In the years right after World War II, the United States conducted several experiments using nuclear weapons in the deserts of the Southwestern U.S. In July of 1947, something crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Whether it was a weather balloon as the official government and Air Force reports suggest or an alien spacecraft is anyone’s guess. But what isn’t debatable is that the incident created an entire cottage industry around alien life, not only in Roswell but in Hollywood and beyond.

For years the story languished and then in the 1970s with the massive influx of sci-fi books and films across the country, interest in the incident(s) at Roswell resurfaced in a big way as alien and UFO conspiracy theorists descended on New Mexico, each with a fresh theory on “what really happened.”

The 1990s had the Air Force released two reports about what the supposed true nature of the crashed object. The government has stuck to the same basic story that it was with a twist. The object was a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

Beginnings: The story began far from Roswell when on June 14, William Brazel, a ranch foreman picked up pieces of debris about  30 miles northwest of the town and base. But later reports published on July 8th called the find, “sometime last week” which meant around July 1-2.

Brazel initially described the debris to the Roswell Daily Record as a “large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks.” He told the local law enforcement, Sheriff Wilcox about his find and the sheriff contacted the Army and Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).

An Army Major and a man in plain clothes accompanied Brazel back to the site where they picked up a few more pieces of debris. It was on July 8th when the PAO officer for RAAF, Major Walter Haup issued a press release and first used the words, “flying disc”. His release was covered in the Roswell paper the next day, stating:

The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been 12 feet [3.5 m] long, [Brazel] felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards [180 m] in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet [1 m] long and 7 or 8 inches [18 or 20 cm] thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches [45 or 50 cm] long and about 8 inches [20 cm] thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds [2 kg]. There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine, and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No strings or wires were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.

The FBI Fort Worth office cabled Washington with the news and quoted an Air Force Major while it stated the following:

“The disc is hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a ballon [sic] by cable, which ballon [sic] was approximately twenty feet (6 m) in diameter. Major Curtan further advices advises [sic] that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright field had not [unintelligible] borne out this belief.”

The military tried to hide the true purpose of the object, which was nuclear test monitoring by telling the public that the crashed object was a weather balloon. They had the pieces flown to Fort Worth Army Airfield. They then held a press conference, where pieces of the debris were shown which matched the weather balloon story and in no way resembled an alien spacecraft. The story faded quickly the next day and went into a deep sleep for over 30 years.

Project Mogul: Why the Army and the government covered up the events in Roswell took place long before the 1947 incident. Since the early days of World War II, a group of geophysicists and oceanographers had been working on a top-secret atomic espionage project at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Air Field that was code-named “Project Mogul”.

Project Mogul consisted of the use of high-altitude weather balloons to carry low-frequency sound sensors into the tropopause, high above the earth. In this part of the earth’s outer atmosphere, sound waves can travel for thousands of miles without interference, much like under the ocean. With microphones placed by balloons high into this sound channel, the United States could gather intelligence on any nuclear testing as far away as the Soviet Union.

From the Smithsonian: The debris found by  Brazel in his sheep pasture outside Roswell 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.

Due to security restrictions, no one at Roswell would have been aware of the project and would legitimately have no idea what the objects were. According to unconfirmed reports, several members of the RAAF base believed the debris was a Soviet spy balloon sent to monitor the U.S. The story about the weather balloon was thin, but for the most part, people were satisfied and the newspapers let the matter drop. But for some people, the story rang hollow and they were looking for much deeper answers.

Those people and others saw what the Pentagon began doing in the 1950s as very suspicious and it tied into what they saw as a continuation of the events at Roswell.

Conspiracy Theories Abound: The military conducted a series of secret “dummy drops” all across New Mexico. These experiments encompassed not only bases and test ranges but other public lands as well. The tests were meant to test ways for the Air Force pilots to survive ejecting from aircraft at high altitudes.

The Air Force constructed featureless dummies with latex “skin” and aluminum “bones”, which at first glance appeared to look like space aliens. But people grew suspicious when they’d see things fall from the sky and then watch as soldiers would descend on the landing site and whisk away the evidence as soon they arrived.

For the conspiracy theorists, this convinced them that extraterrestrial creatures were landing on earth and that the government was covering it all up.

Starting around 1978 and lasting well into the 1990s there were a slew of UFO researchers that firmly believed that an alien spaceship had crash-landed in New Mexico in 1947. These researchers descended on the area and interviewed hundreds of supposed witnesses to the event.

Most were debunked and a few were absolute fabrications but a story in the Huffington Post in 2012, breathed some new life into the subject when retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French alleged that there wasn’t one crash at Roswell but two.

The surprising part is that French was once the Air Force officer in charge of debunking alien spacecraft claims. He said the first alien craft was actually shot down utilizing an electronic pulse-type weapon that disabled the space crafts controls and forced the UFO to crash.

He further claims that the second crashed a few days later while trying to recover the first one. French flew hundreds of combat missions in Korea and Vietnam and later worked in intelligence. He said he saw pieces of an Alien spacecraft with inscriptions on it that appeared almost Arabic.

The problem is, pulse-type weapons didn’t exist in the 1950s or 60s but we never let that interfere with a good story. And French’s story is the best yet.

In a country obsessed with Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. There will never be an end to such stories. So, do you believe that “we are not alone” in the galaxy? It would be hard and a bit ludicrous to believe that we’re the only form of life out there.

The recently released footage of the Air Force and Navy pilots seeing UFOs that are infinitely more advanced than our latest and best fighter aircraft would give immediate credence to that fact.  So why doesn’t the government or the Pentagon issue a statement stating that they believe that E.T. wasn’t phoning home but buzzing around our military aircraft?

The Pentagon funded a $22 million dollar project to study UFO encounters between 2007 and 2012. Most of the cash went to a single contractor, Bigelow Aerospace, which built a facility in Nevada outside of Las Vegas to study physical evidence related to various UFOs. The group supposedly came into possession of “metal alloys and other materials” that had allegedly originated in some of the UFOs.

The unit was shut down, ostensibly for budgetary concerns but perhaps it is time to not only research these phenomena but to actually put forth a true effort into finding how all of these incidents around the world connect.

One thing is for certain, all of these incidents began with the July 1947 incident at Roswell and whether they are aliens or man-made secret projects, more effort needs to be put forth to identify and understand them.

But the autopsies of aliens at Roswell? I’m not buying that one.

Photos: Wikipedia