116: The Truth about Roswell: Decoding Decades of Deception
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It was a sunny afternoon on June 24th, 1947, and Kenneth Arnold was flying his small aircraft over Mineral Washington. He was heading to Yakima, but took a slight detour to look for a lost U.S. Marine Corps plane. If he could find it, he could collect a nice reward. Flying near Mount Rainier, he spotted a shiny object in his plane's mirror. Then he saw multiple flashes of light. It looked like a group of aircraft flying in formation.

But something was wrong. These aircraft didn't have tails, and they were flying faster than anything he'd ever seen. After about two minutes, the objects vanished near Mount Adams. When Kenneth landed in Yakima, he immediately told his friends and airport staff about his bizarre experience.

By the time he reached Pendleton, Oregon, his story had spread and reporters were eager to hear it. In describing the odd movement of these objects, Kenneth said it was like a teacup saucer skipping across a lake. At that moment, the term "flying saucer" was born. And over the next two weeks, events would unfold that would affect every person on Earth and change the course of history.

When you drive east out of Albuquerque on Route 40 and take the 285 south, you're in the middle of nowhere. It's sand and scrub brush for miles. Take this drive at night, and the darkness is something you've never seen. It's heavy and penetrating and unsettling if you're not used to it. And summer storms in the New Mexico desert are also something unique.

Heat lightning can tear through the sky for hours, lighting up the landscape all the way to the horizon. July 1st, 1947 was one of the worst lightning storms in years. That same night, the Army airfield outside of Roswell had been tracking strange radar blips.

Same with the nearby White Sands Proving Ground, a missile base that had been testing German V-2 rockets since the end of the war. The nuclear testing facility at the Alamogordo bombing range was also tracking the objects. The blips were moving too fast to be aircraft. Some blips would disappear off the radar screen, then reappear a few seconds later.

This was a major concern. The 509th at Roswell was an elite unit, the only unit responsible for deploying atomic weapons. Finally, technicians took the radar equipment apart to check for malfunctions. They couldn't find any.

the objects continued to zip around the area for hours. Dan Wilmott and his wife were on their porch watching the lightning storm when a bright oval object zipped over their house and disappeared over the horizon. Moments later, the object streaked over Steve Robinson's truck as he was making deliveries.

He tracked the object to the horizon, moving faster than any plane he'd ever seen. Over the next few nights, local sheriff George Wilcox received dozens of calls about objects in the sky. He hadn't seen anything himself, so he told the folks it was probably lightning or planes from the nearby airbase. But then Mac Brazel, a local rancher, came into the office.

Mack told the sheriff he had come across a debris field on his ranch in Corona, New Mexico. At first, he thought it was plane wreckage, but the material was like nothing he'd ever seen. He even brought a few pieces to show the sheriff.

In the back of Mac's pickup were pieces of metal that looked like aluminum foil, but much thinner. It was also much stronger and lighter. And strangest of all, even though you can bend or crumble the metal, as soon as you released it, it would revert back to its original shape. The sheriff called Roswell Army Airfield just outside of town, and the matter was assigned to an Army intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel. Brazel took Marcel back to the debris site, and the two gathered up more pieces of material from the crashed object.

On Tuesday morning, Marcel took the material to the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard. Later that day, Walter Hott, the base's public information officer, issued a press release that was picked up by newspapers and radio stations all over the country. Now let me guess, the press release said they denied everything. Nope. The official United States Army press release said, we found a UFO. Yatse!

Headline edition July 8, 1947. The Army Air Forces has announced that a flying disc has been found and is now in the possession of the Army. Army officers say the missile, found sometime last week, has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico, and sent to Wright Field, Ohio, for further inspections.

The report was national news. It was the biggest story in the country. But it was only the biggest story for a day.

Just a few hours after the news broke, the Army retracted it. Then General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth Army Airfield ordered Major Marcel to personally deliver the wreckage to him in Texas. A few hours after they landed, General Ramey held a press conference where aluminum foil and pieces of wooden debris were spread out in front of photographers and newspaper men.

Ramey, with Marcel and Colonel Thomas DuBose backing him up, insisted that the whole UFO thing was a mistake, that the debris was from a weather balloon, and that's all there was to the story. Mac Brazel, the rancher who found the wreckage, also changed his story. He said he regretted coming forward and that the debris was just rubber strips, tinfoil, some paper, and balsa wood.

