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What are some of the conspericies about the 1947 Roswell,NM Crash

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What are some of the conspericies about the 1947 Roswell,NM Crash

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In early July 1947 -- the exact date is unknown -- something fell out of the sky, hitting the ground on a ranch 70 miles from Roswell, New Mexico.

Was it an extraterrestrial craft? A weather balloon? A top-secret, high-altitude military device used to detect Soviet atomic tests?

Nearly 70 years later, those questions persist, with decades of speculation and conjecture fueling the now-legendary case of what's commonly called the Roswell UFO crash.

Roswell marks the event each year on the first weekend in July, attracting a variety of speakers and presentations that aim to shed light on what really happened all those years ago.

Speakers at this year's two-day Roswell Incident include this reporter, a longtime writer on the UFO beat, with a presentation called, "Close Encounters of the Military Kind."

The 125-year-old Roswell Daily Record launched the UFO crash legend on July 8, 1947, when it published a startling headline announcing a "flying saucer" had been captured, as seen above. The next day, the paper printed a contradictory article, quoting the military as claiming the crashed object was merely a weather balloon.

"We have a lot of tie-in with this whole Roswell incident and we wanted to help make it a more serious exploration of the UFO event as kind of a springboard for that topic," said the newspaper's publisher, Barbara Beck, whose family has owned the Roswell Daily Record since 1935.

"There's only so much you can talk about the Roswell incident, because most of the people who were associated with it are dead and we really don't know what happened," Beck, pictured below with this reporter, told The Huffington Post.

Here's how it unfolded in 1947, as told to this reporter four decades ago, by military participants in the original events:

"Col. [William] Blanchard called me and said, 'We've found something northwest of Roswell. We don't know what it is, but you ought to put out a release on it so that we don't get caught with our pants down,'" said Lt. Walter Haut, who was public information officer of the 509th Bomb Group based at Roswell Army Air Field. (It was the 509th that delivered the atomic bombs on Japan, ending World War II.)

Haut said he was never an overly inquisitive person, and didn't talk much about any of this to anyone.

"I do not ask a bunch of questions, unless I need the information for a specific thing," Haut said. "I'm not going to go beyond the scope of what I'm working on. I think that the public would appreciate knowing if it's a true fact, that there are intelligent beings outside of our own Earth, and I don't think it would create any panic."

This brings us to Maj. Jesse Marcel, who at the time was in charge of intelligence and security for the base. He was assigned the initial task of going out to the debris field to collect some of the wreckage -- it was scattered over an area about three-quarters of a mile long, and several hundred feet wide.

"We went out to the scene of where the crash was and started picking up the debris," Marcel recalled. "It's almost indescribable. It's not the kind of material I'd ever seen in my life, nor have I seen it since.

"There were little pieces that looked like they were made of wood, but it wasn't wood, and it had some kind of writing or hieroglyphics that I couldn't decipher and nobody else could. It was flexible, but you couldn't break it and you couldn't burn it.

"Also, I found a piece of metal, which was about the thickness of the foil in a pack of cigarettes. But the amazing part about it was you could put it on the ground, hit it with a sledge hammer and you couldn't even put a dent in it! That astounded me, and I knew it was nothing from here. I was convinced it was not from anywhere on Earth, and I'm still convinced of that."

The video below shows Marcel 30 years after the 1947 events of Roswell, sticking to his story.

Marcel said that, after gathering the wreckage, he was told by Gen. Roger Ramey at Carswell Air Force Base in Forth Worth, Texas, "'Don't open your mouth to the press. Put some stuff on the floor and let them take a picture of it.' But I was careful not to put out anything with detail on it. So, they took pictures, and one picture appeared in the papers."

"Gen. Ramey told news reporters this was nothing but a crashed weather balloon, but I do know this: Later on, I went back to Roswell to resume my duties, but what they did at Carswell was to make a mock display with a battered weather balloon, and they let the press take pictures of that. The whole thing was a cover-up to begin with, and that was the last I heard of it."

There are many more aspects to the original Roswell UFO story, including eyewitnesses to related events. All are overshadowed by the military claim that the crash had nothing to do with an alien ship.

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New Mexico Town Still Celebrates Legendary UFO Crash Tale, 69 Years On

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In early July 1947 -- the exact date is unknown -- something fell out of the sky, hitting the ground on a ranch 70 miles from Roswell, New Mexico. Was it an extraterrestrial craft? A weather balloon? A top-secret, high-altitude military device used to detect Soviet atomic tests?

