away that, rather than draw attention to the other thing:

“Gen. Ramey proposed a plan which I believe originated with his bosses at the pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location.”

To be honest, General Ramey’s diversionary plan has been doggedly followed for decades, to what looks like resounding success. Moreover, the ‘alien capsule’ crash site side of the whole Roswell narrative has been so comprehensively rubbished and yet so inflated with unattributed / confabulated accounts all at the same time that onlookers can’t figure out which mad extreme to believe; and so typically end up believing neither. Tongue only slightly in cheek, it would be easy to trace the roots of corrosive modern political discourse back to this metallic capsule.

The Cheese and the Worms

Was the Roswell Incident a real thing, or is it no more than a story that people with nothing better to do with their time (*cough*) like to garnish a historical nothingburger with? It seems that half of the academic papers on the Roswell Incident now treat it simply as a ‘modern American folk fable’, rather than a bitterly contentious event wrapped by a hundred layers of partisan spin and misinformation. One might argue that the one thing that definitely died that day in 1947 was any kind of respect for the truth.

As an aside, Carlo Ginzburg’s fascinating book “The Cheese and the Worms” (1976) lays out how a sixteenth century Friuli miller called Domenico Scandella went on trial for his heretical belief:

I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.

But frankly, the notion that an otherwise-empty rounded-end aluminium cylinder with a bunch of dying tiny ‘aliens’ in it – modern-day ‘angels’ who appeared ex nihilo, like worms in Scandello’s cheese – just appeared North of Roswell NM surely seems every bit as ludicrous here in the 21st century. And yet people have been feasting on this whole poisoned cheese ball for decades now. But… I digress.

The Problems with the Roswell ‘Capsule’

Anyhoo, if you accept the witness statements on the ‘alien’ capsule to any degree, it seems hard not to at least accept that something ended up in the scrubby ranchland outside Roswell. But if you think a balloon carried the (non-alien) capsule there, then you rapidly run into a whole load of issues… with the capsule itself, that is:

• No CO2 scrubbing (e.g. soda-lime), no heating (e.g. cold management)

Given that the sealed capsule had no CO2 scrubbing, the CO2 levels inside would have quickly climbed, causing dizziness, loss of consciousness, and death. If the capsule was (as asserted) roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, my back-of-envelope calculations imply the occupants could have had no more than five hours at most (and highly unpleasant ones at that) before they started dying. Your mileage may vary.

• No life support, no water, no food

Even if some of the occupants did manage to live (and there was talk of most of them ending up dead), there was no reported sign that their lives were really being supported in any way. Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to conclude that their survival was a priority in any way to those behind it all.

• No engine, no energy, no motive power, no controls, no anything

It was a “vessel” only in the sense that a flimsy plastic flower pot is a vessel, just strong enough for you to get your pansies home from the garden centre. Bear in mind that the few previous stratospheric gondolas all had complicated mechanisms to allow the balloonist inside the gondola to interact with the balloon above: but I believe there was no obvious sign of that here. As a corollary, it would seem that if there was a balloonist / pilot involved in this, they were outside this capsule, not inside it.

• No parachute, no cushioning, no heat shields, and dropped from a low height

The capsule was dinged, but it wasn’t so wrecked that its basic shape was unrecognisable. So: my best guess is that it was dropped from a low height (say, ten to twenty feet?), but not really any higher.

• If the capsule was lifted by a balloon, that would have needed to be a sizeable balloon

Project Mogul used trains of helium balloons, before moving to Helios-style clusters of helium balloons: and that was for a relatively small payload. (Trying to achieve constant-altitude flights, which was the point of that missions.) If this capsule had been intended to get to any height at all, it would have needed to be carried by a sizeable balloon: and that was something way beyond Project Mogul’s paygrade.

• Not a civilian balloon

In 1947, there wasn’t any civilian ballooning in America. Don Piccard had (famously) taken his balloon pilot’s licence in Feb 1947 using a captured Japanese Fu-Go balloon held at NAS Lakehurst, but the wave of non-military ballooning he later inspired and drove was still many years away. And even Charles Moore’s improvised balloon trip under a polyethylene balloon still hadn’t happened yet.

Nick’s Thoughts On All This

In some ways, using a sizeable, metalclad, US Navy balloon as the core of explaining what happened here might seem to be problematic, because that would imply that this inhumanity was deliberate. Had a truly horrible suspension of ethics happened here? Were the people (Americans, surely?) behind all this no better than the Nazi physicians who were (as of mid-1947) being tried at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial?

