Exactly 70 years ago, the "Roswell incident" took place, from which the international hysteria around UFOs and the "government conspiracy" associated with them originates. For all their conspiracy husk, those events are indeed of great historical significance, since they became a significant episode in the global confrontation between the USA and the USSR.
All over the world, July 2 is unofficially celebrated as UFO Day or UFO Day. This is quite fair. No matter how great the skepticism of traditional science towards ufologists, a systematic search for evidence that civilizations from other planets did visit Earth takes its account of an event that occurred near the Foster Place ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. exactly 70 years ago.
Official version of events
In 1947, Foster Place Farm was a typical American backwater. There is no telephone, no electricity, the closest neighbors (the same farmers) live a few miles away. The weather on the night of July 2 to 3 was inclement, a dry thunderstorm sparkled outside the window - a phenomenon in deserted New Mexico is not uncommon. This time, however, the farmer Mac Braisel (later he will have to retell this story many times) heard a particularly strong rumble and saw a flash of light, not at all like lightning. The house shook, but soon everything was quiet.
In the morning, Brazel found that his sheep had escaped from the pen and went in search of the animals. During this search, he discovered the crash site - a wasteland near the farm was littered with strange debris. The material bent like foil, but did not burn and it was not possible to cut it with a knife (at least, Brazel repeatedly vowed this to journalists). In addition, there were inscriptions on the wreckage. Subsequently, the farmer's daughter compared them with numbers, the son with the ancient Indian script, and the closest neighbor with the Chinese characters.
All this stuff that literally fell from the sky, Brazel loaded into his SUV and drove home. The next day, he showed the finds to a neighbor (the one who saw similarities with hieroglyphs in the patterns), he advised him to hand them over to the sheriff, which the farmer did a couple of days later when he reached the village of Korona. Already there, he learned that on the night of the crash, the locals saw some unidentified objects in the sky.
The sheriff contacted Roswell Air Base, where the 509th Aviation Regiment was located, and then the military was already engaged in business. It is worth mentioning that the air unit was not an ordinary one - the pilots of this particular regiment had carried out atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki two years earlier.
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By that time, rumors of a strange crash had already spread around the district - reporters anticipated a sensation in the spirit of "the latest weapon of the Soviet communists who tried to attack the heroic air regiment." After handing over the wreckage to the Roswell military, the farmer gave himself up to the reporters. Articles about this were published by many local newspapers, and a month later - on July 8 - the authorities made an official statement: according to their version, a banal balloon crashed near Roswell. Photos of its wreckage were provided by the army press service to journalists. With a little more noise, the district calmed down.
And the authorities hide
The Roswell Incident was forgotten for more than a quarter of a century - until the late 1970s. Many direct participants in those events, including the farmer Brazel, have already died. However, the famous ufologist Stanton Friedman managed to get Major Jesse Marcel, who was in charge of evacuating the suspicious debris, to talk - he was the one who was called by the Crown Sheriff. The major repeated Breisel's story of unknown material and hieroglyphic-like patterns. After that, in a confident tone of a professional, he declared that the fallen apparatus was not and could not be a weather balloon.
Suddenly one more witness of those events showed up. While Jesse Marcel was examining the site of the discovery of the wreckage, 90 kilometers from him, engineer Grady Barnett allegedly found a disk about eight meters in diameter on the ground, and next to it were the gray corpses of humanoids, which, in their height and build, resembled puny teenagers. Barnett was going to report his find to the authorities, but the authorities were already aware - the military arrived in jeeps to the mysterious disk and strictly forbade the engineer to tell anyone about the find.
An important clarification: by the time of Friedman's interview with Marcel, engineer Barnett was already dead - ufologists talked with his close friends, to whom he told this story, despite the military ban (if, of course, such was the case). The subtlety is that, according to declassified documents of the FBI, whose agents were conducting their own investigations, the corpses of humanoids were seen by several more people. When history found a second life, some of them went to ufologists.
In the community of the latter, the "Roswell incident" had the effect of an exploding bomb. Numerous guesses were made as to what kind of apparatus fell in New Mexico and where the American authorities hid its "passengers". According to the most common version, the wreckage was taken to the famous Area 51 in Nevada, where it is stored in the equally famous hangar number 18.
War of the Worlds
One may or may not believe in the conspiracy of silence by the American government, but the fact is that the Roswell incident was used in an information war against the Soviet Union.
In the book by ufologist Annie Jacobsen, published under the next escalation of the Cold War, it is argued that the "aliens" were personally sent to New Mexico by Comrade Stalin: there were Soviet children on board an unknown aircraft, whose faces and bodies were deliberately mutilated at the direction of the Kremlin. Moreover, the operation was carried out not by anyone, but by Joseph Mengele, who was hiding in the USSR from just retribution (in fact, a Nazi doctor in those days was quietly living out his life in Latin America).
According to Stalin's plan, the "saucer" was to land in one of the major American cities and cause a panic similar to that which occurred during Orson Welles's famous radio show "War of the Worlds." However, due to a thunderstorm, the aircraft crashed in New Mexico, the authorities classified all information, and America was saved.
The hype around the "Roswell incident" gradually turned into hysteria, and the authorities were forced to react. Back in the 1970s, the Air Force confirmed the information about the discovery of humanoids, but said that they were not people, but dummies that the military dropped to test new parachutes. And in 1994, the US Audit Office initiated its own investigation of the events around the Foster Place ranch.
Under this case, British producer Ray Santilli published a video with the autopsy of "humanoids": for two and a half hours, doctors extract various organs from the "alien corpse". On this tape, Santilli managed to earn millions, but today the fact of a fake is considered proven. According to professional doctors, people on the recording are holding medical instruments in their hands for the first time, information signs hanging on the walls were not yet used in 1947, and Santilli himself flatly refused to provide the original film for research.
As for the new official version, developed as a result of the investigation, one of the probes of the once top-secret Mogul project was discovered under Roswell. The probe was a platform carried by many balloons, and microphones were attached to the platform, designed to detect sound waves from the nuclear tests carried out by the USSR at that time. The wreckage of this spy technology was discovered by farmer Brazel. The bendable film that did not burn and was cut is the remnants of anti-radar reflectors, and the patterns were explained by the fact that the manufacturer made children's toys before the war.
According to ufologists, after the publication of the report of the Accounts Chamber, the truth did not get any closer: the question of why the reflectors could not cut the farm knife remained unanswered, like many other questions. However, stories about UFOs and a government conspiracy, as well as UFOlogy itself, are now taken to be treated quite differently than in the 70s of the last century. It is not recognized as a science, even despite the fact that the staff of numerous centers of ufological research around the world are quite authoritative scientists. To their credit, much more often they refute the alien nature of the phenomena being investigated than they claim evidence in favor of certain conspiracy theories.
Anyway, for Roswell this whole story was a lucky ticket. Every year in early July, the city is visited by more than 200 thousand people, who bring the municipality more than $ 5 million in profit. So the "Roswell incident" turned into a successful business, which is typical for America: the city welcomes guests with a series of lectures, exhibitions, a pile of souvenirs and a costume parade of "aliens".
Alexander Antoshin