Some history and background of the Roswell 'Incident' from a friend who is researching and writing a book on the history of Roswell and so-called 'Alien' visitors; some excerpts from his forthcoming book..
In mid-June 1947, W.W. ‘Mac’ Brazel discovered some deteriorated wreckage on the ranch he was operating. He took pieces to the local sheriff who thought that they might have some military significance. Sheriff Wilcox then contacted the local Roswell Army Air Base, where he spoke to Major Jesse Marcel—the man who became a key player in this incident. Colonel William Blanchard ordered Marcel and counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt out to Brazel’s ranch. Cavitt immediately thought it probably came from a weather balloon, but Marcel had other ideas. Even today, Marcel’s wife and son, Jesse, Jr., remembers Marcel Snr. talking about flying saucers. On July 8 the public information office at the base announced they had recovered a flying disk. Although they retracted the claim a few days later, the cat was out of the bag. In effect, it was ‘proof?’ the smoking gun that we had been visited by extraterrestrials.
The timing of this incident was a key factor as to why someone like Marcel became convinced it was a flying saucer. It was also a powerful demonstration of how the media shapes our views. A few weeks earlier, businessman Kenneth Arnold had become a media sensation when he claimed that his light plane was buzzed over Cascade Mountains, Washington, by nine disks like ‘saucers that skipped across the water’.
This incident was the genesis of the expression ‘flying saucers’. Photos of Arnold and his depictions of the craft hit the front pages of newspapers all over the country. It was a sensation that led to an explosion of sightings that year—850 in all—as people started to look skyward in anticipation of seeing unidentified flying objects.
A few days after the original announcement, a press conference was held to explain that nothing more than a weather balloon had crashed on Brazel’s ranch. But Marcel wasn’t convinced—he was caught up in the saucer hype that engulfed the country. He later said that it did not look like any weather balloon he had seen before and, to his credit, he was right. Nonetheless, the flying saucer claim soon became nothing more than ‘pie in the sky’ speculation, and it remained that way for about 30 years. Then suddenly it became bigger than ever!
In 1978 world-famous UFOlogist Stanton Friedman became acquainted with Marcel, who revived his saucer theory by claiming that the government had substituted the original wreckage with materials from weather balloons. Conspiracy theories started to abound with the idea that the government was hiding something. In 1980, two fame-seeking UFO-believing authors (Charles Berlitz and William Moore) penned The Roswell Incident, claiming they had interviewed over 75 witnesses as part of their research. (Charles Berlitz was an occult writer who authored other speculative books about the Bermuda Triangle and the Philadelphia Experiment). It became the most-famous book on Roswell, showing alleged extracts from secret government documents. It included one containing the signature of President Harry S. Truman authorizing a covert group called ‘Majestic 12’ (MJ12) to deal with UFO incidents. This group later became known in UFO lore as the ‘Men in Black’. The book also claimed that the Roswell wreckage included:
The book was a spectacular success and Roswell had well and truly become an ‘incident’.
- Fragments of an exotic, flexible material that would not tear, burn, or break.
- Alien markings on the wreckage, perhaps writing or hieroglyphics.
- Alien bodies that were recovered from the crash.
There was indeed a cover-up at Roswell, but nothing so juicy as advanced alien technology crashing on our planet. This was the beginning of the Cold War era. America had the bomb and had used it during the Second World War. The Soviet Union was developing similar technology. However, mankind had not developed reliable rocket technology to put satellites in space. So how was the US going to be able to keep an eye on the Soviets?
Under a program classified as TOP SECRET 1A, Project Mogul began. The idea was to create large arrays of weather-type balloons—up to 23 in an array—with the purpose of sending them high into the stratosphere where they would be carried around the world by incredibly fast jet streams. These arrays contained radar reflectors that were basically large tinfoil kites made with sticks, called RAWIN targets. A toy company manufactured the kites using nothing more than reinforcing tape. The balloons were made of neoprene rubber, aluminium tubes and eyelet rings. They carried low-frequency microphones, a sonobuoy, and battery packs. Their purpose was to listen to above-ground Soviet atomic tests. It was primitive technology by today’s standards but it was an ingenious, if not hugely successful, way to monitor activities thousands of miles away.
On June 4, 1947, Mogul flight 4 was launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field, New Mexico, not far southwest of Roswell. Some of the balloons burst as a result of exposure to the sun, and as the battery power depleted, the military lost contact with the array, only 17 miles from its eventual crash site. Information about Project Mogul remained classified for over 40 years.
Of course, the Americans did not want the Soviets to know they were spying on them, and thus it was top-secret. Lower level military staff like Blanchard and Marcel had no idea about Project Mogul. But Marcel knew it wasn’t a regular weather balloon and he’d heard the government denials. Coupled with his pre-belief in UFOs, he put two and two together and came up with five—‘ET’.
Is anyone really surprised that governments keep secrets? But resorting to speculative conspiracy theories just because one is not in possession of all of the facts is unwarranted.
It seems incredible that something so mundane could be mistaken for a flying saucer. Even the alien hieroglyphics were nothing more than flower images and child-like designs used on the packing tape. And what of the claims in the book? After years of personal research into UFO claims, I’ve found that the ‘true believers’ never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Quite simply, there were no alien bodies. Brazel never testified to seeing any metal in the wreckage—there was no special unbreakable material, it was neoprene rubber. What of the secret government documents? President Truman’s signature was eventually found to have been ‘lifted’ from another memo. The book contained fraudulent material.
There have been numerous investigations into Roswell. In 1994 a UFO-believing US Congressman asked the fully independent General Accounting Office (GAO) to revisit the claims, although he didn’t obtain what he wanted to hear. Their official report best sums up the major problems:
Below is a diagram of the Project Mogul balloon arrays and the so-called ‘Alien Hieroglyphs’ which were nothing more than child-like designs used on packing tape.
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I never put much stock in Roswell coming to the same conclusion as you did based on what I could read, but a few nagging questions remain...
How could the smartest guys we had at the time, the guys we put in charge of the nuclear bomber wing be so utterly stupid as to mistake a balloon and or plastic dummies for an extraterrestrial "disc"?
If indeed he was such a drooling doofus as to confuse these things why was he not dishonorably discharged and humiliated for life for basically starting a nationwide panic for reporting such?
Its also odd that Jesse stuck to his original story when he interviewed Stanton Friedman.
Regardless, recent events are much more interesting.
