Roswell, 1947: How Did a Torn Balloon Become the World's Most Famous UFO Story?
In July 1947, a U.S. Army air base announced that a "flying disc" had been found on a New Mexico ranch. That same evening it was stated that it had only been a weather balloon, and within days the news was forgotten. Thirty years later the story was reborn, this time with a crashed spacecraft, alien bodies and a secret autopsy. Today Roswell is the world's most famous UFO case, and also the best example of how a small news item becomes a legend.
- When: July 8, 1947
- Where: Corona and the Roswell area, New Mexico, United States
- Witnesses: Rancher William Ware Brazel and his family, Major Jesse A. Marcel, officers of the Roswell air base and Sheriff George Wilcox; the witnesses of the later body accounts came forward only decades after the event.
- Official position: According to the U.S. Air Force's 1994 report, the wreckage was the remains of one of the balloon trains of the top-secret Project Mogul. According to the 1997 report, the accounts of bodies are blended memories of military events from years later.
A pile of junk in the desert
On June 14, 1947, William Ware "Mac" Brazel, a 48-year-old New Mexico rancher, was going over the J. B. Foster ranch, which he managed as caretaker, with his eight-year-old son, Vernon. The ranch lay near the small town of Corona, about 120 kilometers northwest of the nearest larger town, Roswell. Some 11–13 kilometers from the ranch house they came across strange debris.
Brazel later described the find as follows: gray rubber strips, tinfoil, tough paper, thin wooden sticks and tape, some of it with a flower pattern. The debris was scattered over an area about 180 meters in diameter. Brazel did not attach any particular significance to it. On July 4 he went back with his wife and two of his children, and they gathered up the larger pieces. The whole lot made a bundle about 50 centimeters long and 12–13 centimeters thick, and weighed about two kilograms.
He found no metal parts, screws, propellers or any writing. He later said he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but this did not resemble them.
Locations of the Roswell incident. The location of the Foster ranch is approximate. Sky Glitch chart
A summer when everyone saw flying discs
It was no accident that Brazel became suspicious. On June 24, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine bright objects near Mount Rainier in Washington, and the press coined the term "flying saucer." In the following weeks several hundred similar reports came in across the United States, and the newspapers were full of "flying discs."
On July 5, Brazel went to Corona, where according to his uncle the find might even have been one of these "discs." The next day Brazel drove into Roswell and told the story to Sheriff George Wilcox. The sheriff called the military air base outside town.
The base that couldn't get it wrong
Roswell Army Air Field was no ordinary base. It was home to the 509th Bomb Group, which two years earlier had delivered the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1947 it was the only military unit in the world capable of deploying an atomic bomb.
The base intelligence officer, Major Jesse A. Marcel, and Captain Sheridan Cavitt went out to the ranch and brought back the debris. The base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, reported the incident to his superior, General Roger Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air Force.
July 8: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer"
On July 8, Walter Haut, the base's public information officer, issued a press release to local newspapers and radio stations on Blanchard's instructions. The release began: "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday." It said that the base, with the help of a local rancher and the sheriff, had "come into possession" of a disc that "landed sometime last week on a ranch near Roswell".
The news spread around the world in moments. The afternoon edition of the Roswell Daily Record carried it on its front page: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region". The base and the local papers were flooded with calls from reporters.
The front page of the Roswell Daily Record from July 8, 1947. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the United States (copyright not renewed)
That same evening: "weather balloon"
The debris was flown to Fort Worth, to General Ramey's headquarters. Ramey held a press conference that same day, where he showed the find spread out on the floor. Irving Newton, the base meteorologist, examined it and identified it as the remains of a weather balloon and its radar reflector. Photographers took pictures of Ramey, Colonel Thomas DuBose and Major Marcel next to the debris of foil, sticks and paper.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram photos from that time are now in the collection of the University of Texas at Arlington and can be viewed online.
That evening the FBI's Dallas office also sent a teletype to headquarters. According to it, the military said the recovered object "resembled a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector," and the wreckage was being flown on to Wright Field in Ohio. The evening papers and radio stations were already reporting the "balloon" version.
A regretted report
On July 9, the Roswell Daily Record published an interview with Brazel under the headline "Harassed Rancher Who Located 'Saucer' Sorry He Told About It". In it Brazel described in detail what he had found: rubber, tinfoil, paper, wooden sticks and tape with a flower pattern.
One sentence of the interview later mattered a great deal: "I am sure that what I found was not a weather observation balloon." And at the very end he added: "If I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it."
On July 10, at the Alamogordo air base in New Mexico, various balloons and radar reflectors were shown to reporters. With that, the story was closed. Within a few days American papers were writing about other "discs."
Thirty years of silence
Over the next three decades almost nobody talked about Roswell. UFO researchers and books of the era mentioned it at most in a sentence or two, as a misunderstanding that the military had quickly cleared up.
This is one of the most important lessons of this article. Of everything that belongs to Roswell today – the crashed spacecraft, the alien bodies, the secret autopsy, the intimidated witnesses – none was mentioned in 1947. All of it appeared after 1978.
The two lives of the Roswell story: a news item lasting a few days in 1947, then, after thirty years of silence, an ever-growing legend. Sky Glitch chart
The birth of a legend
In 1978, nuclear physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel, who was by then retired. Marcel said that the weather balloon had been a cover story and that in his view the wreckage was not of earthly origin. He spoke of a foil that could be crumpled up but smoothed itself out again, and later his son, Jesse Marcel Jr., also remembered purplish hieroglyphs on a small wooden beam.
The story became truly well known in 1980, when Charles Berlitz and William Moore published their book The Roswell Incident. It already talked about a crashed spacecraft and alien bodies. Over the following decade more and more witnesses came forward, and the story grew with every book.
In 1989, Glenn Dennis, a former Roswell funeral home operator, said that in July 1947 the base had asked him for small, hermetically sealed child-size coffins. He also said that a nurse he knew had secretly told him about an autopsy of alien beings and had even made drawings of them. The nurse's existence was never confirmed. When researchers asked, Dennis first named her as Naomi Selff, but there was no military nurse by that name at the base. He later admitted that he had made up the name and gave another name, which also turned out to be made up.
In 1991, Dennis, Walter Haut and Max Littell founded the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. That same year Thomas DuBose, who had stood next to Ramey in the 1947 photos, admitted that the weather balloon had been a cover story to divert the attention of the press. For decades this statement was the strongest argument of Roswell believers.
By the 1990s several contradictory versions were circulating: with different impact sites, three, four or five bodies, and one surviving alien. Frank Kaufman, who said he was a former officer at the base, described in detail the removal of the crashed spacecraft. His claims, however, contradicted the base's records and the terrain of the site.
The "alien autopsy"
In 1995, British producer Ray Santilli presented a black-and-white film that allegedly showed the autopsy of an alien being from Roswell. The footage was broadcast by several TV channels around the world, and millions saw it.
Doctors and film experts found many errors in it even then. In 2006, Santilli himself admitted that the film had been made in a London apartment, on a set. He claimed that they had "reconstructed" an original film that had since deteriorated, but there is no evidence of this.
Congress asks questions
In 1993, Steven Schiff, a congressman from New Mexico, turned to the GAO, the congressional audit office, because he had not received a satisfactory answer from the Pentagon regarding the Roswell affair. The GAO published its report on July 28, 1995.
The investigation found two records from the time. One was the FBI teletype of July 8. The other was the July 1947 history report of the 509th Bomb Group and the Roswell base, which mentioned the "flying disc" as a "radar tracking balloon." However, the GAO also found that the base's administrative records from 1945 to 1949 and its outgoing messages from 1946 to 1949 had been destroyed, and it is not known by whom, when or under what authority. According to Schiff, this left "unanswered questions."
The Air Force's answer: Project Mogul
In July 1994, the Air Force published its first report, compiled by Colonel Richard L. Weaver. In it, it acknowledged that the 1947 weather balloon explanation had indeed not been entirely true. According to the report, the wreckage "most likely" came from one of the balloon trains of a top-secret program called Project Mogul.
Mogul's purpose was to listen in the upper atmosphere: using microphones mounted on balloons, they tried to detect the sound waves of distant Soviet nuclear tests. To do this, they launched long trains made of neoprene balloons, radar reflectors and instruments. The radar reflectors were made of foil-covered paper and balsa wood sticks, held together with tape.
Structure of a Mogul balloon train, in outline. Sky Glitch chart
The Air Force tracked down former participants in the program. According to the diary of Albert Crary, one of Mogul's leaders, balloon train No. 4 was launched from Alamogordo on June 4, 1947, and was not recovered. Its tracking was lost about 27 kilometers from Brazel's ranch. Charles B. Moore, one of the program's engineers, recognized their own equipment in the Fort Worth photos. The flower-patterned tape had been obtained from a New York toy manufacturer. According to Moore, the 1947 press release "could have been some sort of umbrella cover story to protect our Mogul work".
