Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:46, 2 October 2005

You must add a |reason= parameter to this Cleanup template – replace it with {{Cleanup|September 2005|reason=<Fill reason here>}}, or remove the Cleanup template.

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Roswell UFO incident is a purported crash of an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Roswell, New Mexico, USA. Many books and a number of TV movies have been made concerning the incident, some fictionalized and some more reality-based.

Whether the events that took place in Roswell include the crash of an extraterrestrial craft is a matter of considerable dispute.

Overview: the story as reported in 1947 and the controversy

On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine saucer- or disk-like objects flying at high speed near Mt. Rainier in Washington state. In the days thereafter, hundreds of reports from all over the country of the new "flying saucers" or "flying disks" appeared in the newspapers.

During the first week of July 1947, William "Mack" Brazel, a rancher from New Mexico, discovered a large amount of unusual debris scattered widely over his ranch near Corona, New Mexico, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell. Some of Brazel's neighbors informed him of the new flying disk phenomenon and suggested he go to Roswell to report his find. Brazel informed the local sheriff in Roswell, George Wilcox, that maybe he had found a "flying disk." Wilcox contacted the local Army Air Force base in Roswell. The base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, sent his head intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, and the head of the Roswell Army Counterintelligence Corp, Sheridan Cavitt, to investigate. Marcel and Cavitt returned to the ranch with Brazel, retrieved some of the debris, and transported it to Roswell Army Air Field in Roswell, New Mexico the evening of July 7. At least some of the debris was later flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Army Air Force's aeronautical research labs.

The next afternoon, July 8, Col. Blanchard issued an official Army Air Force press release from Roswell reporting that a "flying disk" had been found "sometime last week" by a local rancher, had been recovered by the intelligence office at the base, and was being flown to "higher headquarters." United Press also reported that residents near the ranch saw "a strange blue light several days ago about 3 a.m." The press release caused a media feeding frenzy, jamming phone lines into New Mexico and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. as reporters clamored for more details.

Within an hour the head of the Eighth Army Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas, Brigadier General Roger Ramey began changing the story, saying now that the crash object was in fact a weather balloon and its attached radar target, "hexagonal in shape". He would later describe it on the radio as "remnants of a tin foil-covered box kite and a rubber balloon." He brought in a weather officer to make the identification official and had pictures taken of the weather balloon and radar target displayed in his office, which he said was the recovered Roswell debris.

Gen. Ramey also had Major Marcel make a statement for the press. Associated Press quoted Marcel saying that Brazel "bundled the tinfoil and broken wooden beams of the kite and the torn synthetic rubber remains on the balloon together and rolled it under some brush."

However, Marcel and Ramey's then chief of staff, Brigadeer General Thomas Dubose (ret.), would later claim that the weather balloon was a cover story to get the press off their backs. Gen. Dubose, in fact, stated he personally received the order from Washington to start the coverup. Both said they were acting under Ramey's orders when they made statements to the press about the object being a weather device. Supporting this to some extent was another quote attributed to Marcel's from 1947 saying that the balloon debris was "scattered over a square mile," inconsistent with the small amount of balloon material that was publicly displayed. Another quote inconsistent with what was shown oddly came from Ramey himself, who was quoted by the Washington Post and elsewhere saying that the object would have been "about 25 feet in diameter" if reconstructed.

Shortly after the new press release of the weather balloon, about three hours after the first press release from Roswell base, Brazel showed up in Roswell at the local newspaper for an interview. Two reporters at the scene later related he was accompanied by military officers. The base provost marshall likewise later confirmed that they were holding Brazel at the base. According to the story published the next day, Brazel said he found five pounds of “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks. ... Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in its construction.” But at the end of his interview, Brazel recanted his earlier balloon description stating that, "...he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. 'I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon, but if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.'" He also said at the start of his interview that he "whispered" to Sheriff Wilcox that "he might have found a flying disk." Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947, page 1)

Sheriff Wilcox was also quoted in other stories and contradicted portions of Brazel's story. According to United Press, instead of Brazel's flying disk Wilcox instead claimed that Brazel came in saying that he thought he had found a "weather meter." Wilcox did say that Brazel also said the object "more or less seemed like tinfoil" and was about 3 feet across. However, when Associated Press asked Wilcox for more details about the object's description, they reported he declined to elaborate saying "I'm working with those fellows at the base." Various Wilcox family members would later claim that he was threatened by the military.

A number of UFO researchers charge that the change in the military's story from flying saucer to weather balloon was disinformation and that the U.S. government was withholding or suppressing information. Whether Ramey showed the actual debris and whether Brazel and Marcel's newspaper statements accurately describe what was actually discovered remain highly contentious to this day in debates between advocates and skeptics. Also hotly debated is whether there really was a coverup and whether some witnesses like Brazel and Wilcox were coerced.

Beyond dispute is that a number of military and civilian witnesses, including Marcel, Dubose, and Brazel's son, gave very different accounts of the events and debris many years later, reviving interest in the case. Instead of flimsy weather balloon material, the debris allegedly possessed highly anomalous physical properties. Some material resembled dull aluminum or lead foil yet, when crumpled, straightened back up leaving no creases or wrinkles. Other debris bore some resemblance to balsa wood in lightness and color. But like the foil material, witnesses claimed that it could not be burned, cut, or otherwise damaged. All debris was said to be extremely light in weight. Some, including metallic-looking "I-beams," was said to be covered with strange writing or "hieroglyphics."