Marcel, in front of the press, backed him up on this and said simply, we went back to the ranch and found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber. General Ramey went back to his normal duties and the whole matter was officially dropped. Headlines again spread throughout the country that the flying disc was nothing more than a weather balloon. Hey, they really took the air out of this story, yeah?

After that, everyone seemed to move on. The flying saucer craze cooled down and the country forgot about Roswell. Oh, not even close. The men at the press conference where the famous photos were taken were men of honor. If they're given orders, they follow them. But as they grew old, they remained men of honor, but there were no more orders to follow. All they had left to follow was their conscience. So these men of honor, they started telling the truth.

Dr. Bob Wood was an aerospace engineer with a long and distinguished career. He worked at Sikorsky, Lockheed, Hughes, and McDonnell Douglas. He taught courses at Georgia Tech, UCLA, Caltech, and USC. Dr. Wood was very well known, so it's easy to find his work history. But there is a hole in Dr. Wood's resume from 1968 to 1970.

During that time, Wood worked on a secret study for McDonnell Douglas. He was given a huge budget to find out if UFOs were real or not. One of the first people Dr. Wood recruited for this project was a young scientist also working at McDonnell Douglas, Stanton R. Friedman. Friedman was a nuclear physicist by trade, but also dabbled in UFO investigation. At the end of their 18-month study, they determined that UFOs were real and worth investigating.

Dr. Wood was invited to present his findings to Congress, but knew this would hurt his career, so he declined.

But Dr. Friedman took a different path. After working on the UFO study for McDonnell Douglas, Friedman began giving speeches on the subject to civic groups and scientific organizations. UFOs had become his passion, so he left the aerospace industry, changed his nickname to the Flying Saucer Physicist, and begun investigating UFOs full time. But even as late as the mid 1970s, Stanton Friedman had never heard of the Roswell incident.

In 1978, Friedman heard about it from a television producer. The producer, Bill Allen, told Friedman that he was ham radio buddies with Jesse Marcel. When Friedman learned that Marcel was the intelligence officer at a base that actually handled the wreckage from a UFO crash, Friedman wanted to meet him. And the story of the Roswell incident takes a wild turn. We found a piece of metal about a foot and a half to two feet wide and about...

That doesn't sound like the material from a weather balloon.

They took pictures of course, they had a whole flock of microphones there. They wanted me to, they wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't at liberty to do that. So all I could do is keep my mouth shut. And General Ramey is the one who discussed, told the newspapers, I mean the newsmen, what it was and to forget about it. It was nothing more than an observation balloon. Of course, which we both knew differently.

Jesse Marcel was in charge of intelligence for the only atomic unit in the world. He wasn't going to go against orders. But before he went to the base with the wreckage and received the keep quiet order, he stopped at home first. There he showed the pieces to his wife and his son, Jesse Jr. The 1942 unit we had was loaded with stuff in the backseat and in the trunk area.

The pieces weren't just metallic scraps. There was a small I-beam that had some kind of writing on it that Jesse and his father described as hieroglyphics. They even had the piece recreated.

Marcel was extremely familiar with all kinds of aircraft, including top secret craft being deployed from Roswell Air Base. This wreckage didn't come from anything he recognized.

- It was not anything from this earth that I'm quite sure of. 'Cause I was vegan until I was almost, I was familiar with just about all materials used in aircraft and in our air travel. This was nothing like that. - Colonel Thomas DuBose, who retired as a brigadier general, was General Rainey's chief of staff. He also posed for pictures at the press conference. He confirmed in multiple interviews that the weather balloon story was a lie. - It was a cover story.

The balloon part of it is the story that's to be given to the press, and that is it, and anything else, forget it. General Clements McMullen in Washington, D.C., called DuBose and gave him three orders. One, get the press off our backs. Two, send some of the wreckage to Washington. And three, never speak of this again. Not to General Ramey, not to anyone. So he didn't.

as deputy to George Kenney, and he in turn responsible to the president, this is the highest priority you can exist, and you will say nothing, and that's the end of it. And Jesus, that's the matter in chief, and he forgot about it.

Stanton Friedman kept interviewing witnesses, kept releasing articles, and kept speaking publicly about Roswell and how he believed it was a cover-up. Throughout the 80s and 90s, the military either said the weather balloon story was true or they said nothing at all. But then in 1993, something very unexpected happened. After a lot of public pressure, the military issued a report about the Roswell incident. It turned out that Friedman was right.

The debris showed to the press in 1947 and the whole weather balloon story, the military admitted it was a lie.