The report also interviewed Sheridan Cavitt, who had gone with Marcel to retrieve the wreckage. In 1994 he said he remembered shiny material and thin, bamboo-like sticks, and that even then he had thought it was material consistent with a weather balloon. He also said he had never taken an oath of secrecy and had never been threatened.
On the trail of the bodies
On June 24, 1997, a few days before the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident, the Air Force issued a second report titled The Roswell Report: Case Closed. This one examined the accounts of bodies.
According to the report, the witnesses remembered real events but placed them at the wrong time. In the 1950s the Air Force dropped test dummies from high-altitude balloons in New Mexico to test parachute rescue for pilots: between 1954 and 1959, 43 balloon flights carried 67 dummies aloft. The dummies were retrieved with military trucks, the same kind the witnesses described. According to the report, the hospital stories blend two real accidents: a 1956 KC-97 air disaster in which 11 servicemen died, and a 1959 balloon accident in which two pilots were injured. The report described this as events being compressed in time.
Many people, not only believers, considered the explanation far-fetched, since in 1947 there were no such dummies yet. According to the Air Force, that is exactly the point: the witnesses compressed events from decades into one week in July.
Roswell today
Today Roswell is the capital of UFO tourism. The town welcomes visitors with a UFO museum, streetlights depicting aliens and gift shops, and every July it holds a UFO festival. The story has spawned a string of books, films and TV series. According to surveys, a significant share of Americans still do not believe the official explanation.
The base intelligence officer, Major Jesse A. Marcel, went to Brazel with a man in plain clothes and collected the remains. The front page of the Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947, reported: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region". According to the base, the object had been flown to "higher headquarters." On July 9 the paper was already reporting that Brigadier General Roger Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, had the debris examined and classified it as a weather balloon. According to the FBI Dallas office's teletype of July 8, the military spoke of an object resembling a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, which was being shipped to Wright Field in Ohio. In the July 9 interview Brazel said he was sure that what he had found was not a weather balloon, and that if he found something else next time, other than a bomb, it would be hard to get him to tell anyone about it. Then the story died down.
The legend came thirty years later
According to the Air Force's 1994 research report, the Roswell incident was not even considered a UFO event until around 1978–1980. After that, books by various authors claimed that the military had recovered not only the wreckage of an alien spacecraft but also the bodies of its crew. According to the report, these claims continue to evolve, and the Air Force is routinely accused of a "cover-up." So of everything that belongs to Roswell today, none was mentioned in 1947: according to contemporary accounts, it was about debris, not bodies.
Congress asks questions
New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff did not receive a satisfactory answer from the Pentagon, so in February 1994 the GAO, the congressional audit office, launched a comprehensive search for government records. The GAO's July 28, 1995 report found two records from 1947: the July history report of the 509th Bomb Group and the Roswell base, which mentions the "flying disc" as a radar tracking balloon, and the FBI teletype. The GAO also found that the base's administrative records from March 1945 through December 1949 and its outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 had been destroyed, but the disposition form does not show who did this, when, or under what authority. In his press release Schiff spoke of "unanswered questions" and noted that these outgoing messages would have been permanent records. Because of the missing records, however, the official side of events still cannot be fully reconstructed today.
The Air Force's two reports
The Air Force's July 1994 report acknowledged that the original weather balloon statement had not been a complete explanation. According to the report, the wreckage most likely came from one of the Project Mogul balloon trains that had not previously been recovered, that is, from a then top-secret program designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. The report interviewed the surviving participants of the program and the only surviving person among those who had collected the debris, and concluded that the material found near Roswell was consistent with a balloon device. According to the Schiff press release, the Mogul explanation at least also indicated that the "weather balloon" version was not correct. This fits with the question of why there was such a high level of security.
The Air Force's June 1997 report (The Roswell Report: Case Closed, by James McAndrew) examined the accounts of bodies. It contains two explanations: first, that in the 1950s experimental dummies were dropped from high-altitude balloons in New Mexico, and second, that the hospital stories may go back to aircraft accidents or to events connected with the balloon experiments. This 1997 report explains the witnesses' memories with military events from years later. Whether this explanation is convincing is disputed: according to critics, the time gap (1947 versus the 1950s) is hard to reconcile with the witnesses' memories, while according to the Air Force it was precisely the passage of time that may have distorted the memories.
