In June 1947, cattlemen found unidentifiable remnants of an explosion near Roswell, New Mexico. Rumors have spread of an alien disaster. Or was it about secret experiments by the American Air Force?
This happened on July 2, 1947, at about 21:50. The Wilmots sat on the veranda of their home in Roswell, New Mexico, staring at the clear evening sky. Suddenly Dan Wilmot noticed a large incandescent object: "It was moving from the southeast and flying northwestward, not high, just a couple of hundred yards - and very fast, probably 600-800 km / h." One of the neighbors, William M. Woody, then 14, later stated under oath that he and his father saw the same object with the same trajectory.
120 kilometers northwest of Roswell, near the Crown, a heavy thunderstorm raged that night. When pastoralist Mac Braisel heard a violent explosion, he and his family first thought about being struck by lightning. Early the next morning, Brazel, accompanied by his neighbor's son, seven-year-old William Proctor, rode on horseback to see the damage caused by the rampant elements. After driving about ten kilometers south, they reached the area where one of Braisel's herds was grazing. The animals looked calm and docile. However, to the right of them, behind the hill, Brazel and his companion saw a terrible picture: before their eyes lay an exploded strip of earth about 1200 meters long and 200 meters wide, covered with a pile of debris. Mac Brazel often found fragments of fallen balloons in his pasture. But these parts, in his opinion,were not from balloons. And there were too many of them. Some glittered like silver, but most had a dull metallic appearance. The parts were large and small. Some were so light that they fluttered in the wind. But most of all, the farmer was surprised by the rods with glowing reddish hieroglyphs, light as balsa wood. Out of curiosity, he did some small experiments. Brazel took a knife from his pocket and tried to cut the rods. But not the slightest scratches remained on the material. It was also not possible to burn it. Mac Brazel grabbed some of the wreckage and rode with little Proctor back to the ranch. At lunch he showed the findings to Floyd and Loretta Proctor, the parents of a seven-year-old boy. Some were so light that they fluttered in the wind. But most of all, the farmer was surprised by the rods with glowing reddish hieroglyphs, light as balsa wood. Out of curiosity, he did some small experiments. Brazel took a knife from his pocket and tried to cut the rods. But not the slightest scratches remained on the material. It was also not possible to burn it. Mac Brazel grabbed some of the wreckage and rode with little Proctor back to the ranch. At lunch he showed the findings to Floyd and Loretta Proctor, the parents of a seven-year-old boy. Some were so light that they fluttered in the wind. But most of all, the farmer was surprised by the rods with glowing reddish hieroglyphs, light as balsa wood. Out of curiosity, he did some small experiments. Brazel took a knife from his pocket and tried to cut the rods. But not the slightest scratches remained on the material. It was also not possible to burn it. Mac Brazel grabbed some of the wreckage and rode with little Proctor back to the ranch. At lunch he showed the findings to Floyd and Loretta Proctor, the parents of a seven-year-old boy. But not the slightest scratches remained on the material. It was also not possible to burn it. Mac Brazel grabbed some of the wreckage and rode with little Proctor back to the ranch. At lunch he showed the findings to Floyd and Loretta Proctor, the parents of a seven-year-old boy. But not the slightest scratches remained on the material. It was also not possible to burn it. Mac Brazel grabbed some of the wreckage and rode with little Proctor back to the ranch. At lunch he showed the findings to Floyd and Loretta Proctor, the parents of a seven-year-old boy.
On July 6, 1947, Mac Braisel traveled to Roswell to report his find to Sheriff Wilcox. He immediately alerted Roswell AFB and spoke with Major Jesse A. Marcel. He examined the wreckage in the sheriff's office, loaded the largest one into his car, and drove to the base, where he took the wreckage directly to the head of the base, Colonel William Blanchard. Blanchard wasted no time and sent Marcel, along with Captain Cavitt, the base's senior counterintelligence officer, to the crash site. All day long they collected the wreckage and loaded it into their car. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, the US Department of Defense in Washington, responded. All finds in a sealed container should be immediately delivered to the capital. In the shortest possible time, the crash site was completely blocked by soldiers.
On July 7, 1947, Marcel and Cavitt were collecting the wreckage of an aircraft in Mac Brazel's pasture - funeral home owner Glenn Dennis received a call from Roswell AFB burial officer.
