Date: 1947
Location: Roswell, New Mexico
The Conspirators: US Army Air Forces, other military branches
The Victims: Unclear
The story of Roswell is the most famous cover-up conspiracy in all of UFOlogy, and it’s based on actual events that UFO authors have strung together into a cohesive narrative of aliens and deception. Strange debris found in 1947 near Roswell Army Air Field was initially described as a “flying disc” in the Roswell Daily Record. Even though the story was corrected the next day to identify it as material from a weather balloon, conspiracy theorists thought there might be more to the story. Imaginative authors in the 1970s claimed that the debris was actually a crashed flying saucer containing alien bodies, and that story has become the stuff of conspiracy legend. Today, conspiracy theorists feel that no intelligent person would believe the ludicrous explanation of “weather balloon” to explain a crashed flying saucer with alien bodies, and so their general belief is that the Air Force’s explanation was a cover-up.
No flying saucer has ever been found crashed at Roswell. What was found in 1947 was debris from a weather balloon, and was well known to the New York University researchers who launched it, and to the Roswell Army Air Field officers who retrieved it.
The Roswell story began when rancher Mac Brazel found some strange debris on the Foster Ranch property 75 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. He reported it to the sheriff, who passed the report along to Major Jesse Marcel at nearby Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). Marcel released a statement to the Roswell Daily Record newspaper, which ran the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”
However, the next day, the Roswell Daily Record printed a correction, stating that it was merely debris from a weather balloon, and this has been the official position of the Air Force ever since (in September of 1947, the US Army Air Forces became the US Air Force).
Although later accounts have varied considerably, the debris that was initially found consisted of some 5 pounds of aluminum and foil. Army Air Force officials immediately identified it as part of a long, low-frequency antenna train suspended from a weather balloon as part of Project Mogul, intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests by their low-frequency radio burst. The photographs of the debris being examined by Marcel and other officers show material consistent with the Mogul balloon trains. Some have accepted this explanation, and others have not.
Regardless, the story was essentially dormant and largely unknown until 1978, thirty-one years later. The National Enquirer tabloid decided to reprint the original uncorrected article from the Roswell Daily Record, which identified the debris as a flying saucer. UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, assuming the first story to be the true account, interviewed everyone he could find who was still alive to try and piece together the story, but there wasn’t much new information. Two other UFOlogists published the book The Roswell Incident, which also didn’t add very much.
It wasn’t for another eleven years that the story finally took on a life of its own. The TV show Unsolved Mysteries devoted a 1989 episode mainly to Friedman and his work. One viewer was a retired mortician, Glenn Dennis, who had worked in Roswell in 1947. Dennis contacted Friedman to share his recollections. Together, the two reconstructed what they believed was an accurate time line of extraordinary events, based entirely upon Dennis’s forty-two-year-old memories. This reconstruction forms the entire basis of the modern Roswell mythology, including alien bodies, multiple crash sites, and an aggressive military cover-up. The 1991 book UFO Crash at Roswell details the complete reconstructed tale, based on Friedman’s interviews with Dennis. This book captures all the out-of-this-world theories you’ve ever heard about the Roswell incident.
It turns out that Glenn Dennis’s memory wasn’t very good, and Friedman was perhaps a little too eager and imaginative.
Under tremendous pressure from UFOlogists and the general public to reveal these alien discoveries, New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff made an official request through the General Accounting Office, and the Air Force detailed Col. Richard L. Weaver and 1st Lt. James McAndrew to dig up everything they could to explain the extraordinary claims in the book. Their findings were compiled into the book The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, which was made freely available to the general public. It is highly entertaining—you should definitely check it out.
Weaver and McAndrew were indeed able to concretely identify all of Dennis’s memories—but it turns out they did not occur in one single event in 1947, but were many unrelated events over a twelve-year period. Most of them happened in the 1950s.
For example, Dennis recalled going to the base one day on business and finding everyone very upset for some reason unknown to him. He remembered a tall, red-haired colonel, accompanied by a black sergeant, who angrily threw Dennis off the base and threatened him. This incident is usually pointed to as part of the cover-up effort. Whatever this incident was, however, could not have happened in 1947, because the Air Force did not begin racial integration until 1949—and the only red-haired colonel ever stationed there, Lee Ferrell, didn’t start until 1956.
Dennis also recalled an Air Force nurse friend being very upset over the autopsy of three small bodies that were mangled, burned black, and emitted fumes so noxious they had to be moved. The nurse soon disappeared and Dennis was not able to learn what happened to her. In fact, these bodies came from a 1956 crash of a KC-97G aircraft, which killed all eleven crew in an intense cabin fire. Little remained of the bodies. Three of the charred corpses were soaked in fuel and had to be moved from the military base because of the strong fumes, and they were autopsied instead at Dennis’s mortuary. The nurse friend who disappeared was Lt. Eileen Mae Fanton, who was taken to a hospital in Texas in 1955 and medically retired—but the dates prove that these incidents were unrelated. (Dennis had been unable to learn her fate simply because of privacy regulations.)
The most amusing of Dennis’s recollections concerned a humanoid creature with a huge head walking under its own power into the base hospital. Even this story was tracked down. Captain Dan Fulgham was struck on the head by a balloon gondola in 1959 and developed a magnificent hematoma, which made his forehead and face swell up. But he said he felt all right, and smoked a cigarette and hung around like that for a while before heading into the hospital for treatment.
Weaver and McAndrew’s report also contains extensive documentation of the debris that was collected. Army Air Forces officers recognized it immediately as a rawin target (short for radio-wind and pronounced RAY-win), a battery-powered telemetry instrument that is lifted by a weather balloon. Although the purpose of Project Mogul was classified, the actual materials its rawin was made of were commonplace, so they were not difficult for the officers to identify.
In short, ample evidence exists that the full scope of the Roswell incident was the recovery of some boring weather balloon equipment that was quickly identified and then forgotten. Zero evidence supports the modern reinterpretations of this event, such as multiple crash sites, alien spacecraft, alien bodies, and death threats and cover-ups by a military conspiracy. After more than seventy years, it’s unlikely that anything new will emerge.