It is late one September night in nineteen ninety seven in the borderlands of Nevada and California. Out on the edges of the desert town of perump sits a simple double wide trailer surrounded by a panopoly of satellite dishes and radio receivers. Eighty miles to the east lie the bright lights of Las Vegas, and just a little further to the north, past desolate valleys and dusty mountain ridges, a place known variously to some as Dreamland or Paradise Branch,
but more commonly today as Area fifty one. Inside the trailer, late night radio DJ Art Bell takes a drag on a cigarette as the Charlie Daniel's band thunders through the Devil Went Down to Georgia, when suddenly he notices a call coming through on the Area fifty one line. Earlier in the show, Art had invited former employees of the secretive US Air Force base to call in on the dedicated line if they wish to share any information about
their time working there. It is shortly after one am, with millions listening across more than four hundred radio stations throughout the nation, when Art prematurely fades out the music and takes the call on my Area fifty one line. You're on there, Hello, Hello, Art, Yes, him. I don't have a whole lot of time A former employee, former employee. I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago, and and I've kind of been running across the country. Man, I don't know where to start them.
They'll triangulate on this position. Really released soon. You can't spend a lot of time on the phone, So give us something quick. Okay, um um, okay. What we're thinking of as as aliens are there, that they're they're extra dimensional beings that an earlier precursor of the UM space program made contact with. H. They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of uh, a lot of aspects of of of the military establishment
of particularly the Area fifty one. UH. The disasters that are coming, as the caller went on to explain, disasters were coming that would lead to the wiping out of major population centers led by these apparent aliens, and then silence, the signal completely cut out, not just for the call, but Art's entire show. Though it would be a stretch to say that Art was shaken by the incident. After all, he had been fielding similar callers throughout his career, this
one was undoubtedly different. Not once in his twenty years of broadcasting history had he ever lost his satellite signal. Something or someone, it seemed, had cut the caller off, and so this incident would become one of many events in the great ocean of UFO conspiracy theories linked to
that mysterious Air Force base. Today, for many, the words Area fifty one are synonymous with the UFOs and theories about just what it is the US government really knows about supposed visitors from other realms, And for one incident in particular that sits at the very top of ufology law. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mc lean smith.
Early in the morning of June fourteenth, nineteen forty seven, two riders are slowly picking their way through desert scrub as a herd of sheep amble about in the distance ahead of them. The riders a forty eight year old ranch manager William mac Brazell and his eight year old son Vernon. For the past decade or so, Brazell had worked as the foreman for the j b. Foster Sheep Ranch, a homestead located about one hundred and thirty miles southeast
of Albuquerque in Lincoln County, New Mexico. Though the family lived seventy miles away into LaRosa, Mac as he was known to his friends, was required to stay on site, boarding in what was little more than a shack, isolated on his own, with no electricity, water, or tell of phone. And so it was with great fondness that he looked forward to days like these, spending time with his son,
just enjoying the tranquility of the desert. Just forty years previously, Mac's uncle, Jesse Wayne Brazil, achieved some notoriety after getting caught up in the murder of Pat Garrett, the infamous lawman who gunned down Billy the Kid. Though Jesse confessed to the killing, many believed he'd merely been put up to it, since that kind of act just wasn't the Brazil way. As for Mac, he was very much the quiet sort, preferring to just keep his head down and
work hard for his family. That morning, Mac and Vernon were about seven miles from the ranch. As Mac ran his eyes over the sheep when he caught sight of something glinting in the distance. That's strange, he thought, as he tugged his hat down further over his eyes and squinted toward the sparkling light it seemed to be coming from the ground. Assuming it to be nothing but a mirrg or some other trick of the light, Mac kicked lightly on the horse and trotted out toward it. But incredibly,
as he drew nearer, the mirage didn't disappear. Instead, it seemed to fracture into a number of separate reflective pieces. This was no mirage, he realized, but something material that had fallen from above and shattered all across the desert floor. Though often out there in that big, wide expanse, it could feel to Mac like he might as well have been on Mars, how isolated he was from the outside world. On occasion, his world would be interrupted by the odd
