Popular Mechanics & Science - What Really Happened at Roswell?

I don’t consider Roswell the pillar of Ufology, that some do. I have created this thread because there are a number of points in it that are relevant to a number of other threads recently sparking debate on ATS .

* Firstly - this post is an example for another member, of how you don’t need to visit document libraries and records offices, but can still do a modicum of research and create a thread reaching beyond a couple of sentences.

*Secondly - Roswell is a good example of a number of ‘personalities’ in their later years telling of government cover-ups, spaceships and aliens.

* Finally - Roswell is perhaps the primary case where efforts to undermine both the official and the ‘more cosmic’ take on events have been prevalent.

For brevity I have relied on a reasonably respectable source for the basis of the details presented.However it contains just a small snippet of the Roswell lore that many of you will already be familiar with.

I have used Popular Science and sister publication Popular Mechanics. Both ran features on the Roswell UFO story during a time of peak interest in the case and the magazine issues are now available exactly as they appeared in print on Google. So I’ve stuck, in general to a summary of these articles in this thread.

First we drift back to July 1997 and the 50th anniversary of the Roswell event........

Popular Mechanics – “Roswell Plus 50”

Source : Popular Mechanics - July 1997

Being a mainstream publication a fairly conservative view on the mother of all UFO conspiracy stories is to be expected. In the opening paragraphs that seems to be the case.

The Popular Mechanics July 1997 edition “Roswell Plus 50”

...............
The passage of time has also complicated the task of ferreting out the truth about Roswell. The three men who might have known what actually happened–rancher Mac Brazel, who collected an armload of wreckage from a crash site near Corona, 85 miles northwest of Roswell; intelligence officer Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, who identified it as from a "flying disc"; and Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, who ordered Marcel to retract his claim–are dead.

Time has also scattered the files of the U.S. Army Air Corps, Atomic Energy Commission and other government agencies that may have investigated the episode into the bureaucratic wind. For this reason, a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation performed at the request of New Mexico Congressman Steven H. Schiff and released in July 1995 reported finding no official records of a crash, other than the Army Air Corps account of a crashed weather balloon and an FBI memo that refers to it.

But then suddenly the column amazingly declares a conclusion totally against the official lines taken since July 9th 1947. There was a crashed disc and dead bodies....



The story then goes on to explain how the RAAF (Roswell Army Air Force) first declared they had found a flying disc and how the story was changed next day. Jesse Marcel, the base intelligence officer, was then sheepishly photographed displaying the wreckage of a weather balloon for the media.



Beyond the odd whisper the story then went quiet, until 1978, when Marcel decided to go public with his own story that the material he had collected was not from this planet. Thirty one years after an event that had hardly registered amongst the plethora of popular UFO cases up to that point, we suddenly had a game changer.



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The Kaufmann Confession



Kevin Randles’ (fairly recent at the time) interviews with Frank Kaufman are then discussed in detail.. And boy did he have a story to tell..........

Kaufman claimed that the Roswell incident began on July 1st 1947. He was working with a group of radar experts around 100 miles to the South West of Roswell when they began to detect unexplainable radar returns. On July 3rd he stated that a bright glare lit up the display and reports started to come into the RAAF base from residents in the north of Roswell describing a glow in the desert as if an aircraft had crashed.

Kaufman then claimed that he drove north into the desert in the early hours accompanied by a small contingent of men, base commander Col. Blanchard and Jesse Marcel. Turning off road near mile marker 132 they eventually found a heel shaped craft 25’ x 12’ embedded into the side of a cliff. Four small dead bodies were at the scene although showing no signs of burns.



Kaufman details how a retrieval operation took place whilst two diversionary sites were also created to confuse anyone curious enough to venture out into the desert. The wreckage and bodies were then inconspicuously transported on an Army truck to Fort Worth, Texas, and then on to Wright Field in Ohio.

Randle already had doubts about the content of Kaufman’s story. A lot of it did not seem to fit. But Kaufman also provided a number of authentic looking notes and documents that also made his story convincing. Elements of Kaufman’s tale are now embedded in the Roswell mythology despite a later discovery that Randle’s doubts were well founded.

