In July, 1947, a rancher named Mac Brazel discovered some unusual debris strewn across his land in Roswell, New Mexico. The debris had created a shallow gouge several hundred feet long. Finding that some of the debris seemed to have strange physical properties, Brazel contacted military authorities who sent two intelligence officers to investigate. Brazel's ranch was soon cordoned off, and soldiers arrived to remove the debris. Then, on the morning of July 8, 1947, Col. William Blanchard, the commanding officer at Roswell Army Air Field, issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a "flying disk," as UFOs were then called, had been recovered. This press release was transmitted over the wire services in time to make headlines in more than thirty U.S. afternoon newspapers. Within hours, however, a second press release, this time from General Roger Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas, claimed that Col. Blanchard and the officers of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell had foolishly mistaken the radar reflector of a weather balloon for the wreckage of an UFO. Public interest faded, and Roswell became a part of UFO folklore. But those who knew Col. William Blanchard say that he was not the type to make such an unbelievably stupid mistake, and they may have been right. Blanchard did, after all, go on to become a four-star general and Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. Col. Jesse Marcel, one of the intelligence officers Blanchard had originally dispatched to the crash site, was also considered highly competent. In 1979, he went public in a videotaped interview, adamantly insisting that the debris he recovered was no weather balloon. When asked about the strange properties of the debris, he stated that "It wouldn't burn ... that stuff weighs nothing, it's so thin, it isn't any thicker than the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes. So I tried to bend the stuff. It wouldn't bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledge hammer. And there was still no dent in it." On one small section of debris, he even claims to have seen strange hieroglyphic symbols. But the claims of Glenn Dennis, a young mortician who worked for the Ballard Funeral Home at the time of the crash, make Marcel's statement seem completely mundane. Shortly after the wreckage was recovered, Dennis received several telephone calls from the mortuary officer at the air field inquiring about the availability of small, hermetically sealed caskets. The officer, who questioned Dennis about the best way to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for several days, seemed strangely concerned about altering the chemical composition of the tissue. The next day, Dennis spoke to a friend of his who worked as a nurse at the base. She seemed quite disturbed, and when he pressed her, she told him that she had assisted in the autopsy of several small, non-human bodies! Several of the original participants in the events at Roswell, including Dennis, say that they were threatened by the military and told not to tell anyone what they knew. Mac Brazel, the rancher who discovered the wreckage, was sequestered by the military for almost a week and never spoke about the incident again, even to his family. If the Roswell UFO crash story is true, then the government has had alien technology in their possession since 1947, and many ufologists have suggested that the U.S. military may have successfully reverse-engineered their own UFOs, thus explaining some of the more recent sightings near U.S. military facilities. The government has consistently refused to cooperate with researchers seeking Roswell or UFO-related documents through the Freedom of Information Act. Claims have been made that documents don't exist or can't be released for national security reasons, and the few documents that have been released are so blacked-out as to be totally useless. Even United States Congressman Steven Schiff of Albuquerque, New Mexico, found himself stonewalled by the Defense Department when requesting information regarding the 1947 Roswell incident on behalf of his constituents. Congressman Schiff called the Defense Department's lack of response "astounding" and suggested that, even after all these years, the government may be involved in a cover-up of the true nature of the events that unfolded at Roswell.