For four long days, Roswell, New Mexico, was dominated by aliens gathered from what seemed to be from across the galaxy. Green figures with huge heads and slanting eyes, wrapped in silvery robes, roamed central Main Street near the International UFO Museum. At the souvenir tent, something one-eyed with a mouth of impressive size was wiping away, a man was smiling happily next to him, but with a couple of extra eyes on springs, and a miniature "flying saucer" was rumbled along the pavement.
The reason for the large gathering was very important: exactly 70 years ago, in July 1947, on a ranch in the vicinity of this town, a legend was born about aliens who allegedly suffered a catastrophe and left mysterious wreckage in memory of themselves.
The version of enthusiastic ufologists
According to the version of events held by UFO enthusiasts, the mysterious object collapsed near Roswell "at some point in the first week of July" in 1947. The honor of the find belongs to the owner of a local ranch, William "Mack" Brazel, who, after a severe thunderstorm, went on horseback to check his herd. According to his stories, diligently preserved in the museum exhibition, he noticed "unusual debris that seemed to be metal" and were scattered over a large area. He also noticed a "shallow trench several hundred feet long."
Brazel told the Chavis County Sheriff George Wilcox of the find, who notified Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer attached to Bomb Group 509 based at Roswell Airfield. From him, the information went higher - to the commander of the 509th group, Colonel William Blanchard, and Marcel himself went to the scene of the alleged incident together with Captain Sheridan Cavitt, a senior counterintelligence officer.
On the morning of July 7, Marcel examined the crash site and noticed small pieces of metal, to which he brought the light of a lighter to check if they were burning. He also discovered small, lightweight structures made up of thin, lightweight and strong rods, and pieces of material resembling foil. By the way, as Jim Hill noted in an interview with TASS correspondent, the grandson of Major Marcel, Jesse Marcel Jr., who spoke at the seminar dedicated to the significant date, was the guest of honor at this Roswell festival.
Based on the information gathered by Major Marcel, Roswell Air Base Public Relations Officer Walter Hout prepared a press release by 11 a.m. on July 8, 1947, about the discovery of the remains of the mysterious disk. Copies of the statement went to the editorial offices of two local radio stations and two local newspapers. At 2:26 am on the same day, an article about the unusual find was on the tape of the Associated Press agency under the headline "The army today announced that a flying disc was found."
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The wreckage was taken to Fort Worth to the office of Brigadier General Roger Ramsey, commander of 8th Wing. As Marcel said many years later, the wreckage was placed on the general's table, however, when they left the office, they disappeared somewhere, and instead of them, an expanded balloon shell appeared on the floor of the office. It was then that the famous photograph was taken, which captured Major Marcel, examining the shell of a high-altitude balloon. The original press release was later withdrawn and all copies seized, and a second press release was issued on 9 July stating that the 509th Bomber Group had mistakenly identified the remains of the balloon as flying saucer wreckage.
On that day, the Roswell Daily Record reported: “General Ramsey got rid of the flying saucer. Ramsey said the enthusiasm for this was unfounded. General Ramsey says the disk was a weather balloon. As for the pioneer, 48-year-old Brazel, according to the newspaper, he "expressed regret that he told about all this."
The realist military version
This version was confirmed in the 1990s, when the US Department of Defense published a special report on the "Roswell incident." According to the document, scraps of silver foil and light spacers are fragments of one of the high-altitude balloons used by the United States to monitor nuclear explosions in the USSR. The details of this once top secret program, dubbed Project Mogul in the late 1940s, became known in September 1994 to The New York Times.
“The wreckage found near Roswell, New Mexico was a payload shattered by the fall, carried by the ballooning balloons,” the newspaper wrote. “They were a variety of sensors and - which gave a particularly rich food for talk about a" spaceship "- reflectors of radio waves made of thin metal foil. Then the US Air Force stated that it was the wreckage of a meteorological probe, which was a lie of necessity. However, over the decades this incident has taken on truly mystical proportions in the eyes of those who believed in flying saucers; they have managed to make weighty accusations out of fragmentary facts and have covered the conspiracy theories in dozens of books, articles and television shows in every way.
In fact, as it is clear from a report prepared by order of the then US Air Force Secretary Sheila Windall, the wreckage was the remains of equipment that was developed by Maurice Ewing, a famous geophysicist who during the war years was engaged in research related to the transmission of sound under water over long distances. In 1944, he began work related to the transmission of sound waves in the upper atmosphere, and after the war, he proposed to the US Air Force to create a system for observing nuclear explosions outside the United States.