Even more controversial than the debris descriptions were stories to emerge later of an intact "disk" and even alien bodies being recovered, primarily second-hand accounts from friends and family members of those involved, such as the Wilcox family. Not surprisingly, no mention of bodies was made in newspaper accounts from 1947. There is a current contention, however, that a telegram held by Gen. Ramey while being photographed with the weather balloon does speak of "the 'disc'" and "the victims of the wreck."

The Roswell Incident briefly received national and even international attention in 1947, but after it was reported that the crash was of a weather balloon and not a "flying disk", the event faded from public view for over 30 years.

Renewed interest

The Roswell incident received little mainstream attention until 1978, when researchers Stanton T. Friedman and William L. Moore compared notes from a series of interviews each had conducted independently.

Friedman and Moore interviewed Lydia Sleppy, a teletype operator who worked at an Albuquerque, New Mexico, radio station in 1947, and United States Air Force Major Jesse A. Marcel (ret.), chief intelligence officer at Roswell base in 1947. Sleppy claimed that the FBI had stopped their teletype story of "the crashed flying disk with bodies" from being transmitted after a Roswell radio reporter had phoned in the story. Marcel reported gathering highly unusual materials near Brazel's ranch, which he said were "not of this Earth." He was then ordered to fly the recovered debris to Wright Field, first stopping in Fort Worth, Texas, to see Brigadier General Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Army Air Force there. Marcel also stated that the weather balloon explanation subsequently put out by Gen. Ramey was a cover story.

Impressive testimony about the Roswell Incident came from retired Air Force Brigadier General Arthur Exon , as related by ufologists Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt. In 1947, Exon was stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. In recorded interviews, Exon said that shortly after the reports of the saucer crash, strange material was shipped to Wright Patterson. Though it was very thin and lightweight, Exon said, the metal could not be bent, dented or scorched. He also said he heard reports of bodies being recovered. Exon added, "Roswell was the recovery of a craft from space."

By 1961, Exon had been promoted to General, and was Wright-Patterson’s base chief from 1964 to 1966. Another statement of Exon's was that other UFO crash recoveries staged out of Wright-Patterson occurred during his tenure as base chief, though he wasn't privy to details. (see 1965 Kecksburg UFO incident) However, critics charge that Exon's knowledge was almost entirely secondhand. In order to have access to U.S. government classified information, one must have both the proper level of security clearance as well as a need to know the information. In consequence, Exon is said to have been denied access to areas of the base where UFO-related studies were ongoing, and was never officially briefed regarding their findings. Thus it is claimed his reported statements decades later may have reflected rumor or opinion not based on personal knowledge. In a 1992 interview, Exon stated that what he had told Randle and Schmitt were rumors that he had heard at Wright Field, and that he had no firsthand knowledge of the debris.

Another report about the events at Roswell came from retired Air Force officer Brigadier General Thomas J. Dubose. In 1947 he was a colonel and Gen. Ramey's chief of staff. In recorded interviews, Dubose said the whole Roswell matter was conducted in the strictest secrecy and even involved the White House. One such secretive event involved a shipment of debris by "colonel courier" from Roswell to Washington D.C., first stopping at Fort Worth. Dubose handled the high-level phone communications and said he personally received the order from Gen. Clemence McMullen in Washington to cover up what happened at Roswell. Dubose also confirmed Major Marcel's account that the weather balloon explanation put out by Gen. Ramey was the cover story to get the press off their backs. (e.g., see Dubose affidavit

Adherents to the UFO theory point to other witnesses in the Roswell case. Family and friends of Capt. Oliver Henderson, a senior pilot at Roswell, stated that he told them of flying the remains of a flying saucer to Wright Field and seeing small alien bodies. Lewis Rickett, a member of the Army Counter Intelligence Corp at Roswell base, confirmed that the metallic debris was highly anomalous and that the military engaged in a large and highly secretive recovery operation at the Brazel ranch. Bill Brazel, Jr., Mack Brazel's son, independently corroborated Major Marcel's descriptions of anomalous debris, the large, linear debris field, and his father's finding of the debris after hearing a tremendous explosion. Both Rickett and Brazel, Jr., described what appeared to be a linear impact groove. Brazel, Jr., also said the military detained his father at the base; this seems to have been corroborated by the base provost marshal, Major Edwin Easley. When pressed for details of his involvement, Easley said he had sworn an oath not to talk about what had happened. Family members also claim that on his death bed Easley spoke of the "creatures" at Roswell, though Easley never mentioned this in interviews with researchers.

Project Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, though not a direct witness, has also stated on numerous occasions that Roswell was a real alien event based on his high-level contacts within the government. "Make no mistake, Roswell happened. I've seen secret files which show the government knew about it—but decided not to tell the public." Mitchell has also spoken about bodies: "A few insiders know the truth . . . and are studying the bodies that have been discovered." St. Petersburg Times article, Feb. 18, 2004

Other high-level, indirect witnesses are retired Brigadier General Steven Lovekin and Senator Barry Goldwater. Lovekin claimed to have received a Pentagon briefing on a 1947 New Mexico crash when he was stationed at the White House in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1959 to 1961. Those briefed were allegedly shown some of the anomalous debris and were also told that alien bodies were recovered. Goldwater, himself a retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, a 1964 Presidential nominee, and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, many times told the story of trying to get into the area at Wright-Patterson where alien artifacts were rumored to be kept. When he brought the subject up with his good friend General Curtis LeMay, USAF Chief of Staff, Goldwater claimed LeMay swore at him, told him never to bring up the subject again, and finished by saying that even he did not have clearance to get in.

