On July 8, 1947, the residents of Roswell, New Mexico, woke up to the news of a UFO, or unidentified flying object. “RAAF Capture Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region” announced the headline in the Roswell Daily Record.
Certainly something had fallen from the skies.
A rancher called William “Mac” Brazel had found debris on his land and reported it to the police. They handed the problem over to the nearby Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). Intelligence officers sent to Brazel’s homestead collected the wreckage and took it back to Roswell with them, issuing a statement to say that a flying disc had been found. The find was then sent on to the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth in Texas. The next day the Eighth Air Force commander offered further clarification. The bits and pieces found by Brazel, he said, were the remains of a weather balloon. He even invited reporters to come along and see the material for themselves. That should have been that. It was, until the end of the 1970s when conspiracy theorists decided to stir things up. In 1980 Charles Berlitz, author of The Bermuda Triangle, wrote a book called The Roswell Incident. It had a similar impact to his earlier tome. Suddenly, people wanted to believe something otherworldly had taken place at Roswell. And once that happened, there seemed to be no shortage of people who started to recall events in 1947 slightly differently. Rubber, tin foil, and paper became material that could only have been extraterrestrial in origin. Then a mortician who’d been working at the Roswell funeral home in 1947 watched a TV program about Roswell and decided to phone a hotline to say he’d witnessed an alien autopsy. I don’t suppose there was anyone more surprised than he was when, in 1995, film of an alien autopsy emerged.
Even this, though, was not the most bizarre attempt to explain what happened at Roswell. That has to be a story that manages to combine Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and secret Soviet overflights of America inspired by the Orson Welles radio play of War of the Worlds and designed to spread panic throughout a credulous population. The only believable thing about it was that it didn’t involve aliens. On that front, at least, it has something in common with the USAF’s account.
In 1995 the Air Force, in an effort to put a stop to all the nonsense, published a detailed report on the Roswell Incident. Containing photographs and documents, many of which had been declassified for the first time, it ran to 1,000 pages and revealed that the Eighth Air Force statement claiming the Roswell “flying saucer” was a weather balloon had not been true. But in 1947 the truth had had to remain top secret.
At that time the greatest priority for the US military was establishing whether or not the USSR had the atom bomb. But in an era before spy satellites or reconnaissance jets it was a fiercely difficult thing to be sure of. A classified program called Project Mogul was initiated in the hope that 600-foot-tall high-flying balloons carrying sensitive acoustic sensors might detect the distant rumble of a nuclear explosion or missile launch.
The USAF report was clear: the debris recovered from “Mac” Brazel’s ranch was not from outer space but from barely 100 miles to the southwest; the fourth of a series of Project Mogul balloons launched from what is now Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.
Just as The X-Files would have us believe, the truth is out there . . .
Just to be clear, this picture doesn’t provide any kind of evidence for the existence of flying saucers.