The Roswell Incident
Many conspiracy theorists, as of today, consider the “Roswell incident” one of the most interesting pieces of evidence proving that extraterrestrial life not only exists but has been covered up by the Us government for many years now.
The famous events happened on July 7th of 1947, almost 75 miles north of the town of Roswell in New Mexico, when remains from a highly classified project used by the US Army Air Force (then renamed US Air Force) to detect atomic bomb tests in the Soviet Union, were recovered from a ranch after being reported by William Brazel, a worker at the ranch.
Brazel immediately thought of UFOs, gathered some of the remains and went to inform Sheriff George Wilcox, in Roswell, of his discovery. Wilcox promptly reported the encounter to the USAAF base at Roswell, which immediately sent agents to the ranch, at that point already accompanied by the press.
The day after, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issued a press release stating that a “flying disk” had crashed on a ranch near Roswell in the course of a powerful storm. During the day several government scientists arrived to investigate the phenomenon and then decided to finally hold a press conference modifying their statements, affirming that what had crashed was a weather balloon.
After their initial statements, claiming that the remains were part of a UFO, the Roswell Daily Record admitted to their mistake, including the USAAF statement, affirming that a weather balloon had been found at the site. Brazel even confessed to regretting the unnecessary publicity brought by the mistake.
Officially, the remains found came from a balloon codenamed Project Mogul, part of an experimental technology trial. This Project was used to detect sound waves in the upper atmosphere from Soviet atom bomb tests by flying microphones on trains of balloons at high altitudes. The technology was quickly substituted, but it remained secret for over 20 years after the event.
The story was wildly forgotten by the public until The National Enquirer reported the original Roswell Daily Record story, but not the correction, once again. After the publication of the story, theories started re-appearing, more interesting than before, which suggested that the government’s incomplete account had been an attempt to cover up the discovery of an alien spacecraft.
There wasn’t, though, much evidence of this, except for several witnesses claiming to have seen remains scattered over a large area and at least one person reported seeing an aircraft in the sky right before the crash. The key testimony came from a former mortician, Glenn Dennis, who claimed, in 1989, that a friend who worked as a nurse at the Roswell Army Air Field had accidentally walked into an examination room where doctors were studying the bodies of three creatures. They looked like humans, but with small bodies, very long arms and big bald heads.
Jumping into 1995, Ray Santilli, a London-based entrepreneur, released “footage” of an alien autopsy performed in Roswell in 1947. Experts immediately advised to not take the video seriously, as it was a hoax, and Santilli himself admitted years later that it was almost entirely fake, even though he still claimed that the real footage existed, but he was forced to recreate it because of the poor conditions of the original.
During the years, the validity of various witnesses has been questioned, and it has been pointed out that many claims over the years have come from “friends of friends” who said to have seen something out of the ordinary related to this incident.
And as proof of how easy it is to be conditioned, the republication of the story came just one year after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film about a government conspiracy covering up alien visits to Earth. The following year the movie came out in the UK, and 750 sightings were officially documented in the Country by the Ministry of Defence.
The correlation between the two phenomena, the release of alien-related movies and the number of sightings, is clearly high. In the year that Independence Day and Mars Attacks were released to the public, there were 609 UFO sightings across the UK, significantly more than the years just before or after. In any case, UFO sightings have been increasing slowly and steadily in the US since the 1970s, growing increasingly rapidly since the early 1990s.
Among the possible explanations, one is that the reporting centre became better known and easier to reach thanks to new technologies such as fax machines and the internet. Another is that the available data from 2000 to 2014 found that most UFOs were reported when people were drunk.
Project Mogul was declassified in the 1970s, but it wasn’t fully connected to Roswell until 1994 when the National Security Agency published a report denying the existence of a conspiracy during the Roswell incident. In 1997 a second report was published, admitting that reports of alien bodies actually were life-sized anthropomorphic test dummies.
Critics seem to believe, though, that the detailed analysis of the Roswell incident inadvertently fuelled interest in conspiracy theories and hyphened suspicions that the US military was involved in a cover-up.
Thanks to the famous Roswell incident, the town has become Ground Zero for UFO conspiracists, which each year on the anniversary of the story, attend a UFO Festival. There, they can dissect mock alien bodies and take part in scientific experiments.
Last year, 70 years since the incident, about 38,000 people went to the conference from all over the world. Some of the most famous and respected UFOlogists including Karl T. Pflock, Kent Jeffrey, and William L. Moore, have admitted over the years that there were no aliens or alien spacecraft involved in the Roswell crash.
Author Letizia
https://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_roswell_incident_at_70_facts_not_myths
http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/59331/roswell-ufo-crash-what-really-happened-67-years-ago
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