on autopsies on weird, tiny, childlike bodies.
After the TV show Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode in 1989 about the Roswell incident, a Missouri man named Gerald Anderson called in to say he was rock hunting with his family in New Mexico in 1947, and had also seen the crashed flying saucer. What’s more, he later told investigators that he had seen three alien bodies underneath the hull of the saucer, with a fourth tending to his injured crewmates. But he said military personnel showed up and ordered the rockhounds to go away and never tell anyone what they had seen.
Anderson’s story seemed to be corroborated by another independent witness, Frank Kaufman, who said he was part of a military search party that had found a crashed saucer some distance away from Brazel’s debris site. He too said he had seen a large craft half-buried in sand, as well as a number of small humanoid bodies.
In 1992, another book by Friedman and co-author Don Berliner came out with a new theory — that two crashed saucers were actually recovered in 1947, along with their alien crews. Crash at Corona explained why Anderson’s story was inconsistent with the Brazel discovery: one saucer exploded in midair, leaving only debris, while the other crashed almost intact.
What really happened at Roswell? The case and its numerous investigations have taken on lives of their own, with researchers debating one another on TV shows and in books and magazines. Even those whose new evidence seems to support another writer or investigator seem to be at odds with others’ statements. It is a confusing quagmire of facts, anecdotes, and, very likely, fiction.
FLAPS AND WAVES
Ufologists recognize several periods in history during which there were significant increases in the numbers of UFO reports either throughout the world or in several countries at the same time. These are called UFO waves. These were in the years 1896–1897, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1966–1967, 1973–1975, 1988–1989, 1993, 1996– 1997, 2004 and 2009.
In addition, there are localized or regional increases of UFO reports during short periods of time, usually over a few weeks or months, called UFO flaps. A good example of this was the Stephenville, Texas, UFO flap of 2008, when hundreds of people reported seeing UFOs near this small town over a matter of weeks.
It’s no wonder, then, that skeptics and debunkers have had fun with the Roswell case. The late Philip Klass, who made a name for himself as a UFO arch-skeptic, took great delight in pointing out inconsistencies and problems with various theories. For example, in 1994, when the U.S. Air Force released a report on an internal investigation into the Roswell claims, the controversy reached a new plateau. They claimed that in 1947, a secret program called Project Mogul was conducted by scientist Charles Moore in the Roswell area.
Moore supervised the launching of balloons with equipment for monitoring Soviet nuclear tests. Each balloon had reflective materials that allowed radar tracking for easy retrieval. According to Air Force records, one of the Mogul balloon arrays was launched on June 4 and was lost by radar tracking near the Brazel debris site a few weeks later. What seemed to clinch the case was the fact that some of the balloon package material was balsa wood held together with glue and packing tape, some of which was emblazoned with abstract designs and lettering that could have been mistaken for hieroglyphics.
But in June 1997, the Air Force came up with a different explanation for the Roswell debris. An internal study discovered that shortly after 1947 a military project was underway, involving the dropping of mannequins from high-altitude balloons to help understand the injuries sustained by pilots and crew who fell from their aircraft. According to the Air Force, it was these three- and four-foot hairless mannequins that were seen by Roswell witnesses and interpreted as aliens.
Needless to say, this explanation hasn’t sat well with investigators and researchers. Some point out that the mannequins were not deployed until long after the Roswell debris discovery. This is countered by the detail that eyewitness accounts of alien bodies did not emerge until decades after the fact, allowing the possibility of confusion in witnesses’ memories about the year of their observations. The alien bodies story became even more confounding with the publication of a new theory in 2005 that the small bodies with large heads were actually human victims of progenia or other malformations who had been subjects in Air Force experiments.
The problem with coming up with a viable and coherent explanation for all the Roswell evidence and claims is that first the Air Force denied there was any event at all. Then it suggested that the crash was Mogul balloons and later added the mannequin explanation. This sounds suspiciously like arm-waving exercises — trying to make the data fit the theory, and not the other way around. Pro-UFO researchers are probably justified in looking askance at these explanations, which seemed to change as newer information was discovered by researchers.
In fact, since part of the Roswell legend is the switching of newspaper stories to comply with military demands, the accusation of a cover-up may be valid. Even if the truth behind the Roswell crash stories is something militarily terrestrial, there is enough evidence to suggest a cover-up of some kind is involved. But was an alien spaceship behind it all, or a top secret military accident?
Researchers note that the air base near Roswell was the only one with nuclear capability in 1947. Furthermore, the area was home to former Nazi rocket scientists spirited out of Europe following the end of the Second World War as part of Operation Paperclip, an attempt to obtain secrets of rocketry and nuclear science. Certainly some experiments would have resulted in at least a few “accidents” which would have been highly classified.
One argument in defense of an apparent cover-up is that with all the secret projects underway in the area in the late 1940s, and with compartmentalization of knowledge in a typical military approach, it is indeed possible that some high-ranking (and most low-ranking) military personnel would not have had knowledge of certain experiments taking place literally right under their noses.
The most vexing issue is that of time. We are well past the sixtieth anniversary of the Roswell case. Most firsthand witnesses are dead. All relevant official documents may have crumbled out of existence long ago, or been accidentally (or purposefully) destroyed.
In 2007, the publication of the contents of an affidavit signed by Walter Haut, the 509th’s press officer responsible for the initial report that a UFO had been found, created a considerable stir within ufology. It was supposedly written in 2002 and sealed until his death. Throughout his lifetime, Haut maintained that he had never seen any wreckage, and even stated this explicitly on the Larry King show on CNN in 2003.
However, in the affidavit, Haut stated that he not only had seen it but handled wreckage from the crash site. He wrote that it was “unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life.” Further, he was later taken to a hangar where he was shown an object “12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape.” And, most astonishingly, “from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin.” Later in his post-mortem confession, he stated: “I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space.”
Skeptics have charged that there is no evidence Haut actually drafted the affidavit himself, as he was already becoming frail and feeble at the time it was written. Indeed, on that same CNN program in 2003 he did appear confused and did not even stay through the entire planned interview. Yet, one ufologist insisted that when Haut was interviewed in 2001, he was clear of thought and knew precisely what he was talking about.
UFOS AND ALIENS ON TV
A TV series based entirely on the UFO mythology surrounding this incident is Roswell, which ran from 1999– 2001. The premise was that some aliens did survive the crash of a craft at Roswell in 1947 and hatched in 1989 as young aliens with the physical appearance of humans.