Against this, skeptics state that some witnesses, whose testimony at first might have seemed compelling, have since been largely or entirely discredited. A notable recent example is Frank Kaufmann, who claimed to have been a member of an exclusive team in charge of the craft and body recovery. After his death it was found that he had hoaxed documents about the crash and about his background in intelligence. Another common criticism is that the bulk of testimony on Roswell, particularly on the subject of bodies, is secondhand or even further removed from the actual events.

A similar incident involving many USAF personnel in the UK in 1980 called the Rendlesham Forest Incident increased the amount of interest in Roswell. Also so did the Kecksburg UFO incident, another alleged military crash recovery at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1965.

Theories and Analysis

Some ufologists have argued that an alien craft crashed near Roswell and that several alien bodies were also recovered. However, skeptics and the United States Air Force have offered a number of other more earthly explanations.

Conventional theories

The Mogul Balloon theory

Under pressure from a Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation initiated by New Mexico Congressmen Steven Schiff, the Air Force in 1994/95 presented evidence that the crash was actually that of a lost Project Mogul balloon launched from nearby Alamogordo, New Mexico, whose top secret purpose was long-distance detection of expected future Russian A-bomb tests. The early Mogul balloon arrays consisted of about two dozen rubber weather balloons and sometimes had several attached radar targets, balsa wood kites covered with a foil/paper material, used for tracking. They claimed this fully accounted for the 1947 debris descriptions, particularly rancher Brazel's, and matched the photos taken in General Ramey's office. Furthermore, the balloon arrays could be up to 600 feet in length, and this was said to account for the large size of the debris field reported by Brazel and Marcel. The Air Force declared the "Roswell case" officially closed (see ).

A few weeks before the GAO released its own report in June 1995, columnist Jack Anderson of the Washington Post wrote that GAO investigators didn't believe the Air Force. They were "quietly skeptical about whether the U.S. Air Force told the truth" and were "not satisfied with the Air Force explanation," though they didn't believe the Air Force was covering up a UFO incident. However, one GAO source told Anderson, "...we do believe that something did happen at Roswell... Something big. We don't know if it was a plane that crashed with a nuclear device on it ... or if it was some other experimental situation. But everything we've seen so far points to an attempt on the part of the Air Force to lead anybody that looks at this down another track."

The Air Force based their Mogul theory primarily on interviews with a few surviving Project Mogul personnel and comparing descriptions of the Mogul balloons with statements from witnesses in 1947 and today. In particular, rancher Brazel's mention of "tape with flower patterns" was said to be a perfect match for tape allegedly used in the construction of the radar targets sometimes attached to the balloons.

Critics counter that the report was written by Air Force counterintelligence agents and charge they used classic propaganda techniques such as ridicule, selective quotations, and omission of contradictory evidence, such as anomalous debris descriptions or testimony about a coverup, such as from General Dubose. In fact, Dubose, an important primary witness and one of their own generals, was never mentioned. They also note that the Mogul personnel were not directly involved and have no idea what may or may not have been recovered in the field.

The one primary witness the Air Force did interview was Sheridan Cavitt, the Army Counterintelligence Corp agent who accompanied Major Marcel and rancher Brazel back to the ranch and participated in recovery of the material. The Air Force claimed that Cavitt's balloon testimony also supported their theory. However critics contend that Cavitt's testimony was not credible and actually contradicted the Air Force's Mogul balloon hypothesis. Cavitt claimed to find a balloon crash no bigger than his living room and denied any markings on the debris, including the so-called "flower patterns," claiming stories of such "hieroglyphics" came solely from crashed saucer promoters. Critics charge that Cavitt was merely repeating the original 1947 weather balloon cover story. Cavitt also denied going out with Marcel or ever meeting rancher Brazel, which critics note begs the question how Cavitt found his tiny balloon crash without Brazel's help. It also directly contradicts Marcel's testimony and 1947 newspaper stories, including a statement by Brazel, that Cavitt was with Marcel and Brazel. Finally they point out that Cavitt told researchers for years that he wasn't involved in any way and/or not at Roswell at the time.

The Air Force also noted in their 1994/95 report that they deliberately weren't addressing the issue of alien bodies. One justification given was that the crash wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon which had "no 'alien' passengers therein." Another reason they said was that some of the claims had been shown to be hoaxes or made by anonymous witnesses. Critics of the report note that the first reason is an example of circular reasoning, since the Air Force was using it's own unproven explanation as justification for its other conclusion of no bodies being involved. Some witnesses were also clearly not hoaxers or anonymous, a notable example being Gen. Exon, whom the Air Force never interviewed.

However, after initially ridiculing the notion of bodies, the Air Force changed positions and did a follow-up investigation examining possible sources for the reports of bodies. In 1997 they issued another "case closed" report stating that stories of alien bodies were actually distortions of various aviation experiments from the 1950s and 1960s. They claimed to show that the testimony of the people saying they had seen bodies near Roswell was in good agreement with actual events involving crash test dummies dropped from high altitude baloons, aircraft accidents, and a manned balloon accident. The time discrepancy between the 1947 incident and the later period of crash test dummy drops and the accident they said could be accounted for by distortions of memory.