When Glenn Dennis arrived at the military hospital some time later, there were three ambulances at the door. Military police were guarding the strange-looking debris. As soon as Dennis entered, an officer appeared and ordered to put the undertaker out, without failing to whisper:
Dennis, like a civilian, ignored the order. The next day he met with a familiar nurse who was on duty at the base. She said excitedly:
"There have been so many UFO sensations over the past decades, but in the end they always turned out to be a big hoax."
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Then the nurse drew one of the corpses on a napkin. When the funeral home owner called her again, he was told that his friend had been sent to refresher courses and she had died in a plane crash.
A few days before the events near Roswell, eyewitnesses observed unidentified flying objects in the sky over America. As private jet pilot Kenneth Arnold flew over the Cascade Mountains in Washington on June 24, he suddenly saw nine disc-shaped objects flying past him.
“They looked like flying saucers,” he said. On the same day, Oregon worker Roy Timm added independently, he observed three disks flying over his house. Other US citizens claimed that in those weeks of 1947 they saw more than a thousand times those silvery discs, cylindrical or spherical spaceships, all very fast and extremely maneuverable.
But what happened near Roswell is still considered the most famous case of the alleged landing of aliens on planet Earth. Until now, experts - police and physicists, military and doctors, ufologists and psychologists - argue about truthful and erroneous statements, conspiracy and concealment of facts by the authorities, fraud and deception of feelings by witnesses. What is fact and what is fiction? "How could we have arranged such a conspiracy if we could not keep even a simple secret"
Transforming aliens into plastic dolls
The mistrust that the US military faces is aroused by them. On July 8, 1947, a day after Major Marcel, along with counterintelligence officer Cavitt, delivered the wreckage to Roswell airbase, base spokesman Walter Hot announced that a real UFO had indeed been found. The sensational news immediately spread throughout the world. A few hours later, the message was refuted: it was allegedly only about the accident of the meteorological balloon-probe. But hardly anyone believed this explanation.
The authorities' retreat was like trying to force squeezed toothpaste back into a tube. True, press officer Walter Hoth, decades later, adhered to the first version, according to which the army confiscated the remains of a crashed UFO.
The confusing information policy of the US military continued. In the first report on Roswell of 1994, for which Air Force Colonel Richard Weaver was in charge, the weather balloon suddenly turned into a spy balloon.
Behind him was the Mogul project, an extremely secret one in the 40s. The Americans, with the help of sensitive spy balls hovering at an altitude of 12 km, wanted to track the tests of atomic bombs and missiles with atomic charges in the Soviet Union. Sensitive sensors on board the balloons were able to pick up the shock waves from nuclear explosions. Indeed, one of these aircraft registered the Soviet atomic bomb test. A year later, Project Mogul was completed because the shock waves from atomic tests could be measured on the ground. One such spy ball, the military finally announced in 1994, fell near Roswell. He owns the wreckage found in 1947.
The question remains: what have the aliens got to do with it?
Various witnesses described them as being of small stature, 1.50-1.65 m, with tiny ears and noses, no hair or eyebrows. "They had ashy faces," Frank Koufman, then a civilian in the army, described their appearance, "and they were dressed in one-piece suits." Here, too, the military came up with an earthly explanation. Colonel John Haynes, author of the last Roswell report in 1997, without thinking twice, turned the aliens into plastic dolls:
It was said that with the help of dummies, the military wanted to test parachutes for pilots of high-altitude jet fighters. “They threw dolls everywhere,” Haynes said.
“We will be the only puppets in this case, if we believe even a single word” - this is how Dennis Baltazar from the so-called UFO network MiGop reacted to this statement. After all, puppet tests have only been conducted since 1953, while the Roswell event took place in July 1947. To this objection, study leader Haynes responded, this time psychologically sound: and time intervals. As a result of a kind of compression of time, various cases merged into one event - and turned into the Roswell legend. For zealous Roswells like Dennis Balthazar (who appears on his business card as a "sworn UFO detective"), "these government explanations are just an insult to our intellect."
Restricted Zone 51
The distrust of UFO supporters who believe in aliens reached unearthly proportions when the US authorities in 1994 were forced to reveal another secret of the military. Until then, no ordinary citizen knew about Area 51, located 150 kilometers north of Las Vegas. The name is already mysterious. It comes from a plan that existed in the 1950s, according to which a remote place in the desert state of Nevada was divided into squares for testing atomic bombs. In 1954, an air base appeared in the desert sands for secret tests of military technologies. No one knows exactly what is happening in the 4687 square miles fenced area. The entire military zone of 30,500 sq. km, slightly less than North Rhine-Westphalia.
