Roswell Hardware Man and Wife Report Disk Seen
The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that they had in their possession, a flying saucer.

According to information released by the department, under the supervision of Major Jesse A. Marcel, base intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises.
Major Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated. After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters.

The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer's construction or its appearance had been revealed.

Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot apparently were the only persons in Roswell who saw what they thought was a flying disk.
They were sitting on their porch at 105 South Penn. last Wednesday night at about ten o'clock when a large glowing object zoomed out of the sky from the southeast, going in a northwesterly direction at a high rate of speed.
Wilmot called Mrs. Wilmot's attention to it and both ran down into the yard to watch. It was in sight less then a minute, perhaps 40 or 50 seconds, Wilmot estimated.
Wilmot said that it appeared to him to be about 1,500 feet high and going fast. He estimated between 400 and 500 miles per hour.
In appearance it looked oval in shape like two inverted saucers, faced mouth to mouth, or like two old type washbowls placed, together in the same fashion. The entire body glowed as though light were showing through from inside, though not like it would inside, though not like it would be if a light were merely underneath. From where he stood Wilmot said that the object looked to be about 5 feet in size, and making allowance for the distance it was from town he figured that it must have been 15 to 20 feet in diameter, though this was just a guess.
Wilmot said that he heard no sound but that Mrs. Wilmot said she heard a swishing sound for a very short time.
The object came into view from the southeast and disappeared over the treetops in the general vicinity of six mile hill. Wilmot, who is one of the most respected and reliable citizens in town, kept the story to himself hoping that someone else would come out and tell about having seen one, but finally today decided that he would go ahead and tell about it. The announcement that the RAAF was in possession of one came only a few minutes after he decided to release the details of what he had seen.

An examination by the army revealed last night that mysterious objects found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was a harmless high-altitude weather balloon, not a grounded flying disk. Excitement was high until Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commander of the Eighth air forces with headquarters here cleared up the mystery.

The bundle of tinfoil, broken wood beams and rubber remnants of a balloon were sent here yesterday by army air transport in the wake of reports that it was a flying disk.
But the general said the objects were the crushed remains of a ray wind target used to determine the direction and velocity of winds at high altitudes.
Warrant Officer Irving Newton, forecaster at the army air forces weather station here said, "we use them because they go much higher than the eye can see."
The weather balloon was found several days ago near the center of New Mexico by Rancher W. W. Brazel. He said he didn't think much about it until he went into Corona, N. M., last Saturday and heard the flying disk reports.
He returned to his ranch, 85 miles northwest of Roswell, and recovered the wreckage of the balloon, which he had placed under some brush. Then Brazel hurried back to Roswell, where he reported his find to the sheriff's office.
The sheriff called the Roswell air field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, 509th bomb group intelligence officer was assigned to the case.
Col. William H. Blanchard, commanding officer of the bomb group, reported the find to General Ramey and the object was flown immediately to the army air field here.
Ramey went on the air here last night to announce the New Mexico discovery was not a flying disk. Newton said that when rigged up, the instrument "looks like a six-pointed star, is silvery in appearance and rises in the air like a kite." In Roswell, the discovery set off a flurry of excitement.
Sheriff George Wicox's telephone lines were jammed. Three calls came from England, one of them from The London Daily Mail, he said. A public relations officer here said the balloon was in his office "and it'll probably stay right there."
Newton, who made the examination, said some 80 weather stations in the U. S. were using that type of balloon and that it could have come from any of them.
He said he had sent up identical balloons during the invasion of Okinawa to determine ballistics information for heavy guns.