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Source 1

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Air Force Details a New Theory in U.F.O. Case

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The new Roswell report, titled 'Case Closed,' was written by Capt. James McAndrew, an intelligence officer assigned to the Secretary of the Air Force's Declassification and Review Team. Its 231 pages are designed to go beyond the 1994 report by revealing more about Federal work in the desert and examining what apparently inspired sightings of not only alien artifacts but of the extraterrestrials themselves.

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Source 2

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Additional Links Back to the 1940s
UFO Crash in Roswell, New Mexico

When it comes to the Roswell Incident of 1947, when a UFO allegedly crashed near Roswell, NM, it is hard to separate fact from fiction or fancy. There are no two identical accounts of the incident; each differs in when the UFO crashed, when it was found, who was involved and what happened once the military was called in.

But there are a few things that can be said with certainty. Sometime in the first few days of July 1947, W.W. "Mac" Brazel and a son of a neighbor rode out to a pasture near their home in Corona, NM. There had been a thunderstorm the night before and Brazel, a rancher, wanted to check on the sheep. What they found was a debris field that stretched almost three-fourths of a mile wide. The debris consisted of fragments of metal, and upon closer inspection Brazel noticed a shallow ditch that was a few hundred feet long.

Brazel was intrigued by the uniqueness of the debris, which did not seem to burn or cut, and took a piece to show his neighbors. His neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, were also intrigued and suggested that Brazel bring it to the local sheriff. On July 6th, Brazel made the 75-mile drive to Roswell to the sheriff's office. Sheriff George Wilcox listened to Brazel's story, inspected the piece of debris and decided that the best course of action was to call the military. The 509th Bomb Group was called in.

Several accounts state that Senior CounterIntelligence Corps (CIC) agent Captain Sheridan Cavitt and Intelligence Officer Major Jesse Marcel were sent to investigate Brazel's findings. Others report that Colonel William Blanchard, commander of the 509th Bomb Group, accompanied them.

On July 7th, the military representatives examined the debris in the pasture for themselves. Marcel's recollection of the scene was that there were small bits of metal interspersed in the debris that did not burn when he held a cigarette lighter to them. Marcel also observed "weightless I-beam-like structures that were 3/8"x1/4", none of them very long, that would neither bend nor break. Some of these I-beams had indecipherable characters along the length, in two colors." The military men filled their vehicle with samples of the debris to return to the army base.

The next day, a press release written by Lt. Walter G. Haut, Public Relations Officer at the Roswell Army Air Field, was sent to the two local radio stations and newspapers. The release read "The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disk had been found." A few hours later a new release was issued retracting the first announcement, saying that "...the 509th Bomb Group had mistakenly identified a weather balloon as wreckage of a flying saucer."

This is where the facts begin to get cloudy, accounts begin to differ and many contending theories as to what had actually happened began to develop. Most of the theories about the Roswell Incident involve a wholesale government cover-up.

One cover-up theory begins with Marcel's return to the air field. He brought the debris in to show his commanding officer. His CO was equally baffled by the unfamiliar materials and sent Marcel to the Fort Worth Army Air Field to show his finds to General Ramey, Commanding Officer of the Eighth Air Force. Marcel laid the debris on Ramey's desk so the general could see the mysterious metal. Ramey looked at the metal, and asked Marcel to show him on the map (located in another room down the hall) where exactly the debris had been found. Marcel did so, but when they returned to Ramey's office the debris that Marcel had placed on the desk was gone and in its place was a weather balloon.

An equally intriguing story recounted in the cover up theory lore is that of Glenn Dennis. Dennis was a mortician at the time of the alleged UFO crash (he later went on to co-found the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM). Around the time that the military began to investigate the debris field found by Brazel, Dennis received a call from the Mortuary Officer. The officer inquired about acquiring a certain type of coffin, and also how to stop the decomposition of corpses that had been laying outside for a period of time. Later that day Dennis drove to the hospital on the air base and observed what looked like metal from wreckage in an ambulance. When he stopped to chat with a nurse he knew, he was forced to leave the base. The nurse visited him the next day, and during this visit drew Davis a picture of the corpses that the coffins were needed for. A few days later, the nurse was transferred to England and never heard from again.

