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From time to time in
1947, some people in various parts of the United States and some other
countries reported seeing strange objects in the sky and claimed that they
were spacecraft piloted by space aliens. In the midst of this “flying saucer”
craze, some unusual material fell to the ground on or about July 4 near
Roswell, N.M. On July 8 an eager young information officer at the Roswell
Army Air Field (RAAF) issued an extraordinary and unauthorized press release.
He put forth the story that a “flying disk” had been retrieved from a local
ranch. The Roswell Daily Record immediately picked up the press
release and printed the story with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer
On Ranch in Roswell Region.” (See also Unidentified Flying Object [UFO].) The young officer was
reprimanded and the air base released new information stating that the
“saucer” had actually been a weather balloon, or rather a cluster of
balloons, carrying a radar target—a device somewhat like a box kite, made of
foiled paper fastened to a balsa wood frame. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
published a photograph of two amused Air Force officers posing with the
debris, which consisted of some flexible, silvery material. The Roswell
Daily Record also carried the correction and featured an interview with
the rancher, William (Mac) Brazel, who did not
believe that the debris he discovered was from a weather balloon. (The
portions of the debris most puzzling to Brazel may
in fact have been from a radar target.) Soon, the story faded from public attention. The Roswell incident,
however, began to serve as the basis for hoaxes. One of the early hoaxes was
the 1949 story that actual footage of a captured spacecraft would be shown in
a forthcoming science-fiction film ‘The Flying Saucer'. An actor was hired to
pose as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and swear that
the retrieval was true. When the producer-director was interviewed by Air
Force investigators, he admitted the story was a publicity stunt. The
following year a book titled ‘Behind the Flying Saucers' was published. In it
the author, Frank Scully, alleged that the United States government possessed
no fewer than three alien spaceships, along with the bodies of their
occupants. An investigation of the facts revealed that Scully was told the
story by two confidence men who were attempting to sell an oil-locating
device that they claimed was based on alien technology. During the 1970s
various persons claimed to have seen the bodies of the aliens stored at one
or another secret location. A major promoter of such tales was “Professor”
Robert S. Carr, a spinner of yarns who, according to his son, told such
stories just to make himself seem more interesting. Then in 1980 a book
titled ‘The Roswell Incident' was published. The book's coauthors, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, labeled the weather balloon
explanation a “cover story.” They argued that the original debris, which they
believed was from a crashed flying saucer, had been flown to Wright Field
(later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) near Dayton, Ohio, and material from
a weather balloon was “hastily substituted.” Berlitz
and Moore cited the recollections of former Roswell staff officer Major Jesse
A. Marcel, who was in charge of intelligence at Roswell in 1947. He and Brazel's son described materials that resembled metallic
foil, balsa sticks, and string, yet were supposedly quite technologically
advanced. The authors imply that the material was of extraterrestrial origin.
Unfortunately, many years had elapsed between 1947 and 1980, individual
memories had perhaps become untrustworthy, and in the meantime the forces of
myth-making were in operation. Still other Roswell
hoaxes included the notorious “MJ-12 documents” of 1984, which purported to
show a secret operation was launched by President Truman to handle the
Roswell incident; a falsified diary that surfaced in 1990, supposedly kept by
a man who came upon a crashed saucer with injured aliens in 1947; a bogus
alien autopsy film of 1995 purporting to show the dissection of an alien
corpse; a fake Roswell UFO fragment delivered to a UFO museum in 1996; and so
on. Such sensational hoaxes helped to make the term “Roswell incident” almost
universally familiar to the point that it has achieved the status of myth. Ironically, Berlitz and Moore were right about one thing: the
government's claim that a weather balloon crashed at Roswell was incorrect.
In 1994 the Air Force admitted that the recovered material was in reality
from a United States spy balloon. Part of Project Mogul, it was an attempt to
monitor anticipated nuclear tests by the Soviet Union. In 1997 a definitive
Air Force report ventured the opinion that stories of alien bodies may have
come from civilian witnesses who saw parachute crash test dummies, a severely
injured airman parachutist, and charred bodies from an airplane crash during
the 1950s. The Air Force report proposed that the witnesses “consolidated”
the separate events—the Project Mogul materials, the crash test dummies, the
airman, and the charred bodies—in their memories.
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