Episode 9.4: "INVASION: UFO" (part 4), feat. UFO Skeptics Michael Shermer and Robert Sheaffer
- Michel Gagné
- Mar 25
- 30 min read
Updated: Jun 24
The 1947 Roswell Crashed Flying Saucer:
Ufology’s Dirty Little Secret
(Paranoid Planet, Episode 9.4, Chapter 5)
The International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico, opened its doors to the public in 1992, and has recently welcomed its five millionth visitor. Located inside a refurbished 1930s era movie theater, the UFO museum is the hub of a thriving multi-million dollar media and tourism industry that includes an annual UFO festival, lots of UFO themed eateries and souvenir shops, UFO crash site tours, a UFO research library, and numerous conventions and speaker events featuring famous ufologists like Stanton Friedman, Kathleen Marden, Donald Schmitt, Kevin Randle, and alleged alien abductee Travis Walton. former Roswell mayor Dennis Kintigh recently stated that “It’s our brand. It’s an incredible gift given to us. People might not know where New Mexico is, but they’ve heard of Roswell.” Mayor Kintigh also enjoyed dressing up in Men-In-Black fashions at the annual Roswell UFO festival.[1]
Far more than just a kitschy tourist destination, Roswell is the epicenter of a widespread modern belief system—some might call it a new religion—devoted to discovering (and celebrating) proofs of intelligent extraterrestrial visitors, their super-advanced technology, and their intentions for visiting us. The museum was founded by Glenn Dennis & Walter Haut—two names that you should take note of in the story that follows.
The museum’s central feature is, of course, its comprehensive permanent exhibit about a 1947 incident that reportedly involved the recovery of a crashed alien spaceship and dead alien bodies. Indeed, the exhibit includes a vast array of drawings, paintings, dioramas, plastic sculptures, and multimedia presentations showcasing large silvery flying saucers and hairless, bug-eyed, and bulbous-headed space aliens dressed in grey jumpsuits, alongside many typed affidavits signed by self-proclaimed UFO witnesses. And yet absent from all this, defying the very concept of a museum, are any tangible artifacts—physical, photographic, or otherwise—of the story being advanced, not just the second- and third-hand testimonies and interpretive artworks of those who say that they witnessed something otherworldly. Of course, the story that the museum tells is also about a massive government cover-up in which all physical proofs of the crashed Roswell saucer(s) have been hidden away by the power elites who don’t want the rest of us to know about it. At least, that’s what the many Extra-terrestrial visitations proponents have claimed, including people like Nick Pope, Leslie Kean, Luis Elizondo, and James Fox, all of whom were discussed in our previous episodes.
The crashed UFO narrative that the Roswell museum promotes, alongside hundreds of ufology books, TV programs, Hollywood movies, and “documentaries”, comes in a number of versions, not all of which can be correct. Here is a streamlined version drawn from a selection of famous TV programs and ufology books [2]:
On the night of July 2nd, 1947, a rancher named Mac Brazel, who managed the Foster Ranch located near Corona, New Mexico, some 60 miles (or 100km) northwest of Roswell, heard an unusual explosion during a violent thunderstorm. The following day, he found a large debris field three quarters of a mile long and three hundred feet wide on a remote area of his ranch. Unable to identify the nature of these materials, Brazel collected a small amount and drove into Roswell to inform Sherriff George Wilcox, who then informed the local Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), which in turn sent two intelligence officers to Brazel’s ranch to investigate. One of these officers, Major Jesse Marcel, despite being trained to investigate air accidents, was unable to determine the nature of the wreckage but would later describe it as being made up of a malleable metallic material as thin as tinfoil and virtually indestructible.
Later that evening, Marcel stopped off at his home in the middle of the night to show his family pieces of the mysterious debris. Many decades later, his then ten-year-old son Jesse Marcel, Jr. would tell the media how fascinated he’d been with a particular piece of material, which he described as a thin, flexible, but very resistant metallic "Ɪ beam" marked with strange purple symbols reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
A public information officer for the 509th Bomb Group stationed at Roswell Army Air Field then put out a press release telling local media and the Associated Press—and hence, the entire world—that the Army had just recovered a “flying disk”. The news circulated the globe and made Roswell popular for about 48 hours as calls flooded in from out-of-town journalists requesting more information. That officer’s name was Walter Haut—the future co-founder of the Roswell UFO museum. In an interview he gave some thirty years later, Haut would declare that he had produced the story under the orders of the base’s commanding officer Colonel Blanchard, who had taken the brave and dangerous decision to break rank and go public with this earth-shattering discovery. By this time, Colonel Blanchard had long been deceased and so could not corroborate Haut’s claim.