Harassed Rancher Who Located 'Saucer' Sorry He Told About It

W. W. Brazel, 48,
A Lincoln County rancher living 30 miles south of Corona, today told his story of finding what the army at first described as a flying disk, but the publicity which attended his find caused him to add that if he ever found anything else short of a bomb, he sure wasn't going to say anything about it.
Brazel was brought here late yesterday by W. E. Whitmore, of radio station KGFL, had his picture taken and gave an interview to the Record and Jason Kellahin, sent here from the Albuquerque bureau of the Associated Press to cover the story. The picture he posed for was sent out over AP telephoto wire sending machine specially set up in the Record office by R. D. Adair, AP wire chief sent here from Albuquerque for the sole purpose of getting out his picture and that of sheriff George Wilcox, to whom Brazel originally gave the information of his find. Brazel related that on June 14 he and an 8-year old son, Vernon, were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J. B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up on rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks. At the time Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter, Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris. The next day he first heard about the flying disks, and he wondered if what he had found might be the remnants of one of these. Monday he came to town to sell some wool and while here he went to see sheriff George Wilcox and "whispered kinda confidential like" that he might have found a flying disk. Wilcox got in touch with the Roswell Army Air Field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel and a man in plain clothes accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the pieces of the "disk" and went to his home to try to reconstruct it. According to Brazel they simply could not reconstruct it at all. They tried to make a kite out of it, but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it could fit.
Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell and that was the last he heard of it until the story broke that he had found a flying disk.
Brazel said that he did not see it fall from the sky and did not see it before it was torn up, so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he thought it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smokey 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 wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used. Brazel said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. "I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon," he said. "But if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it."

The first document is supposedly a document recovered from the US National Archives and is alleged to be the briefing document prepared for President Elect, Dwight D. Eisenhower by President Truman.

A second document follows and is a General Accounting Office Report to Congressman Schiff, NM concerning the lack of authenticity of this Majestic 12 document.

On 24 June, 1947, a civilian pilot flying over the Cascade Mountains in the State of Washington observed nine flying disc-shaped aircraft travelling in formation at a high rate of speed.
Although this was not the first known sighting of such objects, it was the first to gain widespread attention in the public media.
Hundreds of reports of sightings of similar objects followed. Many of these came from highly credible military and civilian sources. These reports resulted in independant efforts by several different elements of the military to ascertain the nature and purpose of these objects in the interests of national defense.
A number of witnesses were interviewed and there were several unsuccessful attempts to utilize aircraft in efforts to pursue reported discs in flight.
Public reaction bordered on near hysteria at times.
In spite of these efforts, little of substance was learned about the objects until a local rancher reported that one had crashed in a remote region of New Mexico located approximately seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell Army Air Base (now Walker Field).

On 7 July, 1947, a secret operation was begun to assure recovery of the wreckage of this object for scientific study. During the course of this operation, serial reconnaisance discovered that four small human-like beings had apparently ejected from the aircraft before it exploded.
These had fallen to earth about two miles east of the wreckage site.
All four were dead and badly decomposed due to action by predators and exposure to the elements during the approximately one week time period which had elapsed before their discovery. A special scientific team took charge of removing these bodies for study.
The wreckage of the craft was also removed to several different locations. Civilian and military witnesses in the area were debriefed, and news reporters were given the effective cover story that the object had been a misguided weather research balloon.
A covert analytical effort organized by Gen. Twining and Dr. Rush acting on the direct orders of the President, resulted in a preliminary concensus (19 September, 1947) that the disc was most likely a short range reconnaisance craft.
This conclusion was based for the most part on the craft's size and the apparent lack of any identifiable provisioning.
A similar anaylsis of the four dead occupants was arranged by Dr. Bronk.
It was the tentative conclusion of this group (30 November, 1947) that although these creatures are human-like in appearance, the biological and evolutionary processes responsible for their development has apparently been quite different form those observed or postulated in homo-sapiens.

Dr. Bronk's team has suggested the term "Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities", or "EBEs", be adopted as the standard term of reference for these creatures until such time as a more definitive designation can be agreed upon.
Since it is virtually certain that these craft do not originate in any country on earth, considerable speculation has centred around what their point of origin might be and how they got here.
Mars was and remains a possibility, although some scientists, most notably Dr. Menzel, consider it more likely that we are dealing with beings from another solar system entirely.