 
The German Connection



Another theory that the magazine explored was how the US had searched for German engineers who had worked on a saucer project.

The Horten brothers were two of these engineers moved to the US after their capture in late 1946 as part of Operation Paperclip. Declassified records obtained by the magazine during investigation suggested that the failed Avro flying car and Horten wing were, in fact built as decoys to hide the existence of more potent hardware. One was a secret flying disc program called Project Pye Wacket. Its objective was to design a 5’ diameter liquid-fuelled missile launch platform to protect U.S. bombers penetrating Soviet airspace.



Artistic impression of the Pye Wacket saucer shaped missile.


However when ICBM became the main delivery system for nuclear weapons in the 1960s the program appeared to have been cancelled with many details of it remaining classified to this day.

The author however states that, although interesting, they don’t feel a German inspired craft crashed at Roswell.
 

The Japanese Connection



Closing its investigations the researchers believed a forthcoming release of documents would eventually reveal what crashed and neatly explain the "dead aliens".

These documents were supposedly going to reveal a Japanese equivalent to Operation Paperclip and a suicide-piloted version of the Fugo incendiary bomb. The article speculates heavily that the craft that crashed near Roswell was a more advanced Fugo, or a hybrid craft. Japanese engineers brought to the US had built the craft and the dead bodies were those of Japanese pilots....

Fifty years after the fact, the questions about Roswell still ring loud and clear. Our investigation leads us to believe the explanations that require an extraterrestrial presence, while possible, are nevertheless highly implausible. We're putting our money on a flying disc labelled "Made In Japan."

The documents revealing these supposed experiments by captured Japanese engineers and pilots on US soil have still not materialized. This theory now seems one of the more bizarre Roswell theories put out there. 

continues below >>>

Popular Mechanics – June 2003

Source : Popular Mechanics - June 2003



Five years later the same author, Jim Wilson, delves once again into the Roswell story. Files from the Cold War era were seeing regular releases at the time. This article covered the 11 boxes of most recently released Roswell files and the military paper trail from Roswell AAF base beginning in early July days of 1947.

Most of the boxes were filled with newspaper and magazine clippings about flying saucers, old books, and government UFO reports that were made public decades ago. There were Betamax videotapes about UFOs. We even found the remains of the infamous balloon reflector, which UFO buffs claim the government planted at the crash site in place of the pieces of the flying disc. These pieces, they say, were taken to an undisclosed military base.

Then, amid the clutter, in Box 1, we found what we were after. It was a seemingly unimportant document titled "Morning Reports, July 1947." ..................

Now if there was anything unusual going on at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947 then surely these morning reports would reveal something?



But sadly no details of any deployment of fire fighters, medical staff or even men sent off base were revealed, never mind details of an accident.

Claims that enlisted men and officers involved in a cleanup operation were transferred from Roswell AAF to maintain a silence were also investigated. These transfers were actually confirmed in the released papers and were initiated as part of the creation of the US Air Force. The men were moving from Army to Air Force. The paper trail was not turning up anything unusual.

The article doesn’t really mention what was in the remaining boxes of evidence in any detail. Apparently part of the Mogul balloon was part of this evidence but no further comment on it. Nor is there any mention of the press releases of finding a flying disc or the collection of materials by Jesse Marcel.

Next an attempt to contact Kaufmann was made.Then it was discovered that he had passed away in 2001. His widow however had allowed access to his papers to, amongst others, Mark Rodeghier (scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies). In late 2002, Rodeghier had published his findings.

"To put it quite plainly, Frank Kaufmann created an altered version of an official document to present a false version of his military career consistent with his claims about his involvement with the events at Roswell. His supposed work in intelligence was used to explain how he came to be so knowledgeable about what crashed at Roswell and the subsequent military cover-up."

Kaufman also possessed old military stationary and two old typewriters which he had used to produce other faked documents to embellish his story.

Source : Kevin Randle's blog

Kaufman’s story shows how people do lie and fabricate evidence to fool others and weave their way into a story. Their motives may be to gain 15 minutes of fame, for financial reward or simply to fool or confuse others. Whatever the reasons people have done so throughout history and will continue to do so in the future.