In 1946, Project Mogul was assigned the highest category of secrecy and allocated virtually unlimited funds. Work on it was carried out at Watson Laboratories in Red Bank (New Jersey). Ewing developed sensors capable of detecting low-frequency vibrations, and a meteorologist at New York University Athelstan Spielhouse was responsible for creating shells for high-altitude sounding balloons that would hover at a specified height. Test launches of probe balloons were carried out in Lakehurst, NJ, Bethlehem, PA, and Alamogordo, New Mexico. Special reflectors of thin foil radio waves were installed on the probes so that their flight could be monitored from the ground using radars.
To test the effectiveness of the Mogul system at the Shite Sands test site in New Mexico, powerful charges of conventional explosives were detonated. This system was also used to monitor a series of American nuclear tests in the Pacific. According to the project participants, the Mogul sensors detected the first Soviet nuclear explosion in 1949. However, a year later, in 1950, the project was canceled due to technical difficulties: powerful air currents in the upper atmosphere constantly carried the balloons beyond the reception of ground tracking stations. “From the point of view of equipment operation, the project was a real nightmare,” quoted the opinion of Charles Moore, chief engineer of Mogul, to The New York Times. "However, from a scientific point of view, it was an undoubted success."
The gloomy skeptics version
While rampant alien fun reigned on Roswell's main street, more than 70 skeptics gathered in the Roswell Mall hall, considering all speculation about aliens to be idle and harmful fiction. One of the participants in the Conference on the Modern Challenges of the Concept of the Appearance of Aliens - an expert on the study of biblical texts Michael Heizer - said that he could not understand people who "because of laziness or ignorance, simply invent unimaginable things." “They are here making statements about some ancient materials, about knowledge that no one is able to verify, and no one even turns to the primary sources of this information,” the Roswell Daily Record quoted him as saying. "I just don't like people who were poorly taught."
“What seems to be important is a broader issue: are there aliens,” he said. - I think this is an important question, as well as the question of who we are and how we reached the current level of development. The important question is about God. These are the big questions, and all these retellings of stories about ancient astronauts are mostly bullshit."
Another participant in the discussion - the author of more than four dozen books on the "UFO phenomenon" written in a critical tone, Nick Redfern, expressed the opinion that the traces of the fall of a mysterious object in the vicinity of Roswell are, perhaps, a kind of "hologram" that left an imprint in reality.
There is no certainty about the "hologram" or other phenomena, but there is no doubt that what happened 70 years ago left an indelible mark on Roswell, the editor of the Roswell Daily Record Jeff Tucker said in an interview with a TASS correspondent. According to him, especially for the festival, his newspaper released a 32-page Vision supplement with materials about the incident that played such a big role in the history of the city. "If not for this event," he stressed, "we would have remained in the dark, like dozens of other cities in New Mexico." To be convinced of the veracity of these words, it was enough to take to the streets of Roswell. Unlike 70 gloomy skeptics, about 9 thousand supporters of the version of the UFO arrival gathered on the streets of the city. In fact, these people are translating the history of events in Roswell from the field of scientific debate into the field of popular culture.
Contrary to skeptics
“It was just amazing,” Julian Haversham, head of the organizing committee of the UFO Festival in Roswell, told TASS. “People came to us from all over the United States and from abroad. There were, for example, guests from South Korea. True, no one came from Russia this time, but we will have a festival next year as well”.
The most popular, according to her, this time was the competition for the best alien costume. “Yes, many people chose green for their costumes, traditional for alien guests,” she said. - And how much invention people put into these costumes! One of the prizes was given to a robe made up of colored balls, and the other was a silver foil cube with eyes and tentacles. " According to her estimates, festival participants spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to appear before everyone "in a stunning alien appearance."
Equally popular was the competition for the best outfit of the “alien pet animals”. Dogs of different breeds claimed this honorable role. For one of the contestants, the owners built something resembling a flying saucer on wheels out of silvery fabric; for another, a bright orange plastic mask framed with green curls. Fans of a healthy lifestyle were offered to take part in the 5 and 10 kilometer races under the intriguing motto “Catch the Alien”, and at one of the concert venues young actors from Eastern New Mexico University showed a play “War of the Worlds” based on the novel by H. G. Wells, very appropriate for Roswell.
“This festival was the best of all that has been held so far,” said Jim Hill, director of the International UFO Museum in Roswell, in an interview with a TASS correspondent. “Interest in the Roswell incident is not on the decline: our museum is visited by 200,000 people every year, and over the 25 years of the museum's existence, the number of visitors has exceeded 3.7 million.” According to him, the museum did not prepare any special exposition for the 70th anniversary of the Roswell incident, since the one that has already been created is impressive: humanoid figures with disproportionately large heads and huge mysterious eyes froze in a semi-dark hall under the shadow of a huge flying saucer …
Igor Borisenko