Numerous examples of what appear to be a form of writing were found in the wreckage. Efforts to decipher these have remained largely unsuccessful. Equally unsuccessful have been efforts to determine the method of propulsion or the nature and method of transmission of the power source involved.
Research along these lines has been complicated by the complete absence of identifiable wings, propellers, jets, or other conventional methods of propulsion and guidance, as well as a total lack of metallic wiring, vacuum tubes, or similar recognizable electronic components.
It is assumed that the propulsion unit was completely destroyed by the explosion which caused the crash.
A need for as much additional information as possible about these craft, their performance characteristics and their purpose led to the undertaking known as U.S. Air Force Project SIGN in December, 1947.
In order to preserve security, a liason within the Intelligence Division of Air Material Command whose role was to pass along certain types of information through channels.
SIGN evolved into project GRUDGE in December, 1948. The operation is currently being conducted under the code name BLUE BOOK, with liason maintained through the Air Force officer who is head of the project.

On 06 December, 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio/Gurrero area of the Texas/Mexican border after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere.
By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object was almost totally incinerated. As much material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.
Implications for the National Security are of continuing importance in that the motives and ultimate intentions of these visitors remain completely unknown.
In addition, a significant upsurge in the surveillance activity of these craft begining in May and continuing through the autumn of this year has caused considerable concern that the new developments may be iminent.
It is for these reasons, as well as the obvious international and technological considerations and the ultimate need to avoid a public panic at all costs, that the Majestic-12 Group remains of the unanimous opinion and that the imposition of the strictest security precautions should continue without interruption into the new administration.
At the same time, contingency plan MJ-1949-04P/78 (Top Secret - Eyes Only) should be held in continued readiness should the need to make a public announcement present itself.

United States General
Accounting Office
Washington, D.C. 20548
National Security and
International Affairs Division
94-0692

July 28, 1995
The Honorable Steven H. Schiff
House of Representatives
Dear Mr. Schiff:
In response to your request, we asked several agencies for their views on the authenticity of the publicly circulated written material referred to as Majestic 12.
The origin of this material is unknown, but it is purported to represent highly classified government records explaining unidentified flying object recovery procedures and the crash of a disc-shaped aircraft near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947.
Since the late 1980s, several federal agencies have been contacted by nongovernmental persons and asked to comment on the authenticity of the Majestic 12 material. The agencies contacted include the Information Security Oversight Office
(responsible for overseeing the information security programs of all executive branch agencies that create or handle classified national security information),
the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, Deputy for Security and Investigative Programs, and the National Archives.
These agencies responded to the inquiries by stating that their knowledge of Majestic 12 was limited to the written material submitted to them by non-governmental persons. These agencies added that they found no records in their files relating to Majestic 12.
Moreover, the agencies' overall conclusion concerning the authenticity of the Majestic 12 written material was the same there is no evidence that the Majestic 12 written material constitutes actual documents originally created in the executive branch.
According to the Information Security Oversight Office and the Air Force, the Majestic 12 material should not be treated as if it had ever been actually classified by an executive branch agency or government official.
We found nothing in our work that contradicts the conclusions reached by these agencies.

We also asked the archivists at the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower libraries for their views on the authenticity of the Majestic 12 material.
The archivists said that over the years they have received several inquiries from the public concerning this material. In their search for related records, including classified intelligence and National Security Council documents, they found nothing that appeared to fit the description of the Majestic 12 material or any references to this particular designation.

Lastly, during our review of material received from the public by the Information Security Oversight Office in connection with past Freedom of Information Act requests, we came across a message dated November 17, 1980.
The message, which appeared to have been originated by the Operations Division of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), contained the words "MJ Twelve."
We contacted AFOSI to determine the authenticity of the November 1980 message.
In a letter dated February 28, 1995, the Commander, AFOSI, Investigative Operations Center, advised us that a search of AFOSI files failed to disclose any official record copy of the message.
The commander also advised us that in connection with an earlier Freedom of Information Act request, AFOSI had been asked to determine the authenticity of the message.
At that time, AFOSI concluded that the message was a forgery.
Sincerely yours,
/s/Richard Davis
Director, National Security Analysis

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