weather balloon dropping in from out of the sky. But as Mac looked upon the strange mix of materials scattered across the floor in front of him, the only thing he did know was that this was nothing like any of those weather balloons he had seen before. Ten days later, after mac Brazel's discovery in New Mexico, something unusual was
about to unfold fifteen hundred miles away. Since nineteen forty one, fire control engineer Kenneth Arnold had run his own business, selling and installing firefighting equipment to rural areas across five western states. Part of Arnold's success owed much to his dual experience as a pilot, which gave him direct access to his clients in a way that most of his
competitors couldn't match. In nineteen forty four, Arnold gained his solo flying license and duly purchased his own plane, often flying forty to one hundred hours per month as he peddled his wear up and down the country. By the summer of nineteen forty seven, Arnold, who was by then thirty two, had over nine thousand hours of flying time under his belt. On the morning of June twenty fourth, Arnold had been helping to install equipment for the Central
Air Service in Chehalis, Washington. Having finished the job shortly before two pm, Arnold headed to the local airport, then boarded his call Air single engine airplane, and promptly set off toward his next appointment, pulling ever higher into the bright blue sky. Above, Arnold set course for the city of Yakama, located just one hundred and fifty miles due east on the other side of the Cascades mountain range.
With it being such a calm and clear day, Arnold decided to have a look for a C forty six transport plane but had apparently gone down in the Cascades somewhere on the southwest slope of Mountbrenier only a few days previously. A five thousand dollar reward had been offered to any one who could locate it. A short time later, flying at nine and a half thousand feet, Arnold made his approach to the mountain, then turned back on himself
to make a thorough sweep of its western bridge. Seeing nothing below save for a series of dark, rocky crags protruding out from under a dusting of fine white snow, Arnold continued westward, just past the town of Ashford before completing a three hundred and sixty degree turn and heading
on towards Yakima. Though he was disappointed not to have spotted the downed plain, Arnold eased back to an altitude of nine thousand, two hundred feet and resolved just to enjoy the rest of the flight from thereon, in admiring the wide blue sky above and the wild, untouched terrain below. Moments later, Arnold noticed a DC four aircraft flying about
fifteen miles behind him and five thousand feet above. He was just making a note of it when he was distracted by a series of sudden bright flashes reflecting off his plane. Startled by the flashes, Arnold hurriedly searched about for any sign of any other aircraft nearby, worried that he might have gotten too close to something without realizing.
Then he noticed something odd just beyond the summit of Mount Raynier, what appeared to be nine single aircraft flying at a similar altitude to his own plane, approaching rapidly in a V formation from north to south. Arnold watched with amazement as the apparent crafts, though keeping set on their course, continued to dip and swerve in and out of the high mountain peaks, moving as if there were
stones being skimmed across water. As they did so, bright flashes of sunlight reflected off them, just like he had been startled by moments before. Before long, the objects had moved in front of the mountain, from which Arnold was then able to observe the shape of them, silhouetted against the white canvas of snow behind, and that was when
things got really strange. At first, the objects seemed to be little more than thin black lines, until they would flip suddenly and momentarily revealed themselves to be round, saucer like discs that came to a point at the back. Worried his eyes were deceiving him, Arnold slid the window back to get a clear view unimpeded by the plexiglass. He also tried turning the plane slightly for a different angle,
but still the nine strange objects remained visible. Quickly grabbing a small tool from his pocket, Arnold used it to compare the size of the vehicles with the DC four in the distance, judging them to be about half the size of its wingspan. The width of the whole v formation be estimated to be about five miles long. After almost three minutes, Arnold watched the objects as they continued on their way south toward Mount Adams, before eventually disappearing
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Unexplained podcast today to get started. That's t e la DC dot com slash Unexplained podcast of amused and excitable Arnold touched down at Yakima Airport just after four p m, where he immediately regaled airport manager and good friend Al Baxter with what he had just witnessed. Baxter listened carefully to what his friend had to say, but there was just no way he thought that Arnold could possibly have