Critics of the 1997 "crash dummies" report note that it is inconsistent with the Air Force's earlier position that there was nothing to the stories of bodies because all witnesses were unreliable. Indeed, some of the witness testimony they relied most heavily on were from the same people strongly suspected of hoaxing. It is also argued that there is no resemblance between the six-foot test-dummies made to human proportions and the descriptions of small, non-human, decomposing bodies. Also the experiments were conducted in areas of New Mexico that were remote from Brazel's ranch and where witnesses said bodies were found. Finally, it is argued, the severe memory distortion theory is at best highly questionable and cannot account for the serious differences in times, locations, and body descriptions.

The question has been raised why the Air Force chose to deal with the issue of bodies after initially ridiculing and avoiding it. Speculation from some UFO researchers is that this may have been the result of pressure from the Clinton White House. President Bill Clinton is known to have had an interest in Roswell, instructing friend and associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell to find out definitively what happened there in 1947 (reported in Hubbell's memoirs). In November 1995, only a few days before the Air Force issued the final version of its first Roswell report, Clinton responded in a prepared speech to a child's letter about Roswell during a trip to Northern Ireland. Clinton said that as far as he knew "an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico," but then added, "If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know." (See also 2005 Clinton Roswell comments in "Recent Developments" below, where he again states his doubts about Roswell but again raises the possibility of information being withheld from him.)

The question remains that if it was not a flying saucer, why the initial reports of a recovered "flying disk" and government secrecy? Here are some explanations proposed by skeptic Karl T. Pflock in his book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe:

• The military's initial UFO crash report was the blunder of a particular officer suffering from an attack of hubris and caught up in the desire to "scoop" the biggest story he could see, which involved the growing number of UFO sightings. See Kenneth Arnold.
• What crashed in the desert was a balloon with a long train of equipment, and this balloon was part of a top-secret project—Project Mogul, hence the government secrecy.
• Several years later, an aerial tanker crashed near Roswell and the crew's badly burned bodies were found. Pflock suggests that this crash merged with later reports in some witnesses' minds and accounts for unusual reports.

Most who dismiss any UFO connection favor the second theory used by the Air Force: the debris was in fact the remains of a Project Mogul observation balloon. Some proponents of this theory claim the balloons used in Project Mogul were extremely strange looking and would have appeared otherworldly to observers, and the project itself was so heavily classified it was nearly unknown outside of the higher branches of the U.S. government.

Those who dispute this interpretation note that the purpose of Project Mogul was classified, but the main components were not, being standard meteorological equipment such as rubber weather balloons and radar-target kites made of balsa wood and foil/paper also used for wrapping candy bars. None of this would have appeared otherworldly to anyone. It is also pointed out that such flimsy materials do not match the many descriptions of anomalous, extra-strong and heat-resistant debris reported by witnesses such as Marcel, Rickett, Brazel, Jr., and Exon. Additionally, it is claimed, the Air Force quoted witnesses very selectively and out of context to eliminate almost all testimony about anomalous physical properties.

It is further argued that Mogul records indicate that the military was unconcerned about civilians stumbling across other Mogul balloon crashes, since the components were unclassified and the balloon's top-secret purpose could not be discerned from the debris. One such noted incident from June 8 involved another New Mexico rancher, who immediately notified Alamogordo Army Air Force Base, which then sent out three men to retrieve the remains of the balloon. This is completely unlike the very large and secretive military response to what rancher Brazel found at his place in early July.

Another point raised is that historically the military made no attempt to conceal the existence of the Mogul balloons. For example, the day after the Roswell base press release, a mock Mogul balloon launch was staged for the press at Alamogordo (see ) and used to try to explain both the Roswell events and the recent nationwide flood of flying saucer reports (see Kenneth Arnold). Again, it is contended, this is inconsistent with the notion that a crashed Mogul balloon would be bathed in high secrecy, even if the project itself was top secret.

The nuclear accident theory

There is also some speculation that the Roswell incident was the result of a broken arrow: an accident involving a nuclear weapon. Even the GAO considered this possibility, according to columnist Jack Anderson. In one proposed scenario, Marcel, a staff intelligence officer with the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office, was responsible for the initial press release that a "flying saucer" had crash-landed. Some have proposed that Marcel created the cover story of a UFO crash, rather than admit that a nuclear weapon had accidentally fallen out of military hands.

However, the facts do not support this theory. There are no known nuclear accidents from this period, despite dozens of such incidents being declassified and now in the public record (See List of nuclear accidents). Some argue that it is also makes no sense that the military would be completely unaware of losing a nuclear weapon until a sheep rancher notified them about it. Indeed, the U.S. had no assembled nuclear weapon in its arsenal at the time.

The horrible secret experiments theory

A variation of the nuclear accident theory came out in June 2005 when UFO researcher Nick Redfern published a book called Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, . Redfern's thesis is that the Roswell crash has nothing to do with aliens or Mogul balloons, but was instead the crash of an experimental spy craft hybrid involving advanced Japanese Fugo balloon technology lifting a German-based Horten flying wing glider (see also Military flying saucers) and with a captured Japanese flight crew inside the glider. The alleged experiment went awry when the glider prematurely decoupled and crashed at one site, while the lifting balloons drifted off and allegedly created the debris field at the Mack Brazel ranch site. Almost the identical theory was first presented in an article in Popular Mechanics magazine in July 1997, the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash.(Popular Mechanics article)

The "horrible truth" that was subsequently covered up to this day was allegedly the illegal detention and use of Japanese prisoners of war in this and other experiments, including biological weapons research, high altitude decompression tests, and radiation exposure. Genetically deformed surviving victims of criminal medical experimentation by the notorious Japanese Unit 731 were also allegedly used. Further, captured Japanese war criminal scientists were allegedly brought over and participated in these experiments, similar to the program of using captured German scientists brought to the U.S. with Operation Paperclip. Allegedly, the primary purpose of these criminal experiments was to obtain needed physiological data for the development of a Nuclear aircraft, plus other delivery systems for nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry. Redfern also contends that the U.S. government is quite content with the public believing in aliens because it is less shocking and damaging than what really happened. Allegedly other purported New Mexico flying saucer crashes were just cover stories for some of the experiments. Redfern wrote that when he contacted the U.S. Air Force, they had no comment on his theory and said they were sticking to their official Mogul balloon and crash dummy reports for explaining the Roswell incident.

