Roswell incident
The Roswell UFO incident is a well-known incident involving a purported crash of an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Roswell, New Mexico, USA.
Some ufologists and much of the general public have shown interest in the Roswell Reports. Many books and a number of TV movies have been made concerning the alleged events, both fictionalized and more serious studies of the reports.
Some supporters of the extraterrestrial hypothesis consider the Roswell case among the most important recorded events.
During the first week of July 1947, a ranch farmer from New Mexico named Mac Brazel discovered a great amount of strange debris in his land, which was scattered over a large area and seemed to possess strange physical properties. Shortly after, the authorities were informed: military personnel arrived at the area, retrieved the wreckage, and transported it to Roswell Army Airfield; it was later flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
Initial Air Force press releases reported that a "flying disk", "hexagonal in shape" had been recovered, although the story was rapidly changed to say that the crash was in fact a weather balloon. Some conspiracy theorists charge the change in reports was disinformation and that the U.S. government was withholding or suppressing information.
The Roswell Incident received national attention in 1947, but after the "flying disk" news report was replaced by the weather balloon explanation, the event faded from the mainstream. Until 1978, that is, when researchers Stanton T. Freidman and William L. Moore compared notes from a series of interviews each had conducted independently.
Friedman and Moore interviewed Lydia Sleppy, who worked at an Albuquerque, New Mexico, radio station in 1947, and United States Air Force Major Jesse A. Marcel. Sleppy claimed that Air Force personnel had stopped reports of the flying disk and its non-human occupants from being publicized. Marcel reported gathering unusual materials near Brazel's ranch.
Some ufologists have argued an alien craft crashed near Roswell. It is also said that an alien body was found at the crash site, and then moved by military to the infamous Area 51 in Nevada. Official reports state that the body was actually a dummy often used during tests.
Today, UFO tourism is a major income for people around Roswell. The place has also been featured in many books, comics, movies and television series – for example, in the Star Trek universe, the object was a Ferengi ship from the future. Another notable example is the Roswell television series. In the DC Comics universe, the official explanation is that it was a "crashed Dominator scoutship", but this is widely discounted as being a cover story.
In 1994, the "Roswell case" was officially closed (see [1]), though Ray Santilli, a British film producer, produced a film in 1995 supposedly showing the autopsy of an alien from the crash; however, this film showed the alleged surgeons utterly disregarding both surgical and scientific procedure, and for this reason (and many others) is considered spurious. Later, it was revealed that the film was a hoax.
Additionally, in 2003, the Sci-Fi Channel funded a scientific investigation at Roswell that revealed some anomalies, and collected many samples of local soil.
The question remains that if it wasn't a flying saucer, why the initial reports of UFOs and government secrecy? Here are some explanations proposed by Karl T. Pflock in his book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe:
- The initial report of a UFO crash by the military was the blunder of a particular officer suffering from an attack of hubris and caught up in the desire to "scoop" the biggest story he could see, which involved the growing number of UFO sightings. See Kenneth Arnold.
- What crashed in the desert was a balloon with a long train of equipment, and this balloon was of a top secret project – Project Mogul, hence the government secrecy.
- Several years later, an aerial tanker crashed near Roswell and the crew's badly-burned bodies were found. Pflock suggests that this crash merged with later reports in some witnesses' minds, and accounts for unusual reports.
However, if it was a crash of an extraterrestrial craft, as many continue to insist, then some ufologists would argue that several things follow:
- The United States government knows that extraterrestrials have visited our planet but will not admit that fact.
- The U.S. government is currently in possession of alien technology.
As of now, there is still no definite proof to either cause, nor are any of the above conclusions logically implied by the premise. The official denial of anything of an extraterrestrial origin continues, while the conspiracy theorists continue to insist that the officials are lying.
There is some speculation that the Roswell incident is the result of a broken arrow: an accident involving a nuclear weapon. Marcel, a staff intelligence officer with the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office, was responsible for the initial press release that a "flying saucer" had crash-landed. Some have proposed that Marcel created the cover story of a UFO crash, rather than admit that a nuclear weapon had accidentally fallen out of military hands.
External links
- FBI electronic reading room site on Roswell The official position of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
- An answer to the Case Closed statement This is the answer that follows from the Center for UFO studies in Chicago when the Air Force officially closed the case
- recent effort to gather 400+ ex-military/contractors, etc. to testify under oath before congress.
- The Incident (website of the International UFO Museum & Research Center, Roswell)