ilcoxafter driving into Roswell, that the aircraft had created a shallow gouge several hundred feet longand was scattered over a large area. Sheriff Wilcox then notified authorities at the Roswell ArmyAir Field and with the assistance of his deputies, proceeded to investigate the matter. Shortlyafter the 509th Bomb Group arrived from their station 35 miles away (Walker 38), they closed offthe area for a number of days and retrieved the wreckage. The debris was initially taken toRoswell Army Air Field and eventually flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio (Jeffrey). Beforethe military could intervene, the event had already been witnessed by more than one-hundredpeople. Local police, fire squad, and curious members of the Roswell community make up thesepeople. A lot of them were part of the initial recovery team and are now telling their stories thathave been bottled up for nearly a half of a century (Randal 11).According to one unnamed witness of the Roswell recovery team,The crash site was littered with pieces of the aircraft. Something about thesize of a fighter plane had crashed, the metal was unlike anything I'd ever seenbefore. I picked up a piece the size of a car fender with one hand, it couldn't haveweighed more than a quarter of a pound and no matter how hard I tried I couldn'teven get it to bend (Randal 11).This statement describes the type of material that was found at the site and has been described inthis manner by numerous witnesses. The next statement was made by Curry Holden, anarcheologist who was one of the first to arrive on the scene, "I saw a crashed airplane withoutwings and with a fat fuselage. There were three bodies. Two were outside the craft and the otherone was still inside, visible through a gash in the fuselage" (Walker 38). Other bits of informationhave also been documented from locals arriving initially at the scene. First, there is the localundertaker, Glenn Dennis, who was asked by the base if...
