{"it":{"id":"CR-ROS","kind":"crash","sub":"Alleged recovery","name":"Roswell incident","place":"Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, USA","lat":33.9503,"lon":-105.3142,"date":"June–July 1947","rep":"The base's 'flying disc' release was withdrawn within a day and replaced with a weather-balloon story.","off":"Air Force reports in 1994 and 1997 said the debris came from Project Mogul, a classified balloon train for detecting Soviet nuclear tests.","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Roswell incident","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident"},{"t":"US Air Force: The Roswell Report: Case Closed (1997)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2010/Dec/01/2001330112/-1/-1/0/AFD-101201-038.pdf"},{"t":"US GAO (1995), NSIAD-95-187: Results of a search for records on the 1947 Roswell crash (archived PDF)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/2020id_/https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-187.pdf"},{"t":"US Air Force: The Roswell Report (archived)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://www.af.mil/The-Roswell-Report/"}],"tags":["Roswell","US Air Force","Debris","USA"],"sum":"On 8 July 1947 the public information office at Roswell Army Air Field announced that its men had recovered a crashed \"flying disc\". The next day the press reported that the commanding general of the Eighth Air Force said it was a radar-tracking weather balloon.\n\nIn 1995 the General Accounting Office searched for every government record on the crash. It found only two from 1947: a July history report from the 509th Bomb Group and the air field, and an FBI teletype dated 8 July. The teletype said the object resembled a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector. Records of the air field's administration from March 1945 to December 1949, and its outgoing messages from October 1946 to December 1949, had been destroyed, and no record showed who destroyed them or on whose authority.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is that gap, and the stories of bodies that grew up later.\n\nThe Air Force view came in two reports. In 1994 it traced the debris to a balloon project code-named Mogul, designed to learn the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research. Its later report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, said the \"aliens\" were test dummies carried by high-altitude balloons. It linked the hospital stories to a 1956 KC-97 crash that killed 11 airmen and a 1959 balloon accident. Congressman Steven Schiff asked for the GAO search because he was concerned the Defense Department had not given him all it held.\n\nIf the records had survived, would the debate be over?","qs":["The Army said flying disc on 8 July 1947 and weather balloon the next day. Which statement do you trust, and why?","Key air field records from 1945 to 1949 were destroyed with no record of who did it. Accident or cover-up?","The Air Force tied the body stories to dummies and accidents years later. Does that settle Roswell?"],"yt":"Read the 8 July press release and the 1994 report side by side. Which details does Mogul explain, and which later claims does it not address?","rel":["REC-TWI1947","GOV-FBI"],"hook":"On 8 July 1947 the Army said it had a flying disc. A day later it was a balloon.","why":"Roswell's first press release said flying disc. The Air Force has offered three explanations since."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"CR-ROS","src":[{"id":null,"t":"US General Accounting Office, Government Records: Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New Mexico, GAO/NSIAD-95-187, July 1995.","u":"https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-187.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Vol. I, March 2024.","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-FEB-2024-FINAL.PDF"},{"id":null,"t":"US National Archives: Project BLUE BOOK - Unidentified Flying Objects, including the Majestic 12 reference report.","u":"https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos"},{"id":null,"t":"FBI Dallas teletype to the Director and SAC Cincinnati, “Flying Disc, Information Concerning,” 8 July 1947, 6:17 p.m. (FBI Vault, Roswell UFO Part 01; OCR read of the scan).","u":"https://vault.fbi.gov/Roswell%20UFO/Roswell%20UFO%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29/view"},{"id":null,"t":"US Air Force, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, Air Force News special report and executive summary (Capt. James McAndrew, 1997).","u":"https://www.af.mil/The-Roswell-Report/"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Project Mogul (quoting Weaver and McAndrew, The Roswell Report, 1995, p. 9).","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Roswell incident (opened in full, with its cited 1947 press quotes).","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident"}],"sum":"On a ranch near Corona, in New Mexico, the debris lay scattered across several acres: tinfoil, rubber, tape and thin wooden beams. The man who found it, W. W. \"Mac\" Brazel, managed the ranch. He had no telephone and no radio, and he did not know that America had spent the past few weeks seeing flying discs everywhere. When he drove into Corona on 5 July 1947, his uncle suggested that the junk might be from one of those \"flying disks.\" Brazel took the idea to the county sheriff. Within days, the wreckage on his land would become the most famous crash in the history of the unexplained.\n\nThe craze Brazel had missed began that June, when the pilot Kenneth Arnold reported a sighting that set off a wave of more than 800 similar reports. So when Sheriff George Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field, the base took it seriously. Its intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, and the counter-intelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt drove out to collect the debris. The base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, told his superior, General Roger Ramey of the Eighth Air Force. And on 8 July the base's public information officer, Walter Haut, put out a statement that began: \"The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday.\" The intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group, it said, had been able \"to gain possession of a disc\" with the help of a local rancher.\n\nWithin hours the story changed. At Fort Worth, Ramey, his chief of staff Colonel Thomas DuBose and the weather officer Irving Newton told reporters the debris was a weather balloon. Marcel, interviewed there, described \"parts of the weather device,\" made of \"tinfoil and broken wooden beams.\" That same evening, at 6:17 p.m., the FBI's Dallas office sent a teletype to J. Edgar Hoover. It relayed that the object, \"hexagonal in shape,\" had been suspended from a balloon and resembled \"a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector,\" and that the disc and balloon were going to Wright Field \"by special plane\" for examination. It ended: \"No further investigation being conducted.\" Brazel, for his part, told reporters: \"I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon.\"\n\nSo, on a single day, the same Army Air Forces made two opposite statements about the same pile of debris. Everything that followed grew in the space between them.\n\nFor thirty years, almost nothing grew at all. Roswell was nearly forgotten. Then, in 1978, the ufologist Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, now retired, who said the debris had been something else. In 1980 the book The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, quoted him describing material that was \"nothing made on this earth.\" More witnesses came forward, many of them second-hand. In August 1989 a mortician, Glenn Dennis, told of alien bodies. That year an episode of Unsolved Mysteries retelling stories of captured bodies was watched by 28 million people. The writer Curtis Peebles noted that some 300 witnesses were eventually claimed for the case. Marcel's son recalled seeing \"purple-hued hieroglyphics\" on one of the beams.\n\nThe official answer came in the 1990s, and it was a third explanation: neither disc nor weather balloon. In 1994 the Air Force traced the debris to Project Mogul, a classified programme run by Air Materiel Command from 1947 to 1949 that flew long trains of balloons carrying microphones, designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. A New York University team had launched one of them, Flight 4, from Alamogordo on 4 June 1947 and lost contact with it near the Brazel ranch. The Air Force concluded that the material was \"most likely from one of the MOGUL balloons that had not been previously recovered.\" It found no sign of a planned cover story. Ramey, it suggested, may have offered the weather balloon to \"deflect interest\" from Mogul, or may simply have believed his weather officer. Even the strange markings found an explanation: the tape on Mogul's radar targets came from a New York toy maker, and its printed symbols match what Marcel's son remembered.\n\nIn 1997 a second report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, dealt with the bodies. The \"aliens,\" it said, were test dummies carried by high-altitude balloons. Stories of bodies at the base hospital it traced to two later accidents, a 1956 crash of a KC-97 in which 11 airmen died, and a 1959 balloon mishap in which two men were injured. Activities spread over \"a period of many years,\" the Air Force said, had been compressed in memory into \"two or three days in July 1947.\"\n\nThat is the official case at full strength, and it is strong. Every physical detail Brazel gave in 1947, the foil, rubber, tape and sticks, fits a balloon train. A secret programme explains why the Army reached for a cover story, and why that cover story was itself not quite true. Much of the later legend, meanwhile, has been shown to be fabricated. The \"MJ-12\" papers, which claimed a secret committee managed recovered saucers, are a hoax; the National Archives found a related 1954 memo bore a classification marking that did not come into use until the Nixon administration. The \"alien autopsy\" film promoted in 1995 was admitted in 2006 to have been staged in a London living room. The 1948 Aztec crashed-saucer story, a con by fraudsters, introduced the alien bodies later attached to Roswell.\n\nBut a strong case is not a closed one, and one question never quite goes away: who controlled the story, and why? In 1993 Congressman Steven Schiff, concerned that the Defense Department had not given him all it held, asked the General Accounting Office to find every government record of the crash. The Air Force released people from their secrecy obligations so they could speak. The GAO's 1995 report found only two documents from 1947: the July history of the 509th Bomb Group, which said the \"flying disc\" had turned out to be a radar-tracking balloon, and the FBI teletype. Then it found a hole. The air field's administrative records from March 1945 to December 1949, and its outgoing messages from October 1946 to December 1949, \"were destroyed.\" The disposition form \"does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records,\" or on what authority. Those outgoing messages are precisely the ones that would show what the base told its headquarters in July 1947.\n\nOther questions remain. Why would an intelligence office describe balloon debris as a disc in a public release at all? The Mogul account explains a secret worth protecting. It explains less well why the first statement went out, or why Marcel, a trained intelligence officer, remembered the debris so differently three decades on. Supporters of the alternative case point to that officer, to dozens of people who described a cordon, bodies and threats, and to an official story that has changed three times: disc, weather balloon, Mogul.\n\nThe government has looked again and again. President Bill Clinton asked his staff to check and later said, \"As far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell.\" In March 2024 the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reviewed the whole file and found \"no evidence\" that any US government investigation had confirmed a UAP as extraterrestrial technology, tracing current crash-retrieval claims largely to \"circular reporting.\"\n\nPerhaps Roswell's real secret was ordinary: a classified balloon that came down on a ranch and was described to the public first as a saucer and then as a weather balloon, neither of which was true. But the messages that would have settled it were destroyed, and no one can say by whom. When a government's first story is a disc, its second a balloon and its third a secret, and the one file that could arbitrate between them is gone, how much of the legend did the public invent, and how much was it invited to fill?"},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/CR-ROS-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Roswell incident, Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, USA — Roswell Daily Record. July 8, 1947. Full front page. Article titled: \"RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell…","by":"Roswell Daily Record.","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roswell_Daily_Record._July_8,_1947._RAAF_Captures_Flying_Saucer_On_Ranch_in_Roswell_Region._Full_front_page.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/CR-ROS.webp","by":"Roswell Daily Record.","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roswell_Daily_Record._July_8,_1947._RAAF_Captures_Flying_Saucer_On_Ranch_in_Roswell_Region._Top_of_front_page.jpg","cap":"Roswell Daily Record. July 8, 1947. RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region. Top of front page.jpg"}]},"hh":[{"v":"1 day","h":"Time before the Army’s “flying disc” statement was retracted","s":[341]},{"v":"Project Mogul","h":"US Air Force reports (1994, 1997) traced the debris to a classified balloon train","s":[342]},{"v":"June–July 1947","h":"Date","s":[341]},{"v":"Ranch near Corona","h":"Location: Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, USA","s":[341]}],"hs":{"341":["Wikipedia: Roswell incident","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident"],"342":["US Air Force: The Roswell Report: Case Closed (1997)","https://media.defense.gov/2010/Dec/01/2001330112/-1/-1/0/AFD-101201-038.pdf"]}}