On This Day: Flying Disks and Painted Flowers
by Noel Agnew
Rubber strips, tinfoil, paper and sticks. On this day in 1947 a reported discovery of these materials in a field sparked rumors that America was being visited by extraterrestrials. It was Wiliam Brazel, a New Mexico farmer, who claimed that he found, “a large area of bright wreckage made up on rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks” on his land. Recent reports of UFO sightings in Roswell NM had Brazel convinced what he found was debris from an alien craft. On July 7th, reported the Roswell Daily Chronicle, Brazel went to town to see the sheriff and “whispered kinda confidential like” that he might have found a flying disk.
As you might expect the army, when dispatched to the scene, was unable to reconstruct a functioning craft from the wreckage. They did say, however, that they could use it to build a kite or weather balloon. I wonder where they put the “considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it”. Many believe that something did fall out of the sky in July 1947 and that Roswell is one of the US government’s biggest cover-ups, but it seems unlikely that Mr. Brazel’s paper and tape shed any light on the theories.
