The government changed its story about the Roswell ‘saucer’—a few times.
The following day, the Roswell Daily Record ran a story about the crash and the RAAF’s astonishing claim. But U.S. Army officials quickly reversed themselves on the “flying saucer” claim, stating that the found debris was actually from a weather balloon, releasing photographs of Major Jesse Marcel posing with pieces of the supposed weather balloon debris as proof.
For decades, many UFO researchers were skeptical of the government’s changed account, and in 1994, the U.S. Air Force released a report in which they concluded that the “weather balloon” story had been bogus. According to the 1994 explanation, the wreckage came from a spy device created for a then-classified project called Project Mogul.
The device—a train of high-altitude balloons equipped with microphones—was designed to detect acoustic waves generated by Soviet nuclear tests. Because Project Mogul was a covert operation, the report argued, officials provided a false explanation for the crash to avoid revealing details of the program.
Other elements of the Roswell story—namely claims by some eyewitnesses that alien bodies were recovered from the site—were addressed in a more extensive follow-up report released in 1997. That report concluded that accounts of alien bodies likely stemmed from memories of military parachute-test dummies and other Air Force activities that had become conflated over time.
Roger Launius, a historian and retired curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, says those two reports resolve most of the remaining questions about Roswell.
“This story has been resolved,” Launius says. “Has absolutely every question been answered? I can’t say that. But I’m not sure that there are significant holes.”
“You do not divulge state secrets in the context of national security… My surmise is they probably saw [the initial flying saucer explanation] as a useful cover story.”
Donald Schmitt, a UFO researcher who has spent nearly three decades investigating the Roswell incident and is co-founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, says that explanation makes little sense. The “flying saucer” story, he contends, was so sensational that it was bound to draw attention to the area and its sensitive military operations. Doing so, he argues, would have run counter to the interests of the War Department.
“Two hours west of Roswell the first atomic bomb was detonated. You had ongoing atomic research at Los Alamos. You had all this testing of captured German V-2 rockets at White Sands. And at Roswell, you had the first atomic bomb squadron headquartered,” Schmitt says. “The thought that they would have intentionally set up any type of publicity as a distraction? If anything, they needed less attention.”
Was Roswell’s ‘UFO’ from the USSR?
Another theory—advanced in Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base—holds that the crashed craft was neither extraterrestrial nor the product of a U.S. surveillance program. Instead, it alleges, the incident stemmed from a Soviet plot orchestrated by leader Joseph Stalin.
An unnamed source who reportedly worked as an engineer at Area 51 for defense contractor EG&G told the book’s author, Annie Jacobsen, a national security journalist, that the operation had been designed by Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. According to the source, the Soviets physically altered adolescent children to resemble aliens and placed them aboard an aircraft that flew over New Mexico. The alleged goal, according to the account, was for the children to emerge from the wreckage and be mistaken for visitors from Mars, triggering widespread panic and overwhelming America’s early-warning systems with reports of UFO sightings.
That theory could help explain the unusual markings described by Jesse Marcel Jr., the son of the intelligence officer named in the initial press release. According to Marcel Jr.’s book, The Roswell Legacy, his father brought some of the wreckage home, allowing him to examine the disputed debris before it was taken to the base.
Marcel Jr. wrote that the material was metallic and “I could see what looked like writing. At first, I thought of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were no animal outlines or figures. They weren’t mathematical figures either; they were more like geometric symbols—squares, circles, triangles, pyramids, and the like.”
Marcel Jr. was 11 years old at the time, and the Cold War only just beginning. Could the young boy have been reading the Cyrillic alphabet for the first time, allowing his imagination to do the rest?
On this, Schmitt and Launius agree: It’s not likely.
“There’s no evidence in any Soviet archives that there were such experiments as this,” says Launius. “And if the intent was to generate panic, it failed utterly miserably.”