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In October 1993, a US Congressman from New Mexico, Stephen Schiff, launched an inquiry into the Roswell incident. Congress directed the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation to uncover any documents they might have. In 1995, the Air Force released its findings in the Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. The report concluded that the material recovered by Jesse Marcel from Mark Brazel's ranch in 1947 was not from a regular weather balloon.

The wreckage was actually from a super secret program called Project Mogul. Project Mogul was a military surveillance program. Balloons equipped with acoustic sensors were launched to high altitudes to listen for the signatures of Russian atomic bomb tests. So why did some of the men at the airbase think this was a UFO? Well, because they were never told about Project Mogul.

To attempt to limit unauthorized disclosure, the Air Force employed a security mechanism known as "compartmentation". Compartmentation controlled access to classified information by dispersing portions of the research among several facilities and institutions. Each participating entity received only enough information necessary to accomplish its assigned tasks.

In the case of Mogul, only a small circle of Air Force officers received the intimate details that linked together these unrelated research projects. Okay, but these were highly trained military personnel. They couldn't recognize a surveillance balloon? Well, according to the Air Force report, no, they couldn't.

Although members of the 509th possessed high-level clearances, they were not privy to the existence of Mogul. Their job was to deliver nuclear weapons, not to detect them. And to be perfectly clear, the investigators found no evidence of a UFO. The Air Force research found absolutely no indication that what happened near Roswell in 1947 involved any type of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Uh, is this kind of like when the FBI investigates itself and finds they did nothing wrong? Or the DOJ investigates itself and finds they did nothing wrong? It's exactly like that. Uh-huh. Yeah, the report didn't sit well. The balloon story sounds like it's full of hot air. Ugh. Ah! Yeah! Ha ha ha!

Okay, sorry, sorry. Couldn't help it. Go on. The Air Force said that the wreckage wasn't a flying saucer. They said it was a secret balloon. What they didn't really address was the fact that they lied to the American people and put a bunch of fake balloon wreckage on display for the press. So in 1997, the Air Force issued another report. They had a lot of questions to answer. Like, what happened to all the records from 1947? Wait, what do you mean?

What? Who destroyed the documents? Well...

The document disposition form did not properly indicate the authority under which the disposal action was taken. So the records are gone and nobody knows who did it? Mm-hmm. I call it bulls**t. But the question people really wanted to be answered was, what happened to the alien bodies recovered from the second secret crash site? Wait, another crash with bodies? My Sharona! Yes, there have been ET visitation. There have been crashed craft.

There have been material and bodies recovered. And there is some group of people somewhere that may or may not be associated with government at this point, but certainly were at one time, that have this knowledge. The first public crash site was a few miles south of Corona, New Mexico. But there was a second crash site. And according to eyewitnesses, whistleblowers and leaked documents, here's what happened the summer of 1947.

In the few months leading up to the Roswell incident, there were over 300 UFO sightings over the New Mexico desert. These were witnessed by local residents and military personnel. On Friday, July 4th, two alien ships were flying over Corona, New Mexico. Why they were there is unclear, but best guess is they were surveying White Sands Missile Range,

Back then, White Sands was the Alamogordo bombing and gunnery range. It's about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, and was the location of Trinity, the first time the human race deployed a nuclear weapon. That evening, there was an especially violent thunderstorm. Lightning filled the sky. The alien ships, unprepared for and unshielded from lightning, experienced an equipment failure. While flying in a tight formation, they collide.

Rancher Mac Brazel hears a tremendous thunderclap, but it's different from the rest of the thunder. Others in the area report similar phenomena. Whoa, wait, wait, what's that word? What? Phenomena? Phenomena. Phenomena. And you may continue.

At 11:27 p.m., military radar installations all report seeing the objects. Then they pulse and vanish. They suspect a crash. Jim Ragsdale and his friend Trudy are camping in the area. They see a bright flash of light and hear a roaring sound that passes overhead. Then something big strikes the ground nearby.

Several archaeologists, including W. Curry Holden, are working a dig near Roswell. They stumble across the impact site where the object is crashed. One of them heads to the closest phone to tell Sheriff George Wilcox they found a crashed aircraft. Wilcox calls the local fire department to alert them about the crash. The site is about 35 miles north of Roswell. The Roswell Fire Department, escorted by members of the Roswell Police Department, respond. These are among the first civilians to visit the impact site.

