Roswell

On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold is flying over Washington State in the northwestern United States. He reports nine fast objects in the sky. The newspapers turn them into “flying saucers”.

In the weeks that follow, hundreds of people across the country report similar things, many of them over the Fourth of July weekend, the national holiday. In Roswell, a small town in the state of New Mexico, people read about it in the paper.

On the edge of Roswell lies an Army airfield. It is home to the 509th Bomb Group. This is the unit that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. In 1947 it is the only one able to deliver nuclear weapons.

Whatever happens on this base is therefore secret as a matter of course. That matters for understanding the days that follow.

About 150 kilometers southwest of Roswell, a research team from New York University sends up a long chain of balloons. It belongs to Project Mogul, a secret program. The balloons carry instruments to high altitude. From there they are meant to notice if the Soviet Union tests an atomic bomb anywhere.

Flight No. 4 consists of 23 weather balloons and three radar reflectors. These are light frames of foil and wooden sticks that make the balloon train visible on radar. All together it is about 600 feet long.

The researchers lose track of the train as it drifts toward the village of Corona.

Rancher W. W. Brazel, known to everyone as Mac, is out on his range with his eight-year-old son Vernon. Seven or eight miles from the ranch house the two come upon a field full of bright wreckage.

Brazel is busy and leaves it where it is. That is how he tells it to the newspaper three weeks later.

On the Fourth of July, the national holiday, Brazel returns to the spot with his wife, Vernon and his fourteen-year-old daughter Betty. They gather up what they can find.

The bundle is about a foot and a half long and weighs, by his estimate, five pounds.

In the village of Corona Brazel hears for the first time about the flying discs the whole country is talking about. His uncle suggests the debris might be one of them.

There is no telephone on the ranch. Anyone who wants to report something has to drive.

On Monday Brazel drives more than 60 miles to Roswell and shows Sheriff George Wilcox a few pieces. Wilcox calls the base.

Two officers drive out to the ranch with Brazel and take the material with them: Major Jesse Marcel, who is in charge of military intelligence for the 509th Bomb Group, and Captain Sheridan Cavitt.

The base public information officer, Walter Haut, issues a release to the press: the 509th Bomb Group has come into possession of a flying disc.

That afternoon the local paper, the Roswell Daily Record, runs the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region”. RAAF is the abbreviation of the base, Roswell Army Air Field.

The wire services carry the story around the world.

Marcel flies the debris to Fort Worth in Texas, headquarters of the Eighth Air Force. There General Roger Ramey shows it to the press. Weather officer Irving Newton takes a look and identifies a weather balloon with a radar reflector.

At 6:17 p.m. the FBI office in Dallas sends a teletype to Washington: the disc is hexagonal and was hanging from a balloon.

Then comes a sentence that does not fit: a phone call with Wright Field, it says, had not borne out the balloon explanation.

The next day the papers print the retraction. The Roswell Daily Record lets Brazel speak for himself. He has found weather balloons on the ranch twice before, he says. This did not look like them.

Part of the debris goes on to Wright Field in the state of Ohio. There it is identified as weather equipment.

A second story dates from the same summer. On June 21, 1947, three days before Arnold’s report, a man named Harold Dahl claims to have seen six flying objects near Maury Island in Washington State. He later says a man in a dark suit warned him not to talk about it.

The FBI quickly finds the claims to be false. In 1956 Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer, calls the case the dirtiest hoax in UFO history. That same year Gray Barker’s book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers comes out. It makes the “men in black” famous.

They do not appear in the Roswell files. The idea returns later all the same: as stories of witnesses who were threatened and silenced.

UFO researcher Stanton Friedman talks to Jesse Marcel. The major of 1947 has long since retired. Marcel says the balloon story was a cover.

In 1980 the TV series In Search of airs his interview. That fall the book The Roswell Incident comes out. The forgotten incident becomes a case.

In December 1984 a brown envelope drops through Jaime Shandera’s mail slot, with no return address and a New Mexico postmark. Inside is a roll of undeveloped film. Shandera works with William Moore, co-author of the Roswell book.

The pictures on the film show purported secret papers. They describe a committee of twelve men called Majestic 12. President Truman is said to have set it up in 1947 to recover and investigate alien craft.

Air Force investigators report in 1988 that no such committee ever existed. The FBI calls the document “completely bogus”. To this day there are only photographs of the papers and no original.

Former mortician Glenn Dennis tells of alien bodies. The TV show Unsolved Mysteries presents the story to 28 million viewers.

After that more witnesses come forward. They name different crash sites and describe different craft. In 1991 a UFO museum opens in Roswell, with Dennis among its founders.

Congressman Steven Schiff demands answers. At his request the General Accounting Office looks into the case. This is an agency that oversees the government on behalf of Congress. The Air Force produces a report of its own.

Its finding: the debris came from Project Mogul, the secret balloon program. And it concedes that the 1947 explanation of an ordinary weather balloon was a cover story.

The GAO finds no evidence of a spacecraft. It does find that records of the base from 1945 to 1949 were destroyed. They include all messages the base sent out from October 1946 on.

Who did this, when, and whether they were allowed to could no longer be established. That same year a film claiming to show the autopsy of an alien is broadcast worldwide.

Shortly before the 50th anniversary the Air Force publishes a second report, titled Case Closed. It traces the accounts of bodies back to test dummies dropped by parachute over New Mexico in the 1950s.

Critics point out that those tests took place years after 1947. Polls from the time show that most Americans do not believe the Air Force.

Ray Santilli had put the autopsy film into circulation in 1995. Now he admits that the footage was staged. It was shot in a flat in London.

Roswell now lives well off its story. Some 90,000 visitors come every year.