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Popular Science - June 1997

Popular Science in June 1997 also offered up it’s take on the Roswell events as the 50th anniversary of whatever happened approached.

We hear of Mac Brazel’s find of strange material on the Foster ranch. Material he could not burn or cut with a knife. Then Jesse Marcel’s story is laid out and describes how he took home parts of a “flying saucer” for his son Jesse Junior to see.

Jesse Marcel Junior then recalls his father waking him late at night to show him strange metal foil, pieces of what looked like Bakelite plastic, and a lightweight I-beam inscribed with purplish hieroglyphic-like symbols.

Next Walter Haut (the base public relations officer) explains that Base Commander Col. William H. Blanchard told him to issue a press release and say that the RAAF had a flying saucer in its possession.

 

Glenn Dennis

The story then focuses on Glenn Dennis, employed at the Ballard Funeral Home as a mortician, and aged 21 years old in July 1947. As many know, his story has also been absorbed in to the Roswell folklore. Dennis claims he received strange calls from a military “mortuary officer” , asking how many hermetically sealed baby child caskets and what embalming fluids would do to a body .



In this article there is no mention of the elusive nurse who spoke to him about alien dead bodies. The nurse story has never really checked out. With it Dennis’ credibility as a witness has suffered. Dennis seems to have confused events from a later date and perhaps created large parts of his story. Even if some parts of Dennis’ tale were true then he is now seen as an unreliable witness in the case.

Crash Sites

The next part of the article focuses on the various crash sites detailed down the years.

First up is the Hub Corn Ranch, 30 miles North of Roswell. The owner claims it was not until 1994 when he first realised a spacecraft crashed there back in 1947. Ironically Jim McKnight, whose aunt sold the ranch to Corn's father, signed an affidavit that says his family owned the ranch in 1947, and no military personnel ever set foot there to recover a spacecraft or any other debris.

A second site, some 50 miles West of Roswell, is dismissed. The witness, Jim Ragsdale, claimed he was with a girlfriend on the July 4th weekend, in his truck, when a spaceship came crashing through the trees a mere 50 yards away. He said the spaceship was not badly damaged and so he looked inside and saw dead alien bodies before fleeing the scene when military vehicles began to approach in the early hours. It seems his story didn’t really add up because a local nightspot Pine Lodge was only a mile from the spot. The article contests that any such crash would have attracted a lot of attention, especially on the holiday weekend, from the clientele at Pine Lodge.

Finally we have the original crash site on the Foster ranch, around 75 miles Northwest of Roswell. The military clean up seems to have been the most comprehensive one in history as neither civilians or military personnel managed to hold on to even the smallest a piece of the ‘memory metal’.




The article sums it all up claiming that there was indeed a cover-up over what crashed at Roswell in 1947 but also tows the official government line. There was no spaceship, no alien bodies were recovered and the materials found by Mac Brazel (and collected by Jesse Marcel ) were from a top secret Mogul Balloon project. Anything else was simply confusion or fabrication.

The US military deceived the public over what really came down in the vicinity of Roswell in 1947 until the mid-1990s. Allegedly they were protecting details of a top secret program to monitor the Soviets nuclear capabilities at the start of the Cold War. Was this true or just another story to cover up something else?

On the other side of the coin a whole mythology of crashed saucers, dead alien bodies, back engineered technology and even an international cabal who secretly deal with the aliens has grown out of the Roswell story.

If you go back to the original 1947 reports, Brazel left the debris strewn across the ranch until he heard about a reward for retrieving a flying saucer. Debris, from initial descriptions, that appears to fit in with the story of a crashed Mogul balloon. The ‘memory metal’ was actually scattered in pieces across the pasture and described as like tinfoil. So was it really that unbreakable?

For the US military it is impossible to prove they aren’t holding on to something that (they claim) never existed in the first place. But the changes to their own story down the years have only added to the suspicion that they are still concealing the truth.

For the cast of players in the Roswell story, many who have now departed this earth, their stories are almost all anecdotal. It’s easy to think they had no reason to lie. But people can be mistaken, get confused, are often prone to exaggeration and sometimes will tell lies. The more people that have become involved the more inflated the story has become.

Back in 1978 Prime Witness - Jesse Marcel claimed that the debris he had retrieved was “not of this world”. He made no mention of aliens in any interview made public.



Sheridan Cavitt, who eventually admitted being with Marcel in the debris field that July day, flatly denied what he saw was anything other than a balloon in a written statement.



Even the very beginnings of the story are seen totally differently by two of the first hand military witnesses to reach the crash site. Once the crowd of extras were introduced to spice up the story Jesse Marcel’s part became heavily diluted. Without him speaking out then perhaps Ufology may have taken a very different turn.

So what do you think ATSers?

Is there anything beyond the Mogul balloon story?

Did a bunch of wannabees looking for fame or a quick buck suddenly jump on a bandwagon encouraged by ‘researchers’ eager to sell books?

Or was there a concerted effort to undermine the whole Roswell story once Jesse Marcel decided to pipe up?






Addendum : If you want to see the official Roswell Reports from the USAF then IsaacKoi’s thread is a good place to start :
“US Government reports on Roswell incident - PDF downloads

Roswell was probably a disinformation ploy to convince the Soviets we had crashed/recovered non-terrestrial technology.

They had the disclosure, the sudden yanking of the story (ah, suspicion), then the planting of several leaks.

What does not make sense is that the large debris field of Mac Brazel does not, in any way equate to - and listen closely - to 'the recovery of a flying disc'.

The headline was 'RAAF Captures Flying Saucer, which was probably the reporter's terminology.

The story says:
'No Details of Flying Disk Are Revealed;
'Roswell Hardware';
'Man and Wife';
'Report Disk Seen'.

There's no evidence that anything was flying, no evidence that there was any thing which equated to a disc. The man and wife were probably the Wilmots who saw a 'disk' shaped fireball. The unidentified rancher was probably Brazel.
(bolding mine)

The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.

According to information released by the department, over authority of Maj. J. A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises.

How does a field of debris equate to an 'instrument', a 'flying saucer' (which was not seen flying)?

Was the debris substituted? Was the story released to titillate the Soviets, and then a debris field created?

It just doesn't match up.

And, we know that Gen Ramey and Dubois and Col. Blanchard were not demoted for prematurely releasing a 'top secret' item, they were promoted.

The Wilmotts talked about seeing a fireball. Is that related to the Brazel debris field?

So there's a lot of conflation a lot of 'oops, we didn't mean to release that', pictures with General Ramey, and we know Marcel liked to 'tell stories'.

The best estimation is a disinformation ploy to scare the Russkies, I think.

a reply to: mirageman

Popular Science magazine is widely known as promoting the government's position toward the phenomena.
I guess they think they have a credible reputation to uphold. Not to mention the multiple pipelines they have into all areas of official science that mostly detest the very concept of aliens buzzing around us in UFOs.

what about the smoking gun story.Being able to read the letter Marcel was holding. Blown up for the newspaper.a reply to: Maverick7

Popular Science magazine is widely known as promoting the government's position toward the phenomena.

yep..they're a bunch of confirmed assholes.

I just had too.

SnF

originally posted by: mirageman

So what do you think ATSers?

Don't know what happened there mate but I do think the event is worth putting into context with other UFO sightings around the same time.

A while back Stanton Friedman told me that Roswell was not the beginning, but actually the end of a period when Flying Discs (as they were called back then) were buzzing the entire United States continuously for an entire 2 weeks BEFORE Roswell. He suggested I should go have a look through the newspaper microfiche archives in my area because the majority of these sightings were right in my area. I did so and... he turned out to be 100% correct.

The Day Before Roswell

These two statements also piqued my interest.

"After the plane from Roswell arrived with the material I asked the base commander to personaly transport it in a B-26 to Major General Mc Mullen in Washington DC.
The entire operation was conducted under strictest secrey.The weather balloon explanation for the material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press".
Brigadier General Thomas Dubose.
Commanding Officer of Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Affadavit 09/16/01



"We heard the material was coming to Wright Field. It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don't know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual".
Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon

Cheers.

Nice write-up mirageman. To let you know where I have always stood on ET's in general, I think it is likely they exist in the universe, but I am not convinced they are visiting earth. It is possible, and people are definitely seeing something, and normally I tend to lean where the most abundant evidence points. The abundant evidence for UFO's in general comes from eyewitness accounts, and there are tens of thousands of them. I do not believe people are making this stuff up in the majority of cases, and the big question in my mind is just how likely is the average person to mistake a know craft for an ET craft? So I have been torn for a long time between my believing the majority of eyewitnesses are seeing things, and the fact that it doesn't seem that plausible for aliens to be visiting earth, considering we have virtually no proof. So I am on the fence so to speak, but I definitely believe in the possibility.

Now the idea of a saucer-shaped missile or conventional aircraft is preposterous to me, mainly because the shape is horrible for conventional flight. It is highly inefficient, and would not generate lift like a traditional wing. Therefore I believe that if the military somehow does have craft of this shape, they are not using conventional propulsion methods. Judging from witness testimony, the movements attributed to these craft would suggest that they are not interacting with our atmosphere like a traditional aircraft, which suggests some type of anti-gravity technology, even though we know of no way to achieve this at present. There could perhaps be some type of field being generated, and which is used to negate the force of gravity, perhaps somehow acting as an artificial atmosphere, or giving the craft some force to act against. I don't really know.

What I always think of when I hear Roswell is the account of the farmer whose property the craft crashed onto, as well as the claim from the journalist that the government showed up and basically threatened him, whitewashing the story of ET's. If I remember correctly this was about the time the government recanted on the UFO claim. I have also always wondered why they would have initially stated it was a UFO in the first place. It seemed plausible that this could have been done to hide a secret experimental craft or a classified balloon project they were working on, and they felt that it was better for people to think it was an alien craft than a classified project. That makes perfect sense. So why then do they go back on what they initially stated, when the initial claim would have supported their aims of keeping the balloon project a secret? Let people believe what they want, as long as it is not the truth.

I always thought it seemed more plausible that they recanted because what was initially claimed was accurate. If what was initially claimed was inaccurate, why not let it stay that way? I highly doubt it was some type of reverse-psychology, where they planned to say it was a UFO, then change the story in the hopes that people would definitely think it was a UFO then, and that there was a coverup, all to protect a conventional project. Most people at that time would have believed the government, as they didn't lie as much as they are willing to now, at least in my opinion. The times were different, and more innocent in a way. That is partly why I think that the truth might have initially been told to start with. The claim was made by a person who did not think the government would try to cover up the fact that an alien ship had crashed, and that this would have been announced the the public. It just seems slightly more plausible to me than the alternative, which would have to be as follows:

I do not see the government coming out and saying it was an ET craft on an assumption. I mean they would have looked into the matter and would have known if it wasn't an ET craft right? That much should have been obvious. So the claim of it being a UFO just doesn't seem to fit. Why did they bring in the UFO aspect at all? And they were the ones that did that initially, not the public. And couple that with the reports of Brazel, the man whose property the craft landed upon, and things already seem fishy, and we are just scratching the surface. The farmer would have been able to tell the difference in some foil and sticks and an alien craft. And the claim of crash dummies was a later addition, and the dummies, and we know what they look like today, were in no way similar to the bodies that were seen.

Anyway, I do think there are way better cases than Roswell for UFO investigators, but the reason I think Roswell is such a big deal is because there were supposedly bodies recovered. Did you guys see the thread the other day about the Area 51 employee, the guy who did the deathbed confession, and showed that alien picture? I thought that was pretty cool looking, but I didn't look into it very much. Do you think that an alien like that in that particular picture, or an alien like the supposed "greys" could be confused with a human-looking crash test dummy? I have many, many more question about Roswell, and many more things that I find illogical and fishy, but I will see what others have to say first. Again though, I think you did a great job on this thread.

originally posted by: JiggyPotamus The abundant evidence for UFO's in general comes from eyewitness accounts, and there are tens of thousands of them. I do not believe people are making this stuff up in the majority of cases

Actually, when you rule out mistaken identities (bolides, Venus, planes seen at odd angles) and experimental craft (f117-A, early Have Blues, B-2), the rest consist of a huge group of made up reports, hoaxes, scams (people flying ultralights, RPVs).

