The Legend:
On the night of July 4, 1947, something crashed into the rocky plains outside of the small town of Roswell, New Mexico.
For several days prior to the crash, UFOs had been sighted off and on by various local residents; then, on the evening of July 4, a rancher discovered some sort of flying ship which had crashed onto his property. But the ship wasn't the real find: alongside it were the bodies of its four passengers, all but one dead -- and all very obviously alien to this earth. All four were short and hairless, with grey skin and large heads, and huge black eyes. The rancher rushed to his house and immediately called the local military base, who then took control of the situation.
At first, the local military seemed proud to annouce they had a genuine "flying saucer," and the news spread fast. Soldiers showed pieces of the ship to their families and neighbors, the find was announced to newspapers, and everyone was excited. Then the cover-up began.
Newspapers were told that the wreckage was a weather balloon, not a ship as earlier stated. A Roswell radio station was threatened with shutdown if they broadcast the story. Local people were threatened with imprisonment or death if they ever told about what they had seen and heard of the ship, the wreckage, and the bodies. And, for forty years, the cover-up was successful.
After all that time, many of the threatened residents lost their fear of reprisal and began to talk. The story slowly developed weight as more and more witnesses came forward, but it needed physical proof to back it up before the government would treat the incident seriously.
In 1995, physical proof finally appeared. An unnamed army officer released a movie he had filmed and hidden since 1947... a movie of an autopsy being performed on one of the aliens from the crash. With this new evidence, attention has been refocused on the crash, and it seems now that the full story of what happened to the ship and its passengers after they were confiscated by the army in Roswell will soon be known.

Variations, variations, variations...
The main evidence for the Roswell Incident is eyewitness tesimony, which creates a major problem since few of these witnesses agree on the exact who, what, where, and when's of the crash. This could be due either to the fact that these witnesses waited forty years to talk and so are hazy on details due to time, or possibly because "witnesses" are lying or changing their stories to please the news media and get attention. Worse still, it could be a combination of these two problems.
the matter has also become more confused due to the attempts of several researchers to reach a more accurate version of the story by combining several different versions, picking and choosing the details that are felt by them to be most correct based on differing criteria of the moment. All in all, the amount of variation is nightmarish.
Within this mass, there are several major variations which can each be traced to just one or two sources. Before an overall study of the account can begin, I have to examine each of these core sources separately in their own articles; keeping that in mind, each will have their legend (the story as it is presently said to have ocurred) summarized first, and then they will all be filled out slowly as I unzip the huge number of sources for the stories. The main accounts of the events in New Mexico are:

• W.W. "Mac" Brazel
  Found wreckage commonly believed to have fallen from a damaged alien spacecraft.

• Glenn Dennis
  Encountered unsual behavior on the part of the local military, and claims to have talked to a witness that saw dead alien bodies.

• Jesse Marcel, Sr.
  Claimed to have handled alien wreckage from Brazil's debris site.

• Frankie Rowe
  Claims to have handled wreckage from an alien spacecraft, and that her father saw dead alien bodies.

• Loretta Proctor
  Claims that she and her husband handled wreckage from an alien spacecraft that was shown to them by Mac Brazel.

• Bill Brazel
  Son of Mac Brazel; claims to have kept pieces of wreckage from an alien spacecraft until military personel took them.

• Jesse Marcel, Jr.
  Son of Jesse Marcel, Sr.; claims to have handled wreckage from an alien spacecraft and that his father was victim of a government cover-up.

• The Military Explaination
  Claims that the story of the incident stems from experimental weather balloons and crash-test dummies dropped from high altitude.

• The Alien Autopsy Film
  A film that is claimed to show the autopsy of an alien from about the time of the Roswell Incident.

Sources:

• A History of UFO Crashes, Kevin Randle, 1995 Avon Books.
• The Roswell Incident, Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore, 1980 G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1988 Berkley Publishing Group.
• UFO Crash at Roswell, Kevin Randle & Donald Schmitt, 1991 Avon Books.