The Roswell Incident: Unraveling the Mystery of the 1947 UFO Crash

When it comes to talk of whether aliens have visited Earth or if UFO sightings are actually not of this world, no event is as iconic or widely debated as that of the Roswell Incident of 1947. This mystery unfolded in the prairie landscapes of New Mexico, just north of Roswell, where an alleged UFO crash sparked an enduring controversy that we continue to talk about today.

The incident fueled conspiracy theories that claimed that the government covered up the debris from an alien spaceship. By 1994, the US Air Force released a report that concluded that the crashed UFO was a top-secret nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

When one reporter questioned what would happen if the public didn’t accept this explanation, as they had not accepted the others, the Air Force spokesperson stated that perhaps they would be back with another report. The release of the report only seemed to intensify the public’s curiosity and suspicion surrounding the incident, with many pointing out inconsistencies and gaps in the official narrative.

The Resurgence of Interest in 2023 and 2024

Fast forward to the last couple of years, a resurgence in interest around the Roswell Incident had emerged, sparked by claims from former intelligence officials and whistleblowers. These individuals came forward alleging that the U.S. government is concealing evidence of extraterrestrial craft, and even their deceased inhabitants. GOP Representative Tim Burchett publicly commented on the handling of the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, asserting that it was ‘100%’ covered up by the U.S. government.

However, the Pentagon maintains its position, stating that they haven’t found any “verifiable information” to support these assertions. Despite this, the claims have stirred up a new wave of conspiracy theories reminiscent of the discourse that followed the initial Roswell Incident. While the truth remains elusive to the public, the fascination with the Roswell Incident persists. 

The Roswell Incident: What Supposedly Happened?

The alien/UFO trend was just starting to emerge in 1947, with sightings starting to occur across the United States. One of the first most notable sightings was in Washington State by Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot. Arnold reported seeing nine shiny, unidentified flying objects moving at “incredible speed” past Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947. Arnold’s recollection of this event, with the objects becoming known as “flying saucers,” resulted in a wave of over 800 sightings. However, Arnold’s sighting is often considered the catalyst for the modern UFO phenomenon.

Many of the witnesses echoed Arnold’s description with speed faster than planes and elements from aircraft such as glass domes, cockpits, fins, legs, jet pipes, vapor trails, and propellers. On July 4, 1947, United Airlines Flight 105 reported seeing multiple flying saucers. That summer, Americans began associating these flying saucers with secret military projects, hoaxes, or other natural events.

By this summer, the US top-secret Project Mogul had already launched thousands of balloons equipped with devices that could listen in on Soviet atomic tests. And, on June 4, 1947, the US supposedly launched a long train of these similar balloons from Alamogordo Army Air Field. Designated as Flight 4, they tracked down the balloons flying northeast toward Corona until they lost contact within 27 kilometers of Mac Brazel’s ranch.

By mid-June, W.W. “Mac” Brazel discovered debris scattered across several acres of his ranch. Initially, Brazel didn’t think anything unusual about the debris. He gathered it and tried to dispose of it under some brush. As the ranch did not have a phone or radio, Brazel was unaware of the country’s flying saucer craze.

The UFO Media Frenzy

On July 5, Brazel traveled to Corona, New Mexico, where guests from a local bar told him all about the flying saucer stories. Brazel then transported some of the debris he found to the sheriff’s office in Roswell. Sheriff George Wilcox contacted the Roswell Army Air Field, who assigned the situation to Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt. Brazel took Marcel and Cavitt to the debris site to gather more material for examination.

On July 8, Marcel brought the debris to the 509th Commander, Colonel William Blanchard. Blanchard reported the finding to General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth Army Air Field, which led to orders to bring the material by plane to FWAAF immediately. At the end of the day, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release announcing that the military recovered a “flying disc” near Roswell. RAAF flight engineer Robert Porter was part of the crew that brought what he was “told was a flying saucer” to the flight to Fort Worth.

The Roswell radio station KSWS director George Walsh broke the news of the findings. Walsh then relayed the announcement to the Associated Press, which led to the station receiving an overwhelming amount of phone calls.

