Real or Imagined

Mac Brazel didn't think much of the debris that littered his land after that July storm back in 1947. His primary concern lay with the sheep that wouldn't move across the debris field but rather worked their way around it. By all accounts he had picked up a few of these balloons that tumbled down from the sky. As a caretaker of the Foster ranch, his primary job was herd control, fencing, and general land management. Weather balloons falling from the sky was part of it. Probably a very tiny part, but a part, nonetheless.

When the storm delivered a debris field hundreds of yards long it was more than he and his pony, or even his truck, could handle. With that conundrum he reported the mess to the local sheriff in Roswell, who in turn let the Air Force know. 

What follows is pretty common knowledge.

The ironic thing is, that no matter where you fall on Roswell, if you buy the Air Force's final report, or the skeptic's view of what really happened, that fact remains that despite being on the front page of the Roswell Gazette and very briefly the newswires, the Air Force managed to so utterly bury the story that it wasn't mentioned again for 30. Despite all the hubbub around flying saucers, UFOs, strange lights in the sky, abductions, etc, this story remained buried. The only story where the Air Force (Army Air Corps at the time) admitted to having a flying saucer.

Brazel left the Roswell area not long after, moved west and continued to work ranches. He would never talk about the incident in public, and by most accounts of his children, in private either.

The story vanished. Brazzel died in '63 and the whatever it was, didn't exist for a long time. But Brazel entered the history books and has become a part of the mythological landscape - real or imagined - of the United States.

What an amazing tale.