The Roswell Incident - Daily Dose Documentary

The Roswell Incident

Roswell Incident

In July of 1947, after a string of flying saucer sightings made their way into the national press, New Mexico rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel found some wreckage on his sizable property 75 miles north of Roswell, consisting of rubber strips, tinfoil and thick paper.

Early Suspicions

Suspecting he had discovered something profoundly similar to the recent UFO sightings, Brazel brought some of the crash sight material to Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox, who quickly shared it with Colonel William Blanchard of Roswell Army Air Field, prompting a written statement the next day by U.S. Army Air Corps personal to write that “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.”

Obfuscation Begins

The following day, Air Force officials quickly changed their story from a flying disc to a downed weather balloon, setting off a decades-long debate amongst conspiracy theorists and legitimate researchers alike to find the truth behind what had been recovered from the New Mexico desert, leading to a 1994 disclosure by U.S. Air Force personnel that the wreckage was a high altitude spy balloon associated with the top secret Project Mogul, which monitored Soviet nuclear testing progress during Russia’s quest to match American nuclear weapons technology.

Claims of Dead Aliens

To further debunk several eyewitness accounts of dead aliens being removed from the crash site, in a 1997 report, Air Force officials explained away the bodies as parachute test dummies. Today, Roswellians depend on tourism for much of their existence, including a UFO museum and research center, an alien-themed McDonalds, alien streetlights and an extraterrestrial family beside their broken down space ship, looking for a jump-start, making the Roswell Incident, a lasting bit of American folklore.