Unsolved Mysteries: The True Story of the Roswell UFO Incident — and What Experts Are Still Trying to Debunk

Ufologists call the Roswell incident “the ultimate cold case.”

On the night of July 2, 1947, in the middle of a severe thunderstorm, ranchers outside of Roswell, NM, recall hearing what sounded like an explosion. The next day, WW “Mack” Brazel discovered debris in a field near his home – unlike any he had ever seen.

After turning the wreckage over to the United States Air Force, Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release saying they had captured the flying saucer. Word spread around the world, but the claims were quickly retracted 24 hours later. A revised Air Force statement informed citizens that the wreckage was not from a UFO, but only the remains of a weather balloon that had crashed.

It’s been almost 80 years since the Roswell incident, and there are countless theories about what was found in New Mexico. Ufologists Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, who have been trying to uncover the truth since 1989, believe Roswell is “the one case that could solve the whole UFO mystery overnight.” Their revelations about the alleged government cover-up were documented on Netflix Unsolved mysteriesvolume 5 episode 4

“I believe the military experienced an alien craft extraction. That’s where the evidence leads us,” Randle claimed in the episode. “The Air Force says they have no evidence he was an alien. I think the files were collected and are in another vault hidden deep in the government archives and so there was no paper trail to it.”

Here’s everything you need to know about the Roswell incident that left many confused.

What is the Roswell incident?

WW “Mack” Brazel.

Courtesy of Netflix

On July 2, 1947, a crash occurred in the desert 75 miles outside of Roswell, NM. According to Schmitt and Randle’s research, rancher WW “Mack” Brazel discovered metal-like debris in a field near his home the next day.

Brazel loaded what he could into his pickup truck and drove to Roswell where the 509th Composite Group was stationed. This is the same unit of the United States Air Force that dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Major Jesse Marcel, chief of intelligence, received the materials from Brazel, and on July 8, 1947, Roswell Airfield issued a press release claiming that they had captured a flying saucer. Marcel was immediately ordered to board a B-29 bomber and deliver the wreckage to Brigadier General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth, Texas.

Upon arrival, Marcel left the materials in Ramey’s office and the pair visited the map room. When they returned, the wreckage was reportedly gone, replaced by a pile of rotting neoprene rubber balloons and a shredded radar reflector kite.

After allegedly ordering Marcelo not to say a word to the press or his family about what had happened, Ramey held a press conference, claiming that the wreckage was the remains of a weather balloon crash.

Marcel was silent for 30 years. After becoming terminally ill, he spoke in 1980 in a TV series In search of… about what he believed to be true.

“I knew I’d never seen anything like that before, and now I don’t know what it was. It was nothing of this Earth. I’m pretty sure of that,” he said before describing the materials. “You couldn’t even bend it. You couldn’t love him. Even a sledgehammer would bounce off him.”

After Ramey’s press conference, the military sent troops into the desert to collect evidence from the wreckage. Meanwhile, a team of archaeologists from Western Texas Tech searched for the impact site and came across the pod – an egg-shaped craft about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle 27 miles away from the debris field. They allegedly discovered bodies that were not human.

Captain Oliver “Pappy” Henderson of the First Airlift Unit flew the alleged bodies from Roswell to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

“My husband told me that the bodies are small, the heads are bigger, and the eyes are quite sunken and slightly slanted. They are not of this Earth,” Henderson’s wife, Sappho, once said in an interview, according to Unsolved mysteries. “When my husband, who was a man of truth, told me this story, I believed him.”

What does the US government claim happened in Roswell?

Maj. Jesse A. Marcel at the Fort Worth Military Airfield holds a piece of foil covered with material related to the Roswell, New Mexico, UFO incident, July 8, 1947.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram/THA/Shutterstock

Since 1947, the US government has tried in several reports to explain what happened at Roswell. The first — a 231-page report entitled Roswell Report: Facts vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert – was published in 1994 and was co-authored by Air Force One Special Agent in Charge Richard Weaver.

“I really wanted there to be something, but there was almost nothing in the Air Force records about Roswell, and then we found out about Project Mogul,” Weaver said in Netflix’s Unsolved mysteries.

Project Mogul was a top-secret Air Force project whose primary purpose was to detect Soviet nuclear explosions and ballistic missile launches using “naval acoustic sensors, radar reflective targets, and nylon fibers carried by a train of weather balloons.” Based on this, Weaver concluded that the Project Mogul balloon crashed in Roswell.

In 1997, the Air Force issued The Roswell Report written by Captain James McAndrew, and dealt with alleged bodies found in New Mexico. The report claims the bodies were mannequins carried by high-altitude research balloons.

What did the experts say about the Roswell incident?

Donald Schmitt and Kevin Randle in “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Courtesy of Netflix

In episode 4 of Unsolved mysteriesSchmitt and Randle divided their counterarguments into two government reports. Although they have no concrete evidence that what was found in Roswell was extraterrestrial, they believe the Air Force is covering up something.

As regards The Roswell incident report, Schmitt and Randle investigated Project Mogul. They discovered that the project itself was secret, but the materials used were not.

“The Mogul’s equipment was standard weather balloons, off-the-shelf radar targets,” Randle, a retired lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot and in Iraq as a battalion intelligence officer, said in the series. “There was no reason Jesse Marcel Senior couldn’t recognize that.”

The report also stated that the Roswell crash was related to Flight No. 4 Mogul projects. However, ufologists also learned that flight no. 4, which was supposed to take place on June 4, 1947, was canceled due to bad weather.

“If the flight was canceled, well, it couldn’t have left debris,” Randle said. “One thing is clear, everyone agrees that something fell, but what was it?”

As regards The Roswell ReportSchmitt and Randle found the Air Force’s attempt to explain away the bodies laughable.

“They’re talking about crash test dummies, which weren’t even created until 1952, five years later,” said Schmitt, former co-director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for the Study of UFOs in Chicago. “So none of our ’47 body witnesses could have been crash test dummies.”

In September 2024, PEOPLE spoke with Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official for a secret Pentagon program that investigated UFOs and author of the book Inevitable: The Pentagon’s Search for UFOs. He could speak openly about the US government’s possession of non-human biological samples.

“I want to be careful when I say ‘bodies’ because the body guesses that you have an intact, whole corpse or corpse. What I can say is that biological samples have been found,” he said before describing the “inhuman” technology he once held in his hands.

“It was a metal surface that was beveled and had multiple layers of material inside it. It had all kinds of interesting electrical properties. It wasn’t natural. It was definitely engineered. When we showed it to scientists at one of the top aerospace corporations in the world they just scratched their heads and said it couldn’t be produced, and yet it was.”

What other theories are there about the Roswell incident?

A team of researchers investigates Roswell, NM

Courtesy of Netflix

The Roswell incident has spawned several conspiracy theories. According to Blazesome people believe that the alleged UFO was of Nazi origin. Theorists claim that a spacecraft called The Bell, a machine powered by electric particles, fell from the sky during a test flight.

Meanwhile, Charles Berlitz and William Moore, authors The Roswell incident published in 1980, believed that a spacecraft monitoring US nuclear weapons activity was flying over New Mexico when it was struck by lightning and crashed.

More recently, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen, who wrote Area 51: The Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base in 2011 theorized that Russia’s Joseph Stalin had sent a spacecraft with “grotesque child-sized aviators” to fly over the US and cause hysteria, per The Seattle Times.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education