Even if you disagree with many of Nick Redfern’s “Body Snatchers in the Desert” details, this is essentially the dark heart of his argument: that the whole point of the Roswell ‘alien’ story was to divert everyone’s attention towards the curious metallic balloon debris in the New Mexico scrubland, and away from the inhumanity and (what you’d have to say looks a lot like) human experimentation going on in the capsule.

My current opinion – which may change, of course – is that I suspect the experiments were constructed aiming more for deniability than for deliberate mythopoiesis. If the capsule were to be discovered (as indeed it was), I think the basic plan was for it to be an unlabelled mystery (i.e. one without any external reference points), and perhaps even a mystery that in the end vaguely pointed more towards Japan than, say, Oak Ridge. But the US Army wasn’t in on that whole insider gag, and the idea that this was in fact an “alien spaceship” took hold, with grotesque (and far-reaching) consequences. Such as the Netflix series.

In many ways, ‘aliens‘ was the one story pretty much everyone wanted to be true here. Don’t you think?

Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt’s “Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-up” (2009) is, as you’d expect from the title, a curated collection of the many, many statements they and others have elicited from people who were, in one way or another, witness to the Roswell Incident.

Today I thought I’d bring all those witness fragments that relate to the (widely believed to be) ‘alien’ capsule together in one place, because jumping between them all in my notes was becoming quite tiresome. I’ve also tried to arrange them in a kind of logical sequence, following the capsule as it was taken from the ‘crash site’ just north of Roswell NM to the Army base on the south side of town.

Rolland Menagh, as reported by Rolland Menagh Jr in 2005 – Witness to Roswell, p.106

My father was an MP who guarded the UFO crash site north of Roswell. He saw the ship, which he described as being round or egg-shaped and seamless.

Edward Harrison – Witness to Roswell, p.103

“And I say, “How come they have an 18-wheeler out there haulin’ a balloon around?””

James W. Storm – Witness to Roswell, p.107

After a few minutes, a “snub-nosed tractor and lowboy flat trailer showed up.” On the back of the lowboy was a tarp that was covering “a saucer part so big (that) it was covered.” The lowboy continued towards Highway #285, which runs north to south through the centre of Roswell, where it becomes Main Street.

Richard Talbert – Witness to Roswell, pp. 105

“The low-boy had a tarp on it, and there was something under the tarp. I don’t recall now how I did it, but I was able to get a quick look under the tarp. I think it must not have been securely tied down on one end, or it just came loose, and it flapped up briefly as it went past me. Anyway, I saw a silver, oval-shaped something that was approximately 4 to 5 feet wide by about 12 feet long and 5 to 7 feet high. It had a dome on it, but it was damaged because it was cut off at one end.”

Paul McFerrin – Witness to Roswell, p. 105

“We were walking down Main Street when we saw this big, military flatbed transporting an egg-shaped object through town, obviously heading for the base. The flatbed trailer had a tarp over the object but you could pretty much tell what shape the object underneath was.”

Jobie MacPherson – Witness to Roswell, pp. 105-106

“It was coming from the north heading toward the base and went right past me. Jeeps and a flatbed truck. I could see mangled metal sticking out on the flatbed and something else that had a conical shape to it, like a pod.”

Earl V. Fulford – Witness to Roswell, pp. 110-111

When the rig got close enough, Fulford could see that it was pulling a lowboy trailer, and that the lowboy was carrying something under a tarp that was “about the size and shape of a Volkswagen Beetle”

Walter G. Haut (affidavit) – Witness to Roswell, p.286

“It was approx. 12-15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section or landing gear was visible.”

Julie Shuster

“At one point I asked [Haut] about the size, and he said the craft was about 25 feet in diameter.”

Tom Carey

“The ship which [Haut] described was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, more of an egg-shaped object […] And when asked point blank what he believed it was that he had seen, without hesitation he’d say, ‘It was not from this Earth, it was something manufactured off this Earth.’”

George Newling – Witness to Roswell, pp.118-119

“It was shaped like a ‘tear-drop’ and slightly damaged, but still intact. It appeared to be metallic and grayish in color, about 4 to 6 feet high and 10 to 12 feet long, and it had what appeared to be small, hexagonal cells or plates running the length of it on what I assumed was its underside.”