Redfern bases his theory primarily on five sources, all of whom approached him, and several of whom Redfern says he knows to have been in contact with one another, raising the possibility of collusion. The main source was an unnamed colonel who provided details of the actual crash and other manned high-altitude experiments using human guinea pigs that supposedly took place from May through August 1947. Another source, an unnamed official in the British Home Office, initially approached Redfern in 1996, and also claimed that he and others were told in 1989 of the alien Roswell crash and shown the alien autopsy film (see next section) by the CIA and British Ministry of Defense in an attempt to dissuade them from pursuing their own UFO studies. But instead, they allegedly suspected the Roswell story given them was bogus and the autopsy film a fake, part of a cover story to hide criminal U.S. experiments on Japanese POWs. Even Redfern admits he initially found this source's approach, story, and willingness to publicly disclose such information suspicious.

There are also no documents to support that any such program ever existed. One of Redfern's sources claimed that all documents and photos plus bodies were destroyed to eliminate all traces of this criminal activity. Some critics of Redfern's thesis note it is almost entirely based on dubious testimony of a few people who approached Redfern, nearly all of whom admit to previous psyops/counterintelligence backgrounds, with conveniently no way to ever check their stories against official records since allegedly all such records have been destroyed.

Critics also note other problems, such as the gross mismatch between the materials described by most witnesses from the Brazel debris field--numerous, mostly small metallic pieces with anomolous properties scattered along a long linear path--and what would be expected from a balloon crash. Redfern's sources also claim that part of the flying wing craft and one of the Japanese crew were carried away with the balloons and were also found near the main debris field. Redfern states high priority was attached to recovering these and searches were initiated. Left unexplained is the seeming absence of any tracking or how searchers could have missed spotting the large, fully-exposed debris field from the air, despite over two days having elapsed from the time of the alleged disaster. Redfern attributes this to "bad luck."

Another serious objection raised was the historical fact that there were no survivors of the medical experiments of Japanese Unit 731. They were all killed to eliminate evidence when the Russians invaded China and quickly overran the Japanese positions. Hence there were no genetically deformed bodies for the U.S. to "snatch," seriously undercutting one of Redfern's key "horrible truth" arguments supposedly underlying the Roswell crash and subsequent coverup.

Nonetheless, Redfern's theory is undoubtedly provocative and has quickly gained much support inside the UFO research community along with much criticism.

The "Alien Autopsy" film

Another twist in the Roswell story also occurred in 1995 when Ray Santilli, a British film producer, produced a film supposedly showing the autopsy of an alien from a 1947 New Mexico crash. In the U.S., portions of the film were shown on the FOX-TV network in 1996 along with some analysis by special effects experts and a pathologist.

Santilli claimed he accidentally ran into the former Army cameraman in the course of looking for archival film footage for another documentary. The crash described by Santilli's cameraman, however, does not conform to the classic Roswell crash of early July 1947 near Corona, New Mexico. Instead the cameraman was allegedly brought to the scene of the crash southwest of Socorro, New Mexico on May 30, 1947, and the autopsy depicted in the film was supposed to have been shot in Fort Worth, Texas in early July.

The body shown in the Santilli autopsy footage on the exterior appears very human-like and muscular, but the being has six fingers and six toes and appears to lack nipples and a navel. The head and eyes appear slightly enlarged and the eyes are covered with a black membrane of some sort removed by the surgeon in the course of the autopsy. The internal organs also do not appear to be human.

Skeptics argue this film showed the alleged surgeons utterly disregarding conventional surgical and scientific procedure. Various special effects people have argued the body could have been easily manufactured using standard special effects techniques. For these reasons—and many others—the film is widely considered spurious both within and outside the UFO community.

However, nothing has emerged to definitively prove the film a hoax, such as a historical anachronism. The autopsy film also has certain elements that make it possible that it was indeed filmed in 1947. Other elements might suggest that the autopsy could be on a real body instead of a special effects dummy. Opinions of medical experts and special effects experts are divided. Some ufologists still maintain that the film might be an authentic alien autopsy.

Generally, however, the film is considered to be either a hoax by Santilli, or a real 1947 film that does, for some reason, show the autopsy of a rubber mannequin or perhaps a doctored human body. For example, see directly above for the comments of a British government official claiming to have viewed the autopsy film in 1989 and saying they suspected it depicted illegal U.S. government experiments on Japanese POWs. Nick Redfern maintains the film might be a genuine surviving record of the experiments he claims the military conducted in 1947 on genetically deformed humans. Bob Shell, a photo expert who Santilli had examine the film for authenticity, has also claimed that one of the investigators and authors of the two Air Force Roswell reports, Capt. James McAndrew, confided to him that the Air Force had independently run across the film in their archives in 1995 before Santilli had shown it. Shell said this was a prelude to McAndrew then asking him if he knew where the camerman lived. British researcher Colin Andrews also told the story of visiting Santilli in June 1995 with a Japanese researcher, Johsen Takano, and a Taiwanese researcher, Dr. Hoang-Yung Chiang. After Santilli screened the film, Andrews claimed the other researchers said they had already viewed the same autopsy. Allegedly Takano said it was brought by CIA courier to Japan after the Japanese government had requested UFO information from the U.S. government. Dr. Chiang allegedly claimed to have seen several hours of the film on an official visit to CIA headquarters.