“All afternoon, I tried to call Sheriff Wilcox for more information but could never get through to him,” recalled Walsh. At the time. “Media people called me from all over the world.”

The Government’s Response to the Roswell Incident

General Ramey, his chief of staff, Colonel Thomas Dubose, and weather officer Irving Newton held a press conference regarding the Roswell Incident. They claimed that the debris found in Brazel’s field were pieces of a weather balloon. Irving told reporters that similar radar targets were used at around 80 weather stations. He added that the balloons would be attached to a star-shaped reflective target. Following the launch, the balloon expanded as the altitude increased before it burst at 60,000 feet.

On July 9, 1947, the US Army echoed the officers’ comments that the debris was a weather balloon.

“The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been 12 feet long, [Brazel] 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,” according to the story of the July 9, 1947 edition of the Roswell Daily Record.

The 1947 account by the government seemed to leave out any connection to the Cold War military programs. Major Wilbur D. Pritchard said the weather balloon story was to distract the public from Project Mogul.

The 1994 Report

However, the 1994 report by the US Air Force seemed to change its stance from its initial report, admitting that the “Weather balloon” explanation was bogus. In the 1994 report, the supposed alien wreckage was from a spy device for a then-top-secret project called Project Mogul.

Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Roswell Incident

The Roswell Incident fueled a lot of conspiracy theories over the years, even as the media hype surrounding it died down over the coming years. Folklore scholars traced the development of the narrative surrounding Roswell throughout its history. They found that this stemmed from the waning days of World War II when Japan released thousands of Fu-Go balloon bombs that could inflict damage and strike fear in the US.

These conspiracy theories rekindled an interest in the Roswell Incident, further fueled by hoaxes, legends, and stories of crashed spaceships and alien bodies in New Mexico.

One of the hoaxes fueled by the Roswell Incident was the Twin Falls crashed disc that also emerged in 1947. On July 11, the press reported the recovery of a 30-inch disc from a yard in Twin Falls, Idaho. The day after, on July 12, it was revealed to be nothing but a hoax. The press reported that four teenagers confessed to making up the story with photos of the so-called disc released to the public.

However, a few weeks later, on July 28, two army officers were reported to have died in a plane crash. They were said to be investigating a debunked report of recovered disc debris at Maury Island in Washington.

In 1949, there was the Aztec Saucer Hoax. Con-artists scammed journalist Frank Scully and the Variety publication into publishing a story of a crashed saucer with dead alien bodies in Aztec, New Mexico. The story revealed humanoid bodies that were about three feet tall. It also claimed to recover metal stronger than those found on Earth, and alien writing in the wreckage. Coincidentally, the elements of this story would reappear in some versions of the Roswell myth.

The Fortec Conspiracy, Hanger 18, and the First Atomic Bomb

By the 1960s to 1970s, the community of UFO enthusiasts revisited earlier conspiracy theories surrounding aliens. In 1996,a UFO conspiracy theory book, Incident at Exeter, briefly mentioned a crashed flying saucer story about alien bodies in an Air Force morgue at Wright-Patterson Field. This mention inspired the 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy, which centered on a UFO coverup by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division.

In October 1974, science fiction author and conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr publicly claimed in an interview with WKRC in Cincinnati that alien bodies were being stored at “Hangar 18” at Wright-Patterson. The Air Force later refuted Carr’s claim. They stated that Hangar 18 did not exist and that it was similar to The Fortec Conspiracy.

Five years later, Carr doubled down on his claims in September 1979. This time, Carr included a surgical nurse who witnessed the alien’s autopsy.

UFO researcher and co-founder of the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Center Donald Schmitt pointed out that the 1994 and 1997 reports by the government did not make sense. 

“Two hours west of Roswell, the first atomic bomb was detonated. You had ongoing atomic research at Los Alamos. You had all this testing of captured German V-2 rockets at White Sands. And at Roswell, you had the first atomic bomb squadron headquartered,” said Schmitt. “The thought that they would have intentionally set up any type of publicity as a distraction? If anything, they needed less attention.”

