Interviewed recently by his son Donald Trump Jr., President Trump added to the mystique of Roswell, New Mexico, stating that it’s “a very interesting place.” Trump is conflating Roswell with the Groom Lake facility, colloquially known as Area 51. But it remains the case that the U.S. government is highly confident that some unidentified flying objects witnessed since the late 1940s do not belong to the United States, China, Russia, or Elon Musk.
It’s also a reminder of the mystique that surrounds what happened in Roswell around this time 73 years ago. It’s a story full of uncertainties and curious circumstances.
Here’s what we know: Between mid-June and early July 1947, a rancher near Roswell found strange materials on the Foster Ranch he managed. William “Mac” Brazel told the local sheriff that he might have found a “flying saucer.” The sheriff then called up the Army Air Force (precursor to the Air Force), which sent a team to collect the materials from Brazel’s ranch. It then relocated those materials to Roswell Army Air Field. The Army Air Force produced a press release saying it had indeed found a flying saucer. It then quickly changed tack, saying that the material was from a crashed weather balloon.
Decades passed without much attention. The conspiracy theories grew. Attempting to quell the emerging controversy, in the 1990s, the Air Force declared that the materials Brazel had recovered actually belonged to “Project Mogul,” a late-1940s top-secret program to detect Soviet atom bomb tests. Reports of alien bodies found at a crash site were dismissed as witnesses conflating incidents and actually seeing test dummies.
Being that 1947 was the start of the Cold War and a time of great fear over the “red menace” and MGB spy rings, it would make sense for the government to lie about a weather balloon versus a Project Mogul balloon. But considering the Pentagon’s regular obfuscation about UFO-related matters, the Air Force’s 1990s statements should not be regarded as the end of the story. Just one possibility.
Before we get into the other possibilities, I believe that witness testimony supports three basic conclusions about Roswell. First, the Army did indeed detain and interrogate Mac Brazel, warning him to stay silent about the crash (whatever it was that crashed). Second, the Army closed down major access routes to Foster Ranch and the surrounding area and threatened local radio stations not to discuss the crash. Third, numerous residents in and around Roswell witnessed UFOs in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
I am also moderately confident that materials recovered from the crash site included so-called memory metal. According to witness reports, Brazel recovered and retained some of this metal, which would behave in highly unusual ways under manipulation; for example, immediately springing back to flat form after being crumpled, as well as being exceptionally hard to break or destroy. Although the metal may have been classified U.S. military material, the first recorded development of memory metals did not occur until the 1960s. The point is relevant in that unconventional alloys form a central role at the heart of the UFO phenomenon.
There’s circumstantial evidence of a cover-up with regard to the government’s line that a Project Mogul balloon crashed. In 1995, the Government Accountability Office observed that “in our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering [Roswell Army Air Field] activities had been destroyed and others had not. For example, RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed.”
Quite convenient that those records fit within the crash time frame. Why only outgoing messages and not incoming messages? That’s a lot of time-specific paper files to lose. Perhaps this was simply bad record-keeping? It must be noted that the Air Force record-handling standards during the late 1940s and 1950s were far laxer than those of today. Records destruction does not alone prove a conspiracy.
More interesting is the nuclear factor. I find Robert Hastings’s reporting in his landmark book UFOs and Nukes most compelling here. In his chapter on Roswell, Hastings notes that when it came to the area surrounding Roswell in 1947, “no other place on Earth at that time hosted such a concentration of projects designed to advance the technology of warfare.”
The synergy of credible 1940s witness sightings of UFOs in and around the Los Alamos nuclear research facility — a phenomenon that Los Alamos’s in-house magazine recorded as ongoing in the 1960s — the White Sands missile range, and those near Roswell (the base may have possessed nuclear weapons at the time) is notable. Note, also, that Kenneth Arnold’s famous flying disk sighting took place near the Hanford plutonium production plant during the same period as the Roswell furor. Considering that Hastings’s research and present U.S. government analysis connect the appearance of UFOs to military nuclear facilities, it is unsurprising that these areas of New Mexico saw so many UFO reports.
But what of the Air Force’s suggestion that its Project Mogul NYU Flight 4 test was responsible for the crash? It’s debatable. Researcher Dr. David Rudiak, for example, asserts that Test 4 was canceled, along with two preceding tests, due to poor weather. Other researchers say Rudiak’s research should be judged more skeptically.