Haut’s press release was contradicted just a few hours later by General Roger Ramey, who had asked that Major Marcel fly the debris to him at Carswell Air Base in Fort Worth, Texas, where a second press release was produced declaring this time that the debris Marcel had collected was in fact nothing more than a downed weather balloon. The press was invited to take pictures of Ramey and Marcel, who posed alongside tattered pieces of wood, wax paper, rubber, and aluminium foil, while the real pieces of the crashed saucer were flown to what is now Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, or to some other undisclosed location. Jesse Marcel was then threatened not to speak of this find with the public. Mac Brazel was likewise intimidated to stay silent. General Ramey died in 1963, taking whatever he knew about the real Roswell crash with him to the grave.
Once covered-up, the entire Roswell crashed saucer was forgotten. It remained a footnote in UFO lore until the late Seventies when a group of researchers, including Stanton Friedman, William Moore, and Charles Berlitz, convinced that the weather balloon story hid an explosive secret, tracked down Jesse Marcel and his son, as well as Walter Haut, who told them that what they had seen in 1947 was something “not of this world”. Their investigation—and that of other committed ufologists—led to the emergence of several new witnesses, like Dan Wilmot and his wife, who reportedly saw something fall out of the sky on that 4th of July weekend during which Mac Brazel found the debris, or Barney Barnett, Gerald Anderson, Jim Ragsdale, and Frank Kaufman, all of whom recalled having seen—albeit in different locations nowhere near Brazel’s ranch—an entire crashed saucer with four or five small alien bodies in silver-coloured spacesuits being taken away by a military convoy. These claims led dozens of other UFO enthusiasts to speculate that not just one but several spaceships crashed in New Mexico on the same night, perhaps in some kind of thunderstorm-induced collision, rendering the debris on Mac Brazel’s ranch only a small part of the total wreckage. “Taken together,” wrote British ufologist Jenny Randles, “[these corroborating testimonies] form either the greatest fairy tale of all time or the biggest untold secret.”[3] Randles, of course, believed the latter.
But the most influential new witness of the alleged Roswell flying disk crash was a former local mortician called Glenn Dennis—the other future co-founder of the UFO museum—who would attest in the early 1990s that he had witnessed the charred remains of alien bodies being placed into tiny coffins and carried to the Roswell Army Air Field. He further claimed that he was given a description and drawings of an alien autopsy by an anonymous female friend who at that time worked as a nurse on the restricted base. When later prompted to produce these drawings, Dennis told his interviewers that they had mysteriously disappeared, just like the nurse a few decades before—likely due to foul play—leaving him with only his memories of these events.
In 1997, a retired Army officer named Philip Corso, produced a book in which he claimed he once assisted a group of Americanized ex-Nazi scientists reverse engineer five truckfuls of alien technologies recovered at Roswell, materials that allowed the U.S. military to produce lasers, fiber optic cables, microchips, night vision goggles, and bullet-proof vests, all of which allowed the military industrial complex to gain global technological hegemony and helped the U.S. win the Cold War against the Soviets. According to Corso and his co-author William Birnes, the recovered alien crafts were not actually spaceships but time machines.
All of these claims—give or take a couple, depending on which ufologist you listen to most—make up the core of what Stanton Friedman has called the “Cosmic Watergate”,[4] a large-scale, multi-generational government cover-up of all evidence of alien visitors whom, he believes, have come to our planet in response to our discovery and use of nuclear weapons, either to help us evolve ethically and give up this deadly technology, or to destroy us if we will not—a premise that he seems to have borrowed from the 1951 sci-fi classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still. As proof of this massive government cover-up, Friedman and others have offered a Top Secret 1952 military briefing document titled “Majestic-12”—a copy of which ufologist and TV writer Jamie Shandera fortuitously received through the mail from an anonymous source back in 1984. This document, purportedly signed by President Harry Truman himself, discusses the recovery of alien craft and alien bodies by the US military.
But is this story of a recovered spaceship and alien bodies logically consistent? And can it be supported with reliable first-hand evidence? The short answer, on both counts, is no. In fact, both logic and evidence tell us that the entire Roswell saucer story is nothing more than a collective self-delusion based on a mixture of bad memories, wishful thinking, cherry-picked evidence, deceptive hoaxes, and willful ignorance.
