Ask an Amateur Scientist: Roswell, NM
Case #003 – “Did a UFO really crash at Roswell?”
I. The Setup
In the middle of the night or in the early evening or afternoon of the days or weeks of mid to late June, 1947, something crashed in one of two or three locations on the Foster ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico, where farmer William “Mac” Brazel worked as foreman. A number of extraterrestrial bodies may have been found amongst the wreckage. Or nothing at all.
Given such a vivid story, it’s no wonder a legend was born. One might be tempted to label the Roswell incident as an object of public fascination for sixty years now. I know I would, but that may just be my OCD yearning for round numbers acting up. However, in the thirty-one years between 1947 and 1978, nobody really gave Roswell a first thought, much less a second. After an initial press release touting the recovery of a flying saucer, the official military line on the matter was that a weather balloon had crashed on the Foster ranch, resulting in an unwarranted fit of UFO hysteria. This version of the story, supported by photographic evidence, held water. Roswell sweated and loitered at the back of public consciousness as a bohemian retreat. The only extraterrestrial creatures associated with the town came from the ranting journals of pharmacologically adventurous hippies on desert vision quests.
But in 1978, physicist and author Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, a former major with the Roswell Army Air Field, who claimed to have recovered the remains of an extraterrestrial spacecraft from the Foster ranch. That interview formed the basis of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore. This book began what would become a kind of Roswell mania (Ros-mania? Rosapalooza?) that continues to this day.
Though many people believe that an alien craft did, in fact, crash that night, the story seems to have a difficult time being taken seriously in the popular culture. It was a major plot point in the multi-million dollar blockbuster Independence Day, wherein Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith destroyed armies of extraterrestrial invaders via a laptop with a dial-up modem.
The Roswell legend was lampooned in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine featuring the hilariously lovable, yet disturbingly racist money-grubber Quark. (Let’s face it, as much as I love DS9, I’ve always been a little creeped out by the fact that all Ferengi have big noses and live for profit.)
And there was the made-for-Showtime film, Roswell: The U.F.O. Cover-Up, which, though it tried to maintain a serious tone, laughably starred Kyle MacLachlan, whose most critically acclaimed role has been opposite a backward-talking midget.
What about the WB’s teen soap opera Roswell, you ask? Well, I think my point is made.
So, did a U.F.O. really crash at Roswell? I won’t give it away just yet, but there is a reason why this story is so easily parodied.
[nms:roswell,4,0]
II. The Findings
First of all, the testimony of Mac Brazel, who originally found the debris on the Foster ranch, is suspect. In various interviews with the local and national press, he has variously said that he recovered the debris either a few days or a few weeks before he called the sheriff’s department about it, which in turn called the Army. Sometimes he said he left the material where he found it, and other times he said he rolled it up and stashed it under a bush. Strangely, no one seems to question his reasoning behind rolling things up and stashing them in bushes. Maybe it’s a farmer thing. In any case, the debris didn’t seem unusual to him until after he visited the local watering holes and heard stories about flying saucer sightings in and around Roswell. That’s when he called the sheriff and said he might have the remains of a downed spaceship. Yes, this story is founded upon the claims of a drunken farmer who hides treasure in bushes.
A lot has been made in the paranormal research circles about that initial press release from the Army Air Field claiming that a flying saucer had been recovered. At first glance, it does seem awfully suspicious that the Army would tell the public that they’d found a spaceship and then say it was really a weather balloon. But Brazel had described the debris as an assortment of “rubber strips, tin foil, a rather tough paper, and sticks.” He also said that he and Maj. Jesse Marcel, who was sent to collect the material, couldn’t piece it back together again. Even if a spaceship had crashed, why would its wreckage exactly resemble what one would expect to find from a downed balloon? And if it couldn’t be reassembled, how could anyone know whether it was disc-shaped? It seems more likely that the initial press release came from Brazel’s description of the debris as flying saucer wreckage, not from the actual investigation. Besides, how credible can a person be if he sees a pile of tin foil and twigs and assumes it’s an interstellar spacecraft?
The next day an article appeared in the papers featuring a photograph of Maj. Marcel and other Army officials posing with the debris. The weather balloon explanation became official, and the case was closed until Marcel’s 1978 interview and the subsequent onslaught of books, movies, video games, and television shows devoted to exposing the UFO cover-up at any cost. And in the case of the Atari arcade game Area 51, the cost is fifty cents.
The Roswell story has since taken on all the hallmarks of a self-expanding myth. More and more details have been added to the initial framework of the story. In the ensuing decades, we have been told that Maj. Marcel posed with the actual alien wreckage, which was switched with weather balloon materials for later photographs. There have been stories of mass intimidation, burning of records, and even death threats made in the name of the conspiracy. This kind of legend building is a fundamental trait of any myth, from the Loch Ness Monster to Bigfoot. (The New Testament Gospels also smell of this phenomenon, but that’s a topic for a future column.) In fact, most of us have probably even built our own personal myths up the same way. Remember how that car honked at you the other day when you were checking your mail? Remember how you told a friend that you thought you saw the car swerve toward you a little? Remember how you later said that the driver kind of looked like your junior high P.E. coach? What was originally a boring story about a drive-by honking has now become a gritty tale of revenge and mental illness. This is how good stories are made, and the Roswell story has been similarly compounded to the point of farce.