How about the witnesses? Well, the first point to note is that a witness who sees something odd is not necessarily a witness who sees something amazing (though patterns in pre-internet era witness reports among those who live thousands of miles apart and have never met do make them more compelling). Unfortunately, when it comes to Roswell, many witnesses did not speak directly to researchers. Their testimony is delivered secondhand. Another challenge is that quite a few unreliable “witnesses” have popped up over the years, offering extraordinary stories that fall apart upon closer inspection.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t compelling witness accounts. Take Hastings’s interview with Chet Lytle, for instance. Lytle, who was involved in the Manhattan Project and held a top-secret clearance as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, had a close friendship with William Blanchard in the 1950s. Blanchard commanded Roswell Army Air Field during the Roswell incident. Hastings writes that Lytle told him that in 1953, Blanchard, then a general, recounted “that a crashed alien spacecraft had indeed been recovered in July 1947. The general said four dead humanoid beings had been aboard.”
Such an extraordinary tale must be judged with skepticism, especially since this is thirdhand information. Still, Hastings adds why he believed Lytle was telling the truth:
“I do not believe Lytle was the type of person who would fabricate or exaggerate. He was not at all insistent about having an astounding tale to tell. On the contrary, he was for years resolutely unwilling to elaborate upon his initial intriguing remarks to me. Once he did agree to a formal interview, Lytle did not gush information with abandon or pretension, but offered what he knew in a measured, matter-of-fact demeanor. If he could not remember names or details about events that had occurred decades before, he did not attempt to ‘fill in the blanks,’ but simply apologized for the memory lapse. In short, I consider Lytle’s remarks about Roswell, though they are hearsay, to be well worth including in this book.” For what it’s worth, I know Hastings and I trust him.
What of the materials Brazel found? As I see it, two options stand out. Either those materials belonged to the Project Mogul balloon or perhaps, as retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Arthur Exon later claimed, the Foster Ranch was just a “skip site,” where a UFO skidded and then temporarily regained altitude before crashing finally in another location. That could, could being the operative word, explain why the Army threw down such a wide lockdown area immediately after Brazel’s report: Were they aware of a crash before he was? Of course, Exon also might have gotten it wrong. Or maybe the Army was extremely concerned about the Mogul project falling into Soviet hands.
Finally, there’s the presidential factor. We would expect, after all, that had a craft from elsewhere crashed in the New Mexico desert, Harry S. Truman might just have been briefed on it. But in my reviews of Truman’s schedule in June and July 1947, the only interesting meetings that stand out are two on June 25 and one on June 27.
On June 25 at 11 a.m., Truman met with “the Secretary of War [Robert P. Patterson], Honorable Kenneth Royall, the Under Secretary of War, Major General Curtis LeMay.” The log notes that “the Secretary of War called [the White House] yesterday to ask for this appointment.” Five minutes after the conclusion of the first meeting, at 11:35 a.m., Truman met with Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, then chief of staff of the Army.
On June 27, Truman presided over a meeting with numerous other top military officials. The log records “the Secretary of the Navy [James Forrestal] (Is coming with the group, off record, at 3.30 pm but he wanted to see the President alone for a few minutes so decided to come fifteen minutes early).” At 3:30 p.m., the main meeting begins, including “Secretary of State [George C. Marshall], The Secretary of War [Robert P. Patterson], The Secretary of the Navy [James Forrestal], General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the Honorable David Lilienthal — Atomic Energy Commission.” The log also notes that the meeting was “off record” and that the guests “used [the] east entrance.”
Considering the UFO-nuclear connection, it might be noteworthy that Lilienthal was at that meeting. Yes, it’s more probable the discussions were focused on standard fare concerns such as the U.S.’s nuclear posture toward the Soviet Union. But as Michael Swords records, on July 4, Lilienthal was asked by the Denver Colorado Post about the abundant nationwide witness reports of flying disks. Lilienthal said “he had no idea what they were but ‘was anxious to know if any of them had fallen to the ground.'”
It’s slightly strange that LeMay attended that June 27 meeting with the president and what would now be the secretary and deputy secretary of defense. For one, it’s the only time during Truman’s presidency that LeMay is recorded meeting with Truman in a nonceremonial setting. And why wasn’t the chief of the Army Air Force, Carl Spaatz, in attendance? Or, if not Spaatz, why not his deputy? Why just LeMay, responsible for Army Air Force research and development?
Most likely because LeMay was working on some conventional military platform that piqued Truman’s curiosity, and Truman wanted the go-to guy. Fortunately, we do know one thing. One year after the Roswell incident, the Air Force established its first official investigation of UFOs: Project Sign. Why 1948? Did the credible witness sightings reach a critical mass, or did something else provoke government action? The Air Force clearly believed something was going on, even if Project Sign and subsequent studies essentially whitewashed the issue, deception being a central element.
Today, however, more scientifically minded UFO-research programs are underway in the Pentagon and intelligence community. So, even if we never find out for sure what crashed at Roswell, the larger story of UFOs isn’t going away.
Tom Rogan is a foreign policy-focused commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
