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The Roswell Incident

In early July of 1947, something crashed on the Foster Ranch near the town of Roswell, New Mexico. The ranch foreman, William 'Mac' Brazel, discovered a debris field consisting of some kind of metallic foil, rubber, and sticks. Brazel collected the debris and reported it to the local Sheriff George Wilcox on either July 6 or 7. Brazel wondered if perhaps he had found the remains of a flying saucer (the term 'flying saucer' having been coined and popularized less than two weeks earlier). Wilcox contacted Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) and Brazel was accompanied back to the debris field by Major Jesse Marcel and a plainclothes man. Marcel and the other man collected several pieces of debris and took them back to RAAF. On July 8, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued the following statement to the press:

"Roswell Army Air Base, Roswell, N.M.

8 July 1947, a.m.

The many rumours regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the co-operation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell some time last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters."

The very next day, however, the story was changed and the debris was no longer that of a flying saucer, but rather a mis-identified weather balloon. Interest in the incident faded.

Three decades later, interest in Roswell was revived, largely due to the efforts of nuclear physicist turned UFOlogist, Stanton T. Friedman. Friedman was the first civilian to document the debris field at Roswell. He, along with other researchers, began to actively seek out eye-witnesses to the original Roswell incident and interview them. During these interviews, startling information came to light. Major Jesse Marcel was interviewed in 1979, and when asked if he felt that the wreckage he saw was of a weather balloon, stated "it certainly wasn't anything built by us and it most certainly wasn't any weather balloon." Major Marcel went on to describe wreckage that was very different to that which had been shown in photographs taken by the press. He described beams bearing some form of hieroglyphics. These beams, according to Major Marcel, resembled balsa wood in appearance and weight, but were a much harder material - one which would not burn. He also described a strange, brown parchment-like substance that was very strong, and something resembling tin foil, but which Marcel was certain wasn't tin foil. He recalled that another person involved in the salvage found a small, lightweight black box which could not be opened. An unusual property of the wreckage, according to Marcel, was that it could not be damaged easily. Attempts were made to cut it, and even to dent it with a 16 pound sledgehammer, but it remained intact. It could be bent, but not creased. When bent or wrinkled, the material would simply return to its original shape. All of this wreckage, according to Marcel, was shipped off to Fort Worth, Texas. The wreckage photographed by the press was not the Roswell wreckage, but was substitute wreckage taken from an actual weather balloon.

Regarding the possibility of bodies being found at the crash site, Marcel was certain that no bodies had been found. However there was a second supposed crash site, around 200 miles west of Roswell, on the Plains of San Agustin. Supposedly, a civil engineer named Grady 'Barney' Barnett was on assignment near the town of Magdalena on the morning of July 3rd, when he saw something glinting in the sunlight. Thinking it might be a downed plane, he approached it and saw a crashed, disc-shaped craft surrounded by dead bodies. The bodies were humanoid, but were smaller than humans, with proportionately larger heads. They had small eyes and were hairless. They wore grey clothing. According to Barnett's story, as he and some other civilians were looking at the bodies, military personnel arrived and escorted them away, telling them that the army was taking over. A cordon was set up, and Barnett and the others were told to keep quiet, and that talking about what they'd seen would be unpatriotic.

In the 1990s, the US government declassified certain documents and opened up about Project Mogul - a top secret operation in which special balloons were deployed with the intention of detecting Russian nuclear tests. Apparently, the weather balloon story had indeed been a cover-up, but rather than covering up the existence of extraterrestrials, the army was covering up the existence of Project Mogul. What had crashed had been a Mogul balloon.

Obviously, even if one accepts Project Mogul as an explanation, there still appear to be holes in the story. If it was just a balloon, what of Major Marcel's claims of strange wreckage? What of the craft and bodies discovered by Barnett? Why did Walter Haut issue a statement to the press claiming the army had recovered a flying saucer?

The problem with Roswell is that it lay dormant for three decades, and was finally revived at a time when both UFOs and conspiracy theories had gained significant popularity within society. Any evidence of extraterrestrial involvement that came out after the case was revived must necessarily be considered questionable at best, due to the amount of time that had passed. For example, Major Marcel's claims of strange writing on the wreckage becomes a lot less credible when one takes into account the fact that he was recalling indecipherable symbols he saw within a very short space of time, decades earlier. Drawings do exist of the supposed symbols, but again, they were produced in the late 1970s by Major Marcel and his son, who had been eleven years old in 1947.

As for Marcel's claims that the wreckage was made of a strange material, and his adamance that the object could not have been a weather balloon or indeed anything else built by the US, they do not necessarily contradict the Project Mogul explanation. When asked about a second crash site, Marcel stated that he had heard about it but could not verify that there was one from his own experience, and that "if another military group had become involved with a larger piece of wreckage, there would be no reason for me to be informed about it officially." This is an important point. There was no reason for Marcel - or indeed anyone else at RAAF - to be officially informed about anything that they weren't directly involved in. When asked if what he saw was something he recognized, specifically a weather balloon, he answered no. Indeed, it wasn't a weather balloon, and if we consider that he may not have been involved with Project Mogul, it makes perfect sense that he wouldn't recognize it. Even the fact that the material was unlike anything he'd encountered can be explained by his lack of involvement in Project Mogul.

Regarding Barnett's story about a second crash site with bodies, it suffers the same problem of having been reported thirty years after the fact. Even if we still give it credence, there is one glaring problem: Barnett died in 1969. His story, when it was told to UFO researchers and subsequently published, was second-hand and based on stories he'd supposedly told in 1947.

As I wrote above, the problem with Roswell is the thirty year period during which nobody particularly cared about it. As a result, the majority of the 'evidence' is either unreliable, based on presupposition, or comes from secondary sources. The only reliable primary evidence of the army believing the crash to have involved extraterrestrials is the press statement released by Walter Haut in 1947 in which they claimed they'd captured a flying saucer, but realistically that means very little. The Roswell Statement, as it became known, actually doesn't contain anything pointing to extraterrestrial involvement beyond the use of the rather vague term 'flying disc'. Once you apply Occam's razor to Roswell, and get rid of the unreliable and presuppositional evidence that came to light in the 1970s, you're left with the following story: some debris was found on a ranch in New Mexico in 1947.

Does that mean it wasn't an alien spacecraft? Not necessarily. But the evidence pointing to this as an explanation is questionable at best.