At 5:30 AM, the military, knowing the approximate location of the saucer crash, move in with a carefully selected team to recover the craft. The soldiers find civilians already on site. The area is secured and the civilians are escorted off. Only those with the highest clearance are allowed near the center of the impact. Guards are posted facing out. The site is cleaned and secured in six hours. Five alien bodies are recovered.

The aliens are described the same way by many witnesses. About four feet tall, large heads, large eyes, no ears, no nose, only nostrils and small mouths. They had pale skin. At first, the bodies appeared to be without clothes, but they were actually wearing very tight-fitting suits. The bodies are covered by sheets, then placed in lead-lined body bags. John McBoyle, a reporter for KSWS Radio in Roswell, attempts to access the site.

He calls the station and reports seeing a crushed dishpan-like object and a large military presence. Lydia Sleppy from the parent station in Albuquerque tries to broadcast his report. Sleppy receives a call from the FBI and is ordered not to broadcast.

Melvin F. Brown, who's on guard duty at the impact site, has been ordered to not look under the tarp. But the moment that everyone's back is turned, he does. He sees the bodies of the alien flight crew. He described them as small with large heads and pale skin. Nearby, Mac Brazel discovers a large debris field. He heads to the home of his closest neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor. He shows them a little sliver of material that he can neither burn nor cut.

The Proctor suggests he shows the sheriff. He agrees and gathers pieces of the wreckage and heads home for the night. I remember he said something about that you could crumple it up and it would

Military bases along the West Coast put fighters on standby in case more flying discs are seen. Bases in Oregon and Washington have planes equipped with gun cameras. They're put on airborne alert. In Roswell for a conference, C. Bertram Schultz, a paleontologist, sees a large military presence on Highway 285.

He doesn't realize until later why so many soldiers were there. Local mortician Glenn Dennis, contracting with the airbase, receives an odd request for small caskets and later encountered unusual debris at the hospital while aiding an injured airman. Dennis is then confronted by officers who tell him he's seen and heard nothing. They say, quote, "If he opens his mouth, they will be picking his bones out of the sand."

And he just said, "Look, mister, you don't go in and start any rumors and razzles. Nothing happened out here." And he said, "If you do, you know, it'd be real serious problems." And then, so I just, being as my character was at that time, I said, "I'm a surveyor and you can go to hell." And that's where he said, "You may be the one going to hell." And then that's when he really told me, he said, "Somebody will be picking your bones out of the sand if you do that."

Back at the crash site, the bodies are sealed into a long crate, which is taken to a hangar and left overnight. The crate is guarded by military police who were ordered not to approach it. Melvin Brown is once again standing guard. Brown's commanding officer approaches and says, "Come on, Brownie, let's have a look inside." But there's nothing to see because everything has been packed and crated ready for shipment. To where, the soldiers have no idea.

William Woody and his father try to drive out toward the area where they'd seen the object coming down, but the roads are blocked. The side roads off Highway 285 from Vaughn and to the west are guarded by military police who allow no one to pass. Mack Brazel gets up early and drives to Roswell, about 75 miles away. He stops at the office of Sheriff George A. Wilcox. Wilcox is excited about the find and notifies the military at Roswell Army Airfield.

While waiting for the military officers to arrive, Wilcox sends two of his deputies to the ranch. A reporter named Frank Joyce contacts the sheriff's office to inquire about any interesting events. Wilcox directs him to Brazil. Colonel William Blanchard, in charge of the 509th Bomb Group,

instructs Air Intelligence Officer Jesse A. Marcel to investigate. Marcel visits the Sheriff's office. He interviews Brazel, examines the material, and then decides to visit the ranch himself. Marcel returns to the base, taking some debris with him, and reports his findings to Blanchard.

Convinced they have something highly unusual, possibly of Soviet origin, Blanchard alerts his superiors. Marcel comes back to the Sheriff's Office with counterintelligence agent Captain Sheridan Cavett. They take Brazel back to his ranch and inspect the debris field. Following orders from General Clements McMullen, Blanchard obtains more debris from the Sheriff's Office. It's sealed and transported to Fort Worth Army Airfield, where Colonel Thomas DuBose receives it for onward transport to Washington, D.C.

After Marcel and Cavett leave with Brazel, the two deputies returned to say they didn't find the debris field, but they did find a burned area in one of the pastures where sand had been turned to glass and blackened. It looked as if something circular had touched down.

