The Roswell Incident

We can't talk about ETs without talking about the Roswell Incident. It's the most famous American UFO sighting of all time! It all started on June 14, 1967, in Roswell, New Mexico. A rancher and his son were driving across their land and encoutered "a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, tough paper, and sticks." Eventually, this got to General Roger W. Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas. Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence office from the base, was sent with a sheriff to return to the cite and collect all of the "wreckage." As they tried to ascertain what the materials were, Marcel chose to make a public statement. On July 8, Marcel’s comments ran in the local afternoon newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, alongside a headline stating “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell.”

The body of the story contained a dramatic, memorable sentence: “The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into the possession of a Flying Saucer.” But was it true? On July 9, an Air Force official clarified the paper’s report: The alleged “flying saucer,” he said, was only a crashed weather balloon. However, to anyone who had seen the debris (or the newspaper photographs of it), it was clear that whatever this thing was, it was no weather balloon. Some people believed–and still believe–that the crashed vehicle had not come from Earth at all. They argued that the debris in Brazel’s field must have come from an alien spaceship. It didn't help that throughout the 1950s, the Air Force conduced a series of secret “dummy drops” over air bases, test ranges and unoccupied fields across New Mexico. These experiments, meant to test ways for pilots to survive falls from high altitudes, sent bandaged, featureless dummies with latex “skin” and aluminum “bones”–dummies that looked an awful lot like space aliens were supposed to–falling from the sky onto the ground, whereupon military vehicles would descend on the landing site to retrieve the “bodies” as quickly as possible.  It turned out that the U.S. military was way more into civilians thinking there was an alien spaceship than telling them the truth in this case. The Army now says that the debris in the rancher's field outside Roswell actually belonged to Project Mogul. Project Mogul used sturdy high-altitude balloons to carry low-frequency sound sensors into the tropopause, a faraway part of the Earth’s atmosphere that acts as a sound channel. In this part of the atmosphere, sound waves can travel for thousands of miles without interference, much like under the ocean. Scientists believed that if they sent microphones into this sound channel, they would be able to eavesdrop on nuclear tests as far away as the Soviet Union. Apparently, the discovered debris was the remains of a 700-foot-long string of neoprene balloons, radar reflectors (for tracking) and sonic equipment that the scientists had launched from the Alamogordo base in June and that had, evidently, crashed in early July 1947. Because it was highly classified, no one knew what to make of it, and no one from Alamorgordo could step in to clear things up. ... But hey, I don't really know. Could they have been covering up something extraterrestrial, too? And even if the Roswell Incident was more a case of covering up nuclear espionage than extraterrestrial life, we know the government is covering up ETs all the time.