The Roswell Incident

On the night of 2 July 1947, the Wilmots were sitting outside their home in Roswell, New Mexico, when they saw a glowing oval object cross the sky from southeast to northwest. It lasted forty or fifty seconds, around 9:50 in the evening.

The next morning, an engineer named Barney Barnett was working with a group of archaeology students on the plains of San Agustin, about 400 kilometers west of Roswell. Out in the open desert, they were drawn to a glare coming off the sand. Thinking it was the wreck of a downed plane, they walked over. What they found was an object eight to ten meters across, lens-shaped and partly destroyed. Bodies lay near it and inside it. They were small, with oversized heads and small eyes, no taller than about a meter and a half, dressed in plain grey suits.

Soon an Air Force jeep arrived. The officers sealed off the site and warned the witnesses to say nothing, because “this was the result of a secret experiment of national interest,” a weather balloon. A large truck followed, loaded the craft and the bodies, and drove off to an unknown destination.

Meanwhile, the rancher William MacBrazel had found an area of his land, some 500 square meters, scattered with strange debris. He told his neighbors and showed them one of the pieces: something like aluminum, but extremely flexible and at the same time very hard, with faint markings on it that looked like flowers when you caught them at the right angle. The neighbors told him that the night before they had seen at least a dozen unidentified objects over the region, and that he should take his find to Sheriff George Wilcox. So he did.

In a short press release, Lieutenant Walter Haut of the nearby air base announced that the United States Air Force had recovered a flying disc, now stored in Hangar 84 at White Sands.

MacBrazel went with the sheriff to set the record straight with the military and was held at the base for several hours to give a statement. When he returned to the ranch, soldiers had surrounded the site, collecting debris and letting no one near. The recovered material and its presumed crew were moved to Wright-Patterson and stored for study in Hangar 18, then later to Muroc Air Base in California, where, the story goes, they were shown to President Eisenhower on 20 February 1954. After that the trail goes cold, though it is said the wreckage and its occupants ended up at Area 51, in Nevada.

The official explanation finally came: eleven weather balloons launched under Project Mogul, fitted with aluminum tails so they could be tracked by radar. After the event a blackout was ordered across the local radio stations, especially KOAT, which had been covering the story. KOAT reportedly received a fax that read, more or less: “DO NOT TRANSMIT THESE MESSAGES. CEASE THE NEWS IMMEDIATELY.” Later, under pressure, Major Jesse Marcel displayed what he called the remains of a balloon, now letting reporters photograph it up close, unlike the day before, when the debris had been a different kind, shown only from a distance.

By most accounts, everyone tied to the incident was quietly pressured by military intelligence to stay silent. With time the story faded, replaced by an almost identical one in Russia, in the city of Petrozavodsk on 20 September 1977, this time witnessed by hundreds of people and explained away as the Kosmos 955 satellite re-entering the atmosphere.

The case came back to life when investigators and the American public pushed again, and Senator Steven Schiff of New Mexico asked Congress for the fullest possible report, drawing on documents held by the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Council. Unfortunately all the records from Roswell Air Base for that period had been destroyed. The thirty-page document that resulted said, in essence, that the debris came from a “secret balloon.”

In 1995 a film surfaced claiming to show the autopsy of one of the captured beings. Faced with the controversy, Congress produced a new 230-page report, which said the “aliens” the witnesses described in the San Agustin desert were in fact crash-test dummies, “anthropomorphic dummies used in Air Force trials.”

There is a problem with that. Those dummies were only manufactured between 1954 and 1959. The Roswell incident happened in 1947.

To address the contradictions, Colonel John Haynes held a press conference from the Pentagon on 24 June 1997 to deliver the final report on Roswell, again. Pressed with questions, he mostly read out its contents. When a CNN reporter suggested he was being used as a known skeptic of UFOs, he answered: “Case closed. You have the facts, the dates, and the reports.”

On 4 July 1997 a separate conference was held in Roswell itself, attended by Derrel Sims, a former CIA hypno-anesthetist and biochemist; Dr. Vernon-Clark, a researcher at the University of San Diego; and Dr. Roger Leir. Sims said he had come into possession of fragments believed to be part of what was found at the site, passed to him by Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr., son of the same Major Marcel who in 1947 had told reporters the wreck was only a weather balloon. The officer had apparently kept a few fragments to show his family.

Dr. Vernon-Clark ran two analyses on the metallic material. The first, mass spectrometry, measures the proportions of isotopes to identify the elements in a sample. The Roswell residue was dissolved in a mix of hydrofluoric and nitric acid, vaporized, and injected into argon plasma that separated the ions, which were then accelerated into a spectrometer and counted. The results showed a wider variation in isotope composition than would be normal for anything formed on Earth.

The second test, optical emission spectroscopy, excites a vaporized sample in argon plasma so that each element emits light at its own wavelength. From this Vernon-Clark concluded the material could not have formed naturally. It had been manufactured, and beyond that he could say no more for now.

So even though Roswell is “closed” as far as the Pentagon is concerned, there is still a great deal left to investigate. And it leaves one question hanging: why would military intelligence work so hard to bury the truth? Only to keep chaos from breaking out, or for something more?