Firstly, it is important to note that the Roswell flying disk press release caused little discussion following the US Army’s second press release that stated that Mac Brazel’s debris was just a damaged weather balloon. Life-long Roswell resident and veteran local journalist John Purvis is only one of thousands of Roswellites who never heard anything of the crashed saucer narrative until the popular actor and 1980s TV host Robert Stack and a crew of his hit TV show Unsolved Mysteries rolled into town to record an episode based on the writings of UFO crashologists Friedman, Moore, and Berlitz.[5] Indeed, no witness testimony of a flying saucer crash at Roswell, either by military personnel or by civilians (who were not subject to secrecy laws), was ever recorded between 1948 and the late 1970s when the ufologists started jogging people’s dusty old memories—that is unless you include Gerald Anderson’s uncle’s alleged diary, or the infamous Majestic-12 papers, both of which were exposed as mischievous forgeries.[6]
It should also be noted that the events that happened at Roswell in 1947 occurred only ten days after Idaho businessman and private pilot Kenneth Arnold told the world he had spotted a squadron of shimmering metallic “batwings” gliding around Mount Rainier in Washington state—which were wrongly described by newspapers as “flying saucers” and “flying disks”, and which, as explained in Paranoid Planet, Episode 9.2, were probably just a formation of white pelicans soaring on air currents. Indeed, the news of Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers had only just appeared in Mac Brazel’s local newspapers, which led the rancher’s uncle in nearby Corona to inform him there might be a reward on offer for any such recovered discs. This is what prompted Mac Brazel to take a bundle of the stuff to Roswell on Monday July 7th and show Sherriff Wilcox.
It appears that Roswell Army Air Field press officer Walter Haut was also familiar with the Kenneth Arnold story, which helps explain why he used the term “flying disk” on his July 8th press release, even though he had not seen the debris firsthand nor had Jesse Marcel described it as such. Indeed, Haut’s press release contained few accurate facts, stating for instance that the disk had landed intact on the ranch just a few days prior and had been put in storage by the rancher over the weekend. It is also clear that no one at that time said anything about bodies, alien or otherwise. That part would only emerge three decades later.
But before we assess the factual accuracy of this story, it may be useful to highlight some of the many logical fallacies that it contains. One of these is a false dilemma when its proponents force us to conclude that if the Army put out two contradictory press releases—one about a presumably alien flying disk and the other about a downed weather balloon—that one of the two stories must be true. And so, the poor logic goes, if we can prove that the materials found by Mac Brazel were not part of a weather balloon, then the alien flying disk story is true. However, there is nothing preventing both of these stories from being false, which, as we will see, is the case.
Another fallacy in this crashed saucer story is the repeated appeal to false authority figures (aka: “ad verecundiam” fallacy) whose uninformed and untrained opinions are taken as fact—including those of a sleepy 10 year old boy, of civilians with no knowledge of military projects, and of low-ranking military officers with no training in physics, chemistry or engineering, or a high-enough security clearance to know what was going on in a restricted airbase 100 miles away.
Two more fallacies (which frequently appear together) are the crashologists’ excessive reliance on anecdotal evidence coupled with cherry-picking only those interviewee memories that supports their theory. This is seen in their generous use of second-hand testimonies (often recorded decades after the fact), of referring to anonymous—and therefore unverifiable—sources, and of relying on the writings of other ufologists rather than the original and most reliable documents (e.g., newspaper stories and declassified government memos). Accepting such claims at face value can lead us to inadvertently play a grown-up version of the telephone game without realizing that we are merely reinforcing the erroneous claims of others.
Add to all this the fact that many of the books, articles, TV programs, and films promoting the crashed saucer story often contain contradictory claims that cannot all simultaneously be true (like the multiple reported crash sites) and you have to conclude that a majority of the stories we hear about Roswell have to be at least partly false. In some cases, the same authors and witnesses even contradict their own stories, such as when Walter Haut and Jesse Marcel claimed that they had kept silent for years out of fear of being punished, but then suddenly began blabbing to anyone who would hear them without any hindrance or reprisals while the alleged secret remained classified and the Cold War was still raging.
