Roswell, New Mexico Crash and Recovery, 1947

New Mexico Crash and Recovery

No single incident did more to put allegedly crashed saucers and little green men into the public consciousness than what took place in July of 1947 some fifty miles north of the New Mexico city of Roswell when an unassuming farmer named Matt Brazell discovered a debris field strewn with tiny metallic strips and wooden sticks near his farm. Having heard about “flying disks” in the papers (the Arnold sighting having made national headlines two months earlier), Matt wondered if he hadn’t stumbled across his very own crashed flying saucer and immediately contacted local military authorities. Curiously, at first they agreed with the farmer’s assessment and declared that a “crashed disk” had been recovered, only to recant hours later and claim the debris was part of a crashed weather balloon all along. That seemed to put an end the story and it was quickly relegated to the dustbin of UFO folklore until the late seventies when the Army Air Force intelligence officer who had been sent to pick the stuff up (which he stuffed into the trunk of his car)—one Jesse Marcel—claimed the material he recovered was extraterrestrial after all, creating a conspiracy theory of epic proportions that refuses to die to this day. So ingrained in the popular culture did the Roswell “crash” eventually become, that even when the Air Force came clean in 1995 by declassifying its up-to-then top secret Mogul project and admitting they had made the whole crash disk part up in an attempt to divert attention from Mogul’s true mission (high altitude balloons carrying long arrays of instruments designed to detect evidence of Soviet atomic blasts in the upper atmosphere), most ufologists refused to accept it. Since then, the story has diverged from its original account of a single debris field into stories of multiple crashes, loads of dead aliens, and charges that the technology recovered from it and a half dozen other crashes since (apparently UFOs crash with some regularity) is behind most of the great technological advances of the last fifty years. It also turned the formerly sleepy little enclave of Roswell into a Mecca for UFO buffs and created a cottage industry that will probably stand longer than the Roman Empire did.