At Fort Worth Army Airfield, DuBose and Colonel Allen D. Clark receive the debris and prepare to fly it to Washington, D.C. and General McMullen. Because of the distance to the ranch over roads that are less than adequate, Brazel, Marcel, and Cavett don't arrive until after dark. They stay at an old ranch house nearby and wait for daylight.

A special flight departs for Andrews Airfield in Washington, D.C. at 2:00 a.m., carrying the debris and the bodies. Brazel guides two military officers to the crash site. The debris is thin as paper, but incredibly sturdy. The metal paper reminds them of tinfoil. They can crumple it, but the metal immediately returns to its original shape. Mack Brazel is becoming inundated with media requests.

So Walt Whitmore, Frank Joyce's boss at KGFL, arranges to hide Brazel at his own home. Marcel and Cabot comb the field's perimeter and surrounding areas. They collect debris and at dusk begin the trip back to Roswell. Later in the afternoon, civilian reports come in regarding a second crash site.

Lieutenant General Nathan E. Twining is commander of the Air Material Command at Wright Field, Ohio. AMC worked closely with industry partners, research labs, and other government agencies to advance aviation technology. The general alters his plans and flies into Alamogordo Army Field.

Alamogordo Army Field, also known as Holloman Air Force Base, is located approximately 82 miles southwest of Roswell, New Mexico. A few years later, a film would be leaked from Holloman showing UFOs landing on the base. General Carl Spatz, commander of all Army Air Forces, tells reporters that he knows nothing about the flying disks or the plans from various local units to search for them.

Walt Whitmore Sr., who asked Brazel to stay the night in Roswell at his home, now brings in KGFL News. That evening, the station owner and newsman, Judd Roberts, records an interview with Brazel. The interview is scheduled to be broadcast the following morning. Roberts didn't know it at the time, but that broadcast would never happen.

At 2:00 AM, Marcel stops at his house on the way to the base, waking his wife and son. They examine the debris on the kitchen floor, believing it to be a flying saucer. They load it into the car with his son's help. At 6:00 AM, Marcel and Cavett inform Blanchard about what they've seen.

Blanchard orders guards to secure the debris field, denying access to unauthorized individuals. Blanchard contacts 8th Air Force Headquarters, dismissing the possibility of material being from a Soviet device. The messages relayed up the chain of command to SAC Headquarters. During a staff meeting at 7.30 a.m., the debris is discussed. Samples of the wreckage are examined, but no one can identify it.

The main concern is whether to disclose the discovery to the public. General Ramey proposes a plan to divert attention away from the incident. Walt Whitmore at KGFL receives a phone call from the FCC in Washington. He's told not to air the interview with Mack Brazel.

If he does, the station will lose its broadcast license. Later, Senator Dennis Chavez, chairman of the Senate Appropriation Committee, called Whitmore to strongly advise him to do as he was instructed. Blanchard confers with higher headquarters. Jesse Marcel is ordered to Fort Worth. Mack Brazel, the ranch foreman who first discovered the debris field, was arrested and detained by the US Army.

He remained in custody for four or five days. Brazel was denied access to a phone, was given an army physical, and was subjected to rigorous questioning and intimidation while under arrest. Sheriff Wilcox returns to the crash site with two deputies. Military police deny them access. At 11:00 AM, Colonel Blanchard announces the recovery of a flying disc. Lieutenant Walter Hott distributes the press release to radio stations and newspapers. At 2:26 PM, the story hits the AP wire.

It reads, "The Army Air Forces here today announced a flying disc had been found. The base receives so many calls that it becomes difficult to access an outside line." Four minutes after this, at 2:30 p.m., Colonel Blanchard officially goes on leave, though he actually returns to the site to oversee additional cleanup. He deploys techniques learned from the less reported UFO crash that occurred in Missouri in 1941.

At 3:00 PM, Marcel is told that he's going to Fort Worth with the wreckage. Only a few packages are loaded onto the plane. One, a triangular package about two feet long, is wrapped in brown paper. The other three are about the size of shoeboxes. They're so light that it feels as if there's nothing in them. The special flight, a B-29, takes off for the Fort Worth Army Airfield. Marcel arrives in Ramey's office with some of the debris. The general wants to see where the debris was found. Marcel accompanies him to the map room.

Once Ramey is satisfied, they walk back to the general's office, but the debris is gone. In its place is a ripped apart weather balloon scattered on the floor. At 4:30 p.m., General Roger Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force and Blanchard's supervising officer, presented to the press an alternate story. He claimed the Army had recovered a high altitude balloon. Warrant Officer Irving Newton is ordered from the weather office at the Fort Worth Army Airfield to Ramey's office.