Bill Ennis – Witness to Roswell, p. 118

“It was a spaceship. After all these years, I still don’t know how that ship flew. There was no engine! Before I go, I’d like to know.”

Seeing an advert on the side of a bus for the film “Nuremberg” yesterday reminded me of an aspect of Nick Redfern’s “Body Snatchers in the Desert”. There, Redfern put forward an (occasionally) sketchy but (definitely) alien-free account of the Roswell Incident. In 2017, he described his book as “the Roswell-themed story that UFOlogy hates and which, back in 2005, made [him] public enemy number one“.

For Redfern, 1947 was a key moment in history, not so much because of the main Nuremberg trials (which had finished in late 1946), but because of the Doctors’ Trial, which ran from December 1946 to August 1947. Twenty physicians and three SS officials were charged for their involvement in:

• Aktion T4 – ‘involuntary euthanasia’ [i.e. mass murder] of disabled and mentally handicapped people
• Nazi human experimentation – 15,000 documented victims, though the real total was much higher

Seven were hanged, five got life imprisonment, four got prison sentences, and seven were acquitted.

Redfern, thanks to his informant “The Black Widow”, built up an account of Roswell where the ‘little aliens‘ in the aluminium capsule were in fact handicapped Japanese people (with progeria, etc). And so in mid-1947, the shadow of Nuremberg’s Doctors’ Trial hung heavily (he believed) over all the people involved in these human experiments that were all too similar to that which those Nazi doctors were very publicly on trial for.

Radiation Exposure and Cosmic Rays

The obvious question: what on earth was so important about balloon experiments circa 1947 that American biophysics researchers would even consider Nazi-style human experimentation as an option, let alone actually doing it? For the Black Widow, this was all about Oak Ridge’s “research into understanding high-altitude flight and exposure on the human body for the military [and] how that tied into plans NEPA would have to one day build nuclear aircraft that would be able to fly at [very] high altitudes […] for long periods.” (Body Snatchers, p.7)

One of the US military’s key strategic fears 1945-1950 was to do with cosmic rays: the concern (which we now know to be hugely exaggerated) was that people working in the stratosphere for extended periods might just suddently die from exposure to (what were thought to be) violently powerful cosmic rays. And so – the argument runs – there were medical committees in 1946-1947 who were trying to get an answer to this problem by any means possible. And if that involved what we would consider unethical means? They apparently didn’t care. Until the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial forced them to care.

Redfern (and indeed the Black Widow) frames this in terms of Operation Paperclip, i.e. that it was all the fault of those nasty German and Japanese scientists swooshed into America in the post-WWII mayhem, bringing their unethical research values in with them. But to be fair, I’m currently looking at the lists of people on medical committees (e.g. the AEC’s ABRC), and I’m honestly not seeing any Paperclippers there. The uncomfortable truth? Back then, it wasn’t necessary to be a Nazi or a member of Unit 731 to have extraordinarily suspect ethical values, if you thought that would ‘get the job done‘.

David DeVorkin and Project Helios

With this whole highly politicised (I nearly typed “highly charged“) cosmic ray situation in mind, I’m now re-reading David DeVorkin’s “The Race to the Stratosphere”: this covers high-altitude scientific ballooning either side of WWII, and (archivally) is exceptionally strong on the bodies and committees that collectively defined what science would get funded (and so what Science would become) post-WWII.

To my mind, these committees had perceived Project Helios as the knight in shining armour that would help get the stratospheric data they needed to resolve their issues and strategic fears. So it was extremely awkward for them all when that project stumbled, faltered, and got cancelled in the first few months of 1947. Jean Piccard had proved to be a terrible project principal, and his Great Big Plan to get people (to be honest, mainly him and his wife) to the stratosphere using his plastic balloon clusters had been exposed as just a little bit too hopeful for the ONR. So the US Navy kicked Piccard out, and subsequently split Project Helios into an unmanned half (Skyhook) and a manned half (Project Manhigh with Otto Winzen).

More generally, DeVorkin’s big idea is that manned scientific ballooning in the 1930s was a lot like manned rocket flight in the 1960s: and I think there’s a lot to like about this conceptual framework. But… to be honest, I’m now far from sure that the situation in the 1930s (for example, with cosmic rays) is an accurate guide to the situation in the later 1940s. Which is why I’m now going to re-read his book really carefully, and then move onto his “Science with a Vengeance” (which I only found out about a few days ago).

