The Roswell UFO Crash

The Roswell UFO Crash

Without a doubt, the best UFO story of all time is the one about an extraterrestrial spaceship crashing in the desert near the tiny town of Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947. This was no mere sighting of a strange light in the sky. No, this time we had confirmation from the US military, recovered wreckage, and maybe even the dead bodies of aliens to prove it. Roswell is the Holy Grail of UFO belief. But there’s one catch: it’s almost certainly not true.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the “Roswell Incident.” But I know better than to accept it because I have studied the claims and the facts, spoken with a test pilot who may have inadvertently contributed to the myth, and considered how the tale works so well with the human propensity to believe without evidence. That is not to say, however, that there isn’t a true story to be told here. Roswell believers are right about a few key elements. Something unusual did crash in the desert. Strange wreckage was recovered. And there really was a government cover-up about it.

It all started when local rancher Mack Brazel found debris in the desert outside of Roswell in June 1947. He assumed it was just trash and moved on. (Not the reaction one would expect if it was a crashed flying vehicle of any kind.) Several days later, a private pilot named Ken Arnold reported seeing weird objects while flying in the Pacific Northwest, far from Roswell. He described the objects as flat and shaped something like boomerangs, but the term “flying saucer” was widely reported in the media and that’s what stuck with the US public. It is interesting to think that more accurate reporting of Arnold’s sighting would have led to the “flying boomerang” craze of the 1950s instead of flying saucers and all those black-and-white sci-fi B movies of the era would have depicted flying boomerangs terrorizing the Earth. In the wake of the Arnold story, thousands of people across America made UFO reports in the following months and years. The UFO era had taken flight, and it likely influenced the events at Roswell.

Some three weeks after he found the wreckage, Brazel drove into town, where he might have heard about Arnold’s UFO sighting or other “flying saucer” stories. Regardless, for one reason or another, Brazel now felt that what he found might be important, so he reported it to Roswell’s sheriff, who in turn alerted the nearby Roswell Army Airfield. Personnel from the base recovered the materials and then the story really took off because an enthusiastic public-information officer issued a press release claiming that a “flying disc” had been recovered. Soon after that, the Roswell Daily Record newspaper carried a lead story about it with this headline: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer in Roswell Region.”29 It’s worth noting that in those days “flying saucer” or “flying disc” didn’t necessarily mean alien spacecraft to people the way it does today. So maybe the press release wasn’t quite as overreaching then as it seems to us today. A very important point in all of this is that immediate descriptions of the material by Brazel, the original discoverer, seem to make it clear that this was absolutely not the remains of spaceship from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. The following excerpts are from a front-page report printed on July 9, 1947, in the Roswell Daily Record on page 1, just one day after the original “flying disc” story. (Bold added for emphasis.)

“Wilcox [Roswell sheriff] got in touch with the Roswell Army Air Field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel and a man in plain clothes accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the pieces of the “disk” and went to his home to try to reconstruct it.”

“According to Brazel they simply could not reconstruct it at all. They tried to make a kite out of it, but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it could fit.”

“Brazel said that he did not see it fall from the sky and did not see it before it was torn up, so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he thought it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was 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 might 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 strings 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.”30

This is based on reporting that was done very recent to the event, which makes it far more reliable than the extraordinary recollections that would come many years later. Did you notice the absence of any talk about dead alien bodies in or around the wreckage? Don’t you think something like that would have been prominent on the mind of Brazel and others? But they seem concerned only with rubber, string, and Scotch tape. Another key detail is that the men tried to construct a kite out of the materials. They failed, but their attempt says everything we need to know about what planet this wreckage likely came from. Clearly, they did not see this as the remains of a spacecraft. Just imagine if you found a crashed space shuttle in the desert. What are the odds that your first impulse would be to reconstruct a kite out of the debris? While I am sure that any species capable of traveling to Earth from another world would be significantly more advanced than we are, it’s doubtful that they would be so smart as to be able to make it here in a vehicle constructed out of rubber and wood and held together by glue and tape.

Continuing with the story, the materials were then flown to Fort Worth Army Air Base in Texas, where people there immediately recognized what it was. They took one look at the paper, foil, rubber, and balsa-wood sticks and issued an official report declaring that it was nothing more than debris from a downed “weather balloon.” That’s it; case closed. Most people accepted that and forgot about it until the Roswell crash myth grew many years later. But there is more to the original story.

The military lied. Yes, there really was a Roswell cover-up. The evidence points to balloon equipment used for a secret purpose, rather than an ordinary weather observation. Sadly, however, the real story doesn’t include aliens crashing on Earth. This probably explains why it’s not nearly as popular as that other Roswell story.