It is easy to get caught up in these stories of a government conspiracy to cover-up the news of a UFO crash. Intriguing as this is, there are other theories that try to explain what happened in Roswell in July of 1947. Was the debris that Brazel found actually from a top-secret spy plane that the army was developing and testing? Was it actually the wreckage from a downed Soviet spy craft? Or was it merely a weather balloon, as the Army claimed? Something did crash in Roswell and since we do not have a definitive answer about what it actually was, it is in the true sense a UFO - an Unidentified Flying Object.

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Additional Links Back to the 1940s When it comes to the Roswell Incident of 1947, when a UFO allegedly crashed near Roswell, NM, it is hard to separate fact from fiction or fancy. There are no two identical accounts of the incident; each differs in when the UFO crashed, when it was found, who was involved and what happened once the military was called in.

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In Roswell, New Mexico, exactly seven decades ago this month, the first little green men arrived.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Let's start closer to the beginning. On June 14, 1947, a rancher named W.W. "Mac" Brazel and his son Vernon were driving across their ranchland some 80 miles northwest of Roswell when they encountered something they'd never seen before. It was, in Brazel's words, "a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper, and sticks. "

The metallic-looking, lightweight fabric was scattered, shredded across the gravel and sagebrush of the New Mexico desert. Brazel didn't know what to do with the newfound items, or how they had landed on the property, so on July 4 he collected all of the mysterious wreckage he could find. On July 7, he drove it all to Roswell, delivering the goods to Sheriff George Wilcox.

Wilcox, too, was confounded.

Seeking answers, he contacted Colonel "Butch" Blanchard, commander of the Roswell Army Airfield's 509th Composite Group, located just outside of town. Blanchard was stymied. Working his way up the chain of command, he decided to contact his superior, General Roger W. Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas.

Blanchard also sent Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer from the base, to investigate more thoroughly. Accompanied by the sheriff and Brazel, Marcel returned to the site and collected all of the "wreckage." As they tried to ascertain what the materials were, Marcel chose to make a public statement. On July 8, Marcel's comments ran in the local afternoon newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, alongside a headline stating "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell."

The body of the story contained a dramatic, memorable sentence: "The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into the possession of a Flying Saucer."

"Apparently, it was better from the Air Force's perspective that there was a crashed 'alien' spacecraft out there than to tell the truth," says Roger Launius, the recently-retired curator of space history at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

"A flying saucer was easier to admit than Project Mogul," Launius adds, a chuckle in his voice. "And with that, we were off to the races."

It was after the close of World War II, a time when nuclear weapons cast a long shadow. Truth-telling was not a priority, and there were remarkably unusual events underscoring the situation at hand.

Everywhere you looked in 1947, the global, social and political chessboard was being re-divided. The Soviet Union began to claim eastern European nations for itself in a new post-war vacuum. Voice of America started broadcasting in Russian to the eastern bloc, peddling the principles of American democracy. The U.S. sent V2 rockets carrying payloads of corn seeds and fruit flies into outer space. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the "Doomsday Clock" ticking, and the Marshall Plan was in the making to rebuild war-torn Europe. Small wonder that in the heat of summer that year, flying saucers became all the rage.

On June 21, Navy Seaman Harold Dahl claimed to have seen six unidentified flying objects in the sky near Maury Island in Washington state's Puget Sound. The next morning, Dahl said he was sought out and debriefed by "men in black."

Three days after the Dahl sighting, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold said he had spotted a flying saucer in the sky by Mount Rainer, Washington.

"UFOs aren't unusual," Launius says. "They're simply unidentified things you see in the sky. We've all probably seen them. And, if you look long enough, you'll probably eventually figure out what it is you're looking at. It's not extraterrestrials."

By the end of 1947, mass hysteria had seized the global mindset, with more than 300 alleged "flying saucer" sightings in the last six months of that year alone.

"Not that there was ever any credible evidence to support the sightings," Launius adds.

By early July 1947, Brazel had heard tales of flying saucers in the Pacific Northwest. These sightings spurred him to show his discovery to the authorities, but just one day after the Air Force announced it had come into possession of a flying saucer, Roswell's morning newspaper debunked the story.

A published statement from the War Department in Washington claimed the debris collected on Brazel's ranch was the remains of a weather balloon, and the Roswell Dispatch's morning headline, "Army Debunks Roswell Flying Disc as World Simmers with Excitement," set the tale to rest on July 9.

"But we need to back it up, here," says Launius. "What was really going on was something called Project Mogul."

In this classified program, the U.S. government launched high-altitude balloons into the ionosphere, hoping to monitor Russian nuclear tests. "The Russians wouldn't get a nuclear weapon until 1949," Launius adds. "But we didn't know that in 1947."

