The Roswell Incident
—Chrissie
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The headline of the 8 July 1947 of the Roswell Daily Record was a shocking one: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” And yet, it wasn’t entirely surprising to many. The summer of 1947 saw an increase in reports of flying saucers, beginning with the sightings by pilot Kenneth Arnold in late June. It is him (or, rather, the reporters who wrote up his story) to whom we can credit the term “flying saucer.” Arnold described the objects he saw near Mt. Rainer as flying “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”
UFO sightings were hardly a new phenomenon in 1947, but reports of strange lights and crafts in the air had grown massively in the previous few years. One need not to go too deep to find the reason; during the war, people had become accustomed to seeing more planes and many had made a point of learning to identify American, Japanese, and German planes with an eye toward their own safety. And so, more people spent more time looking at the sky, and wartime customs of attentiveness led many to report anything unusual, for fear it was the enemy.
The actual events around the Roswell Incident are not terribly interesting. In early July, Mac Brazel, a local rancher, found what could only be described as wreckage e in one of his fields. He took it to Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox. It was a collection of metal foils, pieces of rubber, and light pieces of wood. Wilcox couldn’t identify it, either, and so took it to Colonel William Blanchard of the Roswell Army Air Field. There is a bit of confusion in reasoning over the next part: a press release was sent from the RAAF which said they had found a flying saucer, though why they would make such an outlandish announcement is up for debate. It was picked up by the local paper, the Roswell Daily Record, leading to the now infamous front-page story. The idea that it was a flying saucer seems to have come from comments made by Major Jesse Marcel, who had been tasked with collecting the material and accompanying it to the Fort Worth Army Air Force Field for identification. There General Roger Ramey explained it came from a weather balloon. We know now that this was a partial lie: the debris was from a Project Mogul craft, a classified effort to spy on Soviet nuclear testing by measuring sound waves in the atmosphere. The “partial” part is that the spy device was, indeed, being carried by meteorological balloons. Explanation in hand, people went back to their lives and it was forgotten for thirty years.
If you have any passing familiarity with the story of Roswell, you’ve already noticed this account is missing some major elements of the story. The debris wasn’t rushed off to Wright-Patterson Base in Ohio or to some nascent facility in Nevada that would become Area 51; the metal wasn’t inscribed with weird hieroglyphics and didn’t morph back to its original shape after being crushed; and there were no alien bodies discovered and autopsied. These elements, which are the most central parts of the story, came later and not from reliable sources.
For those who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Roswell was just part of the culture. Much of this generation went through a UFO phase in our adolescence, in the same way it seems all kids go through a dinosaur phase around age five. Some time in your pre-teen years, you found a book about UFOs, or alien abduction, or other such phenomena and it just blew your mind. We’d grown up with the idea that some things are kept secret, and not just the normal things like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Our parents witnessed the Kennedy Assassination in their teen years and the Watergate hearings and the release of the Pentagon Papers in their twenties, the latter two being genuine cover-ups and the former widely believed to be. Creeping into these elements of history and culture was Roswell, which seemed so obviously a coverup of alien contact. After all, why would they issue the press release if it weren’t true? And how was it possible that the officers working at an Army Air Force base couldn’t identify the pieces of a weather balloon?
The return to these, and other questions about Roswell began with the work of UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, who was put into contact with Jesse Marcel in 1978. The retired officer was happy to discuss the incident with Friedman and others. In interviews with the National Enquirer and on the television show In Search of…, he stated the weather balloon explanation was a coverup of the discovery of an alien craft. His son corroborated the story with memories of pieces of strange metal his father brought home: some of the metamorphic foil and a small I-beam with unrecognizable symbols.
The alien bodies don’t come into the story until the 1980 publication of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. This element was also included in a story published by the tabloid newspaper The Globe in the same year. When asked about these, Marcel said that he had never seen any bodies, only debris. The inclusion of alien bodies seems to originate with what can be called, at best, a second-hand story about a group of archaeology students who found them while hiking. A further account of bodies came from Glen Dennis, a mortician in Roswell who claims to have answered questions about the preservation of bodies and the availability of small caskets that could be hermetically sealed. He also says he spoke to a nurse who was involved in the autopsy of an alien being, but could not name the person. It is worth noting here that, shortly after discussing this information with various authors, Dennis opened a UFO Museum in Roswell with Walter Haut (the man who issued the press release from RAAF). Dennis’ claims were expanded upon in later books, which also brought up new claims of multiple crafts and aliens which had survived and were held by the military. A book by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmidt added an even more fantastical element: that General Eisenhower was brought in to inspect the debris. Later claims expanded this to say that later, while President, Eisenhower met with extraterrestrials on at least two occasions. The only corroboration of this story comes from his great-granddaughter, who bases her claims on family stories she heard in childhood.
In 1994, an Air Force investigation concluded the materials were from Project Mogul; not a weather balloon, but not an alien spacecraft, either. This satisfied few of those who believed in the coverup, they claimed it was misinformation. Those who did not see Roswell as a coverup said this was the answer. The next year saw the airing of Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, a faux documentary claiming to show real footage from the autopsy of one of the Roswell aliens. It was a ratings hit for Fox, which had little to do with its validity. It was thoroughly debunked immediately and even on another Fox-aired show a few years later. The producer, Ray Santilli, admitted it was fake, but that it was based on real footage he had seen but could not provide.
By the turn of the century, there was little, if anything, new to say about Roswell. The various claims have been solidly debunked, with most new research leading to the debris being part of Project Mogul.
Besides, we all know it was just a Ferengi father taking his son to Starfleet Academy who experienced unintentional time travel.