The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

In 1980 that interest was reignited by the publication of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, with additional unaccredited material by Stanton Friedman. The Roswell Incident maintained categorically that an alien craft had crashed west of Roswell in July 1947, and that alien bodies had been recovered from the wreckage; the debris (like «nothing made on this earth», Marcel recalled) at Brazel’s farm was break-up from this craft and that the Army’s weather-balloon story was a cover-up to prevent hysteria over an alien invasion. Since The Roswell Incident, other UFO researchers have suggested that the US has back-engineered alien technology from the Roswell craft at Area 51, and many think — à la Nick Redfern in Body Snatchers in the Desert (2005) — that the Roswell craft was on a mission to experiment on human beings.

The Roswell Incident garnered an impressive array of new evidence. Among those interviewed by Friedman and Moore was a teletype operator called Lydia Sleppy, who in 1947 was typing out the story of the Roswell crash when she was interrupted by an incoming message: «Attention Albuquerque. Do not transmit. Repeat do not transmit this message. Stop communication immediately.» Meanwhile, Roswell researchers Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt found in the woodwork one Arthur Exon, a retired Air Force brigadier, who told of unusual debris brought into Wright Field in 1947 which was indestructible despite its extraordinarily light weight. Yet another retired USAF officer, Brigadier-General Thomas Dubose, stated in interviews that the White House had been involved in the cover-up and that the weather balloon story was a fabrication. Soon there was a positive rush of people and sources to back up the Roswell alien-crash story. New Mexico mortician Glenn Dennis recalled being asked to provide child-sized coffins for the Roswell base, documents from secret government committee Majestic–12 confirmed the recovery of alien bodies at Roswell … and then in 1995 a film surfaced showing an autopsy on the recovered aliens.

Under scrutiny, however, most of the new information appeared riddled with holes. Sceptics proved conclusively that the Roswell autopsy film was a hoax, as were most if not all the Majestic–12 documents, while Lydia Sleppy’s story became ever more fanciful. Declassified documents from 1948 included a secret memorandum by an Air Force intelligence officer reporting no «physical evidence of the existence [of extraterrestrial craft] has been obtained». Marcel contradicted himself on whether the debris he posed with in a 1947 photograph was the recovered debris or switched material.

In an attempt to pour oil on troubled waters, the US Air Force finally published two official reports on the Roswell incident, in 1994 and 1997. The second of these concluded: «But … witnesses are mistaken about when events they saw occurred, and they are also seriously mistaken about details of the events.» This second report was entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed.

Hardly. Counter-reports, books, films … all fly steadily into magazines, bookstores, websites, TV schedules … Such promiscuity is not aided by the fact that the UFO community itself is split on whether there was an alien crash at Roswell in 1947.

So, as we said at the beginning, what did happen at Roswell? According to the Roswell Daily Record of 8 July 1947, the debris Brazel found included «a paper fin … Scotch tape». Not exactly the kind of high tech you’d expect from interstellar-travelling Little Green Men, is it? In the absence of hard or convincing alien evidence, the high likelihood is that the debris found at Roswell was from a terrestrial craft. This craft could have been

a prototype jetfighter which crashed (some researchers suggest the whole aliens-crash-at-Roswell story was actually concocted by an intelligence unit in the US military to cover up the embarrassing failure);

a crashed missile from RAAF itself, which was home to the 509th Bomb Group, the world’s only nuclear bomb squadron in 1947 (this would explain the armed guard used to move materials from Roswell);

a fu-go incendiary balloon launched by Japan in 1945 but coming to earth two years later;

or, as the Air Force contends in its 1990s reports, a high-altitude US balloon from the spying operation known as Operation Mogul against Russian nuclear facilities.

All these scenarios would require some minor (in Cold War terms) deceit, but the Air Force’s explanation (see below) best fits the facts.

So overwhelming is the quality of the mundane cause for the Roswell incident that William Moore, co-author of the book which started the hullabaloo, has stated: «I am no longer of the opinion that the extraterrestrial explanation is the best explanation for the [Roswell] event.»