Newton, in front of a small number of reporters and officers, identifies the wreckage on the office floor as a balloon. He's photographed and sent back to his regular duties. The press takes photographs of Jesse Marcel, General Ramey and Thomas DuBose with the balloon. At 6:17 p.m., the FBI sends a teletype message from the Dallas office to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, telling him that a balloon is responsible for the reports.

The message disputes General Ramey's announcement to the press. At 7:30 p.m., the AP breaks the news that the Roswell flying disc was a balloon. Ramey appears on a radio station and confirms this. A few hours later, an unscheduled flight arrives. An officer hands over more sealed boxes of wreckage. At 11:59 p.m., the photographs are transmitted to New York for wide distribution. But a small hiccup in the official story.

During the entire process, Raimi held a memo in his right hand. In the photos, the text is very blurry.

But by the early 2000s, software had improved to the point that enhancing the memo became feasible. But to do this, you'd need the original negatives right from the camera, if they still existed. Well, Stanton Friedman looked into this, and it turned out the negatives did still exist. So he bought them and had them analyzed. Can you read the words? Most of the words, yes. What's it say? Does it mention a spaceship? It sure does.

Stanton Friedman spent a lot of money to recover the original photographic negatives from the press conference where the weather balloon was made public. The negatives and prints made from them were subjected to multiple levels of analysis. In at least one of the photographs, the front face of the memo is clearly visible. Early analysis showed that there were several words that could be deciphered which had a

electrifying implications. The words urgent, victims, wreck, and the name of Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg came through very clearly. Also references to a disc to be shipped by B-29, which did happen. The message then seems to imply that they should misstate the meaning of the story. It then suggests sending out public relations officers with weather balloons, that this would work if photos were used and demonstrated to the press. It did work.

Morning newspapers report that the flying saucer near Roswell is a weather device. Second site cleanup resumes at sunrise to ensure civilians don't stumble upon the airfield.

At 8 a.m., members of the 1st Air Transport Unit load crates into C-54s. Armed guards watch as three or four aircraft are loaded for transport to Kirtland Air Base and then on to Los Alamos. Los Alamos was, and might still be, the most secure military facility in the world. Colonel Blanchard personally takes Hott to Building 84, Hangar P3, which is heavily guarded both inside and out. Inside, Hott observes the recently recovered object.

12 to 15 feet long, 6 feet high, resembling an egg with a metallic surface. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear were visible. He sees a couple of bodies under a canvas tarp. They have large heads and are child-sized. There's been so much that has been brought forth by legitimate people that there had to be something to it, and apparently that wasn't something that...

crash landed out there in the desert. I'm from the League. More wreckage arrives at the base, boxed into crates of various sizes and shapes. At noon, a crate guarded by MPs is moved to bomb pit number one. It's unusual for anything other than weapons to be stored there. In Roswell, Floyd Proctor and Lyman Strickland spot Mac Brazel escorted by military officers, ignoring their attempts to communicate, which is strange.

Photographer Robin Adair receives a call from the main office in New York instructing him to head to Roswell immediately. He flies over the sites. He sees troops, vehicles and military police covering large areas. A sealed, unmarked wooden crate is brought out and loaded into a B-29, tail number 7301, bound for Fort Worth. It's guarded by six armed MPs, never allowing it out of their sight.

Under military escort, Mac Brazel is taken to the offices of the Roswell Daily Record, where he provides reporters with a news story. Later, reporter Frank Joyce points out that this news story is much different than his original account. Brazel responds that it would be bad for him if he didn't tell the news story. At 8 p.m., the B-29 flight crew is back. Again, they were not debriefed, but are told that they have flown the general's furniture to Fort Worth.

They are cautioned not to tell anyone, including their families, about the flight. As far as anyone is concerned, the flight never happened. At the debris field and impact site, cleanup is intense. No debris remains, and there's no sign they were ever there. Military personnel returned to Sheriff Wilcox's office and asked for a box of debris that he'd been storing. Wilcox surrenders it without protest.

The debriefings of all witnesses are underway. Participants are taken into a room in small groups and told that the recovery is a highly classified event. Everyone is to forget that it ever happened.

The military warns civilians around Roswell that they can never talk about what happened. In some cases, the witnesses are threatened with death should they ever speak to anyone. Over the next few years, the military continued to search for and even find more debris from the crash sites. But they stonewalled long enough that the public lost interest.

