Foster Ranch

The Foster Ranch is the J. B. Foster sheep ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, about 75 miles north-northwest of Roswell near Corona, where foreman Mac Brazel came upon a field of strewn wreckage in the summer of 1947 — the debris field of the Roswell incident, and the place from which Jesse Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt of the 509th Bomb Group gathered the fragments that Roswell Army Air Field first announced as a "flying disc". Marcel described a scatter of foil-like, I-beam and parchment-like material over roughly three quarters of a mile of pasture, and Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner, Tom Carey, Schmitt and Randle hold that it came from a craft that broke apart in the air during the night of 2 July, with two of its occupants found at the Dee Proctor body site, two and a half miles east on the same ranch. The Air Force's 1994 Roswell Report holds instead that the field was a Project Mogul balloon train, "Flight 4", launched from Alamogordo on 4 June 1947 — which requires that Marcel and Cavitt took the remains of a classified program for something else; Karl Pflock, who investigated the case for eight years, likewise concluded that no craft crashed there.

Location and ownership

The Foster Ranch lies on the high desert plateau of Lincoln County — semi-arid, sparsely vegetated, crossed by arroyos and low basalt outcrops. Its owner was J. B. Foster; Brazel ran it as foreman. The debris field lay 7 to 8 miles from the ranch house by Brazel's own 1947 newspaper statement, and Schmitt puts it about 10 miles out, on Bureau of Land Management land rather than Foster's deeded property, so that any artifact found there could be claimed by the federal government.

The 1947 debris field

Two datings of the find are on record. In his statement to the Roswell Daily Record on 10 July 1947, Brazel said he and his eight-year-old son Vernon came upon "a large area of bright wreckage" on 14 June, paid it little mind, and returned on 4 July with his wife and children to gather it. Friedman and Berliner place the fall instead on the stormy night of Wednesday 2 July and the discovery the next morning, when Brazel and his seven-year-old neighbour Dee Proctor rode out to check fences and windmills. Brazel took samples to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox on Sunday 6 July; Marcel and Cavitt reached the ranch that night and were led to the field in the morning. The Air Force report notes that the 14 June date falls ten days after the launch of Mogul Flight 4, which it holds "came to rest some miles northwest of Roswell" and was shredded by surface winds before Brazel found it.

What lay on the ground is the center of the dispute. Marcel recalled foil-like material, I-beam members with markings, and parchment-like paper, all light and strong, over an area of about three quarters of a mile by several hundred feet. Carey and Schmitt describe the many small pieces of very thin, light, strong foil, and the small balsa-like I-beams with symbols along them, as outside 1947 materials science; they report that skeptics and the Air Force instead call the witnesses mistaken about the materials' strength and the symbols nothing more than flowery Scotch tape on radar-kite sticks. Cavitt, the only living eyewitness to the field when the Air Force interviewed him, described a small area of square sticks a quarter to a half inch across and light reflecting material that he recognised as consistent with a weather balloon; the Air Force's identification with Flight 4 rests on the "black box" Cavitt described and on Mogul scientist Charles Moore's identification of a service flight carrying a sonobuoy.

The monsoon, the scatter and the three sites

Carey and Schmitt place the event in the monsoon season, when Lincoln County has dry lightning storms, and hold that the craft was struck by lightning or exploded internally, blowing its outer shell apart over the Foster Ranch while an inner cabin or escape capsule flew on 30 to 35 miles. On that reconstruction there are three sites: the debris field; the Dee Proctor body site, where two occupants landed on a bluff; and the final impact site nearer Roswell, where the cabin came to rest with two dead and one surviving occupant. The Foster Ranch material and the remains are said to have gone under armed guard to Roswell Army Air Field, then to Eighth Air Force headquarters at Fort Worth and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Friedman and Berliner note that the earlier suggestion that the craft Barney Barnett reported west of Socorro was the main body of the Foster Ranch craft is not supported by the secondhand information on Barnett, which "all points away from Corona".

The Spanish Well

Ranch hands used an abandoned water well, the "Spanish Well", to dispose of recovered weather balloons from the 509th's wind-measuring launches. Carey believes soldiers cleaning the field threw smaller pieces of wreckage down the same shaft, which has since been cemented over.

Military cleanup and later visits

Lawrence R. Spencer's Alien Interview places at least several dozen soldiers on the field under strict secrecy. Bill Brazel told Friedman and Berliner of a remark in a recreation hall that led the military to confiscate a cigar box of small pieces of wreckage; according to Schmitt, the Brazel family said cattle would not graze the pasture for five years. Schmitt reports that in October 1987 ranch hand James Parker ran down a trespassing Air Force jeep whose two occupants asked whether this was where the "flying saucer" crashed in 1947.

Digs and surveys

Carey and Schmitt first surveyed and gridded the debris field in September 1989 under the sponsorship of the Center for UFO Studies. In 2002, with the University of New Mexico's Office of Contract Archaeology and a Syfy Channel commitment, they cut seven backhoe trenches across the line where Bill Brazel and other witnesses placed a 1947 furrow and report a V-shaped stratigraphic anomaly just below the surface, which Schmitt reads as evidence that something impacted the ground. Schmitt says soil testing by the University of New Mexico found potassium lower in the debris field than in surrounding ground, and that about 100 square feet of the western ridge was sprayed with nails that his team spent roughly two years clearing, which he reads as deliberate contamination by trespassers. Five digs had been conducted by the time of Schmitt's 2017 book.

Significance

Brazel's decision to drive to Roswell and report what he found is the first link of the evidentiary chain: without it there would have been no sheriff's call, no Roswell Army Air Field press release and no public record.

References

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