The Roswell Incident

The Roswell Incident

The Roswell Incident: Deception Upon Deception

In 1947, something mysterious crashed in the deserts of Roswell, New Mexico. Was it an extra-terrestrial spacecraft with alien bodies, as many witnesses claim? Or was it something far more mundane, which the government tried to cover up for decades? Even now, over 70 years later, the truth remains frustratingly elusive.

The first sign something was amiss came when rancher Mack Brazel stumbled upon unusual debris while checking his sheep - debris unlike anything he had seen before. Foil-like metal that couldn't be bent or dented. Indestructible paper. Strange rubber and wood fragments. He informed the local sheriff, who contacted the nearby Roswell Army Air Field.

Major Jesse Marcel was dispatched to collect the wreckage. As an intelligence officer, he knew every material used in aircraft construction - yet this was something new entirely. Strictly honouring orders from his superiors, Marcel told no one. The wreckage was flown to regional command for examination, with Marcel accompanying it.

Then came the press release heard round the world: the army had recovered a "flying disc" that had crashed northwest of Roswell. While not openly declaring the wreckage extra-terrestrial, the use of the flying saucer terminology (made popular weeks earlier by pilot Kenneth Arnold's sighting) strongly implied as much. The story spread like wildfire, even making international headlines.

But almost as quickly as the hype built up, the government worked aggressively to tamp it down. Barely 24 hours later, a retraction was issued - it was not a flying disc after all, authorities claimed, but a simple weather balloon. Rancher Brazel, Sheriff Wilcox, Major Marcel - all now concurred with the revised meteorological explanation. Case closed, or so it seemed.

Three decades passed with nary a word about Roswell. But interest was revived thanks to Stanton Friedman, who in the late 1970s decided to take a closer look. In over 100 interviews with witnesses and others involved, disturbing new facts came to light. Many stood by claims that alien bodies had been recovered. Major Marcel himself, ignoring past orders to stay silent, described handling materials unlike anything known to exist on Earth.

As books, movies and TV shows popularized the incident, the U.S. government finally released new details in the mid-1990s. The weather balloon story, it turns out, was itself a cover-up - but not for aliens. Rather, it was to divert attention from Project Mogul, a top-secret program that used high-altitude balloons with sophisticated equipment to detect Soviet A-bomb tests. These spy balloons, ancestors of satellites, could account for the advanced-seeming debris.

As for alien bodies, those were really parachute test dummies, routinely dropped in designated target zones in the 1950s. With UFO fever running high, seeing these mannequins retrieved likely sparked visions of little green men. Case closed again, or so the official version goes.

Yet questions and inconsistencies remain. Project Mogul balloons were not made of unbendable metal foil or indestructible paper. No parachute dummy drops occurred until years after 1947. And curiously, many military files from around the exact time of Roswell were destroyed - with no explanation who did it or why.

So what really happened in that New Mexico desert so long ago? Weather balloon or flying saucer - or something else entirely? Over 70 years later, we still don't know for sure. But someone seems determined to keep the full truth from being revealed. Until all facts come to light, the mystery of Roswell will live on.