Roswell was still talked about in local UFO groups and zines, but those were considered fringe. But in 1978, Stanton Friedman brought the Roswell incident to the mainstream. In 1980, Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz... Yep, that guy.

They wrote the Roswell incident, which sold a lot of copies. Roswell was covered on TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of, and later was featured prominently on the X-Files. By the 1990s, everyone had heard of Roswell, which forced the Air Force to release that report in 1995. This brings us back to the second Air Force report released in 1997. And in this report, we finally learn what happened to the bodies.

In 1997, the Air Force released another report about Roswell. It was called the Roswell Report: Case Closed. This report rehashed the Project Mogul balloon explanation of the wreckage. It spent some time trying to discredit witnesses and UFO investigators. And it explained why there were eyewitness reports of bodies. The Air Force said these recovered alien bodies were actually crash test dummies used in high altitude parachute tests. - Oh, this is gonna be good.

The project was codenamed Operation High Dive. High Dive dropped hundreds of dummies from various heights to see what kind of falls could be survivable. So the aliens everyone saw were dummies? That's the word. So they used four foot tall dummies with big heads, huh? Nope. The dummies were six feet tall, but some were discovered burned so their limbs were shorter. Um... Or they were damaged.

Damage to the dummies included loss of heads, arms, legs and fingers. This detail, dummies with missing fingers, appears to satisfy another element of the research profile, aliens with only four fingers.

Uh, you know, I think the real dummies are the people who wrote this report. Yeah, I would agree that this is not as satisfying an explanation as the Air Force thinks it is. Okay, okay, okay. Let's say the Air Force is telling the truth, which they're not, but let's just say they really dropped dummies all over the desert. Okay. And these dummies were confused with, I can't believe I'm even saying it, the dummies were confused with four-foot-tall aliens. Right. Why not just tell us that in the other report?

Oh, because Operation High Jump, the super secret high altitude dummy dropping project, it didn't start until 1953, six years after the Roswell crash. Is this a joke? Nope. They're talking about 1947. You're talking about dummies used in the 50s almost a decade later. Well, I'm afraid that's a problem that we have with time compression.

Oh, did he say time compression? Yeah, that's Air Force speak for people got the dates wrong. Are you punking me? Well, what is this? The report even quotes an eyewitness named Gerald Anderson who found bodies that he said looked like plastic dolls. Credible witness? Well, I don't know. Maybe Gerald was a very intelligent and observant five-year-old. Precocious, I think they call it. They quoted a five-year-old witness? They did.

But to be fair, Gerald was 55 when they interviewed him. Okay, okay, let me get this straight. They interview a 55-year-old man who tells him what he saw 50 years ago when he was 5? That's right. Geez, I haven't seen an investigation this sloppy since, uh, well, since every FBI investigation in the last five years. Yeah, it wasn't convincing.

This is a common government CYA technique. You assert the outcome, then you have your team of investigators and experts fill in the details that eventually arrive at your desired outcome, no matter how ridiculous the details are. Oh, you mean like a bat kebab from a wet market in the middle of nowhere? Well, that theory's still being debated. Let's stay focused.

Now, it's only fair that we present all sides of the Roswell story. Now, the timeline I went through earlier is all from witness accounts and sworn affidavits. There are a lot of accounts that I didn't cover because I couldn't corroborate them. But even the witness reports I did cover

aren't perfect. I've seen videos and books and articles say that there are as many as 600 eyewitnesses who've come forward saying they saw ships and debris and bodies. Now, maybe that's true, but I can only find seven. Almost every witness account comes from a friend or a spouse or a child or grandchild of a witness.

And other witnesses have had trouble with their stories. Loretta Proctor, who saw the debris when Mack Brazel brought it to her house, said they couldn't burn the metal. They tried bending it and cutting it and they couldn't do it. That's a new story. Her earlier story mentions nothing about debris. In fact, she specifically said she never saw debris of any kind. Lydia Sleppy was the teletype operator who claimed the FBI interrupted her broadcast and ordered her to stop. And there's no evidence of this at all.

but a lot of evidence has disappeared in this case. - That's true, but I still would have liked to have seen a memo about the broadcast and it's just not there. Melvin Brown was the guard who said he saw bodies on two different occasions, once at the crash site and once while guarding the hangar. The truth is, his story comes from his daughter, Beverly, who only mentioned Roswell many years after her father died. - Well, it doesn't mean it's not true. He was guarding something. - Yeah, but he wasn't a guard.