All of these logical problems should invite any critically-minded person to be suspicious, though they do not on their own make some version of the crashed saucer story impossible, at least not until we take a good look at the facts—both those that are claimed to be true by crashed saucer enthusiasts and those that are provably true but have been conveniently left out of the crashologists’ narrative.[7]
First, a careful reading of several news stories that appeared in the week of Monday July 7, 1947, reveals that many of the basic elements of the popular crashed spaceship story are false. For instance, Mac Brazel stated in a Roswell Daily Record interview published on July 9th that he first spotted the debris on June 14, that’s over three weeks before he told Sheriff Wilcox about it, not on July 3rd as most crashologists claim. This makes it therefore unlikely that whatever Dan Wilmot saw falling out of the sky that 4th of July weekend had anything to do with what Brazel discovered. It also puts into question the research skills of every author who has since claimed that Brazel heard some object crash or explode on the night of July 2nd.
Furthermore, it was clear from the beginning that the largest pieces of debris that Brazel found and collected weighed altogether no more than five pounds, fit in the cab of his truck (with a bale of sheep's wool), and was composed largely of “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks”, a description he gave to Roswell radio reporter Frank Joyce on July 7th, before Jesse Marcel, Walter Haut, and the Roswell Army Air Field had even heard anything about it, and he continued to describe it as such in subsequent interviews.[8] Brazel certainly never described anything that looked like parts of an engine, landing gear, fuselage, fiber optic cables, or dead alien bodies. Brazel did speculate that it might have been some kind of flying object, but not a spaceship so much as a large kite the size of a table top, though he was unable to reconstruct it. The descriptions he gave to the press were also the same that were shared by his wife and daughter, Major Marcel and his son Jesse Jr. (barring a few unusual details we’ll address later), and the frequently and conveniently ignored Captain Sheridan Cavitt who had accompanied Marcel to the ranch and who never believed, unlike Marcel, that they ever found anything “out of this world”.[9] And these are the same materials we can see in the famous Fort Worth Star-Telegram photos of July 8th, alongside Major Marcel and General Ramey at Carswell Air Base. It may well be that these objects were not the remains of a standard weather balloon, and that both Major Marcel and General Ramey knew this to be so, but that does not mean they were from outer space. In fact, one of the problems with the ufologists’ claim that the debris photographed in Fort Worth was not the same stuff Brazel had found on his ranch, is that they exactly resemble Marcel’s own description of the debris, published in the Fort Worth Morning Star Telegram on July 9th 1947,[10] and those he would repeat (again, with a few extra details) thirty years later when he was allegedly spilling the beans to ufologist Stanton Friedman.
But not only is the “bogus debris” theory contradicted by the crashologists’ prime witnesses, it also leads us to wonder why the Army would have replaced it with false evidence that looked exactly like what Brazel and his family were describing to reporters back in Roswell at the same time that Marcel and Ramey were posing in Fort Worth alongside identical “fake” evidence.[11] It must also be noted that General Ramey and his staff never said that the objects displayed in Fort Worth were the remains of a balloon, but rather of a “Rawin target” (or radar reflector)—a lightweight, foil-covered, box-shaped structure that was often attached to weather balloons so that they could be tracked by ground radar.[12] Whether General Ramey thought that’s all the debris was, or that he was hiding a greater secret, is unclear. In any event, the fact that Brazel, Marcel, and Haut all openly expressed their skepticism about this debris being a typical weather balloon suggests that no major effort was made by the military to force any of them to defend a fraudulent cover story. Indeed, Captain Cavitt would later declare that no one was told not to talk about it.[13]
As for Walter Haut, the Roswell Army Air Field public information officer who issued the original “flying disk” press release, his claim that he did not concoct this story himself but was simply following Colonel Blanchard‘s orders is suspect to the highest degree. There is a clear trail of evidence—and several witnesses, including Major Marcel—that show that Haut was severely reprimanded for not getting this story approved before its release, and then transferred to a less prestigious security job, which led him to resign from the military a few months later.[14] He ran several local businesses over the following decades, until he became a ufologist hero and entered the UFO museum business. Meanwhile Colonel Blanchard was promoted to a four-star general.
