Roswell Central: War Room: Mack Brazel

The Brazels' final resting place in Tularosa, New Mexico

available at the time. The interview was meant to be aired as a scoop, but was never played on the air. Unfortunately, the recording has been lost to us because it was confiscated by the Army on the afternoon of July 8 and never returned during their operation to kill the original disk-retrieval story and remove all contrary evidence.
The third and last interview was conducted by an El Paso radio station. We know only that it took place, and can only guess that Brazel repeated the story he gave the Roswell Daily Record

the weather-balloon explanation.
What follows is an attempt to piece together the historical Mack Brazel and his role in the Roswell events. To this end, we have relied on the recollections of family, friends, and the few others who had contact with him during the critical days of July 1947. You may have read some of this information before, but in this article we refine our picture of Brazel's role and present new findings about what he may have discovered.
In preparing this overview, we have relied on the original interviews made and published by William Moore, Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt when he was Randle's research partner, as well as our own recent field work.

W. WARE "MACK" BRAZEL
     We'll begin with his nickname. Most accounts refer to him as "Mac," partly because researchers heard the name and applied the most logical phonetic spelling. And his family tells us he was so named after former President William McKinley. However, family documents show that the spelling "Mack" was always used. Indeed, the inscription on his tombstone reads W. Ware Mack Brazel.
     In addition to the first-person interview with Brazel at the Roswell Daily Record, we know of three other interviews. The first was done on the spur of the moment by Roswell radio station KGFL announcer Frank Joyce on Sunday, July 6. Joyce made it a practice to call Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox for new leads.
     It happened that Brazel was in Wilcox's office at the time, relating his discovery of strange debris. Wilcox put Brazel on the telephone, and Joyce proceeded to interview him.
     The second instance was an interview conducted at the home of Walt Whitmore, the owner of KGFL. This was probably done late on Monday, July 7. The interview was recorded on a wire recorder, the technology

Based on our investigations and reasonable deductions, it seems almost certain that the Joyce and Whitmore interviews presented Brazel's story in honest, undistorted fashion. At some point on July 7-8, Brazel was placed in military custody at the base. His statements during this period are therefore suspect and may be the result of coercion. Family members believe that Brazel was frightened or bought off by the military, and that his July 8 Roswell Daily Record interview, in particular, was at least in the main outlines, dictated to him by the Army. One of the goals of our reinvestgation of Brazel has been to determine why he, alone among Roswell witnesses, was detained by the military.

THE HARRASSED RANCHER
Mack Brazel's name first surfaced in public in the July 9 Roswell Daily Record article. Although the paper did not print a photo of Brazel, many other papers throughout the country did. Apparently his picture was the first Wirephoto electronically transmitted fro Roswell. When this picture appeared in the Albuquerque Journal, it alerted his son Bill, Jr. to the fact that his father was the center of a large controversy and that he might need some help.
The same page of the Journal carried the debunking story from Ramey's Fort Worth office, headlined "Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer." Brazel is also mentioned by name in this article.

FAMILY LORE
Mack Brazel died in 1963 at the age of 64, and his wife Maggie died in 1975 at the age of 73. Thus both were dead well before any rersearcher could interview them about the events of 1947.
But there remain a number of family members who can fill us in on Mack's character and personality. They tell us he was a throwback to the "old-time cowboys." Frank