Roswell Incident 2: An Attempt to List a Dozen Agreed-Upon Facts

Roswell Post Two.
Here I confess that I have read, in the last two years, two books on Roswell, plus Out There by Howard Blum, which dealt with it peripherally and analytically.  Whether the other two books dealt with it analytically--some say yes, some say no.  The willingness to spend, say, 50 hours, reading these things, all by itself, places me, if not in the Nutcase Camp, somewhere a little bit off the grid.
Or does it?  Blum is a real hard-evidence kind of guy, and he spent two years or so on related stuff.

The two Roswell books were both written by people (guys, probably white) convinced that a NonEarthly event happened.  They're the Nutcase Camp to the skeptics.  It seems humans can convince ourselves of virtually anything we earnestly wish to believe.  Blum, a really good-looking guy at least in 1990 when his book came out (no, I'm not gay or bi.  I just think he's tall, handsome, well dressed, well posed, probably Jewish, and a good thinker), is an author and journalist, who spent three years running down leads about a government panel called the UFO Working Group.  It was formed to evaluate UFO reports and find out if they posed a security risk to we the people.

Let's see if I can tell you six or eight things about Roswell that everybody agrees on.  Are there that many?  I may not need to remind you that those holding opposing conclusions about Roswell have called each other some fairly nasty names.  "Cultists" will do for a first example.  I myself in a later post wonder whether a reporter used bad judgment in what to report.  Those folks are in the "use good judgment" business.  Insults worthy of some from Donald Trump, the man who got busy building buildings, screwing women, insulting politicians and ended up president, in other words, ended up as a politician very capable of being insulted himself.

Let's see if we can start with easy-to-agree-upon things about Roswell.
1) Other than for locals who know and love it and UFO rah-rah people who find it very dreamy, Roswell is a boring place.  This is my first dramatic finding, and I set it out as self-evident.  Roswell is 50,000 people in the middle of lots of fairly ugly desert.  For 100 or so miles in any direction, there's rabbits and lizards and a few small town.
2) I came to conclusion #1 by seeing the most exciting local features.  They're things like a museum about little grey men, a Walmart, a military college with an impressive parade ground, and a senior citizen's center that serves tasty food I did not find boring.  I said ugly desert because where I came from, around Moab, Utah, the desert is beautiful. Southern Utah has five national parks.  This is NOT the scene at Roswell.  If any small town ever needed a UFO convention to spruce it up . . .  Nature abhors a vacuum, eh?
3) I'll try to make up with you Roswell lovers by noting that, other than UFOs, this almost city has serious claims to fame.  First, 50,000 people in that part of the world is almost a "big city."  Myself, I grew up in a town of 4,000 people.  Who am I to look down my nose?   Next, Roswell has Penny's in addition to Wally's, which was what my girlfriend Joan called W-mart and she worked there 12 years.  Another Roswell high point is that, through sheer good luck, it is close to both Carlsbad Caverns and El Paso, Texas.  That's thrilling, at least if you're thrilled by really pretty caves or really ugly places in west Texas.  Demi Moore and John Denver were both born there.  I don't see how one town this size could have snagged them both.  I don't think of New Mexico when I sing "Rocky Mountain High."  Do you?  Roger Staubach (don't ask who he was if you don't know; you won't care) and Sam Donaldson (same) both went to the military academy, so heavy on celebrities.
3) Just everybody agrees there had been a flurry of UFO reports in the summer of 1947. New Mexico seems to have had more than its share.
4) About the beginning of summer, 1947, something crashed out of the sky during a storm onto a ranch in the desert, miles northwest of Roswell, closer to the tiny town of Corona.  Even the government agrees to this.  I've checked.  So in only four facts I've proved that there was no Roswell Incident, because it was a Corona Incident.  Case closed.
5) There was plenty of debris from the crash and a ranch foreman named Mack Brazel and a boy who rode along helping him found it.
6) History.com, which should be striving for objectivity, calls the debris "unidentifiable."  Seems safe to say it mystified the first few locals to see it.  Far as I can tell, this puzzlement is historical.  We're trying to be careful here.  I wanna keep all 8 readers of this blog happy for the time being, no matter what their Roswell Religion dogma states.  Fair?
7)  Loretta Proctor, on the nearest neighboring ranch, says Brazel was befuddled by what to do about the debris and brought them a sample right before the 4th of July weekend.  The 4th was Friday.  The sides disagree on what the debris was, but the only account we have of that meeting comes from Loretta, interviews much later, starting in 1989, 42 years after.  She said it was a round piece 4 inches long and light like balsa wood.  It looked like plastic but wasn't.  Her husband Floyd tried to whittle on it with his knife, but could not.  No mark.  Good sharp knife.  Brazel held a match up to it and it didn't even turn black.  They hadn't seen anything like it.