To move this whole research thread forward, The Only Way Is Ethics…

As has probably been abundantly clear for some time, I’m in the (dwindlingly small, possibly even only one member strong) group of people who suspect that the metallic debris in the Roswell Incident debris field (site 1) that looked like exploded metallic balloon envelope debris was in fact exploded metallic balloon envelope debris. I know, I know, it sounds crazy but that’s how it looks from here.

To be clear, the only people making metallic floaty envelopes at all was the US Navy. Its ZMC-2 metal-clad airship flew 752 flights between its launch in 1929 and retirement in 1941. So by 1947, the Navy hadn’t actually built or commissioned a metal-clad airship in nearly twenty years. Hence, viewing the Roswell debris as a metal-clad balloon blowing up might possibly seem a little stretched.

However, people had been calling for more metalclads for many years. Even after WWII, airship-obsessed Vice Admiral Charles “Rosy” Rosendahl was again calling for metalclad airships (SNAFU p.173 “The third phase should be revival of investigation into the very promising “metalclad” design […]”). Others still had proposed building even bigger metalclads, operating more like flying aircraft carriers than airships. All the same, without grinding through the (immense) Rosendahl archive, it’s hard to know exactly what was going on back then (he retired on 1st November 1946). A nice piece of Rosendahl trivia is that he was a member of ye Anciente and Secret Order of Quiet Birdmen.

If the exploding metallic balloon at Roswell was a US Navy exploding metallic balloon, then what happened to the US Navy balloonist? That is a question I’ve tackled in several other posts here, and there willI be more in posts to come. But today’s related question is: what was the balloonist wearing?

My belief is that the balloon was originally intended to fly high up, though this plan was scuppered by a series of miscalculations of the kind people make when they’re trying to do stuff covertly (and so don’t check their workings with people who would be able to point out the obvious errors).

As such, I believe the US Navy balloonist would have needed to be wearing some kind of pressure suit. But what was the state of the art in pressure suits back then?

WWII full-pressure suits

Between 1941 and 1943, John D. Akerman at the Strato Equipment Company of Minneapolis made a series of pressure suits for the US Army (remember that the Air Force was still part of the US Army then). However, early models were unpromising (“[…] suits were cumbersome to don and doff, it was nearly impossible to bend at the waist when the suits were inflated, and the helmets were uncomfortable to wear for long periods.” (“Dressing for Altitude“, pp. 46-47). Other suits were submitted by Goodyear and US Rubber as part of the same project.

One of the more promising ones was the Goodrich XH-5: “The suit was made of laminated rubberized fabric, and ball-bearing joints facilitated mobility at the elbows and knees. A Goodrich-designed self-sealing zipper ran from the crotch to the neck ring. Large, rounded bellows formed the arms and legs to improve mobility, leading to it being called the tomato-worm suit.” (DfA, p.56).

Interestingly, “[d]uring the summer of 1943, the U.S. Navy tested several of the Army pressure suits at the Naval Air Crew Equipment Laboratory in Philadelphia. LCDR Donald W. Gressly was the flight surgeon in charge, assisted by mechanical engineer L.W. Meakin ” (DfA p.60). One of these was an Akerman BABM suit, which seems to have been the BABM-18 (DfA p.62):

The suit was made of two layers of rubberized fabric, operated at 1.5 psi, and consisted of five pieces: an upper torso, trousers, a pair of gloves, and a helmet. Metal connecting rings at the neck, waist, and wrists secured the pieces together. There were leather straps running from the waist ring over the shoulders to
prevent rising and from the waist to the crotch to prevent elongation. A pocket under each armpit creased by thin wire aided mobility for the arms. Straps across the stomach and thighs provide breaking points in the inflated fabric for forward bending and sitting. Three clamps attached the gloves to a rubber gasket, and a standard Army harness and parachute was worn over the suit. There were five zippers on each suit: one 11-inch zipper on each side, one 11-inch zipper on the trouser at the waistline, one 11-inch zipper on the chest of the torso, and one 11-inch zipper on the back of the torso. In theory, flaps on the inner side of each zipper provided an airtight seal.

Ultimately, the US Army didn’t think that any of the suits that had been submitted were good enough to use. Similarly, the US Navy researchers concluded that they were “too heavy, uncomfortable, and not sufficiently ventilated to remove perspiration. Seemingly ignoring the state of the art in airtight fabrics, the Navy researchers believed any pressure suit should be made of a lightweight fabric, although they noted that the General Electric and Akerman suits, which used such fabric, tore too easily under pressure.” (DfA, pp. 67-68).

