The Legend:
On July 4, 1947, Rancher Bill "Mac" Brazel found a large batch of debris strewn across a field at the J.B. Foster Ranch. The debris was like nothing he had ever seen before: strange bits and pieces that among other things included odd pieces of foil that couldn't be cut, burned, or wrinkled, and thin "I"-beams of incredible strength that were covered by strange symbols.
Brazel gathered a boxful of the strange wreckage and took it to his nearest neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, to get their opinion of it. All of them knew it wasn't a weather balloon, then a common source of random litter in the fields. Baffled, they could only assume it was part of an experimental project by the local military, and the Proctors advised Brazel to show it to the county sheriff.
On July 7, Brazel drove the box into Roswell and showed its contents to county sheriff George Wilcox, who was just as baffled by it as were Brazel and the Proctors. Wilcox phoned the Roswell Army Air Base, and, after a brief talk with Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcel, it was agreed that a couple of officers would visit the site to inspect the wreckage. That night, Officer Marcel and Counter-Intelligence Corps Officer Sheridan Cavitt drove out and spent the night at Brazel's bunk house and, in the morning, all three headed back to the site of the debris.
The wreckage covered a section of the field three-quarters of a mile long by two to three-hundred feet wide; far too much to be explained away easily. Marcel, excited by the strange nature of the debris, mentioned the possibility that it was a crashed UFO, an item that a reward was being offered for; the two officers filled a box of their own with the odd pieces, and left, promising Brazel the reward if it was indeed a "flying saucer."
The following day, an army force was sent and combed the field exhaustively, picking up every little bit of the wreckage... and when, on July 8th, the newspapers announced that the mysterious debris was in fact the remnants of a UFO, Brazel knew that he had just become famous by default. Being old friends with the owner of KFGL radio in Roswell, Brazel drove into town to be interviewed about his find and, hopefully, to pick up the reward money that had been mentioned; but he was never to be rewarded. Instead, he was taken into custody by military police as he left the radio station, and, inside the station, his exclusive interview was confiscated and the station was threatened with shutdown if they uttered a single word about it.
No one knows what happened to Brazil over the next few hours, but when he was delivered back to the KFGL by the military police he had completely changed his story. He told his friend that the "truth" was that all he had found was a weather balloon... nothing more.
After that denouncement, Brazel only said one more thing about the occurrence: "If I find anything else besides a bomb, they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it!" True to his word, he never spoke about the odd events again.
Variations
The above represents the cleanest welding of at least four varient accounts of "Mac" Brazel's involvement in the so-called Roswell Incident; to try to sort out the mess, I'll be summarizing each version of the story from each of the separate original sources. After I've managed that, then I'll examine the versions to see what changes and what is provable... sorry people, but this is going to take time.
The orignal sources of the account, in no particular order as of yet, appear to be:
Sources:
