Return to Roswell

Dennis Goza
February 2005

Drive into town and the first thing you'll notice is eyes staring at you. Dozens of pairs of eyes. Alien eyes - alien as in extraterrestrial. They're painted onto the street lamps, which are shaped somewhat like alien heads, at least as they are conceived in the popular imagination. Other alien faces peer at you from storefronts, one of which even has a disc-shaped spacecraft protruding from its façade as if a proverbial flying saucer had crashed into the building. There's no doubt about where you are: Roswell, New Mexico, unquestionably the most prominent of the alleged UFO encounter sites in history.

What really happened here in 1947 has been obscured by legend, but according to the testimony of the individuals involved (most of them considered reliable witnesses), here's a brief synopsis:

• On the night of July 4 during a thunderstorm, residents of southern New Mexico see an exceptionally bright flash and hear an exceptionally loud boom. The army base in Roswell reports tracking a "descending flash" on radar.
• On July 5, Mac Brazel, a rancher near Corona, discovers metallic debris, some of which he stuffs into a sack.
• On July 6, Brazel makes a business trip to Roswell (75 miles away) and brings the fragments to Sheriff Wilcox. (Neighbors have suggested to Brazel that he may have pieces of a UFO, and should try to collect the $3000 reward someone has offered. Only a few months earlier, a pilot in Washington state had sighted a flying formation of disc-shaped objects, and a newspaper account had coined the term "flying saucer".) Wilcox is so intrigued that he calls the local army base. When intelligence officer Jesse Marcel sees the pieces, he also is mystified, and decides to accompany Brazel back to the ranch.
• On July 7, Marcel tours the ranch and collects some of the copious debris, which he takes home and shows to his wife and son. Although the substance is as easily crumpled as foil, it returns promptly to its original shape. At least one segment has unidentifiable symbols on it, suggesting hieroglyphs of some sort. Marcel then takes the fragments to his superior, Col. Blanchard. Meanwhile, Roswell mortician Glenn Dennis receives a call from the base inquiring how many child-size coffins he has in stock. When he replies that he has only one, he is asked about preserving bodies exposed to the elements (just for "future reference"). Later, Dennis makes a trip to the base hospital and encounters a nurse he knows who seems very agitated and urges him to get out of there immediately. He is then escorted out by military guards, who make threats to his life.
• On July 8, Col. Blanchard tells his PR Officer, Walter Haut, to issue a press release that a UFO has been recovered. Marcel takes some of the wreckage to Ft. Worth, where Gen. Ramey spreads it on the floor and tells Marcel to leave the room for a moment. When Marcel returns, the debris has been replaced by scraps of a weather balloon, and Marcel is ordered to remain silent as newspaper photographers take photos. Glenn Dennis meets with the nurse, who sketches what she saw on an examining table - strange little bodies with big heads and eyes.
• On July 9, the nurse is transferred to England. (Not long afterward, she is reported killed in a plane crash.) Gen. Ramey issues a new press release stating that the "UFO" is just a weather balloon. Army pilot "Pappy" Henderson flies the "alien bodies" (which he sees) to another location.
• From July 9-12, Mac Brazel is held in custody by the military for questioning. When he returns home, he has changed his story and claims that he only found a weather balloon. He is driving a brand new truck.

Over the years, purported witnesses gradually come forward to substantiate the UFO stories. Many relate having seen "alien bodies", the number of which varies from 2 to 8, with 4 being the most consistent number. And there is a recurring assertion that one of the aliens survived the crash for a few days.

In 1997, the U.S. government admits that it lied. (An extremely rare occurrence, as you probably know.) It was not a weather balloon after all, they say - it was a spy balloon (presumably looking for Soviet submarines in the desert) launched as part of "Project Mogul". The initial report made no reference to the "alien bodies", but the later version states that these were actually dummies that were dropped from balloons (of a different type) in experiments to assess the damage of such impact.

There is ample room to doubt the truth of some of the extraterrestrial claims, but there is no doubt that the legend has benefited this community enormously. A sleepy little hamlet of 11,000 in 1947, Roswell now has swollen to more than 50,000. And there is little doubt that the tourist trade sparked by the UFO incident is largely responsible.

