What happened
In early July 1947, rancher William “Mac” Brazel brought the Roswell sheriff debris he had found in a pasture: foil, rubber, tape, and wooden sticks. Major Jesse Marcel of Roswell Army Air Field took up the matter, and on July 8 the base press office, on the orders of Colonel William Blanchard, announced that the military had “captured a flying disc.” That same day General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth showed the debris to reporters and declared that it was a weather balloon with a radar reflector. The story faded for more than thirty years. In 1978 physicist Stanton Friedman interviewed Marcel, and subsequent books added accounts of alien bodies and a secret autopsy.
Witnesses
Rancher William “Mac” Brazel, Major Jesse Marcel, Sheriff George Wilcox; from the 1980s on, dozens of people who described the event years later.
Explanations and hypotheses
In 1994 and 1997 the U.S. Air Force published reports stating that the debris came from a balloon of the secret Project Mogul, designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests, and that accounts of “bodies” may have been conflated memories of 1950s tests using crash dummies. Most historians accept the Project Mogul explanation. Proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis see it as yet another cover story and point to inconsistencies in the military’s statements.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
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