Happy anniversary, Roswell, N.M. It was 65 years ago today that the Roswell Daily Record blasted an infamous headline claiming local military officials had captured a flying saucer on a nearby ranch. And now, a former CIA agent says it really happened.
"It was not a damn weather balloon -- it was what it was billed when people first reported it," said Chase Brandon, a 35-year CIA veteran. "It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet, it crashed and I don't doubt for a second that the use of the word 'remains' and 'cadavers' was exactly what people were talking about."
Brandon served as an undercover, covert operations officer in the agency's Clandestine Service for 25 years, where he was assigned missions in international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking and weapons smuggling. He spent his final 10 years of CIA service on the director's staff as the agency's first official liaison to the entertainment and publication industries. It was during this time, in the mid-1990s, that he walked into a special section of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., called the Historical Intelligence Collection.
"It was a vaulted area and not everybody could get in it," Brandon told The Huffington Post. "One day, I was looking around in there and reading some of the titles that were mostly hand-scribbled summations of what was in the boxes. And there was one box that really caught my eye. It had one word on it: Roswell.
"I took the box down, lifted the lid up, rummaged around inside it, put the box back on the shelf and said, 'My god, it really happened!'"
What exactly did the box contain that had such a powerful impact on Brandon?
"Some written material and some photographs, and that's all I will ever say to anybody about the contents of that box," he said. "But it absolutely, for me, was the single validating moment that everything I had believed, and knew that so many other people believed had happened, truly was what occurred,"
None of this comes as a surprise to Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear-physicist-turned-UFOlogist, who was the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident.
To read the rest of this story, visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/08/roswell-ufo-cia-agent-chase-brandon_n_1657077.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular