An Honest Look At… **The Thing That Fell From The Sky**
*Roswell, New Mexico — July 1947*

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On a clear summer day in 1947, something fell out of the sky onto the desert of New Mexico.

Exactly what that thing was has been hotly debated for close to eighty years. It has never been agreed upon. It probably never will be.

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July 1947. A rancher named **Mac Brazel** was riding his horse out across his land, near Roswell, New Mexico after a night of heavy storms. Something about the way the sand cracked under his horse’s hooves caught his eye. He stopped and looked around.

He saw it.

Dropped from the sky in the storm. A spread across a large area of his property. It looked like trash. But he knew that desert. He knew every square inch of those few acres he worked and this was not trash.

Strange foil like materials, thin, and strong. It could be crumpled up and would return to its original shape. Sheets of thin material dotted with piping that connected to even thinner beams. Printed information on those beams. Things that were clearly not meant to connect to each other, much less withstand the descent through the atmosphere. Yet they had.

Brazel rode home, gathered some of the material, and drove into Roswell to report it to Sheriff **George Wilcox**.

Wilcox contacted **Roswell Army Air Field**, the military base just outside Roswell that housed **The 509th Bomb Group**, The worlds only nuclear capable airforce unit at the time.

Officers came out to Brazel’s ranch to investigate. They collected more of the debris. They secured the area around the crash site.

Then two days later on **July 8th, 1947**, the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field issued a statement that made national headlines.

The United States Army Air Forces had recovered the remains of a **flying disc. **

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Say what you will about America in 1947, they didn’t have too much experience with flying discs falling from the sky.

In an instant everyone who had heard the story believed it. Newspapers across the country had calls from readers demanding answers.

The military responded.

**24 hours after their initial press release** the Roswell Army Air Field released another. **This time denying that the debris was a flying disc. **

It was a simple explanation. Weather balloon.

Downed during the storm. That was it. Routine pilot error. A weather balloon that had fallen from the sky and someone saw something they thought was a flying saucer.

Easy.

Almost everyone bought it.

Some people had questions.

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**The Witnesses**

Slowly over the next fifty years people who had first hand knowledge of what really happened to the flying disc came forward.

**Major Jesse Marcel**, the intelligence officer that had received the debris recovered from Brazel’s ranch spoke out several times in his later life. This mystery material was nothing like he had ever seen before or since. He did not like the weather balloon explanation. He did not think it was the truth.

Other people that lived near Roswell at the time or were military personnel that worked at Roswell Army Air Field told stories of things that didn’t line up with the weather balloon landing in the desert and being swept up by the military. Among the more detailed stories:

*Military personnel checking out Brazel’s ranch discovered a second crash site a few miles down range. They say they were quickly deployed to secure the area by their superior officers before anyone else could see the wreckage. Some of them spoke of small bodies. Not human looking at all. That they were brought in and placed into military trucks and taken away. *

*A local mortician by the name of **Glenn Dennis** said he received calls from Roswell Army Air Field asking questions about small coffins and how to preserve bodies that had been outside for days. He also said that a nurse that worked at the base confided in him about seeing the small “alien” bodies after they were recovered. She was flown out and transferred to a different base never to be heard from again. *

Many more stories from many different people came out over the years.

There was no way to confirm any of it.

But there were just as many stories that could not be easily explained away.

**Explanations**

In 1994 the Air Force explained what had really come down near Roswell in July 1947.

It wasn’t a weather balloon. It wasn’t a flying saucer. It was debris from Project Mogul — an airborne surveillance program using high altitude balloons to detect Soviet nuclear testing from the edge of space. Project Mogul was top secret in 1947. That’s why the military couldn’t explain what the debris was when it first came down; that’s why they described it as a flying disc and then fell back on the weak explanation of a weather balloon.

The bodies, the Air Force added in a 1997 report, were most likely test dummies used in high altitude parachute testing. Dummies that when spotted on the ground from afar by understandably panicked witnesses in 1947 could have easily been interpreted otherwise.

The Air Force reports were thorough and technical. Reportedly leaked ahead of time to key researchers. They debunked enough details to satisfy generations of researchers.

They didn’t debunk everything for everyone.

Roswell built a town around the incident. The International UFO Museum and Research Center is located on Main Street. Across the street are alien themed shops and restaurants. There are tourist t-shirts and memorabilia all over town.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors come to Roswell each year because of what happened that summer in 1947. Whether something did come down that scientists can’t explain or whether the explanation the Air Force gave in 1994 is exactly what happened is a question that has persisted for conspiracy theorists, government investigators, and nosy amateurs since July of 1947.

One thing has never come to light:

Definitive proof of alien wreckage.

And no explanation has ever satisfied all the people who have investigated it.

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A rancher found mysterious debris on his property. The military retrieved it and called it a flying disc. Witnesses said things that don’t match the official explanation. The government later admitted it flat out lied to the public about what it found — but it lied about a top secret balloon project, not aliens.

Somewhere between he said/she said lies and cover ups, the truth about Roswell is out there.

Smack dab in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

Waiting to be found.

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Roswell Incident · July 1947 · Roswell, New Mexico
Project Mogul declassified 1994
No confirmed alien evidence · Closed case
Still controversial