Note: DfA gives two references that I’ll need to track down:

• James V. Correale, “The Lightweight Full-Pressure Suit System of the U.S. Navy”, Air Crew Equipment Branch, Naval Air Material Center Philadelphia, 1959.
• “Navy’s Space Suit” Naval Aviation News, NavAer No. 00-75R-3, April 1953; “Developmental History of the Aviator’s Full-Pressure Suit in the U.S. Navy.”

The Strato Model 7

In 1947, the only US Navy full-pressure suit was the Strato Model 7, commissioned in 1946 from John D. Akerman under contract NOa(s)-8192. (DfA p.179) “The one-piece, tight-fitting garment covered the entire body except the face, which was covered by a detachable “goggle-mask.” [..] Two layers of nylon cloth provided protection for the neoprene sandwiched between them against local abrasions.” (DfA pp.179-180)

Five-finger gloves (as opposed to mittens) had zippers along the top to permit donning and doffing. The Model 7 glove used a custom zipper that was “tedious to close,” [..]. There was a neoprene diaphragm at the intersection of the glove and sleeve that allowed the suit to remain pressurized when the glove was removed. The gloves had separate ventilation and pressurization channels to provide comfort even when the suit was not pressurized.

The narrow-neck, close-fitting helmet covered the entire head and ears and was fabricated of the same material as the suit. Ventilation and pressurization of the helmet was through three flat, noncollapsible conduits that discharged air just above the ears and into the goggles. “Donuts” made of soft sponge rubber and chamois cloth protected the ears. The goggle-mask consisted of standard Navy goggles and
a pressure-breathing mask integrated into a single unit.

However, only a single Strato Model 7 was ever delivered to the US Navy, to fit “a very large man”.

It’s possible that the US Navy’s (single) Strato Model 7 was used, but all the same, I’d have to concede that the timing was extremely tight for this to have been used in July 1947. I’ll have to dig up the report from Akerman dated November 1947 and read more:

• Vernon G. Townsend, Vice President and John D. Akerman, Consultant, “Report on U.S. Navy Pressure Suit, Model 7, on Contract NOa(s) 8192,” November 15, 1947.

Note also that NARA has a record in Record Group 342 called “Flying Clothing – Strato Equipment Co.“, which I believe probably covers 1946-1947 US Navy correspondence with Strato (even though that’s an Air Force archival reference). I also suspect that David Clark Company may have more details.

Everyone and their alien dog has heard of the first Roswell site, the ‘thin metallic debris’ field. Many have also heard of the second Roswell site, the ‘metallic alien craft’ / ‘tiny dead aliens’ site. But who knows about the alleged third Roswell site, the “Dee Proctor site”? What evidence is there that this third site was a genuine thing, and not just something concocted by mad-eyed alien conspiracy theorists to sell books?

Timothy “Dee” Proctor

I’ve recently been reading “The Children of Roswell” (2016) by Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt, two prolific (and non-mad-eyed) Roswell researchers who frequently focus on witness testimony. The book’s Chapter One (“This Is Where Mack Found Something“) focuses on the young boy who accompanied Mack Brazel on his rounds of the J. B. Foster Ranch early on 3rd July 1947. This boy was not (as is often reported) Brazel’s 8-year-old son Vernon, but was instead 7-year-old Timothy “Dee” Proctor, the third son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel’s nearest neighbours. (Carey and Schmitt say that “the little Proctor boy eagerly worked for a mere 25 cents per day“, basically living the ‘cowboy dream’ while school was out for the summer.)

For decades (Carey and Schmitt say), Dee refused to talk about what he had seen that day, until finally in 1994 he took his mother Loretta to show her something… interesting. Initially, Dee drove her towards the Foster Ranch along the old Hines Draw Road, roughly three miles from the famous first site. But Dee then carried on past the road that led to the old windmill (by the first ‘Roswell Incident’ site): and, at the fork at the end where the left road leads off to the ranch, he instead turned right towards the “twin (wind)mills”.

Carey and Schmitt: “Dee headed towards the sheep pen, stepped from the truck, unwrapped the chain securing the gate […]. After proceeding on seldom-used trails almost too faint to see, and 10 minutes more […], they came to another gate. From there, they drove into the next pasture and past the first of two bluffs, before swinging around and up and over before coming to a stop above the second bluff.“

This was the location where Dee Proctor reportedly said: “Mom, this is where Mack found something else.” (Carey and Schmitt’s italics). C&S continue: “Peering off to the west along the horizon, they both could see the single windmill on the eastern edge of the debris field, a couple of miles away.”