Haut’s claim is also contradicted by Roswell radio reporter Frank Joyce, the person who first encouraged Mac Brazel and Sherriff Wilcox to contact the Roswell Army Air Field about this find. It was also Frank Joyce who first contacted Walter Haut at the base asking for information that he could report. Colonel Weaver and Captain McAndrew, who wrote the Air Force reports on Roswell in the mid-1990s (see below), also discovered that Colonel Blanchard was on leave from the Roswell Air Field from July 8 to July 23, making it all the more likely that Blanchard never okayed the story and that Haut acted on his own initiative.[15] And so was the crashed flying disk tale brought to life by a low-ranking military press officer who would later admit he never saw the debris, didn’t have any insider knowledge of what had been found on that ranch save for what he heard Brazel, Marcel, and Cavitt describe, and didn’t get the press release vetted by his superiors—but decided nonetheless to publicize the claim that the Army had recovered an alien craft, giving rise to decades of unsubstantiated rumours, hoaxes, and speculations about a crashed flying saucer.[16]
A major nail in the flying disk’s coffin came in the mid-1990s, when ufologist Karl Pflock, a former CIA staffer and Congressional aid, conducted his own investigation of the Roswell crash story. This incited Pflock’s wife’s UFO-curious boss, New Mexico Congressman Stephen Schiff, to ask the United States General Accounting Office (GAO) to open its own inquest. The GAO, in turn, pushed the US Air Force to investigate the Roswell crashed saucer theories and declassify any documents that might help resolve this social panic. A fourth investigation by ufologist and former pilot Kent Jeffrey followed these in 1997.
All four of these investigations failed to locate any reliable witness, log book, or government documents suggesting that any major recovery operation took place near Roswell in July 1947—no requisitions, no extra salaries, no additional staff or civilian contractors, and no movements of large vehicles… nothing to indicate a sizeable recovery effort at the Corona or any other alleged crash site.[17] On the other hand, many classified documents did reveal that high-ranking officials in both the military and intelligence community had no knowledge of any recovered alien spaceship either in July 1947 or in the decades that followed. And since these secret documents preceded the creation of the Project Blue Book UFO studies as well as the Freedom of Information Act, it is safe to assume that they were not maliciously written to hoodwink the public into believing in weather balloons while a series of even more secret government memos discussing an actual crashed alien ship existed elsewhere.[18]
It is now also well-known that the conclusion reached by all of these investigations was that what crashed on Mac Brazel’s ranch in 1947 was not a typical weather balloon nor any kind of flying saucer, but rather part of a then-Top Secret intelligence program called Project Mogul—a short-lived, high-altitude surveillance operation run jointly by the CIA, scientists from New York University (NYU), and the Alamogordo Army Air Field located some 100 miles south-west of Roswell. Between 1947 and 1949, Mogul launched hundreds of 600-foot-long arrays of small neoprene balloons carrying a radiosonde—a meteorological recording device—to monitor Soviet atomic weapons experiments. Attached to the balloons and radiosonde were a series of light-weight Rawin targets made of balsa wood, heavy paper, metallic foil, glue, and tape to help radar bases track the trajectory of each radiosonde—the same kind of radar targets that General Ramey told the media had crashed on Mac Brazel’s ranch. But as the NYU scientists quickly realized, the neoprene balloons tended to disintegrate quickly in the sunlight, causing a number of these devices to be lost, including the one that was launched on June 4, 1947, and disappeared from radar a few dozen miles south of Corona where similar debris were found by rancher Mac Brazel only ten days later. This is part of the reason for which the Mogul neoprene balloons were soon replaced with more resistant polyethylene ones, and then by the large and more durable Skyhook balloons—some of which were also mistaken by pilots for alien spaceships. All of these balloon-born surveillance instruments quickly became obsolete with the development of better seismic detectors and high-altitude reconnaissance vehicles like the U-2 spy plane. And this is why no more crashed Mogul balloon trails and radar targets would be recovered after Mac Brazel did. It remains unclear whether General Ramey knew anything about Project Mogul at the time he promoted the weather balloon explanation or if he was simply just trying to deflate Walter Haut’s silly flying disk story that was attracting unwanted attention to the Roswell Army Air Field—which at the time, it is important to point out, housed the U.S.’s only active nuclear bomber squadron. In any event, Ramey’s inaccurate weather balloon explanation was closer to the truth than Haut’s flying disk story. It is also unclear whether the missing radiosonde—which did not contain any classified evidence and was therefore not of significant value—was ever located or recovered. Had Brazel done so, it might have only strengthened the weather balloon argument.
The two Air Force reports authored by Colonel Richard Weaver and Captain James McAndrew in 1995 and 1997 also provide a great deal of insight about the strange symbols young Jesse Marcel Jr. believed were alien pictograms. As explained by former NYU physicist Charles B. Moore, who had served as Mogul’s project engineer, the foil-covered radar targets had been constructed by a toy manufacturer which had used lavender-colored tape with geometric and floral designs to fasten some of the balsa wood beams to the paper and tin foil.
