Further reading For Roswell
The Day After Roswell by Phillip Corso
UFO Crash at Roswell II: The Chronological Pictorial by Donald R. Schmitt
Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO by Stanton Friedman
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen
Info
Roswell isn’t the first, but it’s definitely the best-known of all UFO crash and cover-up stories out there. It’s the flashpoint for almost every aspect of American UFO mythology (see also: The abduction of Betty and Barney Hill). According to the official US Army Air Force report, a weather balloon crashed near a ranch in the remote regions of Roswell, New Mexico but we all know what really happened. That weather balloon crap isn’t fooling anyone.
Local rancher, Mac Brazel, reported a long field of debris on the ranch property and at first seemed to report that the materials on the ground were extraordinarily strange. Some of the pieces were inscribed with symbols, wreckage of the craft appeared to be made from a material as strong as steel but extremely light. After visits from the nearby Roswell Army Air Field, Brazel then changed his story. But in the early phases of the cover up, an official press release went out to the media reporting that a crashed flying disk had been recovered on the property.
In mid-1947, a United States Army Air Forces balloon crashed at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Following wide initial interest in the crashed “flying disc”, the US military stated that it was merely a conventional weather balloon. Interest subsequently waned until the late 1970s, when ufologists began promoting a variety of increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, claiming that one or more alien spacecraft had crash-landed and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military, which then engaged in a cover-up.
Decades then passed without much incident until the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1977 and conspiracy-minded individuals were coming out of the American woodwork in the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, and Congressional hearings on the CIA. Suddenly, a skeptical eye was cast on the story and a web of documents seemed to tell a larger story about the wreckage recovered, an unacknowledged military base known as Area 51, a facility at Los Alamos National Lab, and a mysterious site at Wright Patterson AFB known as Hangar 18, which likely contained the recovered crash technology.
Episodes: 216 & 217
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