Prologue
On a starlit night in July of 1947, something occurred in the desert between Corona and Roswell New Mexico that came to be known as the Roswell Incident. An object fell from the sky onto the Foster Ranch and was subsequently discovered by the ranch foreman, William “Mac” Brazel. Mac reported his discovery to Sheriff Wilcox who called the near by Army Air Field and reported the incident.
On July 8, The RAAF issued a news release that they had recovered a flying disc that had crashed on a ranch near Roswell New Mexico. Within a matter of hours, it was all over the country that the Air Force had captured a flying saucer. The word was that they also had recovered alien bodies. A few days later The RAAF retracted their statement and The Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth issued a subsequent news release stating that there was no flying disc and that the recovered material was from a top-secret weather balloon. Mac Brazel in turn gave the press a statement that dismissed the weather balloon theory, stating that he had retrieved many weather balloons from the ranch in the past. He was quoted in the Roswell Daily Record as saying “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon”
A flurry of newspaper articles followed from around the country. The Sacramento Bee ran the headline, “Army reveals it has flying disc found on ranch in New Mexico.”
“Experts” and locals alike were interviewed at length, each with conflicting opinions. There were also numerous reports of military cover ups with accusations as far reaching as the white house. There are many that believe a space ship was indeed recovered along with the bodies of aliens and taken to a top-secret location known as “Area 57”.
In the 1990’s the air force issued reports that they claimed accounted for the debris found and for the reports of recovered alien bodies. The reports identified the debris as coming from a top-secret government experiment called Project Mogul, which involved balloons carrying microphones and radio transmitters. The supposed purpose of this equipment was to monitor nuclear tests by the Russians. They claimed that some of the reports of recovered aliens resulted from misidentified military experiments using anthropomorphic dummies. Others were reportedly misidentified human bodies from military accidents.
The first book on the subject “The Roswell Incident” by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore was published in 1980. Since then there have been articles, books and television specials too numerous to mention. Many of these publications and programs allude to a government cover-up.
During the time leading up to the incident and for a period after, there were numerous reports of lights in the skies over the desert. Some of these sightings appeared to be from credible sources, while others were obvious hokum.
Even among UFO proponents, the Roswell incident stirs controversy. Theories about the incident range from belief that alien bodies were recovered along with an alien spacecraft to the whole incident being a giant hoax. Some researchers believe that the crash occurred closer to Corona than Roswell, while others think that there wasn’t any crash. Even others believe that this was only a single incident among many crashes in the area.
There are almost as many theories about the Roswell incident as there are people that have heard of it. The incident has become a popular subject for novels, movies and television shows. The town of Roswell New Mexico has become a tourist attraction, catering to UFO seekers. In addition to the “believers” that descend on Roswell are the merely curious and the ones who think of it as a joke. Regardless of why they come to this little desert town, they do come, and they come in large numbers. The result being that a sizable contingent of Roswell’s commercial livelihood derives from the UFO incident of 1947.
Controversy has raged, died out and rekindled anew for over six decades. As time passes, it seems less and less likely that the debate will ever be resolved. Of course, there are many on both sides that claim that it has already been resolved, and that the evidence is irrefutable.
Regardless of what took place that night in the dessert of New Mexico, the incident remains as a part of our western lore, if not history.