Anecdotes such as these help maintain the fierce controversy that continues to surround the alien autopsy film. If Santilli did not hoax the film, this might suggest the film came from within the U.S. government and either depicts a genuine autopsy of some kind or was a hoax manufactured by some agency such as the CIA for unknown disinformation purposes.

UFO Crash theories

Some UFO proponents theorize events are best explained by a mid-air collision between two alien spacecraft. The first completely fragmented and its remains were found at Mack Brazel's ranch. The second, according to witnesses and people who uphold this theory, landed a short distance away. Allegedly four extraterrestrial entities were found—one alive, one dying, and two dead. This was witnessed by many people, including a university professor and his class, who were going on a field trip. Then the army came, warned the others away, and took care of the crash. Supposedly the surviving alien was christened Extraterrestrial Biological Entity 1 (EBE-1), and survived at a safe house in New Mexico until 1952, when it died of unknown causes. Most of this theory, however, is based on very dubious sources, including "documents" of highly questionable authenticity that arrived in some researchers' mailboxes.

Another theory is the craft was struck by lightning and partly exploded, creating the large debris field of small pieces found at Brazel's ranch. The rest of the crippled craft with crew came down at some other nearby location. Mack Brazel did tell his son Bill and Roswell intelligence officer Marcel that he first found the debris following a tremendous explosion he heard in the midst of a violent thunder and lightning storm. There are also other witnesses to this explosion, including some neighboring ranchers and a highly respected Roswell couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot, who reported to the local newspaper on July 8 seeing a glowing flying saucer pass overhead on the night of July 2. Marcel would later reveal in his last interview that Paul Wilmot had recently told him about his parents also seeing the craft explode in the distance after passing in the direction of Brazel's ranch to the northwest. Marcel added that Brazel came to Roswell a few days later to report the crashed flying saucer.

Regardless if this latter theory of the crash has merit, weather records do provide information on thunderstorm activity and can perhaps help pinpoint when Brazel found the debris field on his ranch. There were no thunderstorms in the region the first three weeks of June 1947, the period when the Project Mogul balloon allegedly responsible for the wreckage was launched (June 4) and when Brazel would later claim in a newspaper interview to have found the debris (June 14). However, there were thunderstorms in late June and early July, specificially July 2 and July 4. The latter dates are at least consistent with the initial Roswell base press release of July 8 that said the rancher had found the "flying disk" "sometime last week." Local ranchers have also told researchers Brazel would not leave such debris sitting in his fields for three weeks since it would have been hazardous to his livestock's health. This again suggests an early July discovery of the wreckage, alien or not.

If Roswell was indeed a crash of an extraterrestrial craft, as some continue to insist, some ufologists would argue that several things follow:

• The United States government knows that extraterrestrials have visited our planet since at least 1947 but still will not admit that fact.
• The U.S. government is currently in possession of alien technology.
• The reasons for initial government secrecy would be largely self-evident: high government officials would probably fear public panic from a potential alien threat (as happened in 1938: see The War of the Worlds (radio)) and there would likely be an attempt to conceal an advanced technology from the Soviets while secretly trying to reverse engineer it.

As of now, there is still no definite proof to either side of the debate. The official denial of anything of an extraterrestrial origin continues, while many ufologists continue to insist that the officials are lying.

Recent developments

In 2005, researcher Nick Redfern published his theory, detailed above, of horrible military experiments involving human guinea pigs that led to the Roswell incident, and claimed this lay at the heart of the high secrecy and subsequent coverup.

Another important recent development concerns attempts to read the text on a paper held by Gen. Ramey in a photo taken with Col. Dubose and the displayed balloon debris. A Roswell investigator named David Rudiak, as well as some other examiners of the message, claim to have identified several important phrases, including "the victims of the wreck," another referring to the crash object as "the 'disk'" (Rudiak thinks it reads "aviators in the 'disk'"). This is cited as strong evidence that the Roswell incident was actually the crash of an alien spacecraft and that bodies were indeed recovered. However, some also note that these interepretations would also be compatible with Redfern's non-alien theory of events. Rudiak also claims to have disproved the calculations done by some supporters of the Mogul balloon hypothesis that winds would have taken the purported lost balloon exactly to the Brazel ranch crash site. (See ). Redfern's anonymous colonel source states in Redfern's book this isn't surprising since Mogul had nothing to do with it, but served instead as a convenient cover story to the real balloon crash that had to be covered up.

In 2002, the Sci-Fi Channel sponsored an archeological dig at the Brazel site in the hopes of uncovering any missed debris that the military failed to collect. Although these results have so far turned out to be negative, the University of New Mexico archeological team did verify recent soil disruption at the exact location that some witnesses said they saw a long, linear impact groove.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who headed the United States Department of Energy under President Clinton, apparently found the results provocative. In 2004, he wrote in a forward to The Roswell Dig Diaries, that "the mystery surrounding this crash has never been adequately explained—not by independent investigators, and not by the U.S. government."