And, Launius adds, thanks to the new, horrifyingly powerful weapon and a changing geopolitical landscape, it was a time of paranoia.

Still, if the rumor of extraterrestrial visitors had been put to rest by the government, it didn't die as easily in the public mind.

"But that was it, really," says Launius. "The debate was over. It was to be the end of speculation. According to the government, the matter was closed. The debris was from a weather balloon."

Of course, though, that wasn't the end.

There would be a 1948 report from the government about what was now being called the "Roswell Incident." In 1950, Frank Scully, a reporter for Variety, wrote Behind the Flying Saucers, a book that detailed alien encounters from the Pacific Northwest to the towns of Aztec and Farmington, New Mexico, where aliens were now said to be landing their aircrafts in people's backyards.

By then, enthusiasm for flying saucers had spread everywhere from Belgium to Russia and Japan. A rumor that had started as a convenient lie for the Air Force had become a distraction to the U.S. government, which was now deep into its nuclear weapons monitoring projects. "But there was no way the Air Force was going to admit what it was doing," Launius says.

Project Mogul was conducted out of Washington, D.C. and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, with some high-altitude balloon launches taking place in the high desert near the state's border with Texas.

Typically, a Project Mogul balloon sent into high altitude stretched 657 feet from tip to tail, 102 feet taller than the Washington Monument and twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

As balloons rode on the upper jet stream toward Russia, a long tail equipped with different types of sensing and listening devices trailed behind.

"But, obviously, something happened to this one balloon," Launius says. "It came back to Earth and probably was spread across a wide area."

Although much of the documentation about Project Mogul has now been declassified, Launius says that civilian access to information failed to stop the lure of extraterrestrial life.

Because the U.S. government was now in a frenzy of nuclear testing-both in the South Pacific and, later, at the Nevada Test Site-the hermetic silence around classified government programs left a certain segment of citizens suspicious. The UFO sightings continued.

"Then we get to the late 1970s and early 1980s," Launius says. "And that period saw a real spike in extraterrestrial interest, from movies to books and other things."

Movies such as Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET, plus dozens of books on the subject, brought aliens to the forefront of the public mindset once again.

"By that time," Launius says, "people's imaginations had gotten the best of them."

Suddenly, there were rumors of regular extraterrestrial life on Earth, not to mention crashed spaceships. There were now stories of two alien ships crashing in New Mexico in June 1947, scattering their contents and tiny green crewmen across the landscape. Before long, any secret government property-from nuclear sites to engineering locations-was suspected to house deceased or imprisoned aliens.

This was most evident at Area 51, an off-limits airstrip and aircraft engineering and development facility inside the Nevada Test Site, about 90 minutes north of Las Vegas. It was rumored that aliens from the Roswell spacecraft and other crashed ships were either being autopsied or slid into cylindrical glass tanks containing gel-like preservatives.

The government wasn't helping to quell speculation, either. At their most secretive sites, they posted large, unambiguous "No Trespassing" signs, often with a reminder to those who entered illegally: "Use of Deadly Force Authorized."

And the alien hysteria had gotten even wackier. By the early 1990s, with scant evidence to support it, a global UFO and extraterrestrial industry had come into existence. There were more movies. More books. More newspaper and magazine stories, more television news segments and shows focused on visitors from space.

In Roswell, the populace had been cashing in on the alien craze for some time. The town was home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, and even a local Wal-Mart got into the spirit, decorating its walls and front windows with green-skinned, large-headed aliens. Roswell's civic seal sports an artist rendering of an alien, and the exterior of the local McDonald's in town has enough spacecraft-based accessories to look like a ship preparing to take off for some distant galaxy. Along the town's Main Street, toy aliens, flying saucers and other extraterrestrial ephemera are sold in local shops.

Roger Launius has served as the chief historian of NASA and sat on several investigative panels discussing what might exist beyond Earth, but he seems more amused by the 70 years of hysteria surrounding the "Roswell Incident" than anything else.

"Well, all I really know," he says, "is that UFOs are exactly that. They're unidentified objects seen in the air. But that's not extraterrestrials."
(ROSWELL DAILY RECORD and ROSWELL DAILY RECORD (stylized) are trademarks of Roswell Daily Record, Inc.)

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In 1947, A High-Altitude Balloon Crash Landed in Roswell. The Aliens Never Left

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Despite its persistence in popular culture, extraterrestrial life owes more to the imagination than reality

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Find out more about the history of Roswell, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com