What do we know today?
Based on the official reports, the contemporary press and the records found by the GAO, the wreckage was balloon-like debris, and the stories about bodies only appeared after 1978. Because of the partial destruction of the base's records, the official story is incompletely documented, but there is nothing in the 1947 sources that points to a spacecraft. Roswell is therefore not an unsolved mystery, but an example of how a legend grows out of a misunderstanding and a secret of the time.
The sober take
Roswell is one of the best-documented and best-explained UFO cases. The wreckage was the remains of a secret balloon program, and the stories about bodies appeared thirty years later and have no trace in 1947. What is truly interesting about Roswell is not the mystery, but how a small news item became a legend.
The wreckage: Project Mogul. The strongest arguments are the contemporary sources:
- Everyone described the same thing. In 1947, Brazel, the sheriff, the FBI and the base's own July report all spoke of rubber, foil, paper, wooden sticks and tape. According to Brazel, the whole lot weighed about two kilograms. That is not what spacecraft wreckage looks like, but a torn balloon train does.
- The photos. The Fort Worth pictures show foil-covered paper, sticks and balloon remnants, the same materials Mogul's radar reflectors were made of.
- The flower-patterned tape. In 1947 Brazel mentioned flower-patterned tape, and Mogul used tape obtained from a toy manufacturer. The later memories of "alien writing" can probably be traced back to this pattern.
- Place and time. Balloon train No. 4 was launched on June 4 and was lost near Brazel's ranch. Brazel found the debris ten days later.
- The reason for the secrecy. Mogul was top secret, so it is understandable that the military pointed to a harmless "weather balloon." DuBose's 1991 statement that the balloon was a cover story is therefore true, but it covered not a spacecraft but a spy program.
What speaks against it? In 1978 Marcel said the wreckage was an exceptionally strong, unknown material. But he said this 31 years later, and in 1947 he himself stood next to the foil debris in the Fort Worth photos. Some Roswell researchers argue that balloon train No. 4 could not have reached the ranch, or that the 1947 flight logs are incomplete. The Air Force acknowledged that there is no complete documentation of flight No. 4, and according to the GAO some of the base's records were lost. These are real gaps, but none of them points to a spacecraft.
The bodies. In 1947 nobody talked about bodies: not Brazel, not the sheriff, not the press, not the military. The body stories appeared after 1980, with more and more details. The best-known witness, Glenn Dennis, gave made-up names, and the most famous "evidence," the autopsy film, was proven to be a fake. The Air Force's 1997 explanation, that the witnesses remembered events from years later, may seem far-fetched, but it doesn't even need to be convincing: what has no contemporary evidence does not need to be explained.
How did it become such a legend? It took several factors:
- A real but insignificant event: a torn balloon train on a ranch.
- A hasty press release: the military itself declared that it had found a "flying disc."
- A real secret: because of Mogul's existence, the official explanation really was not entirely honest.
- Memories surfacing after thirty years: the memories of elderly witnesses, also shaped by the books, films and accounts of other witnesses that appeared in the meantime.
- Demand: books, TV shows, a museum, a festival, tourism. Today Roswell is part of a whole town's livelihood.
In summary: the wreckage was almost certainly one of Project Mogul's balloon trains, and the stories about bodies have no trace in 1947. The secrecy was real, but it hid not a spacecraft but one of the Cold War's secret programs. Roswell is therefore not an unsolved mystery, but the best example of how secrecy, time and public interest turn a simple misunderstanding into the world's most famous UFO story.
What was that?
Sources
- commons.wikimedia.org: File:Roswell Daily Record. July 8, 1947. RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region. Full front page.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
- ufologie.patrickgross.org: UFOS at close sight: Roswell 1947, official documents, Weaver Report of the US Air Force, 1994
- ufologie.patrickgross.org: UFOS at close sight: Roswell 1947, official documents, the GAO Report, 1995
- ufologie.patrickgross.org: UFOS at close sight: Roswell 1947, official documents, Press release of Steven Schiff
- gutenberg.org: The Roswell Report: Case Closed
- ufologie.patrickgross.org: UFOS at close sight: The Roswell 1947 incident in the Press, The Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947
- A Fort Worth Star-Telegram 1947-es fotói (Texasi Egyetem, Arlington)
- A légierő Roswell-oldalának archivált változata
- The Roswell Report: Case Closed, PDF (The Black Vault)