In October 2002 before airing its Roswell documentary, the Sci-Fi Channel also hosted a Washington UFO news conference. John Podesta, President Clinton's chief of staff, appeared as a member of the public relations firm hired by Sci-Fi to help get the government to open up documents on the subject. Podesta stated, "It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the true nature of the phenomena."

In an interview in September 2005, former President Bill Clinton downplayed his and his administration's interest in the Roswell incident. He said they did indeed look into it, but believes it had a rational explanation and didn't think it happened. Many in his administration thought it was a "fraud." However, he added the caveat that he could have been deceived by underlings or career bureaucrats. If that were the case, he said he wouldn't be the first American president that had been lied to or had critical information concealed from him. He also said he would be very surprised if we didn't discover other forms of life in the universe in the near future.

In February 2005, the ABC TV network aired a UFO special hosted by news anchor Peter Jennings. Jennings lambasted the Roswell case as a "myth" "without a shred of evidence." ABC endorsed the Air Force's explanation that the incident resulted solely from the crash of a Project Mogul balloon. Critics of the ABC segment counter that the brief treatment was one-sided and failed to consider many key pieces of evidence, such as the testimony of important witnesses like Generals Exon and Dubose or astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

In 2005, UFO and paranormal researcher Ethan A. Blight claimed to have identified several modern UFO photographs containing spacecraft of the same design as the Roswell craft .

For many ufologists, the Roswell case is considered one of the most important UFO events and the one that started the alleged UFO cover-up, while for the skeptics it is just the most widely popularized case, not specifically notable. The official position of the United States government, as of 2005, remains that nothing of a paranormal or extraterrestrial nature had happened. The final report of the USAF regarding the Roswell case is available, as well as the answer to that report by ufologists, who insist that the report is bogus (see External links).

Cultural Influence and Trivia

Today, UFO tourism provides a major income for people around Roswell. The 1947 incident has been featured in many books, comics, movies and television series.

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Little Green Men", the craft had come from the 24th century, and the aliens were the Ferengi characters Quark, Rom, and Nog. Similarly, in Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well", the characters came from the 31st century, and the captured alien was Dr. Zoidberg.

In the 1996 movie Independence Day, the Roswell craft was a scout from the alien's mother ship. The damaged craft and recovered bodies were moved to the secret base at Area 51 for study. The craft, now flown by humans, played a key role in defeating the alien invasion.

In the 1996 movie The Rock, the FBI Director comments that the alien crash at Roswell was one of the nation's deepest secrets along with such things as the Kennedy assassination.

In the 1996-97 TV series Dark Skies, the Roswell crash was caused by the military shooting down a flying saucer after the aliens announced their hostile intent. President Truman created the secret team Majestic 12 to counter the alien threat. The series was based on much other contemporary UFO lore and conspiracy theories, including Kennedy being assassinated for wanting to reveal the truth about Roswell and UFOs. Robert F. Kennedy was depicted as being a member of Majestic 12, as was astronomer Carl Sagan.

In the 2002 TV series Taken on the Sci-Fi Channel, an Emmy-winning series on alien abductions produced by Steven Speilberg, the Roswell crash plays a central role in the story. Ironically actor Eric Close, who played the lead role in Dark Skies, now depicted an alien survivor of the Roswell crash who adopted human form and had a hybrid child with an Earth woman.

Additionally, in 2002, the Sci-Fi Channel funded a scientific investigation at Roswell that revealed some anomalies, and collected many samples of local soil. The program on the investigation, titled The Roswell Crash: Startling New Evidence, aired the same night as Taken. It also featured analysis of the message about the crash photographed in the hand of General Roger Ramey back in 1947.

Probably the most elaborate (and silly) example of a Roswell-inspired TV series was titled simply Roswell. Similar to some of the plot also used in Taken, it followed the story of four alien survivors of the Roswell crash who adopt human form and live as teenagers in Roswell, one falling in love with a young human. The series ran for two season on the WB and a third on UPN between 1999 and 2002.

One of the executive producers and directors of Roswell was actor Jonathan Frakes, who played one of the main characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Frakes had also hosted an earlier Sci-Fi special on Roswell from 1997 and another on the alien autopsy from 1996 on FOX-TV.

In the TV series 7 Days (1998-2001), technology from the Roswell crash led to a secret time-travel device.

The X-Files made much of the Roswell incident. In some episodes, characters from the Department of Defense tried to sell the idea that it was a staged distraction, while, in others, it is said that the crash was an alien scout ship brought down by its proximity to a deposit of magnetite (and led to the alien rediscovery of the virus in a deposit of oil). In other episodes, the idea was advanced that aliens were just cover stories for genetically engineered human monsters made by the U.S. government, similar to the current theory advanced by Nick Redfern that an alien Roswell crash is just a cover story for horrible experiments on human beings in New Mexico. In at least one episode, as in other series, the Kennedy assassination was linked to the alien coverup conspiracy. The episode "The Unnatural" took place primarily in Roswell itself, telling the story of an alien bounty hunter chasing a renegade survivor of the Roswell crash, who adoped human form, joined a Roswell minor league baseball team, and became their star hitter. In another episode, the writers had some fun with the alien autopsy film and FOX TV, which did a special showing the autopsy and was the X-Files home network. Agent Fox Mulder (himself named after the FOX network) dryly commented that the alien autopsy film shown on FOX was an "obvious fake."

