1947 Shortly after the Second World War, many Americans began to see things in the sky that accelerated to greater speeds, and changed direction more suddenly, than any known aircraft could manage. By day these were silver and disc-shaped; by night they appeared as lights, often flying in formation. The majority of sightings were in the southwest of the country, but the unidentified flying objects, or UFOs for short, were seen almost everywhere, including Washington DC, where a group of lights was photographed and tracked on radar, supposedly accelerating from 100 to 7,200 miles per hour.
Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it’s now clear that at least some of these mystery sightings came from the US military testing advanced airframes and systems, some based on designs developed in Germany during the war. But at the time, the government’s reluctance to come clean bred a whole new branch of the entertainment industry feeding, and feeding on, paranoid fantasies that the authorities were covering up news of invasions from outer space.
Cack-handed military public relations tended to ratchet up the tension. Take Brazel’s discovery, for example. At first intelligence officers from the Air Force base at Roswell allowed that they might be the wreck of a UFO, then quickly changed their minds to identify the remains of a weather balloon with a hexagonal radar reflector attached – which (judging by the materials) it almost certainly was.
Changing the story was a mistake. Whatever could ‘they’ be hiding? Before long the story got around that a complete flying saucer had been retrieved from the desert site, and even that bodies of aliens had been dug out of the wreckage, one of which was taken away for an autopsy. The government responded that they had conducted a number of high-altitude experiments using dummies to test the effect of falls and decompression. The darkest version of this theory, as set out in Nick Redfern’s Body Snatchers in the Desert, is that the ‘dummies’ had been Japanese prisoners of war being used to assess the effects of radiation and decompression.1
The Roswell story was kept alive by a more-or-less unbroken stream of books, as well as documentary reports and other coverage on cable channels like Sci-Fi and Discovery. Fictional spin-offs included TV series like Dark Skies (1996–97) and Roswell (1999–2003), in which alien survivors of the crash take human form and live as teenagers in Roswell, and the evergreen The X-Files, which ran for just under a decade from 1993 to 2002.
1 Nick Redfern, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, New York: Paraview, 2005.