I'd say 20-30% mis-identification of prosaic objects, 10-15% experimental craft and 40-50% hoaxes, jokes, scams, and yes, 5-10% disinformation or black-ops - i.e. government run studies cloaked as ET-events.

Examples of gubmint ops: Betty and Barney Hill (run out of Pease AFB), Lonnie Zamora (Venus explorer test bed craft?), possibly the Louisiana Pascagoula 'abduction'.

a reply to: mirageman
Roswell very much has all the hallmarks of a psychological operation - the most telling part is that the Air Force sent for a reporter, to publicise a theoretically top secret sensitive event, published an article, and then retracted. This is how you cause people to believe.

If a vehicle crashed and it wasnt from the US, that means it was probably Soviet or otherwise. In either case, there would have been a mass panic realising that an enemy was far more advanced! All stories I ever read mentioned the military gave the reporter a handgun, which is against all professional protocol...

Whether it was to cover up a project failure or just to scare the Soviets, it makes sense that they would desire speculation that they had extraterrestrial technology. If they had a project failure it would drop morale among Americans.

Then as Maverick pointed out, the soldiers got promoted! Not charged with treason! If anyone leaks information about top/classified technology, it is considered the highest crime under US law!

Recall the episode of Chasing UFOs where they interviewed one of the primary witnesses and gave him a row of materials and asked him to pick out which was most like what he found. He selected the (mylar I think its called). I have a roll of it in my basement and it fits exactly the descriptions - it doesnt bend, crease, burn, its thin and durable, and shiny like metal...

originally posted by: Michaelfunction
what about the smoking gun story.Being able to read the letter Marcel was holding. Blown up for the newspaper.a reply to: Maverick7

I assume you mean the Ramey Memo? (of which a snippet is shown above).

What I would say is that it relies on the two word "Victims" and "Wreck" being accurate interpretations of the words in the actual memo. Neither of which are entirely clear. The word interpreted as "victims" may contain only 6 letters not 7 and may well say "pieces" for all I know. Or it could say "remains" In which case the whole meaning is changed.

Not necessarily a smoking gun. But interesting nonetheless because it is potentially a vital piece of evidence.

a reply to: karl 12

Yep there was something going on before UFO had even entered the vocabulary and even flying saucer was a brand new term.

a reply to: Maverick7 ; reply to: JiggyPotamus and a reply to: Ridhya

Maverick/Jiggy/Ridhya some interesting thoughts there and thanks for adding to the thread.

Say "Roswell" to most people in the world and they will make the connection with UFOs/Aliens. So in that respect it is the world's most famous case.

However I am not so sure it's the best case we have. All the information from the time points to a debris field and materials consistent with a Mogul balloon. Marcel may not have been able to break or burn it. But whatever it was had come apart so was hardly indestructible.

The announcement of a "flying disc" being captured has be taken in the context of the times and people would not necessarily associate it as describing an alien craft back in 1947. Once Marcel rebooted the story in 1978 a whole host of people crawled out from the desert in the following 2 decades to embellish the tale.

Many of them getting on in life.

The question is why did they?

People like Kaufmann and Dennis are just a couple who came out with fantastic stories. Even Walter Haut got in on the act. Then you have people like Phil Corso. All of their testimony is interesting but also questionable.

Did they simply do it all for personal fame/gain?
Are they confusing different events with Roswell?
Were one or two of them feeding false information for other reasons?
Or amongst it all is there really some truth being told?

The US military don't come out of it well either as even their story has been changed a number of times.

As for the Roswell 'researchers'. Some of them clearly want to steer the story in the direction that makes it highly entertaining and exciting for their readers.

The story has become a modern myth and many pieces of the story don't seem to make sense.

a reply to: mirageman

Both articles take the tone of debunkery and as far as I'm concerned are simply part of the continued cover-up. Funny how it's the same author for both eh? They let the cat out of the bag in '47 and have been trying to stuff it back in ever since, but too many people were aware of what really happened. Many of them are dead now and of course that is great news for the government.

a reply to: mirageman

I think the fact that such an incident as complex and as big as this one, would not all aspects of it make sense, I think, would be a given. There has been so much disinformation and additional information about it all over the past so many decades, how could parts of it not make sense? Personally I believe the headlines were correct originally. The headline that said " Flying Disc Recovered" or whatever the original headline was. The biggest reason I feel this way is because almost immediately after this the military jumped in and demanded a change in the storyline, and offered a different version. A stances they have pretty much taken, and defended ever since.

a reply to: karl 12

...................