Juanita Sultemeier, other ranchers and Jeff Wells

Even though they call this site “The Dee Proctor site”, Carey and Schmitt tell how it was already known to them from their interview with Juanita Sultemeier, who had described bright-headlighted army trucks driving down the “twin mills” trail back in 1947. Other ranchers described having gone through the same two gates, and how Mack Brazel had discovered some kind of crash remains there. Jeff Wells, who had been the ranch supervisor back then, had additionally taken C&S to the same location.

Subsequently, when filming a BBC documentary with producer John Purdy in 1994, they also asked Loretta Proctor to direct them to the location she had previously described having gone to with Dee, and it was indeed the same place. Its location? “[Two and a half] miles east-southeast from the original site […]“, they say. C&S’s Chapter Fourteen mentions that other “little ranchers” visited this site with Dee Proctor: Mack Brazel’s son Vernon, and “boys with the last name of Edington and Wright”.

So, where exactly is it? Is the above enough information to help us do something sensible, you know, like actually find it on a map?

The location of the first site (the debris field)

Wikipedia gives the coordinates of the Roswell Incident debris field (site 1) as 33°57’01.0″N 105°18’51.0″W. On July 5th 2003, the Sci Fi Channel placed a stone marker on the site to commemorate the Roswell Incident (photo by Tom Carey): “In July of the year 1947 a craft of unknown origin spread debris over this site / Witnesses would report materials of an unearthly nature […]“

According to Reddit poster samarkhannor, the stone marker is located here, at 33°57’05.8″N 105°19’08.8″W. Additionally, the Bureau of Land Management gives the site coordinates as 33.952189, -105.331214, and says:

To visit the alleged UFO skip site, park at the Bureau of Land Management’s parking lot off Lincoln County Road B007, or Transwestern Road. The parking lot is about 78 miles from the BLM Roswell Field Office at 2909 W. 2nd St., Roswell. From the parking lot, hike about a mile to the east on BLM land. There is no signage to mark the site, but BLM personnel plan to install signs this fiscal year. There are no plans to make a road to the site, and visitors will have to hike. There is a road to the site, but private land blocks both the northern and southern entrances.

(They also offer a downloadable hiking map to help you get there, which I think is pretty cool.) To be fair, the BLM coordinates seem to be right beside the B007 road running North-South (so perhaps these are the coordinates of the Bureau’s “parking lot”?), and the other stone marker coordinates point to a location about a mile to the east from there, so I guess everything ties together pretty well here.

The location of the third site

Note that the Hines Draw Rd that appears on modern maps (e.g. for Richards Ranch LLC at 951 Hines Draw Rd, outside Capitan NM) seems somewhat shorter than “the old Hines Draw Road”. There’s a short section here, where the road running from East to West is the B024, which quickly turns into the B012:

And I also stumbled across a road section labelled “Hines Draw Rd” further west of there, at the other end of the B012:

From this, my best guess is that the old Hines Draw Road basically ran where the modern B012 road is, from just around Richards Ranch LLC to the bottom right of that sort-of four-way junction, before continuing North along the modern B014.

At the same time, given that that the third site is described as being roughly two and a half miles east-southeast from the debris field, we now have a reasonably good (though inexact) idea of where it is: 33.9365 N, 105.2744 W (or thereabouts). And even from this, we can see the B010 running less than a kilometre away:

And no, I don’t know what the thing on the left is, but it’s about 100m lengthways:

If all of this is basically correct, then I believe that Dee Proctor was (in modern terms) initially driving South along the B014 (there’s a small set of buildings along there marked “627”, was that where they lived?) towards the four-way junction. He then could have taken the first right onto the B001 to go East towards the first crash site (in a roundabout way); or he could have taken the first left to go towards (what is now the Richards) ranch; but he instead took the second right onto the B010, heading South. Go three miles along the B010 and you’re almost certainly fairly close to the site, though where the two bluffs and the two old mills are, I have no idea.

So this is by no means the last word on the matter, because there’s still plenty of guesswork in there, and I might easily have got some (or indeed all) of the above wrong. Please feel free to take the baton and see how far you can run with it!