A solid point, regardless of what you believe occurred.

Roswell’s Smoking Gun: The Ramey Memo

A key piece of evidence that has long intrigued investigators and conspiracy theorists alike is a photograph taken of General Roger Ramey and Colonel Thomas Dubois as they are examining debris “allegedly” recovered. However, what’s gripped the attention of many is not the debris itself but rather a slip of paper clutched in Gen. Ramey’s left hand.

This seemingly innocuous detail has been the subject of intense scrutiny, particularly after UFO researcher David Rudiak used modern technology to analyze the text on the paper in 2001. Rudiak claimed he could decipher approximately 80% of the text, which referred to a “disc” and included a phrase that read: “and the victims of the wreck.”

Rudiak’s analysis has been seen by some as a “smoking gun.” Some believe it provides evidence that supports the theory of an extraterrestrial crash at Roswell. Those people also believe it supports the subsequent government cover-up. However, skeptics argue that the image is too blurry for the text to be conclusively deciphered. Additionally, they caution against jumping to conclusions based on such ambiguous evidence. They point out that the word “disc” could refer to the shape of the balloon radar reflectors, and the phrase “victims of the wreck” could be a misinterpretation or even a fabrication.

The Roswell Incident’s Impact on Pop Culture and UFO Research

As mentioned earlier, the Roswell Incident has inspired pop culture through numerous books, television shows, and films. The 1980 movie Hangar 18 centers around the popular conspiracy theory of an alien ship crashing in the desert in the southwestern US. Director James L. Conway described the film as a modern dramatized take on the Roswell Incident.

Conway would revisit the concept in 1995 in an episode for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, called Little Green Men. In that episode, the characters travel to 1947, triggering the Roswell Incident, and their ship is stored in Hangar 18.

The iconic TV series The X-Files has featured the Roswell incident in several of its episodes. This included Deep Throat, which introduced a Roswell alien crash. As well as the episode My Struggle, which also features the incident. The Jose Chung’s From Outer Space episode also satirized the Alien Autopsy hoax film.

The Roswell incident conspiracy theories continued to be featured in other science fiction TV series like Dark Skies and Taken.

Independence Day, Roswell, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In the 1996 movie Independence Day, the alien invasion prompted the reveal of a Roswell crash and government coverup. This coverup extended to even the President to facilitate plausible deniability.

Pocket Books published a book series in 1998 titled Roswell High. This was adapted into the iconic series Roswell, which is celebrating its 25 anniversary this fall. The series received a second adaptation in 2019, titled Roswell, New Mexico.

The 2008 Indiana Jones film, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there was also a search for an alien body from the Roswell Incident. Then there was the Futurama episode, Roswell That Ends Well, where the characters travel back in time and cause the Roswell Incident. The 2006 film Alien Autopsy is about the 1990s creation of the Santilli hoax movie.

And in 2011, the film Paul follows Roswell tourists who rescue a grey alien.

The Roswell Incident Today

Today, Roswell, New Mexico, has embraced its UFO and alien association. The city’s tourism industry has since been based on UFOlogy museums and businesses, including alien-themed iconography. Roswell has even hosted annual UFO festivals since 1995. (Yours truly has attended three of these festivals)

Out of all the landmarks for UFO enthusiasts to visit in Roswell, the International UFO Museum and Research Center is the one that is most worth a visit. The center was founded in 1991 and includes extensive archives of documentation that guests can view. 

The Enduring Mystery of the Roswell Incident

To this day, the Roswell Incident still leaves major questions unanswered about whether humans are the only life forms. But more directly, whether or not an alien crash really did happen and that the government was covering it up. It might take a long time to find definitive proof. Or perhaps there will never be proof at all that the public has the chance to see. 

However, I personally do believe that the event occurred. I do believe that alien wreckage and alien bodies were recovered. And I’m hopeful that the individuals whose lives were forever changed by their direct involvement with the incident will have some closure and peace once the truth finally comes out.

Because… not to be cliche, but – The Truth Is Out There.