Irving Newton, the weather officer at Fort Worth Army Air Field who closely examined the broken reflector, also recalled that on some of the balsa wood beams where the tape had peeled off, the purple dye had bled into the wood and left imprints of these symbols.[19] It therefore required little imagination on the part of a 10-year-old boy and his impressionable dad, bereft of any historical context, to believe that these symbols were some kind of alien language. Mac Brazel’s daughter Bessie would also remember having seen these inscriptions, though she did not believe them to be alien script.
As for the purported Ɪ beam, Jesse Marcel Jr. is the only person among all of those who handled these materials, including his father, to have ever made such an observation, or to claim it was metallic. Science journalist Philip Klass also points out that Marcel Jr.’s memory is provably wrong in respect to his chronology of events, as it can be proven that Major Marcel had spent the whole night on Mac Brazel’s ranch on the night of July 7, which was located two hours’ drive away from his home in Roswell, then collected more of the debris on the morning of July 8, and then drove back to the Roswell Air Field from where he flew to Fort Worth with the debris that same afternoon. It was therefore not possible for young Jesse Marcel to have seen this debris in the middle of night on July 7, but only after his father’s return from Fort Worth, when he was probably feeling insulted for having been forced to promote the weather balloon cover story. This would also suggest that the alleged UFO pieces young Jesse Marcel had been shown were not all taken away and locked up in a secret military vault.[20] Finally, it is only thirty years later that Major Marcel would begin telling ufologists that the debris field was three quarters of a mile long, and that he’d tried and failed to destroy some of it. None of this lines up with Captain Cavitt’s own memories of these events.[21] And if Marcel is right and Cavitt is wrong, then we should ask ourselves whether any intelligence officer in his right mind would have run the risk of upsetting his superiors by tampering with evidence whose origins were still unknown, and could realistically have been a Soviet device.
This leaves us with the uncorroborated memories of mortician Glenn Dennis, who claimed he once had a friend—an Army nurse called Naomi Maria Selff—who witnessed an alien autopsy, and those of Philip Corso, who claimed he had reverse-engineered alien technologies gathered at Roswell. The second Air Force report by Captain McAndrew explains that Dennis’ nurse friend could not be identified on any Army document, including published yearbooks that could not have been retroactively redacted.[22] He also offers a number of plausible and well-illustrated explanations to account for Dennis’ and others memories of seeing alien bodies at or near Roswell. These include several high-altitude parachute tests the Air Force performed during the forties, fifties, and sixties that used human subjects, primates, and heavy anthropomorphic dummies with minimal facial features that sometimes crashed outside of designated military test areas, as well as experimental re-entry space vehicles, and a series of aerial accidents that produced charred human bodies and injured airmen whose wounds made them look deformed. Some or all of these activities might account for Glenn Dennis’ recollections, which, truth be told, also contain so many anachronisms and disprovable claims that one has to question the entirety of his uncorroborated stories. Ufologist Karl Pflock and UFO skeptic Philip Klass have been even more critical of Dennis, suggesting that he was simultaneously a gullible victim of the ufologist’s leading questions and guilty of embellishing many mundane and irrelevant memories to garner attention and fame. Indeed, it is pretty well established now that almost all of Dennis’ story of the distraught nurse who witnessed an alien autopsy and then suddenly disappeared is a composite of misremembered events, embellished half-truths, and deliberate fabrications on the part of both Dennis and his crashologist fans.[23]
As for Corso’s claims of reverse-engineering space-age technologies, most science historians, including UFO skeptic Curtis Peebles, have no difficulty explaining the human and incremental origins of every technology Corso claims came to us from outer space, from lasers to fiber-optics to bullet-proof Kevlar vests.[24] It is unfortunate that Corso wasn’t able to reverse engineer something that could truly be said to be out of this world, like, say, an actual time machine, or an anti-gravity propulsion system, or—one can only hope—a zero-calorie donut.
There are many other problems with the Roswell crashed saucer narrative—such as the whole idea that alien beings could monitor and detect nuclear explosions from somewhere outside our solar system, or that they could travel in and out of our airspace without at least one country making it available to the public and proper scientific scrutiny, or that the Majestic12 papers and various alien autopsy proofs have all turned out to be hoaxes—but these would require whole books to deal with in detail. But the reasons presented in this essay, and in the many works cited below, should be enough to help you accept that the Roswell saucer story is little more than a complicated and poorly supported crowd-sourced legend, or as I’ve called it in a previous episode, a wet fire cracker.
