Roswell

Roswell is a small town in New Mexico, United States of America. It is also a name that in UFO circles has become synonymous with the alleged July 1947 crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and the subsequent recovery by the U.S. military of both debris and alien bodies. The military maintains the incident was nothing more than a downed and at the time highly classifed research balloon, while UFO proponents and conspiracy theorists cry government cover up.

The incident occurred on the Foster ranch some 70 miles north of Roswell, the aftermath discovered by William “Mac” Brazel the ranch’s foreman' the precise date of the crash unknown. What Brazel purportedly stumbled upon was a large area across which was strewn rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.

On July 6, 1947, probably influenced by a media obsessed with UFOs, Brazel approached Chavez County Sheriff George Wilcox and informed him that he might have found a flying disk. Wilcox immediately contacted Roswell Army Air Field home of the 509th Bomb Group, Colonel William H. Blanchard commanding.

Intelligence Officer Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt a Counter Intelligence Agent arrived to investigate and after speaking briefly with Brazel followed him to his house where they inspected the pieces of wreckage previously gathered. They spent the night and then on Monday morning July 7 Brazel led them to the debris field.

On July 8 a military press release stated that a flying disk had crashed on a ranch north of Roswell. Within hours the story had changed, according to Roger M. Ramey the Commanding General of the Eighth Air Force the disk was actually a weather balloon. A subsequent press conference during which various balloon like debris was displayed seemed to corroborate the General’s declaration. The incident was relegated to the dustbin, dismissed and almost forgotten until a 1978 interview between ufologist Stanton Friedman and Major Jesse Marcel, in which the latter’s astonishing claims shed a new and decidedly different light on the event piquing Friedman's interest.

What Marcel purportedly told Friedman was that the wreckage recovered from the Foster ranch was beyond the scope of terrestrial technology and “not of this earth” and that the remains of the weather balloon presented during the press conference was not what he had found and had in fact been switched with the original material.

Marcel’s claim was later corroborated by Brigadier General Jefferson Dubose, who at the time of the incident as a Colonel and Chief of Staff to General Ramey apparently had full knowledge of clandestine behind the scenes goings-on.

In an affidavit dated 9/16/91 Dubose stated “The material shown in the photographs taken in General Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.” He further stated that in an operation conducted under the greatest secrecy the real material was sent to Major General Clements McMullen, Deputy Commander, Strategic Air Command, Washington D.C. and from there rerouted by personal courier on the General’s plane to Benjamin Chidlaw, Commanding General of the Air Material Command at Wright Field (today Wright Patterson Air Force Base).

If further evidence is needed that something is amiss, perhaps it can be found in another affidavit this time written by Walter Haut in 2002 and made public upon his death in 2005.

As a young 1st Lieutenant, Haut was the public information officer who prepared the press release of July 8, 1947, informing the world about a recovered “flying disk.” After maintaining for his entire adult life that he was never made privy to any secrets, he posthumously revealed that he actually knew far more than he had previously indicated.

Apparently following the press release, Colonel Blanchard had taken him to a B29 hanger and showed him the spacecraft that had been recovered along with several small alien bodies for which he was told a temporary morgue had been prepared. Haut also revealed that there had in fact been two impact sites, the debris field was the first, the second 40 miles north of Roswell was where the flying disk and its crew had been found.

As the years pass more information is revealed, becomes public, changed, modified and in some cases vilified.

A number of witnesses have come forward with stories of military personnel making threats to them and their families, warning them never to reveal to others what they themselves had seen or heard.

In an interview with Omni Magazine, Glenn Dennis former Roswell mortician and a co-founder of The International UFO Museum and Research Centre, [1] claimed that on July 7, 1947, while working at the Ballard Funeral Home he had received two puzzling telephone calls from Roswell Army Air Field, the first asking if he had any small hermetically sealed caskets, the second inquiring about embalming procedures.

Later that day while transporting an injured airman to the base, he had seen piles of strange debris, some pieces covered in hieroglyphic-like symbols. A few minutes later he had run into an Air Force Captain who angrily ordered him off the property, then into a nurse whom he knew quite well. The nurse was apparently hysterical and gasping for air, between sobs she had warned him to get away immediately.

The next morning his father had paid him a visit, apparently the sheriff had been at his house with a warning that he was in a lot of trouble out at the base “You tell Glenn, if he knows anything to keep his mouth shut. They want all your kid’s names, they want to know when they were born, and they want to know where they are now.”

As if that wasn’t enough he was contacted later by the nurse and they met for a drink. She told him a wild story of witnessing diminutive mutilated alien bodies with huge eyes and four fingers, of being pressed into service by physicians she had never seen before, of taking notes while they performed an autopsy and all the while immersed in a stench which was apparently so horrific that it had made her and the doctors sick.

After returning the nurse to her quarters he never saw her again. He did, however, receive correspondence from England weeks later wanting to know if all was well. His return letter to the address given, came back to him, stamped in red at the bottom was one word “deceased.”

In 1994/95 the Air Force changed its story once again. The weather balloon that had been the subject of so much controversy had actually been a high altitude research balloon part of a top secret project called Mogul. These balloons (a forerunner to Skyhook) and the sophisticated instruments they carried were used to spy on Soviet weapons tests and were at the time highly classified.

In 1997 the Air Force also weighed in on the issue of alien bodies found near Roswell. A report called “Case Closed” attempted to convince the general public that those that had claimed to have seen alien bodies had actually been looking at lifelike human facsimiles that had been dropped from high altitude as part of a special government study.

The study they were talking about was project “High Dive” in which anthropomorphic dummies were dropped from altitude, the object to develop a safe way to return humans to Earth via parachute from the edge of space.

When it was pointed out that the dummies weren’t used until 1953, the Air Force’s response was that all those that had witnessed aliens in 1947 were mistaken, possibly experiencing some sort of mass hallucination.

Whether or not an alien spacecraft really did crash near Roswell, New Mexico, is a question to which the public at large may never know the answer. There are of course a few that do know the truth, upper level government officials, along with military and select civilian personnel (scientists, doctors and so forth) that were involved in some fashion in whatever it was that actually did happen. [2]

In the meantime, keep an open mind, scan the skies and say after me with as much conviction as you can muster “Klaatu barada nikto.”

[1] The International UFO Museum and Research Centre was a joint venture founded in 1991 by Max Littell, Glenn Dennis and Walter Haut (the latter was president until 1996). Almost 3 million people have visited the complex, arguably the town's major attraction, since its opening in 1992.

[2] Many conspiracy theorists believe it was a UFO crash near Roswell, that finally compelled U.S. President Harry Truman into (allegedly) issuing an executive order to assemble a mysterious committee of military leaders, government officials and scientists code named Majestic 12.

*UFOs in general are a mainstay of the local economy, the four-day Roswell UFO Festival in particular a fun and financially lucrative event.

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