The only thing the military was honest about was the “balloon” part of their explanation. What they left out is that this balloon was far more interesting and unusual than some run-of-the-mill weather balloon. The debris was almost certainly from one of the many balloon-supported listening devices used in Project Mogul. This top-secret program utilized many large balloons that rose to extremely high altitudes. In some configurations, multiple balloons were connected by cord to form vast “flight trains.” Electronic listening devices were attached to a trailing cord for detecting the sounds of distant explosions, such as above-ground nuclear bomb tests in the Soviet Union. Remember, this was in the mid to late 1940s. Back then, there were no spy satellites or long-distance reconnaissance planes like the U-2 or the SR-71. But the Cold War was underway and the United States was determined to keep an eye, or ear in this case, on its rival. At this time, the United States was the lone nuclear power and was very concerned about the Soviets getting the bomb. All of this was extremely secret work, so it should surprise no one that the military lied.

B. D. Gildenberg, a participant in Project Mogul, says the work was so secret that even many of the people working on the program didn’t know its name or completely understand what it was all about.31 Project Mogul wasn’t declassified until 1972. The reason for the extreme secrecy was that the United States didn’t want the Soviets to know they were listening, because then they would have begun testing underground and made it much more difficult for the United States to monitor them. Gildenberg is certain that what Brazel found in 1947 was the wreckage from one of the kite-like radar reflectors that also hung below the balloons.32 These reflectors were designed to enable ground crews to track the balloons with radar. They were constructed out of rubber, balsa-wood sticks, paper, foil, tape, and glue. Sound familiar?

A big clue that the elaborate Roswell UFO crash story is a made-up tale is the fact that no one in 1947 said anything about seeing an obvious spaceship or alien bodies being recovered and sent to Area 51 for study. All those juicy elements didn’t emerge and become standard components of the story until thirty years later. Only after UFO belief grew, Hollywood unleashed its barrage of alien sci-fi films, alien abduction stories were told, and the classic big-head and tiny-body alien became a prominent fixture in pop culture did the Roswell story morph into what it is today.

Other secret military projects in the region after 1947 may have helped inflate the myth as well. Probably none did this more than the testing of high-altitude ejection systems for pilots. I interviewed former test pilot Joe Kittinger in 2001 about his remarkable aviation career, and he confessed to possibly having played a role in the Roswell myth. He said he and his team dropped short dummies, dressed in futuristic-looking flight suits, from high altitudes for various experiments and tests. Could local people have mistaken some of these dummies for aliens? “Absolutely they did,” Kittinger said. “These dummies that we dropped from balloons were dressed in [silver] pressure suits, so they looked unusual. One time we dropped one and it fell way up in the mountains. These dummies weighed more than two hundred fifty pounds. So how do you carry one out of the mountains? We put it on a stretcher and carried it to the back of an ambulance to take away. Now if somebody is back in the weeds watching this they are going to say, ‘Wow, look at that alien they have there.’ We think that a lot of the alien sightings were actually us doing our work with the test dummies.”33

This was several years after the original “crash” in 1947, however, so how could people remember seeing aliens/dummies in 1947? Because that’s how human memory works. It is well established that the best of us can and do get the timelines of past events confused. It is very easy, natural you might say, to make the mistake of remembering that something happened twenty years ago when it actually happened only five or ten years ago. It is also very easy for the memory of a real event to be contaminated by fictional information obtained from a movie or a book. And it can feel absolutely accurate, no matter how terribly wrong it is.

The Roswell Incident enjoyed a burst of renewed media and public attention in 2011 when Annie Jacobsen’s book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Military Base, was published. Much to the surprise of many readers, her mostly straightforward and credible history of the secret and important work that went on for decades there included a bizarre story about the Roswell crash near the end of the book. According to the claim that Jacobsen presents in a manner that seems intended to convince readers, there really was a flying saucer and tiny humanoids really were recovered at the site. But they weren’t from outer space. According to Jacobsen’s unnamed informant, the spaceship was an advanced flying vehicle built by the Soviet Union and sent into American airspace in order to test US defenses and/or terrorize the US military and public. The crew was not made up of aliens but of human children who had been surgically and/or genetically altered by Soviet scientists to look like big-headed, big-eyed extraterrestrials. Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor who conducted experiments on Jews at Auschwitz during World War II, was in Soviet hands then and helped transform the unfortunate kids into alien invaders.34 Great story! What is not so great, however, is any suggestion that it should be accepted as reliable or true. An extraordinary story from an anonymous source—no matter how exciting the story may be—is not good evidence, proof, or anything else other than just another tall tale to be added to the billions of others that humans have been telling for millennia.