seen what he was claiming. Nonetheless, it was such an unusual story that by the time Arnold arrived in Pendleton, Oregon, to attend an air show later that day, news of his bizarre sighting had already preceded him. Speaking to a number of pilot friends at the show, some former Army pilots, Arnold was urged to recount his story again. Unlike Baxter, however,
many were less certain if Arnold had been mistaken. A number of them speculated as to whether the aircraft might actually have been top secret planes that were still being developed by the US military. During the incident, Arnold had tried to gauge how quickly the objects had been moving by counting the time it took for them to travel between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. It was only later that evening that he remembered to check the distance between
the two landmarks. When he discovered they were fifty miles apart, Arnold was shocked by his estimation. The objects would have had have been flying in the region of seventeen hundred miles per hour, three times faster than any known aircraft at the time. The day after his apparent sighting, Arnold was invited to the offices of the East Oregonian Paper
in Pendleton to share his version of events. The paper published the story the same day, following it up the next giving a description of the aircraft as nine bright saucerlike objects flying at twelve hundred miles per hour. Before long, the story was sweeping the nation, being picked up by countless other papers, including The Chicago Sun, whose now famous headline supersonic flying sources, cited by Idaho Pilot, is thought to be the first ever use of the term flying saucer.
Two days after the event, Arnold was interviewed on k w RC radio. They didn't fly in a conventional formation that's taught in our army. They seemed to kind of weave in and out right above the mountaintop, and I would say that they even went down into the canyons in several instances, or probably one hundred feet. But I could see them against the snow, of course, on Mountaineer, and against the snow on Mount Adams as they were flashing, and against the higher ridge that happens to lay in
between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. But when I observed the tail end of the last one passing Mount Adams, and I was at an angle near a mountraineer from it. But I looked at my watch and it showed one minute in forty two seconds. Well, I fell thought, well that's pretty fast, and I didn't stop to think what the distance was between the two mountains. Well, I landed at Yakima, Washington, and Al Baxter was there to greet me, and he told me, I guess I better changed my
brand for the next few days. Arnold was catapulted into the spotlight in one day two with interview requests and even recognized when out on the street. But incredibly, it wasn't only Arnold who had apparently seen the nine supposed saucerlike aircraft. On June twenty fourth, while Arnold and his plane were heading past Mount Rainier prospector Fred Johnson from Portland, Oregon, was in the Mount Adams district when he too spotted
something unusual heading toward him in the sky above. Having a telescope on him at the time, Johnson was able to get a closer view of them. In a letter written to the Army Air Force some months after the event, Johnson claimed the objects were roughly thirty feet wide at a bright top surface, and were round in shape but tapered to a sharp point at the back, just as
Arnold had claimed. Looking closer through his telescope, Johnson had also apparently seen some kind of device at the tail end, which he described as being like the big of a clock, shifting from side to side like a big magnet. That same day, a Washington State Forest Service worker on firewatch in the Diamond Gap lookout tower, just twenty miles south
of Yakima, saw something too. It was around three pm, while making a routine sweep at the forest with his binoculars, that the man noticed a series of bright flashes coming from the direction of Mount Vernier. The flashes appeared to move in a straight line right across his field of vision. Johnson's and the fire service workers account are thought to be two of at least sixteen similar sightings to Kenneth Arnold's given by witnesses considered credible by either the press
or Army Air Force investigators. The pilot of the DC four that had been flying close to Arnold at the time of the incident was also contacted. However, he was reported not to have seen anything unusual that day. Back at the JB. Foster Ranch in New Mexico, mac Brazel, unaware of the Kenneth Arnold's sightings, was beginning to wander more and more about the peculiar debris it'd spotted on the pastures the previous week. Something about it just didn't
