Brazel, was quoted by the Associated Press as being "sorry he told about it" and describing what he found as tinfoil and other debris. There are three enormous problems with the credibility of the rancher's statements. The first is that he was held incommunicado for days before he made them. The second is that members of his family have asserted that he made them under duress, and his being held incommunicado, which is a matter of record, would certainly support that assertion. The third problem is more telling because it does not rely on the rancher's verisimilitude at all. It is that none of the officers originally involved ever thought that they were dealing with the remains of known objects or they never would have allowed their press release to be issued in the first place.

On looking back through old copies of the Skeptical Inquirer, I discovered an article in the April 1986 issue entitled "Crash of the Crashed Saucer Claim." As it refers to the same incident I have been discussing, I researched it in some detail. Its primary assertion, I am sorry to say, was not supportable at all. The article claimed that the whole busyness began with a story in a book by Frank Scully entitled Behind the Flying Saucers (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1950). I obtained a copy of this book and discovered that there is no relationship whatsoever between its rather dubious tales and the affair in Roswell in 1947. And I also obtained a photostat of the San Francisco Chronicle article from which I have quoted. The photostat is hated July 9, 1947, a year before the "events" covered in t e book. To connect the book and the earlier incident in any way strikes me as an example of poor scholarship and seems not to be supportable. In addition, the Skeptical Inquirer article makes much of rancher Brazel's statements, as quoted by the Associated Press, but does not acknowledge in any way that he made them after a period of being held against his will, and in the presence of the An-Force officers who had been interrogating him. If all he found was a crashed weather balloon, why did they interrogate him? A more logical course would have been to interrogate and severely discipline the officers responsible for the "false" press release. There was no reason to hold an innocent citizen who had made an innocent mistake. Strangely, based on the service information I was able to obtain from the Air Force, I found no evidence of disciplinary action taken against any of the officers involved in the press release.