Roswell 1947: What Actually Happened
The original incident
In early July 1947, W.W. 'Mac' Brazel found unusual debris scattered across his ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. He reported it to the local sheriff, who contacted Roswell Army Air Field. The base issued a press release announcing that personnel had recovered a 'flying disc'.
The next day, the Air Force retracted the statement and said the debris was from a weather balloon. That retraction is the pivot point of fifty years of conspiracy theory.
What the Air Force eventually said
In 1994, the Air Force released a report concluding that the debris was from Project Mogul, a classified programme using high-altitude balloons to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. The unusual materials, including reflective foil and balsa wood, were consistent with Mogul equipment.
A 1997 follow-up report addressed claims that alien bodies had been recovered, concluding that these accounts were likely confabulations of memories of crash test dummies used in separate Air Force experiments during the early 1950s.
The confabulation explanation has itself been questioned, since some witnesses placed the body recoveries in 1947 rather than the early 1950s.
What the documents show
Since the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents related to UFO investigations have been declassified. None contain any reference to recovered alien craft or biological material at Roswell.
The FBI's records, released in full, show a single memo from 1950 describing an unverified report of three 'flying saucers' recovered in New Mexico. The memo records the report; it does not confirm it, and there is no follow-up document.
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