A while back Stanton Friedman told me that Roswell was not the beginning, but actually the end of a period when Flying Discs (as they were called back then) were buzzing the entire United States continuously for an entire 2 weeks BEFORE Roswell. He suggested I should go have a look through the newspaper microfiche archives in my area because the majority of these sightings were right in my area. I did so and... he turned out to be 100% correct. The Day Before Roswell

Interesting because I also found a report from 1967

The Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 by Ted Bloecher : PDF Link

Although there is some dispute over the exact data of the Roswell Crash. Disc sightings peaked around the time the reports were hitting the news wires.



Disc sightings 1947


This report also mentions Roswell

While newspapers still carried a few apparently genuine UFO reports – often buried among a mish-mash of superficial nonsense -- the kind of stories that made headlines after July 8th were the sort a reader found impossible to take seriously. If a report wasn’t an out-and-out hoax, it was an embarrassingly obvious mistake.

One of those mistakes, given the widest possible publicity, had its origins near Roswell, New Mexico, when a farmer named William W. ("Mac") Brazel discovered the wreckage of a disc on his ranch near Corona, early in July. After hearing news broadcasts of flying saucer reports, Brazel, who had stored pieces of the disc in a barn, notified the Sheriff’s Office in Roswell, who, in turn, notified Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the Roswell Army Air Field intelligence offlce. The remnants of the disc were taken to Roswell Field for examination. Through a series of clumsy blunders in public relations, and a desire by the press to manufacture a crashed disc if none would obligingly crash of itself, the story got blown up out of all proportions that read :


"Crashed Disc Found in New Mexico."


According to AP on July 8th, public information officer Lt. Walter Haught (sic) made an announcement of the discovery: “The many rumors 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 sheriffs offlce of Chavez County.”

The effect of this reckless statement was equal to an atomic detonation; results were immediate. While newspaper deluged the air base for additional information, a search party was sent out to scour the landing site for additional fragments; the collected remains of whatever it was that had crashed on Brazel’s ranch were taken to Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth,Texas. There, Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey tried to clarify matters by first explaining that no one had actually seen the object in the air; that the remains were of a flimsy construction; that it was partially composed of tinfoil; and, finally, that it was the wreckage of "a high altitude weather device."

Warrant Office Irving Newton, a weather forecaster at the Fort Worth Weather Station, had identified the crashed "disc" as the remains of weather equipment used widely by weather stations around the country when sending balloons aloft to measure wind directions and velocity.

There remains the possibility that some super-secret upper-atmospheric balloon experiment had crashed near Corona, which would have accounted for all the confusion and secrecy involved in its recovery.

Whether the pictured balloon equipment carried widely in the press was actually a photograph of the recovered fragments remained a question, but news editors should have been on their toes: other similar incidents had already been reported, like the discovery several days before of the weather device at Circleville, Ohio. The New Mexico incident created uproar in Washington, and high Army Air Force officials were reported to have delivered a blistering rebuke to Roswell Field spokesmen for having fostered the confusion. But the damage had already been done and the next day “Another Saucer Shot Down” was typical of the headlines found in American papers.

So twenty years after the event it was considered a military PR disaster even though there was some speculation that a secret balloon experiment was involved, that the original debris photographed may not have been genuine and perhaps this accounted for the secrecy.

my opinion is the 509th were not naive,my grandfather being one of them.
He was an atomic weapon carrying B29 pilot stationed there in 1947.
He was one of the smartest people I've known.

It's also my opinion Popular Science Nat Geo The History Channel
are all media fronts for the NSA. I'd believe what they say about UFO's
about as much as their 9/11 reports.

My grandfather denied the existence of ET craft every time in 38 years of asking.
That is until 2 years before he died. When asked that time all he did was say
"do you really want to know?" I said um yeah...obviously.
and then he simply nodded solemnly .This way he never said it.