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The world was worried about the war when farmer WW Brazel walked into the sheriff’s office in Corona, New Mexico, on a hot, dusty day 75 years ago to report a “flying disc” he may have found on his property, about 100 miles northwest of Roswell AFB.
The next day – July 8, 1947 – the public information officer at the base issued a news release stating that the US Army Air Forces had found a “flying saucer” at the ranch. By the time the military leadership quickly retracted the statement, it was too late: the legend of Roswell as the “UFO Capital of the World” was already taking off—much like the countless bright objects that many Americans claimed to have seen in the sky that summer.
The event we know today as the “Roswell Incident” started the modern UFO sighting movement, along with the extraterrestrial science fiction genre.
The men claim they were abducted by aliens. In Mississippi, the police believed them.
“For centuries, people have seen things they couldn’t explain,” said Roger Launius, historian and retired curator of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “In earlier generations, they called them angels, demons, deities or whatever. This changed with the scientific revolution when people began to wonder if the points of light they were seeing were extraterrestrial in nature.
The fertile soil for Roswell was sown under the darkening mushroom cloud of the nuclear age. World War II had ended less than two years earlier, and the United States and the Soviet Union seemed on the brink of another global conflict. The term Cold War was coined by George Orwell in a 1945 essay and entered modern consciousness when Bernard Baruch, an adviser to President Harry S. Truman, uttered it in a speech in the spring of 1947.
Amidst this heightened concern came the first news of “flying saucers” — and the first mention of the term in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary — on June 24. Media outlets across the country reported that a civilian pilot named Ken Arnold said he saw bright objects hurtling across the sky at supersonic speeds near Mount Rainier in Washington.
Some officials suggested the fast-moving lights might be missiles or jets being tested by the military. Regardless, public hysteria erupted over the next few weeks, with more than 800 similar sightings reported across the country—many of them deemed “fake” events by law enforcement and military officials.
“When Ken Arnold sees these things, they’re told in an over-the-top tabloid way,” Launius said. “It gets hype in the press and builds from there. If the present doesn’t tell you that Americans love conspiracies, I don’t know what does. In 1947 it was no different.”
While all this was happening, the unsuspecting Brazel was tending the sheep and cattle on his ranch in New Mexico. With no radio or newspaper, he was cut off from the outside world. The farmer didn’t think much of the unusual debris he found scattered around his pastures.
On July 5, Brazel headed to Corona on a Saturday night and learned what everyone else was talking about. He began to wonder if there was a relationship. On Monday, he collected the strange material and returned to the city to inform local authorities of his discovery. The sheriff visited Brazel’s ranch, then contacted the military.
The debris was flown to Fort Worth Air Force Base in Texas, where military experts declared it to be from a crashed weather balloon. However, before this statement was relayed back to Roswell, the base in New Mexico sent word of the “flying saucer” being found. Lt. Walter Haut, Roswell’s public information officer, later claimed that base commander Col. William H. Blanchard ordered him to use that description.
For several days, the world’s attention was focused on Roswell, New Mexico, but most people seemed satisfied with the military’s explanation, and the story quickly faded.
It would not erupt again until 1978, when the National Enquirer published an article about the incident. Suddenly, new versions of the event emerged – some from the original participants – with reports of an actual spacecraft, extraterrestrial bodies and a government cover-up adding new layers to the legend.
“The story seems to get better with every retelling,” Launi said. “Initially there was no discussion of extraterrestrial bodies. This is somehow wrapped into it as part of the original incident, although there is nothing about it in the sources of the time.
They claim to have hit an alien on a highway in Georgia. People got excited.
The story unfolds with a seemingly endless array of articles, books, movies, and documentaries about what “really happened” in the New Mexico desert. In 1993, television audiences were introduced to the long-running series The X-Files, whose fictional stories about FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully tracking alien abductions and an international conspiracy only added fuel to the fire.
Many involved in the incident have changed their accounts of the events over time, including the government. In 1947, the CIA and the military were concerned that these “flying saucers” were actually new technology being used by the Soviets. When the Army Air Forces retracted its first statement, it was less than forthcoming about the origin of the debris—probably because it was shrouded in secrecy.
“The weather balloon was a cover story,” Launi said. “The best evidence is that it was a Project Mogul listening device that they recovered pieces of.”
Project Mogul was a military program designed to intercept Russian radio communications via high-altitude balloons that would eventually deflate and fall to Earth. Several crash sites have been identified in the country. In 1994, a US Air Force report identified the top-secret project as the likely source of the debris found in New Mexico.
Launius said that the UFO sightings of the summer of 1947 were the result of a world consumed by fear of the apocalypse.
The remains of a “vampire” were found about 30 years ago. Now the DNA is giving it new life.
“In the United States alone between 1947 and 1960, there were a total of 6,523 UFO reports,” he said. “There seems to be a direct correlation between public perception of the reality of space travel and these UFO sightings. I am convinced that the rapid increase in the number of UFOs reported at the beginning of the Cold War era was a result of heightened tensions as everyone watched the skies for warnings of a nuclear attack.
But even if the Roswell incident can be explained by a military program, the subsequent events in the skies remain a mystery. On July 19, 1952, almost exactly five years after Breazel reported the strange debris on his ranch, there were a series of UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. Airline pilots reported seeing flashes of light piercing the sky, and operators of radars are confused by the fast-moving moments on their screens. The Air Force launched planes to intercept the objects, which disappeared and never returned. The event of 70 years ago has never been explained.
As the poster in Mulder’s office says in The X-Files: “I want to believe.”
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