Numerous willing believers in the crashed saucer tale have dug in their heels and ignored the many untruths and contradictions in their story, and refused to accept the simpler and well-documented explanation involving Project Mogul radar targets. Other ufologists—namely Karl Pflock, Robert Todd, Dennis Stacy, and Kent Jeffrey—have taken the courageous step to admit that despite their desire to believe that aliens do visit our planet, that Roswell is definitely not proof of it. And then there are those, such as Nick Pope, Leslie Kean, James Fox, and Luis Elizondo, who know fine well that nothing of historical importance happened at Roswell in 1947, but keep on telling everyone—while craftily avoiding discussing the details—that “something” alien was definitely found there. As Kent Jeffries one wrote: “Despite overwhelming facts to the contrary, there are those […] who will fight to keep the myth alive at all cost. Roswell is a sacred cow for some, and a cash cow for others.”[25] Indeed, they are the people for whom the actual facts of what happened at Roswell remain a dirty little secret.
AARO assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG [United States Government] is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence. AARO notes that although claims that the USG has recovered and hidden spacecraft date back to the 1940s and 1950s, more modern instances of these claims largely stem from a consistent group of individuals who have been involved in various UAP-related endeavors since at least 2009.
Volume I. U.S. Department of Defense, February 2024, p.9
M.J. Gagné, 2025.
[1] Rachel Williams: “There’s more to Roswell than the UFO stuff—but not that much more,” Roadtrippers, April 3, 2019. https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/roswell-more-than-ufos/
[2] See for example Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore: The Roswell Incident (1980); Jenny Randles: The UFO Conspiracy (1987); Unsolved Mysteries, Season 2, Episode 1 (1989); Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt: UFO Crash at Roswell (1991); Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner: Crash at Corona (1992); Philip J. Corso and William J. Bines: The Day After Roswell (1997); UFO Files, Season 2, Episode 6 (2005); James Fox interview, Joe Rogan Experience podcast Ep. #1976, April 26, 2023.
[3] Jenny Randles: “Chapter 2: Did We Catch One?” The UFO Conspiracy, 1987, p.21-22.
[4] See Dennis Stacy: “Cosmic Conspiracy: Six Decades of Government UFO Cover-Ups,” (in six parts), OMNI Magazine, Vol. 16, No.7-12 (April-September 1994). https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/OMNI_1994_05/mode/2up
[5] John Purvis: “TOUGH QUESTIONS: What story has shadowed my entire 44-year TV news career?” CBS Channel 4 News, Roswell, NM, July 30, 2024. https://cbs4local.com/news/local/tough-questions-what-story-has-shadowed-my-entire-44-year-tv-news-career-john-purvis-ufo-roswell-new-mexico-nm-atomic-bomb-walter-haut-alien-girl-scouts-robert-stack-unsolved-mysteries-tv-vatican-catholic-church
[6] National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): “Majestic 12 or "MJ-12" Reference Report,” and “The "Roswell Incident", Project BLUE BOOK - Unidentified Flying Objects, https://www.archives.gov/research/military/air-force/ufos.
[7] See for example Dennis Stacy: “Cosmic Conspiracy: Six Decades of Government UFO Cover-Ups,” (op. cit.). https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/OMNI_1994_05/mode/2up; Col. Richard L. Weaver and 1st Lt. James McAndrew: The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Headquarters United States Air Force, 1995, https://ia801006.us.archive.org/22/items/DTIC_ADA326148/DTIC_ADA326148.pdf; Captain James McAndrew: The Roswell Report: Case Closed, Headquarters United States Air Force, 1997, https://media.defense.gov/2010/Oct/27/2001330219/-1/-1/0/AFD-101027-030.pdf; Kent Jeffries: “Roswell: Anatomy of a Myth” (1997), http://www.roswellfiles.com/storytellers/KentJeffrey1.htm; Philip Klass: The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup (1997); Pam Rorke Levy, prod.: “Roswell: Final Declassification” UFO Files S1E4, History Channel, 2002/2004, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6scq8p; Brian Dunning: “Aliens in Roswell,” Skeptoid podcast, Episode #79, December 18, 2007, https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4079; Tim Printy: Roswell 4F: Fabrications, Fumbled Facts, And Fables, 1997/2014, https://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/AFdocs.htm; Tim Printy: “Crashology’s Last Stand,” SUNlite, Volume 5, Number 5, September-October 2013, https://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite5_5.pdf); Robert Sheaffer: Bad UFOs: Critical Thinking About UFO Claims (2016); Philip Day, dir.: “Roswell UFO Secrets”(aka “The Real Roswell”) National Geographic, 2007/2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4AxRTzASxE; All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO): Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I. U.S. Department of Defense, February 2024, https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF
[8] "Harassed rancher who located 'Saucer' sorry he told about it", Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947, reprinted in Klass (op.cit.), chapter 1, p.20-22. See also Joyce’s interview in Philip Day, dir.: “Roswell UFO Secrets” (op. cit).