add up. On July two, just over thirty miles to the east of the Foster Ranch, in the town of Roswell, something else was afoot. Roswell, with a population at the time of roughly fifteen thousand, is the seat of Chaves County, and its residents were no strangers to the site of objects flying rapidly through the sky. Back in nineteen thirty, early rocketing pioneer and inspiration to a young Jack Parsons, Robert Goddard, established a base in Roswell to conduct his
research in the nascent technology. Goddard had picked ross Well as the perfect place to experiment due to its sense of isolation and the strict secrecy it afforded him. Only ten years later, the United States Army Air Forces, having acquired land from a local rancher, constructed the Roswell Army
airfield on the southern outskirts of the town. That July night, at one hundred and five South Pennsylvania Avenue, thirty two year old Dorris and forty year old Dan Wilmot headed out to their porch as they usually did to relax after one of the hottest days of the year. The couple were well known to many in the city and highly respected, partly due to Dan being the owner of a prominent local hardware store, but also a serving member
of the city's Board of Education. It was just approaching ten PM when Dan noticed something unusual in the pitch black sky. Since both Dan and Dorris had spent their entire lives the area, having lived through both Godards experimenting and the construction of the local Air Force base, they had seen their fair share of aircraft, but this was
like nothing they had seen before. At first, it seemed nothing more unusual than a bright star in the sky, until Dan realized that not only was it moving, but it was getting closer, sipping through the sky at a high rate of speed. Doris soon caught sight of it too, as it approached from out of the south, heading in a northwesterly direction. In their excitement, the couple sprang to their feet and ran into the yard to get a
better look at it. Dan later estimated it to have been traveling somewhere close to five hundred miles per hour at roughly fifteen hundred feet, but it was the shape of it that really caught their attention, as the couple reported later, at about five feet in depth and somewhere between fifteen to twenty feet wide, it appeared to be
oval like, two inverted sources placed face to face. Aside from the faintest swishing sound, the object was completely silent, but most peculiarly, the whole body of it was glowing, not from any light they could see outside of it, but from the inside of the object. The couple claimed to have watched the object for roughly a minute before it disappeared beyond distant treetops on nearby six mile Hill.
Dan and Doris would spend the rest of the night utterly confused as to what on earth it was they had just seen, assuming that it would be the talk of the town the next day. Much to their surprise, however, not one person mentioned it. Before long, the couple began to wonder if they had seen anything unusual at all. Back out on the j Be Foster ranch, Mac Brazell and his son had been joined by his wife and
daughter to celebrate Independence Day. Having finally decided to do something about the debris out in the field, Brazel convinced his family to join him out there in trying to pick it all up. After riding for an hour and a half, the family came upon the strewn pieces just as Mac had left them on June fourteenth. Together, they jumped down and gathered up as much of it as they could, bundling the rest of it up and hiding
it under a bush. The following day, Mack drove up to Corona, a small township forty miles to the north, to visit his brother in law, Hollis. Later, when Mack told Hollis about the strange materials he had found out in the desert, his brother in law's eyes widened. It was then that Mac heard for the first time about the bizarre sightings of unidentified flying objects that seemed to
be plaguing the nation. And so it was that, after wrestling with what best to do, on Monday morning, je Mac loaded up his truck with some of the pieces of what he'd found and set off toward Roswell. A short time later, after first dropping his family off into LaRosa,
Mac pulled up outside the Chaves County Sheriff's office. Taking the strange materials from the back of his truck, he walked through the big double doors and straight into one of the most beguiling and enduring mysteries of modern times. You've been listening to Unexplained, Season four, episode eleven, New Dawn Fades, Part one of two. The second and final
part will be released next Friday five. If you enjoy this, think to Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now go to Unexplained podcast dot com, forward Slash support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained. Now, it's time to take care of yourself, to make time for you. Teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc
Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app, or visit teledoc dot com Forward slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started. That's t e ladoc dot com slash Unexplained Podcast