We pulled into town on a rainy February morning, and my first order of business was to acquire the haircut I'd been putting off for so long, lest I be mistaken for some otherworldly being myself. The young lady who worked on my head chatted constantly with her co-worker, and it turns out that both of them had had early ambitions to be archaeologists - an occupation that perhaps would have landed them right here in this very region. And they also mentioned something else that made my pointy ears perk up: the desiccated remains of some unidentified creature had just been found in the desert. The co-worker said he had seen a photo of it, and that it had sharp teeth and a horn on its head; and there was supposed to be a story about it on the TV news that night. Even now, I thought, Roswell seems to be a magnet for the unexplained. (And in keeping with the supposed cover-ups of such occurrences, I never heard a word about this alleged discovery from any news source afterward.)

The main attraction in Roswell, at least as far as we are concerned, is the UFO Museum, located on Main Street. We paid a visit to this fascinating place when we were in town five years ago, and we figured it was time for a return trek. So we parked our van and trailer in the lot where the sign said "UFO Parking Only", and in we went for another close encounter.

Now the first thing that a cynic might be prone to utter upon hearing about the museum is that it's a bunch of hucksters trying to make a buck off the gullible public. The problem with that theory is that no admission is charged. There is a jar at the front desk if you feel inspired to make a donation, and the museum does receive a portion of its funding from that source, but you don't have to pay to tour the facility.

We inquired at the front desk whether any of the founders or organizers of the museum might be available to interview. But the gentleman on duty, who apparently has been associated with the museum for quite some time, said that the two surviving founders were both getting up in years, and never did interviews anymore. I assume he was referring to Walter Haut, who wrote the famous UFO press release under orders from his superior, and Glenn Dennis, the former mortician who was contacted by the military about supplying coffins. I wondered if these two were still sticking to their story after all these years. (Later, that question was answered when I viewed an exhibit printing a response by Dennis to an investigator who had called him a liar: "My story has not changed, and it will not change. I was there. He was not.")

As you walk into the building on the right, one of the first things you notice is an antique radio such as would have been in use at the time, modified to play a recording of the actual broadcast by a local radio station announcing that a UFO had been recovered. The broadcast is less than two minutes in length, and rather sketchy in details, but its implications are unequivocal.

Next come several walls covered with dozens of photographs, newspaper clippings, sworn affidavits and other documents. There is also an actual dummy that was used in the balloon tests described by the military, as well as a photograph of this dummy with three others. But we'll be hearing from the dummy again in a moment.

One of the most impressive documents on display is a reproduction of the first few pages of what is claimed to be an official CIA manual titled "Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology; Recovery and Disposal". Next to it are notes establishing its authenticity rather convincingly - and answering the few challenges that have been leveled against that authenticity.

Nearby is a screening room in which films pertaining to UFOs are screened continuously. During the time we were there, the showings were a documentary about secret Nazi projects to develop advanced flying craft, and the Showtime movie "Roswell", from a few years ago, which we watched for the first time.

Let's be clear about something here: the official name of this facility is the International UFO Museum and Research Center, and a major part of its mission is to delve into the truth about UFOs. But another aspect of its purpose, obviously, is preserving the folklore and pop culture that have been spawned by the phenomenon. On the opposite side of the building, the walls are adorned with numerous photos of purported flying objects, many of which are acknowledged to be fake. (Some, however, appear to be genuine.) And throughout the museum, there are a couple of other exhibits of "discoveries" that turned out to be hoaxes, and are clearly labeled as such. They are presented because fraud is, unfortunately, as much a part of UFO history as serious research.

There is also a lecture area with a stage and seats where presentations are made on occasion. On our first visit, a man was there displaying what he claimed was a "Martian tree". He had a rock about the size of a basketball (as I remember) and imbedded in it was a red object about the size of a safety pin (they apparently have some tiny forests on Mars), and which he allowed us to view through a magnifying glass. What I saw was about the shape of a mandrake root. This fellow also had on display several letters from scientists, the general import of which was that they could not discredit his claims. Someone asked him how he happened to find such an object, and he replied, "I'd always wanted to discover proof of life on other planets, and so I prayed for God to let me find something like this, and He did."

Imagine two very different people entering this museum and spending an hour or two examining all the evidence and non-evidence closely. One individual really wants to believe in UFOs, the other is determined not to. At the end of the tour, both will have found plenty to reinforce their beliefs. But as a person who is both open-minded and skeptical myself, I find it hard to believe that an impartial person could emerge from this place without being more inclined to consider the Roswell Incident more plausible than he or she did before entering.

Certainly, some of the "testimony" is unreliable. There is little doubt that many of the "witnesses" who have come forward merely have been seeking to cash in on a craze, or at least obtain their 15 minutes of spotlight. A chart on the wall graphs the number of reported UFO sightings in the period before and after 1947, and you'll note a very dramatic spike right after the Roswell episode. Was this just mass hysteria, or could there be an alternate (or additional) explanation?

