The Roswell incident refers to the July 1947 recovery of metallic and rubber debris from a crashed military balloon near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico Roswell, which sparked conspiracy theories and claims that the debris was from an alien spaceship and part of a United States Government cover-up.1 Mac Brazel said he found crash debris scattered across a cattle ranch 120 kilometres from Roswell on 1947-07-05.2 According to the earliest press reports, the material he collected included extremely strong and lightweight wires, foil, and metallic beams bearing strange writing.3 At midday on 1947-07-08, Colonel William Blanchard ordered his base public information officer, Lieutenant Walter Haut, to issue a press release announcing that the United States Army had recovered a flying disc.4 The initial release referred to a recovered “flying disc”;5 the Army never actually called it a “flying saucer”, only a “disc”.6 According to In Plain Sight, three hours later General Roger Ramey issued a new statement through the Associated Press asserting that the object was simply a weather balloon.7
Jesse Marcel, who investigated the site, later said he had come back from it clearly convinced that a flying disc of extraterrestrial origin had crashed on the ranch.8 He described the debris field as approximately 1,200 metres long and 60 to 90 metres wide.9 Marcel described the debris as including foil sheets that were as light as a feather yet incredibly strong and impervious to tearing,10 and light metal beams bearing strange hieroglyphic writing.11 Marcel did not speak publicly about Roswell until 1978.12 From then until his death in 1986, he said in multiple interviews that he had been ordered to take part in a cover-up and that the real debris he had recovered was substituted by Ramey with wreckage from an old weather balloon,13 and that he believed what had crashed was extraterrestrial.14 Blanchard himself later confided to a friend, the editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch, that what he had seen at Roswell he “had never seen anyplace else” in his life.15
Later testimony extended the extraterrestrial account. In a 2002 deathbed affidavit, Haut said he was taken to a hangar by Blanchard to view recovered child-sized bodies with abnormally large heads lying under a tarpaulin,16 and that he was shown an apparent craft roughly 3.7 to 4.6 metres long, about 1.8 metres high and egg-shaped, with a surface that appeared metallic.17 He said he was convinced that what he had observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space,18 and alleged that Blanchard’s press release had been a ruse to divert attention from a recovery operation at a different site.19 Critics have suggested, according to In Plain Sight, that Haut’s daughter had a financial incentive to promote the extraterrestrial account and that her dying father was willing to go along with it;20 researcher Don Schmitt, by contrast, considers Haut sincere and truthful.21 Philip Corso asserted that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell in 1947 and was recovered by the US government.22 Edgar Mitchell privately told Strom Thurmond by fax that he was convinced Corso’s account was true;23 Thurmond, for his part, said he knew of no cover-up related to Roswell and did not believe one existed.24 Whitley Strieber told Thurmond in a letter that Brigadier General Arthur Exon had told him personally in 1989 that there was a “completely unequivocal cover-up” of a retrieved alien craft at Roswell that “went from Truman on down”.25 Mitchell said his own initial scepticism of the Corso and Strieber accounts slowly turned to amazement as he examined documents and interviewed military colleagues;26 according to In Plain Sight, his interest had first been fired by locals near his hometown of Artesia, New Mexico, close to the crash site, who told him Roswell was real and that there had been a cover-up.27 The Spaceman said Mitchell told him he had been shown relics from the crash, including a sheet of “memory metal” that flattened back into its smooth-surfaced shape after being crushed.28 Barry Goldwater was a close friend of Blanchard, who as a colonel in 1947 was commanding officer of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field when the crash happened,29 and, according to Ross Coulthart, knew several people with direct knowledge of what actually happened.30
A separate strand of unverified testimony comes from letters sent to a radio host by an anonymous army sergeant writing under the pseudonym A Friend, who said his grandfather had taken part in the recovery. According to the letters, the grandfather claimed shortly before his death in 1974 that he had been a member of a retrieval team sent to the crash site in 1947.31 A third letter included six tiny pieces of metal that the writer claimed came from the exterior underside of the disc itself.32 A fifth and final letter, sent in 1996-07, gave a claimed crash site location recorded in the grandfather’s diary as “near Roswell AAF within 30 mile radius of Base”,33 a site located very close to where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945.34
The incident drew official scrutiny decades later. In 1993, Congressman Steven H. Schiff (R-New Mexico) made inquiries about Roswell to the Department of Defense.35 Schiff asked the General Accounting Office, subsequently renamed the Government Accountability Office, to determine the requirements for reporting air accidents such as the Roswell crash and to identify any government records concerning it.36 The United States Air Force (USAF) conducted a systematic search of archives and records centres in support of the audit, and interviewed numerous people who may have had knowledge of the events.37 Its resulting report, The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, stated that the Air Force’s research did not locate or develop any information indicating that Roswell was a UFO event, nor that there had been any government cover-up;38 it found the recovered materials consistent with a balloon of the type used in the then-classified Project Mogul, with no records showing evidence that aliens or extraterrestrial material had been recovered.39 A follow-on 1997 report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, added further materials and analysis supporting the balloon-programme conclusion,40 attributing reports of recovered bodies to United States Army Air Force test dummies carried aloft on high-altitude balloons for scientific research,41 and accounts of units recovering a saucer and crew to Air Force personnel engaged in the dummy-recovery operations.42 In Plain Sight reports that, separately, the General Accounting Office found during its 1995 review that not a single document from Roswell Army Air Field survived from the crash period, with all related paperwork destroyed with no apparent authorisation.43 The Air Force has given four different explanations for what happened at Roswell over the years,44 and in 1994 it changed its account again, admitting its original 1947 weather balloon story was untrue, according to In Plain Sight.45
The incident has continued to attract modern claims and comment. Tom DeLonge suggested that the government’s recovery of a crashed alien spacecraft was the reason why, 90 days after the 1947 crash, the USAF was created as a separate entity from the United States Army;46 he further claimed Roswell was the reason for the 1947 National Security Act that created a security apparatus, including the Central Intelligence Agency, which had supposedly kept the secret for nearly 75 years.47 DeLonge said he had also been told the crash involved a Nazi-built Russian flying saucer.48 In a 2016 email, he wrote that when Roswell crashed, the wreckage was shipped to the laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, which Neil McCasland had overseen until a couple of years earlier.49 UAP conspiracy theory has, more broadly, long alleged that Wright Field, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, was where wreckage pieces were taken in 1947 for further investigation, according to In Plain Sight.50 When Ross Coulthart recited the official USAF explanation that the debris was a Project Mogul balloon, Nat Kobitz laughed dismissively,51 saying that more than one person had reported the recovered material was not soft, but hard metal pieces.52 Eric Davis told George Knapp’s radio listeners that the 1947 crash was indeed a genuine crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft, saying that if you’re going to bet on Roswell, your bet is really good.53 According to In Plain Sight, in 2020-06 Donald Trump discussed Roswell in an interview with his son Don Trump Jr.;54 asked, tongue in cheek, whether he planned to release more information about it,55 Trump responded that he would not talk about what he knows, but that it is “very interesting”.56 As reported in “Trump Says He’s Heard Interesting Things about Roswell”, Trump said on 2020-06-19 that he had heard “interesting” things about the incident.57 President Bill Clinton said that, as far as he knew, an alien spacecraft did not crash at Roswell in 1947, that if the Air Force had recovered alien bodies they had not told him, and that he wanted to know.58 In Plain Sight states plainly that something crashed at Roswell in 1947,59 and notes that even within ufology there are as many trenchant critics of the extraterrestrial account as there are believers in it.60 Its author considers the incident should be treated as an open question for investigation, citing the Air Force’s bungled explanations and admitted lies.61