More than 100 buildings are visible in satellite images. The most notable building is the hangar, so large it can hold an airplane with a space shuttle on top. The longest runway is an incredible 9.6 km. Thousands of employees are brought to the site every day. As many as 20 Boeing 737s are airlifted from McCarren International Airport in Las Vegas. Workers from the surrounding area are brought in on inconspicuous buses. Throughout the territory, apparently, spacious underground premises have been built and kilometer-long corridors have been laid.
The surrounding mountains protect the area from prying eyes. The inscriptions on the plates, stuck into the desert ground every 50 meters, warn of the use of deadly weapons. The borders are guarded by a private security firm whose employees drive white jeeps with government plates. Surveillance cameras record any movement in the restricted area. The forbidden airspace over the territory is more than 33,000 square meters. km.
Whoever decides to enter the restricted area must take into account a year in prison and a $ 5,000 fine. According to unverified information, the Air Force is in direct command. The CIA, the NSA (National Security Agency), and the Lockheed Defense Industrial Corporation's design department, which builds top-secret aircraft, may also be involved.
Unsurprisingly, under these circumstances, Area 51 has become a gold mine for speculation, speculation and rumors. Those who believe in the landing of aliens in July 1947 are convinced that aliens and their flying objects are hidden in widely branched underground laboratories. Some even had the courage to assert that there were conspiracies of the fourth kind (direct contact with aliens) at the highest level.
Such theories, and above all rumors about "zone 51", are completely dismissed by the authorities. According to the US government, it is not aliens that are stored there, but radioactive toxic waste - an explanation that, at least for this region, cannot be taken at face value. Even local politicians choose to embrace the exciting extraterrestrial version. For after the US Air Force acknowledged the existence of a secret test site in 1994, the Federal State of Nevada officially renamed Interstate Highway 375, the only route leading to Area 51, the Alien Highway.
However, in the case of Roswell, not only the desire of the authorities to make everything a mystery caused distrust, but also the believers in UFOs themselves were often not convincing enough. For example, in 1987, the British UFO researcher Tim Goode slipped documents from which it followed that the US military hid four dead aliens in Roswell and subsequently made contact with the aliens. The documents were signed by then US President Harry S. Truman. Good informed the media, and they caused a commotion. Meanwhile, graphological studies have shown that the presidential signature has been forged. Even more unsightly, the story developed around the eighteen-minute 16-millimeter black and white film that American screenwriter and director Ray Santilli bought from 82-year-old Jack Barnett.former US Armed Forces cinematographer, for $ 150,000.
There was a creature with a rickety head lying on a metal table, with open eyes without an iris, and with six fingers. There was a deep wound on his right thigh. Two figures, dressed in protective suits, bent over the creature and felt the swollen belly and poked at the wound on the leg. Then they took scalpels and cut out the internal organs from the body. The shocking scene allegedly depicted US military doctors performing an autopsy on a disastrous Roswell alien pilot in front of a working camera.
In 1995, Santilli made the film public. TV stations in 28 countries bought allegedly important episodes for big money. In Germany, some of the scenes were shown on RTL. The public was excited. Focus magazine wrote about, perhaps, "the most incomprehensible document in the history of mankind." The British newspaper The Independent called the film "the first proof that aliens have visited Earth." Even Berlin's Taz dared to put it this way: "The US military is investigating a dead alien being."
The deception was soon revealed
In the studio shown in the film, a telephone with a coiled cord hung on the wall. However, such a wall telephone, developed by designer Henry Dreyfus, was put on sale by the American telephone company AT&T only in 1956, that is, nine years later after the indicated moment of the "alien autopsy". In addition, a sectional table in the form of a bathtub, with drainage holes, which was not made according to all the rules, was shown, but a simple couch with an ordinary surface, completely unsuitable for opening. And in general, medical specialists did not leave a stone unturned from a fake.
“In the case of the film, we are talking about a fake, easily visible to the pathologist,” read the conclusion of the Munich forensic physician Wolfgang Eisenmenger.
The autopsy people open the skull so awkwardly, as if they were holding a saw for the first time in their lives. I cannot imagine that amateurs would be admitted to the autopsy of the millennium.
While such incidents occasionally cast doubt on the seriousness of UFO studies, most people still strongly believe that intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe.
In the case of Roswell, ufologists continue their search, too. And even if the events of the summer of 1947 have a completely rational explanation - Roswell firmly takes its place in history.