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On June 24, 1947, a 32-year-old businessman and pilot, Kenneth Arnold, was flying his single-engine plane at an altitude of approximately 5,000 feet near the Cascade Mountain Range in Washington State when he saw a blue-white flash in the sky and a chain of nine peculiar aircraft flying at incredible speed. He estimated the speed of the craft to be approximately 1,600 miles per hour, nearly three times faster than any plane in existence at that time. When he landed in Pendleton, Oregon, he was interviewed by a group of reporters about what he had seen. One reporter, Bill Bequette, recorded Arnold's words, "they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water." The next day the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper ran the headline, "Mystery Disks Hurdling Across the Sky" The New York Times picked up the story and suggested that Arnold had seen nothing more than atoms escaping from an overwrought bomb. Others suggested that he had seen experimental aircraft from the U.S. Government. Amold's treatment by the media was less than favorable. He was ridiculed for years and eventually he stated that he wouldn't report a "flying ten story building." Sometime during the first week of July 1947, a local New Mexico rancher, Mac Brazel, while riding out in the morning to check his sheep after a night of intense thunderstorms, discovered a considerable amount of unusual debris.” Something had created a shallow gouge several hundred feet long, and debris was scattered over a large area. Some of the debris seemed to have strange physical properties. After taking a few pieces to show his neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel drove into Roswell and contacted the sheriff, George Wilcox. Sheriff Wilcox notified authorities at Roswell Army Air Field and withthe assistance of his deputies, proceeded to investigate the mat-ter. Shortly after becoming involved, however, the military sealed off the area for a number of days and retrieved all the wreckage. Whatever was found was initially taken to Roswell Army Air Field and eventually flown by B-29 and C-54 aircraft to Wright Field (now Wright Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton, Ohio. Roswell Army Air Field was the home of the elite 509th Bomb Group (at the time the only atomic bomb group in the world). On the morning of July 8, 1947, Colonel William Blanchard, Commander of the 509th Bomb Group, issued an official press release stating that the wreckage of a "crashed disk" had been recovered. The press release was transmitted over the wire services in time to make headlines in over 30 U.S. afternoon Within hours, a second press release was issued from the office of General Roger Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas, 400 miles from the crash site. This second press release rescinded the first one and, in effect, claimed that Colonel Blanchard and the officers of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell had made an unbelievably foolish mistake and somehow incorrectly identified "a weather balloon and its radar reflector" as the wreckage of a "crashed disk." With what appears to be a hastily contrived cover story, an extensive cover-up seems to have begun. These events at Roswell, and whatever followed, have been veiled in government secrecy ever since. 35 THE FIRST WAVE THE ROSWELL INCIDENT newspapers that same day. The man who issued the first press release, Colonel William Blanchard, would not seem