David Vance SubstackRead More
It’s the most famous UFO incident of them all – I am talking of course about the Roswell UFO incident.
It all began on 24 June 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in the US, helping to search for a crashed military aircraft.
He saw 9 crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at a height of around 3km (10,000ft) and an estimated speed of approximately 1,900km/h: seemingly impossible at the time. Arnold described the jerky movement of the objects as being, “like a saucer would if you skipped it over water.” The media got hold of the story, coined the phrase ‘flying saucer’ and a modern mystery was born.
A few weeks later, on 7 July, a local rancher named ‘Mac’ Brazel contacted the sheriff in Roswell to say he’d discovered strange debris spread over his ranch. He’d found it days earlier but hadn’t thought much of it until the stories about flying saucers emerged.
Thinking there might be a connection and guessing something might have crashed during a recent storm, he alerted the authorities. He’d brought some samples of the debris, and when the sheriff contacted the nearby Army airbase, intelligence officer Jesse Marcel went to the crash site with Brazel and recovered more debris.
It gets curious and curiouser when the following truly seismic press release went out from the military base’s public information officer, Walter Haut, who worked with a local journalist to release this report about the event:
“The many rumours regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.
“The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.
“Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”
That seems pretty clear – an unknown object has been found – a “disc” and the military had it. Not a “balloon” – A disc.
But then, in a complete reversal of this position, the US military said a terrible mistake had been made, and that the ‘flying saucer’ was actually a crashed weather balloon.
Are we REALLY expected to believe that? Did the experienced 509th Bomb Group, the only US atomic bomb-capable squadron, not know what a weather balloon was?Doesn’t it REEK of damage limitation – had the truth accidentally leaked out?
Or, was it all a grand deception?
I suppose it should all have ended there except it didn’t because the Roswell UFO crash was then rediscovered in 1978 by nuclear physicist-turned-ufologist called Stanton T Friedman. He has been tipped off that a retired military man had an interesting story to tell: Jesse Marcel.
Marcel told Friedman the weather balloon explanation had been a cover story and that the photos had been staged, with weather balloon debris being substituted for the real wreckage. He claimed that everyone involved in the retrieval was clear the object had indeed been an extraterrestrial spaceship.
Over the next few years, researchers dug deeper into the mystery, tracking down many of the key players, locating additional witnesses and trying to piece together what happened. A number of retired military personnel who had been based at Roswell corroborated some elements of the crashed spacecraft narrative and added their own details.
It’s all so odd. Did the US military recover a non human origin vehicle? Were there occupants and if so, what happened to them? I often think that the 1995 film that allegedly showed an autopsy of an alien (Roswell) was put out to discredit the story as it doesn’t look convincing.
The one thing we can be certain of is that the little dusty town of Roswell in he New Mexico desert was changed forever on June 1947.
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