The most ridiculous of the Roswell addenda is the idea that alien bodies were recovered and autopsied at the local Army base. Glenn Dennis, who claimed to have performed the autopsies himself, named the nurse who assisted him during the procedure. When no such nurse was found to have ever existed, he simply provided another fictional name. In the case of the Fox network’s famous Alien Autopsy special (confusingly hosted by a bloated and very dead-alien-looking Jonathan Frakes), the originator of the supposed autopsy film won’t even provide a sample of the film for dating purposes.
Maj. Jesse Marcel, whose 1978 interview with Stanton Friedman formed the basis for all subsequent Roswell investigations, has since claimed that the material with which he is seen posing in the photo accompanying the weather balloon story was the actual spacecraft remains. When this material was positively identified as coming from a weather balloon, Marcel changed his story and said that an earlier photograph was taken with the real alien debris, which only “looked like” tin foil and balsa wood. When that photograph was uncovered, and the debris was again identified as balloon material, he changed his story yet again. Additionally, Marcel claimed to have won five Air Medals as a pilot. This claim is also false. As are most claims made by senile old coots. I’ve never been to Pyongyang, no matter how many times my grandfather accuses me of being a “dirty Korean”, either.
The problem with building a case on eyewitness accounts is that so many eyewitnesses are either mistaken, lying, delusional, or not even really eyewitnesses in the first place. Of the 25 eyewitness accounts quoted in The Roswell Incident, only seven even saw the debris themselves. And only five of those claimed to have touched it – the same number of people who have ever claimed they were threatened to keep quiet about Roswell.
III. The Conclusion
Just when the Roswell case seemed closed, the U.S. Air Force published The Roswell Report: Case Closed. Released in 1994, this report revealed that the debris recovered at the Foster ranch in 1947 was not technically a weather balloon, but was actually a top secret balloon designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests. An operation called Project Mogul had been sending these experimental balloons up around Roswell at the same time as the supposed “crash”. In fact, the same U.F.O. sightings that inspired Mac Brazel to claim he’d found a flying saucer were probably attributable to sightings of these balloons. The Air Force declassified numerous documents and photographs corroborating the reality of this project. And what were the Project Mogul balloons made out of? Tin foil, balsa wood, and paper. Project Mogul explains why the military took the debris into safekeeping and why Brazel and Marcel couldn’t identify it as a normal weather balloon.
Unlike Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, The Roswell Report’s subtitle is something more than just an empty promise.
IV. What Did We Learn Today?
The Roswell story illustrates a few rules that should never be far from an amateur scientist’s mind.
1. Never trust eyewitnesses. Especially if they can’t back up their claims with evidence.
2. Just because a lot of people tell the same story, it doesn’t make the story true. A tale spread around without any evidence to back it up is the very definition of myth. How many people know the one about the razor blade in the Halloween apple? You know when that actually happened? Never.
3. Extraordinary claims are always marketable. Roswell is an industry. Millions of dollars have been made from interviews, books, pamphlets, candy, and bumper stickers. David Duchovny’s entire career hinges indirectly on the Roswell myth. A story about a farmer finding a balloon on his ranch? Boring. A story about a farmer wrestling a hunk of spaceship from the cold, dead hands of an alien? That’s entertainment!
4. Occam’s Razor. All things being equal, the simplest solution is always the best. Or, in this case, the most accurate. If you’ve seen Contact, you should know this. If you haven’t, you really should rent it. Jake Busey out-creeps anything his dad’s ever done on screen.
5. Independence Day is highly implausible. Dogs don’t heroically dodge fireballs, and death could never come at 28.8Kbps.
About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.
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I think you should reconsider how honest a Government would really be. I am not from the United States so I am not bound by the code of secrecy that the US intelligence officials with knowledge of Roswell are, so I can give you bits of information that would make your hair curl.
Recently, a series of documents was released by the British Government involving UFO sightings and encounters. Some are legitimate, some are not.
If you are such a brilliant scientist, you should be able to inspect these videos, and inform me which are real.
You can find them on the web
But it was not project Mogul. You don't even know that. In 1997 army changed the official story again and said it was a secret balloon that ejected crash dummies on the ground. Which is ofcourse ridiculous because if it was any army project army would be looking for it and nobody looked for it until it appeared in newspapers by army officials who before that made inquiry of asking other army bases and even Pentagon if they were running secret tests.
So what is more ridiculous that it was crashed "Flying saucer" or let loose secret balloon that ejected test crash dummies? The woke up one morning and said "Hey let's make a balloon ejecting test crash dummies and let it do it somewhere where nobody can see the actual test."