8)  Brazel said the debris was in the way of his grazing sheep out in the pasture and that his sheep were afraid of the debris.

Let's lay aside the consensus statements and do a) a thought experiment on the sheep b) Q&A about Loretta Proctor's story.       Don't know if you've buddied around with sheep.  I might be luckier than you because I have.  I am the proud grandson of an accomplished sheep rancher and profanity-user, a broad-shouldered son of Scotland named Tom McKeachnie.  Damned good man.  Sheep are basic.  They're like my bunny Knuffle, only maybe not as cute or as smart.  Sheep mostly just want a) to find things to chew and b) to stay with the other sheep.   Sheep will ignore almost anything that isn't big or loud or moving and put their heads down and nibble, or move to where they can graze.  There tends to be piles of trash and debris out around sheep corrals and fields, and those sheep couldn't care less.  So it's a little odd that even one sheep would be spooked by debris.  Typically, sheep don't give, as Grandpa would say, a shit about debris.  Yet here's the limit on the sheep thought experiment.   They can be dear, but they don't know their heads from a hole in the ground.  We can't prove much by the sheep, but we can wonder.
Turns out the same for Loretta Proctor.  She makes a statement about what happened with a mysterious material when only she, her family, and Brazel were there.  Unlikely any other info exists about that meeting.  If Mack found a Project Mogul device made of conventional albeit high-qualify materials, could it have the properties here described?  Light, nonmetallic, couldn't be burned or cut?
9)  I don't think anybody questions that Brazel took some of whatever the debris was to neighbors, asking for help.  Some say he wanted help identifying the stuff, and some say he thought he needed help cleaning it up because there was so much of it.  Once we get this Roswell jazz played out a ways, I think one side may stumble a bit in accounting for this early Mack Brazel behavior and Proctor family behavior.  Even if it stumbles, it won't think any conclusion but its own is sensible.
10)  It seems that all people in a position to know say that Brazel went into town (Corona, see I told you there was no Roswell Incident) where he could use a phone, since life hadn't provided him either a cell or a land line out at the ranch.  He called his boss in Texas, who then rushed to drive right over, implying something unusual.

Now that I've, so to speak, "achieved" 10 objective facts, a comment.  The last thing I want to do is be a sucker for some cockamamie UFO story with no solid evidence.  Yet I find that Roswell's story seems to be have things, one after another, that seem slightly odd.  22 hints generally do not prove a murderer guilty.  For one thing, what I've read of this Mack Brazel makes him seem like a decent guy, but I imagine him as a redneck, like my cousin Tommy.  Regular guy, maybe not real swift on the uptake.  He finds something in his sheep field that bothers him.  Since when does it give us useful information if a redneck is bothered by something?  Me, I'm more the pointy-headed intellectual type.  Since when does it tell us much if a pointy-headed intellectual is bothered by something?
Now if we may, back to facts.
11) There are claims that pieces from the crash took a lot of attention at the Fourth of July Rodeo in nearby Capitan, NM.  More, it is claimed that no one could cut, burn or identify the material.   Nobody recorded these events with their cell phones or cameras.  Yet it sounds odd and familiar, like Loretta Proctor.
12) Two hints do not an interstellar expedition prove.  No samples of a likely nonEarth material later popped into public view and are displayed in the Smithsonian. 
13) On the Fourth of July weekend, Brazel went to the Roswell sheriff with a box of the debris.  The sheriff decided to call the Army base.  He also sent deputies out to size it up.  I.e., the sheriff was fairly impressed with what turned out to be a weather balloon.  Ranchers in Roswell knew what weather balloons looked like, but the sheriff didn't, I guess, nor his deputies.