[9] See “Transcript of Interview of Sheridan Cavitt,” Weaver and McAndrew, 1995, (op. cit.), chapter 18, p.133-162.
[10] J. Bond Johnson: “‘Disk-overy’ Near Roswell Identified as Weather Balloon by FWAAF Officer,” Fort Worth morning Star Telegram, July 9, 1947, reprinted in Klass (op. cit.), Chapter 1, p.17-18. See also Bud Kennedy: “What actually crashed near Roswell? This photo may hold a crucial clue,” Tacoma News Tribune, July 8, 2021, https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nation-world/national/article160065864.html.
[11] Klass, chapter 11.
[12] Johnson (op. cit.), cited in Klass, chapter 1, p.17-18. This statement is credited by the Star Telegram article to Warrant Officer Irving Newton, the meteorologist who worked at the Carswell base. See also “Fantasy of ‘Flying Disk’ Is Explained Here,” Alamogordo News, July 10, 1947. Reprinted in Richard L. Weaver,
Col., USAF: “Report of Air Force Research Regarding the "Roswell Incident," Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb 1995, https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1995/01/22165111/p43.pdf.
[13] “Transcript of Interview of Sheridan Cavitt,” (op. cit.), p.156.
[14] Klass, chapter 8, p.64-65.
[15] Weaver & McAndrew (op. cit.), p.864.
[16] See Joyce’s interview in Philip Day, dir.: “Roswell UFO Secrets” (op. cit).
[17] Weaver: “Report of Air Force Research Regarding the ‘Roswell Incident’," (op. cit.), p.42.
[18] See Klass, chapters 14 and 26. See also Eric Wojciechowski:
“General Nathan F. Twining and the Flying Disc Problem of 1947,” Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 44, No. 2, March/April 2020, https://skepticalinquirer.org/2020/03/general-nathan-f-twining-and-the-flying-disc-problem-of-1947/, and Tim Printy: “Chapter 29: What Did the Air Force Really know?” Roswell 4F: Fabrications, Fumbled Facts, And Fables, 1997/2014. https://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/AFdocs.htm.
[19] Kent Jeffries: “Roswell: Anatomy of a Myth” (1997), Part 3, http://www.roswellfiles.com/storytellers/KentJeffrey3.htm.
[20] Klass, chapter 4.
[21] “Transcript of Interview of Sheridan Cavitt,” (op. cit.), p.134-138.
[22] McAndrew (1997), chapter 2.1.
[23] Klass, chapter 24; McAndrew (1997), chapters 1.2 to 1.4 and 2.2 to 2.4
[24] See Peebles interview in Pam Rorke Levy, prod.: “Roswell: Final Declassification” UFO Files S1E4, (op. cit.).
[25] Jeffries: “Roswell: Anatomy of a Myth,” (1997), Part 4. The Roswell Files, http://www.roswellfiles.com/storytellers/KentJeffrey4.htm.
Documents related to this episode: *
Episode 9.4A
Larry King Live: Roswell UFO Debate, featuring Stanton Friedman, James Fox, Jesse Marcel, Jr., Michael Shermer and Buzz Aldrin. CNN, July 13, 2007. ("Shermer on Larry King Live with the UFOlogists," YouTube, Uploaded by Skeptic, Jun 30, 2009.)
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UFOs: Investigating the Unknown, Season 1. (National Geographic, 2023). Dir. by Ricki Stern. Feat. Leslie Kean, Luis Elizondo, Jacques Vallée, and Michio Kaku.
Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean: "Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program", The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2017
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Brian Dunning: "The Day the UFO Deactivated the Nukes," Skeptoid Podcast #842, July 26, 2022.
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Brian Dunning: "The Tehran 1976 UFO," Skeptoid Podcast #315, June 19, 2012.
Mick West: "Explained: Chilean Navy "UFO" video - Aerodynamic Contrails, Flight IB6830," Metabunk, January 6, 2017.
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Sean Kirkpatrick: "Here’s What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter," Scientific American, January 19, 2024.
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Episode 9.4C
Robert Sheaffer: Bad UFOs: Critical Thinking About UFO Claims. CreateSpace, 2015.
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* All copyrighted video and audio clips are used for educational purposes only under "fair use" regulations.
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