He was a cook. Oh. Uh, cooks don't guard top-secret military facilities? No. But-but-but-but-but-they-they-they probably kept the aliens frozen, right? So he-he-he was probably guarding the freezer! In the kitchen! Remember I said it's a government technique to start with an outcome, then try to find facts to fit?

That's that. I'll chalk this one up to a maybe. Major Jesse Marcel is one of my favorite witnesses. But take his story with a whole lot of salt. He used to exaggerate his military record quite a bit. He overstated his commendations, his rank, and his credentials. He claimed he was a pilot and shot down five enemy aircraft. He even said he flew the UFO wreckage himself.

But Marcel wasn't a pilot. There's an evaluation report from General Ramey himself who said Marcel was a competent officer, but quote, "Since this officer is not a rated pilot, his assumption of the position of commanding general is not a consideration."

Marcel was an intelligence officer, before that an administrative assistant, and before that a photo interpretation and visual aids officer. He never flew. He also didn't have a degree in physics, which he had claimed during some interviews. In 2020, Marcel's grandchildren supposedly found his diary where he documented everything he saw. This was both exciting and suspicious. Marcel gave interviews for 20 years and never mentioned a diary.

Turned out he didn't write it, and we don't know who did, so his story just got messier. Colonel Thomas DuBose was one of the men photographed with Marcel with the weather balloon.

Not only did the bows say the wreckage was not switched, but he would get pretty annoyed when asked about it. He said the wreckage in the photos is the same wreckage that Marcel brought from Roswell. Glenn Dennis, the mortician, gets a lot of things wrong. And I left out most of his testimony because a big piece of his story is how he had a friend who was a nurse on the base. They had lunch one day. She showed him a drawing of an alien body. Then she ended up dead. But

This never happened. Then there's Walter Haught, the public relations officer who saw the craft and the bodies. He gave a sworn affidavit to be released after his death, signed and witnessed by a notary, and given after a doctor pronounced him of sound mind.

A lot of the Roswell story comes from his affidavit that he gave in 2002. But he was interviewed in 2000 and he had trouble remembering everything. His affidavit, however, was clear and detailed. Turns out the affidavit was written by a UFO author based on interviews with Haught. Haught reviewed it, didn't make any changes, and signed it. Now, does that mean the affidavit is wrong? No, it could be 100% true.

But in every story about Roswell, it's presented as Hutt's words when it was not. It's very possible that when he signed the document, he didn't understand what it was.

But I've seen the interviews with him and he did say everything was true. So he's a tricky one. Colonel Blanchard did go on leave right after the crash, but he didn't oversee any cleanup operation. He went on a two week vacation with his wife to Santa Fe. Sure, these records could have been falsified, but there's proof that he was with the governor during this time. So a lot of witnesses do change their story over time, and that's to be expected. It's 50, 60, 70 years.

But true believers cherry pick the best stories and throw away all the rest. The truth is, we will never really know what happened in Roswell in 1947. The records are gone. The witnesses are dead. And with all due respect to UFO researchers, they only write one side of the story. - Skepticism doesn't sell. - It doesn't.

I believe something did happen out there, but whether it was a secret military program or an alien crash site, I can't be sure. - Well, this turned out to be a downer. - But- - Go on. - In 2013, a document was found in the FBI archives. It's written by Guy Hoddle, special agent in charge of the Washington office. It's dated March 22nd, 1950, and the title is

Information concerning flying saucers. An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape, but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture.

That was sent to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who declined to pursue it. Which leads to one final twist to the Roswell story. And it's a twist that needs its own video. And if you want me to cover it, let me know. In 1972, a witness came forward with new information. Information that was always hinted at, but now we have a lot more details. Turns out, one of the aliens recovered from Roswell stayed in Los Alamos until 1952. In the freezer? No, he was alive.

And he had a lot to say.

Thanks so much for hanging out with us today. My name is AJ. There's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. And if you had fun or learned anything, do Hecklefish a favor, like, subscribe, share, comment. That stuff really helps us out and makes him so happy. And like most topics we cover on the channel, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see or learn more about, go to the Y-Files dot com slash tips. And if you'd like to join a great community, check out the Y-Files Discord. It's free to join. There's thousands of people on there and it's a lot of fun.

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Adorable. Well, that's one way to describe it. Well, that's going to do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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