W. W. Brazel, 48, Lincoln county rancher living 30 miles south east 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 would 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 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 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 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.”

Co-authors of a major book on the 1947 crash of at least one alien spacecraft in the New Mexico desert will be at the Golden Manor Motel in Socorro on Monday, Nov. 16 to seek out additional witnesses to these events.

Nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman and aviation/science writer Don Berliner, whose “Crash at Corona” is now in its second printing, want to meet with people having knowledge of the 1947 crashes.

Their book, being published in August by Paragon House of New York, is being prepared for a made-for-TV movie. It is the story of the discovery, retrieval, shipping and cover-up of what the authors call the most important scientific discovery of the past thousand years.

It is based on dozens of interviews with first- and second-hand civilian and ex-military witnesses to various parts of what is referred to as a very complex series of events.

In order to strengthen their case for government knowledge of what they call “the truth behind almost 50 years of UFO sightings,” the authors are seeking out additional, reliable witnesses. It remains their policy to honor requests to keep the names of witnesses private.

For more information, contact Don Berliner, 1202 S. Washington St., Alexandria. VA., 22314 (703-548-0405); or Stanton T. Friedman, 79 Pembroke Crescent, Fredericton, New Brunswick E3B 2V1, Canada (506 457-0232).

Witnesses are invited to call either author collect or to make arrangements to meet them at any of their stops in New Mexico, which include the cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Alamogordo and Roswell.

By CAPT. JOSEPH W. KITTINGER. JR., USAF

OVERHEAD my onion-shaped balloon spread its 200-foot diameter against a black daytime sky. More than 18½ miles below lay the cloud-hidden New Mexico desert to which I shortly would parachute.

Sitting in my gondola, which gently twisted with the balloon’s slow turnings, I had begun to sweat lightly, though the temperature read 36° below zero Fahrenheit. Sunlight burned in on me under the edge of an aluminized antiglare curtain and through the gondola’s open door.

In my earphones crackled the voice of Capt. Marvin Feldstein, one of our project’s two doctors, from ground control at Holloman Air Force Base:

“Three minutes till jump, Joe.”

I was ready to go, for more reasons than one. For about an hour—as the balloon rose from 50,000 to 102,800 feet above sea level—I had been exposed to an environment requiring the protection of a pressure suit and helmet, and the fear of their failure had always been present. If either should break, unconsciousness would come in 10 or 12 seconds, and death within two minutes.

In our altitude-chamber flights at the laboratory, I always [...]

“Lord, take care of me now,” I pray, then take the big step-off that begins my return from the edge of space, a 13-minute, 45-second plunge to an earth wrapped in clouds. The lanyard attached to my parachute pack is my last link with the gondola. It starts a timer on a small stabilization chute that will open 16 seconds later and prevent horizontal spinning. Without stabilization, man could not survive a jump from these high altitudes.

A National Geographic camera mounted above the gondola took this remarkable photograph at 102,800 feet.

1. On 17 November 1955, an anthropomorphic dummy, B-15 jacket and a stop watch were lost during a high altitude dummy drop from a balloon at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

2. The drop was performed to determine the effectiveness of a two stage personnel parachute in lowering a man-like dummy from 85,000 feet. The test was part of a continuing task “High Altitude Escape Studies”, 7218-71719. The point at which the dummy reached the ground was not known to the recovery crews at the time and an extensive search lasting through the first week of December 1955 failed to discover the lost items.

3. Lost are:

a. 1 ea., dummy, anthropomorphic, Sierra Engineering Co. model 120, stock no. 3500-NL-30010,

b. 1 ea., jacket, B-15, spec. 3220, size 36, stock no. 8415-269-0512,

c. 1 ea., stop watch, Fisher Scientific Co. P/N 14-646, stock no. 8TAA 98545.

4. Because of the loss of these items as a result of a test, it is requested that Lt. Henry P. Nielsen be relieved of the responsibility for these items.

Maybe these con men didn’t know a flying saucer
from a hole in the ground. But they used both
to sucker their victims. They were almost $100,000 ahead
when TRUE’s reporter broke the amazing case of the ...

Had flying saucers manned by crews three feet tall actually landed on Earth? That was the question. This is how TRUE and Mr. Cahn found the answer

For four months, across 4,500 miles and five western states, I tracked down visitors from the planet Venus.

It was a fantastic assignment. The story I was to dig up if I could was the weirdest that any reporter could dream of having handed to him. If I found the Venusians, I couldn’t interview them, even if I knew how to speak their language. For they were dead, those strange little beings, from unknown causes—half of their number crisped by heat to a dark brown color.

They’d come out of the sky in flying saucers. My job was to bring their story down to earth.

I got it—their full inside story. And though I didn’t find the dead Venusians, I uncovered some rather fantastic living characters....

On the crest of the wave of public excitement about flying saucers in the spring of 1950 came news from the West that topped any of the hundreds of saucer reports that had been recorded up to that time. Newspapers everywhere printed and reprinted the rumour that, in Denver, several businessmen had been shown pieces of metal, small gears, and a curious little radio set. These things, it was said, had been taken from a fallen flying saucer.