There are many alleged eyewitness accounts of the Roswell incident that can't be dismissed easily - indeed, it's very difficult to dismiss them at all. (The persistent explanation for why so many of these individuals waited several years before speaking out is fear; they maintained that government agents threatened their lives, and even the lives of their families.) And what's really troubling is that the government's side of the story is equally full of holes. To have a few civilians tell fibs, whether they concur or not, is to be expected. To have several government officials apparently tell fibs, particularly when they tell the SAME fibs, is a much weightier matter.

First, consider the notion that the flying object was merely a balloon. Weather balloons were launched from the vicinity with great frequency, and it was not that unusual to have them make unscheduled landings. The locals were quite familiar with them. (As one character in the "Roswell" film remarks, "even my dog could identify a weather balloon by now".) It's unthinkable that out of all the people who saw these scraps of material, NOT ONE would have recognized it as coming from a balloon. And considering that some of these individuals were military personnel - indeed, even military INTELLIGENCE personnel - the notion that a balloon was not recognized immediately is not only unthinkable but downright terrifying. Remember that it was military intelligence who issued the press release affirming that what had been found was of extraterrestrial origin. Would they have committed such a laughable blunder without subjecting the material to close examination? (Allegedly, they even attempted unsuccessfully to cut it with drills and torches. doesn't sound like neoprene to me.) An espionage balloon, of course, would have been somewhat different, but surely not so radically different as to confound military examiners.

There's one bit of revealing evidence tacked onto the wall here that has been almost universally ignored. Look at the front page of the Roswell Daily Record with that notorious headline story about a spacecraft being salvaged. Now scan down the page about halfway and you'll see another story with the caption "Air Force General Says Army Not Doing Experiments". In this article, Gen. Nathan Twining is quoted as saying, "Neither the AAF nor any other component of the Armed Forces had any plane, guided missile, or other aerial device under development which could possibly be mistaken for a saucer or formation of flying discs." Surely a balloon, no matter how unusual its design, would be classified as an "aerial device".

Now let's return to those dummies. The apparently credible witnesses who claim to have seen the bodies all describe them almost identically: large, hairless heads with big, almond-shaped eyes, and short, spindly bodies. Now look at the dummy on display in the museum, and the photo of the four dummies on the wall. What you'll see is a full-sized, very human form, a form that surely would never be mistaken for E.T. And when you look at the dummy on display, you'll see something else: metal springs clearly visible through the holes that have worn through the skin. The impact of dummies falling to earth from a balloon surely would cause such damage to the covering that the springs would have been noticed.

And then we have the time element. Why did it take the government 50 years to get around to mentioning the dummies at all? Did the same dummies who hypnotized New Mexicans into thinking they looked like space creatures also hypnotize all government agents into forgetting about them for half a century? And note also that the putative dummy experiments were not part of Project Mogul, but Project Excelsior, which commenced in 1957, a full TEN YEARS LATER. How to explain the discrepancy? The government says the folks in Roswell just have faulty memories. You know, something in the water causes everyone to subtract ten years from everything. So how then do they explain the numerous newspaper accounts of the UFO incident - not just in New Mexico but all over the world - clearly dated 1947? Er, they don't. (They do, however, offer an explanation for the "hieroglyphs". Are you ready for this? Here goes: that hush-hush, high-security, high-precision balloon project so vital to national defense during the Cold War Era was constructed using materials supplied by a TOY COMPANY!!!)

Incidentally, I've also conducted some extracurricular research that indicates some of the scientists who apparently developed Project Mogul - and who later vehemently denied any extraterrestrial factor - had THEMSELVES witnessed UFOs! Moreover, one of them, when questioned about possible balloon crashes, pointed out rather fastidiously that balloons in fact do not CRASH at all - they simply DRIFT to the ground.

Making our way around the horseshoe-shaped exhibit arrangement, we come at last to a section celebrating the lighter side of the phenomenon, including cartoons and one of the "aliens" used in the movie "Roswell". We take a swing through the gift shop, where you can purchase not only books and videos you can't find anywhere else, but also such kitschy items as an alien driver's license.

And then we have to be on our way, having stayed so long on our little jaunt that we can't even make time to browse through the research library. We'll just have to save that for our third expedition. And we do hope to return to this enticing little destination on the Third Planet.

UFO buffs often say "the truth is out there". We say that the truth just might be IN there somewhere as well.