In the DC Comics universe, the official explanation is that it was a "crashed Dominator scoutship", but this is widely discounted as being a cover story. The humorous comic book "Roswell", from Bongo Comics, had as its hero the little green man, also called Roswell, who was found in the craft.

The movie Hangar 18 was loosely based on Area 51 and alien technology (Hanger 18 in Area 51 is allegedly where the UFO wreckage was taken).

Six Days In Roswell is a semi-documentary about the city's festival commemorating the 50th anniversary of the incident. Featuring comedian Rich Kronfeld, the film captures the annual event's unusual atmosphere: part scientific conference, part science fiction convention and part county fair.

In the Delta Green supplement for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, the crash at Roswell is depicted as a ruse by the supernatural Mi-Go monster race to influence the U.S. The monsters pretended to be aliens to trick the government into making concessions (i.e., kidnappings, murders) in exchange for supposed technological advances.

In the 2005 episode of Doctor Who, Dalek, a collector of alien artifacts owns the mileometer of the ship that crashed at Roswell. He invented broadband from technology aboard the ship.

The novel Majestic by Whitley Strieber (1989) was a part-fact, part-fiction account of the Roswell crash which Strieber claimed was based on an inside government source.

Secret FBI teletype

On July 8, 1947 a secret teletype message was sent from the FBI office in Dallas, Texas to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and to the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio (the closest FBI office to Wright Field). Decades later the message was released through the Freedom of Information Act. Major "Curtan" in the messages is a misspelling of the name of Major Edwin Kirton. The text of the message is:

FBI DALLAS 7-8-47 6-17 PM PMX

DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI URGENT

FLYING DISC, INFORMATION CONCERNING. MAJOR CURTAN, HEADQUARTERS EIGHTH AIR FORCE, TELEPHONICALLY ADVISED THIS OFFICE THAT AN OBJECT PURPORTING TO BE A FLYING DISC WAS RE COVERED NEAR ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, THIS DATE. THE DISC IS HEXAGONAL IN SHAPE AND WAS SUSPENDED FROM A BALLON BY CABLE, WHICH BALLON WAS APPROXIMATELY TWENTY FEET IN DIAMETER. MAJOR CURTAN FURTHER ADVISED THAT THE OBJECT FOUND RESEMBLES A HIGH ALTITUDE WEATHER BALLON WITH A RADAR REFLECTOR, BUT THAT TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN THEIR OFFICE AND WRIGHT FIELD HAD NOT BORNE OUT THIS BELIEF. DISC AND BALLOON BEING TRANSPORTED TO WRIGHT FIELD BY SPECIAL PLANE FOR EXAMINAT INFORMATION PROVIDED THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL INTEREST IN CASE XXXX AND FACT THAT NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY, ASSOCIATED PRESS, AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF LOCATION OF DISC TODAY. MAJOR CURTAN ADVISED WOULD REQUEST WRIGHT FIELD TO ADVISE CINCINNATI OFFICE RESULTS OF EXAMINATION, NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED.

WYLY

END

Sources

• Jerome Clark, Unexplained! 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena, Visible Ink Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8103-9436-7
• Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmidtt, UFO Crash at Roswell, Avon Books, 1991
• Stanton T. Friedman and Don Berliner, Crash at Corona, Marlowe & Co., 1992
• Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Roswell Incident, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1980

1947 newspaper articles and press bulletins

• Comprehensive collection, summary, and analysis of several dozen local, regional, national, and international press articles
• ABC News radio broadcast, July 8, 1947, audio and transcript
• Mack Brazel's press interview, Associated Press and Roswell Daily Record versions includes photo of Brazel
• RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region, Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947. Text and comparison to AP and UP announcements of base press release

Books for further reading (debunking)

• James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Fact Vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, 1995, U. S. Government Printing Office, ISBN 0-16-048023-X or ISBN 0788146610.

• James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, Barnes & Noble, 1997, ISBN 0-7607-0814-2 (Also published by the U. S. Government Printing Office, June 1997)

• Kal K. Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know, Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-127-0. Dell (Random House) paperback : ISBN 0-440-23613-4

• Philip J. Klass, The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup, Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-164-5

• Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, Prometheus Books, 2003, ISBN 1-57392-894-1

• Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell (editors), The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-131-9 (Has nine chapters on the Roswell incident.)

• Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth, 1994, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994, ISBN 1-56098-343-4 (Has some discussion of the Roswell incident.)

Excerpts from newspaper account of Brazel's find

...came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks."

...the next day he first heard about the flying discs and wondered if what he had found might have been the remnants of one of these."

"...might have been as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that is how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds. There was no sign of any metal in the area which night have been used for an engine and no sign of any propellers of any kind. Although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.

Brazel said that he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. "I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon," he said. "But if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it."

See also

• List of major UFO sightings

External links

• Skepdic The Skeptic's Dictionary entry for Roswell.

• The Roswell Report Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert

• The GAO report

• link to GAO report

• Air Force report

• An answer to the Case Closed statement This is the answer that follows from the Center for UFO studies in Chicago when the Air Force officially closed the case

• recent effort to gather 400+ ex-military/contractors, etc. to testify under oath before congress.

• The Incident (website of the International UFO Museum & Research Center, Roswell)

• Stalking the Elusive Crash-Aircraft Accident Sites and Their Implications for Roswell

• Entry of the Rotten Library about Roswell WARNING: The Rotten Library is part of the site Rotten.com, which

contains graphic and potentially disturbing material.

• Roswell Explained

• UFOs