15)  Remember it's the holiday weekend when some old rancher has a tale to tell.  Somehow it got the attention of not only the lead intel guy at the base, but the commander himself.  Odd.  The Army is impressed.  Before long the crash site or sites were restricted to public access.
 16) About three days later, Colonel Blanchard of the Roswell Army Air base called his P.R. guy, officer Walter Haut, and dictated to him a press release that a crashed "flying disc" had been found and was in the unit's possession, and that he should release this to the press.
17) This report went out to the press, fanning wide initial interest. 
18)  The Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947 said the Army Air Force had found a "flying saucer."
19)  Brazel later said he wished he had gone straight to more of the press instead of to the government.  Why?
20)  Well, one reason could be that he was taken into military custody for about six days and was seen by those who knew him, being taken to different places in Roswell, in the company of soldiers.  I don't know if this is denied by the Army, but there are several witnesses to it.

Opinion:  maybe he thought that wouldn't have happened had he got the press there first.  Opinion: why did they need to take him into custody?  I'm fairly sure no one accused him of breaking the law.  Wasn't charged with anything.  Just a guy who wanted a mess cleaned up and seemed to think he needed official help doing it.
21) Hours after the first report, officials from the local Air Force base said, whoops, they got it straight now.  It was a crashed weather balloon, maybe somehow shaped like a disc, which of course they never are.
22) Public interest faded, not to be picked up again until the 1970s.  I think that thirty-year lag before any of these UFO yokels went on the rag about Roswell is important.  The biggest story on Earth lay quiet and neglected for the entire first half of my life?  Does that add up?  Well, I certainly didn't go investigate it.  Neither did you?
21)  Years later the government admitted the weather balloon story was a cover-up.  The revised report was that it was a nuclear monitoring program called Project Mogul, knowledge of which Uncle Sam didn't want in civilian hands.  So far as I can learn about Mogul, it used more elaborate, larger versions of first traditional weather balloons and later neoprene-made balloons to take its instruments up into the air.
22) Weather balloons landing in New Mexico ranch pastures were common and good numbers of locals did not believe the weather balloon story.  Relations between the base and Roswell civilians soured.  Why would Brazel have gone showing things to his neighbors or calling his boss over what to do about a weather balloon, even a fancy one?  There is no reason.
23) Stories mount into the dozens of locals handling a material unlike any on Earth.  I'm not saying they did.  I'm saying they talked like they did, and it's not five or six people, either.
24)  Also mounting up, in the passing years, are allegations that the Army came around confiscating this material.  Again, I'm not proving the allegations; I'm noting them.
25)  In quite a number of cases, New Mexicans, among the early ones to be exposed to information about the crash or alleged pieces taken from it, said, years later, they were threatened with their lives if they ever talked about it.  And their families' lives.
26) One man of the local radio station said he was taken into custody and held at a Texas military hospital for a year because he told the military to go to hell when they threatened his freedom of the press.  I'm not saying everybody assents to his story; I'm saying I don't think anyone disputes that he made this claim.

Of the above 26, I think we could get "Roswell" students of any viewpoint to agree on well over 20.

Dumm-duh-dumm-dumm.  Roll the drama drum.  Are all these people idiots or liars or was there an overwhelming psychologically brutal coverup?  Did Project Mogul threatening to become public warrant that?
27) This was right after World War II, a very scary total war, and if something unknown is noticed in the sky or crashes on the land, it would be natural for officialdom to be hush-hush about it until they knew exactly what they were dealing with.

If it were alien and all they had was debris, they might never be sure what they were dealing with.  So keep it classified.  Lie to the people about what could be called the most important news story in history, right up there with learning to grow corn.
Source for L. Proctor story in #6,7 above is T. Carey, who interviewed Proctor several times between 1989 and 2010, Children of Roswell, p. 49.  See also Wikipedia, Roswell Incident, Project Mogul.