The Roswell Incident

It was ’round about this time of the year — near the Fourth of July — nearly eight decades ago that a rancher from New Mexico called W.W. Brazel brought a bunch of mysterious-looking debris he had found on his property to the local sheriff, who was situated about 80 miles southeast in the small town of Roswell. You can see a photo of Air Force personnel inspecting the heap of metalic-looking fabric here. It was this very material that gave rise to the “Roswell incident”: a whole kerfuffle of space-alien conspiracy theories that still lingers today.

In 1947, when Brazel found the stuff, the United States was coming to terms with the horrific power of nuclear bombs and the rise of the Soviet Union — the U.S. had emerged as the global superpower after WWII, but the technology that ended the war with the bombing of Japan seemed futuristic and out-of-control, just like our relationship with the Kremlin. Or just like aliens.

The Roswell sheriff brought the debris to the Roswell Army Airfield’s attention, and soon intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel made a public statement, which appeared in the July 8 edition of the local paper, the _Roswell Daily Record_: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell.” Despite the fact that the very next day the War Department in Washington issued a revised statement — the wads of material were really a “weather balloon,” loads of people refused to believe it, instead imagining that the US government was covering up secret contacts with space aliens.

In fact, what Brazel had uncovered was a US government state secret — the so-called weather balloon was actually a fallen high-altitude balloon developed by the military to spy on Russia. Such balloons were part of “Project Mogul,” but the officer Jesse Marcel hadn’t been quick enough to come up with the weather balloon story before the space-alien one. Furthermore, into the 1950s the US Air Force conducted many “dummy drops” to test pilots’ ability to survive falls from high altitudes in New Mexico. The military would rush out to collect the dummy bodies, whose latex skin and aluminum frames resembled aliens in the minds of nervous Americans, fueling conspiracy theories.