Contemporary accounts of materials found The Sacramento Bee article detailing the RAAF statements.On July 8, 1947, reports emerged from the Roswell Army Air Field that a "flying disc" had been recovered. The following historical account reconstructs a timeline of events as described and recorded in initial news reports and several contemporary telexes.
On June 14, farmer William "Mac" Brazel noticed some strange debris while working on a ranch 70 miles from Roswell. This exact date (or "about three weeks" before July
is a point of contention, but is repeated in several initial accounts, in particular the stories that quote Brazel and in a telex sent a few hours after the story broke quoting Sheriff George Wilcox (whom Brazel first contacted). The initial report from the Roswell Army Air Field said the find was "sometime last week," but that description may have been a fourth-hand account of what Brazel actually said, and mentions the sheriff as the one who contacted them about the find.[1] Brazel told the Roswell Daily Record that he and his son saw a "large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks." He paid little attention to it, but returned on July 4 with his son, wife and daughter to gather up the material.[2] Some accounts have described Brazel as having gathered some of the material earlier, rolling it together and stashing it under some brush.[3] The next day, Brazel heard reports about "flying discs" and wondered if that was what he had picked up. On July 7, Brazel saw Sheriff Wilcox and "whispered kinda confidential like" that he may have found a flying disc.[2] Another account quotes Wilcox as saying that Brazel reported the object on July 6.[1]
Sheriff Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field. Maj. Jesse Marcel and a "man in plainclothes" accompanied Brazel back to the ranch where more pieces were picked up. "[W]e spent a couple of hours Monday afternoon [July 7] looking for any more parts of the weather device," said Marcel. "We found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber."[4] They then attempted to reassemble the object but Brazel said they couldn't. Marcel took the debris to Roswell Army Air Field the next morning.
As described in the July 9, 1947 edition of the Roswell Daily Record,[5]
“ "The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been 12 feet long, [Brazel] felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds. There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine, and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No strings or wires were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.” ”
A telex sent to an FBI office from their office in Dallas, Texas, quoted a major from the Eighth Air Force on July 8:[6]
“ "THE DISC IS HEXAGONAL IN SHAPE AND WAS SUSPENDED FROM A BALLON [sic] BY CABLE, WHICH BALLON [sic] WAS APPROXIMATELY TWENTY FEET IN DIAMETER. MAJOR CURTAN FURTHER ADVISED THAT THE OBJECT FOUND RESEMBLES A HIGH ALTITUDE WEATHER BALLOON WITH A RADAR REFLECTOR, BUT THAT TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN THEIR OFFICE AND WRIGHT FIELD HAD NOT [unintelligible] BORNE OUT THIS BELIEF."
