There’s a lot of ambiguity surrounding the Roswell Incident, so the question is, what really happened?
On the 14th June 1947, a rancher W.W. Mac Brazel and his son were making their way across Mac’s ranch land, north of the town Roswell, when they came across ‘a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil and rather tough paper and sticks.’ Mac was intrigued and decided to collect the materials from the wreckage. He then drove to Roswell to show Sheriff George Wilcox what he had found.
The sheriff was puzzled and contacted the commander of Roswell’s Army Airfield 509th Composite Group. An intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, was sent to investigate and released a public statement that a flying saucer had been found.
This was soon after the close of World War II, and nuclear warfare was still on the mind. The Soviet Union had begun claiming Eastern Europe nations in the post-war vacuum and The Marshall Plan was in the works, so the Air Force thought it better to claim a spacecraft had crash landed rather than tell the truth.
On June 21st, Navy Seaman Harold Dahl claimed to have spotted six UFOs, and stated that the next morning he was debriefed by ‘men in black.’ Not long after, the pilot, Kenneth Arnold, saw a flying saucer by Mount Rainer in Washington. By the end of 1947 over 300 UFO sightings had occurred in the last six months. However, on July 9th the Roswell Dispatch’s headline read ‘Army Debunks Roswell Flying Disc as World Simmers with Excitement.’ US Army Officials released a statement that the wreckage was from a weather balloon. However, it was later discovered that this was a cover up for Project Mogul.
Project Mogul was a secret programme run by the US Army Air Forces in which microphones were flown on high altitude balloons, designed to detect long-distance sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. Though despite the news of Project Mogul, some eyewitnesses claimed that alien bodies had been taken from the site, and it was rumoured that these bodies were being autopsied. The government explained this away by stating that these were fallen parachute-test dummies. Donald Schmitt, a UFO researcher, who has spent close to three decades investigating the Roswell incident, says that the Government explanation makes little sense, as claims of a UFO crash would be bound to draw attention to the area, which is exactly the opposite of what the Government would want if there really was a covert military operation taking place.
So what do you think really happened? Was it truly a cover up for Project Mogul or were the US Government hiding something even bigger, like the discovery of alien life forms? Let us know your theories…