The True Story of the Roswell UFO Incident

Ufologists call the Roswell incident the “ultimate act of a cold case.”

On the night of July 2, 1947, ranchers outside Roswell, New Mexico, heard what sounded like an explosion in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. The next day, WW “Mack” Brazel discovered debris in a field near his home – unlike anything he had ever seen.

After the wreckage was handed over to the US Air Force, Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release stating that a flying saucer had been captured. The news spread around the world, but the claims were quickly withdrawn 24 hours later. The Air Force's revised statement informed citizens that the wreckage was not from a UFO, but was merely remnants of a crashed weather observation balloon.

It has been nearly 80 years since the Roswell incident and there are countless theories about what was found in New Mexico. Ufologists Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, who have been trying to uncover the truth since 1989, believe Roswell is the “one case that could solve the entire UFO mystery overnight.” Their findings about an alleged government cover-up are documented on Netflix Unsolved mysteriesVolume 5, Episode 4.

“I believe the military experienced the recovery of an alien spacecraft. The evidence leads us there,” Randle claimed in the episode. “The Air Force says they have no evidence it was an alien. I believe the files were collected and are in another archive hidden deep in the government archives and therefore there was no paper trail to them.”

Here's everything you need to know about the Roswell incident that confused many.

What is the Roswell Incident?

On July 2, 1947, an accident occurred in the desert 75 miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico. According to Schmitt and Randle's research, rancher WW “Mack” Brazel discovered metal-like debris in a field near his home the following day.

Brazel loaded as much wreckage as he could into his truck and drove to Roswell, where the 509th Composite Group was stationed. This was the same US Air Force unit that stationed the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Major Jesse Marcel, the chief of intelligence, received Brazel's materials, and on July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release claiming to have captured a flying saucer. Marcel immediately received orders to board a B-29 bomber and deliver the wreckage to Brigadier General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth, Texas.

Upon his arrival, Marcel dropped off the materials at Ramey's office and the two visited the map room. When they returned, the wreckage was reportedly gone, with a clump of rotting neoprene rubber balloons and a shredded radar reflector kite in its place.

After allegedly instructing Marcel not to say a word about what happened to reporters or his family, Ramey held a press conference and claimed that the wreckage was remnants of a weather observation balloon crash.

Marcel remained silent for 30 years. After becoming terminally ill, he appeared in the television series in 1980 Looking for… about what he believed to be true.

“I knew I had never seen anything like this before and until now I don't know what it was. It was nothing of this earth. I’m pretty sure,” he said before describing the materials. “You couldn't even bend it.” You couldn't dent it. Even a sledgehammer would bounce off it.

After Ramey's news conference, the military sent troops into the desert to collect evidence from the rubble site. Meanwhile, a team of archaeologists from Western Texas Tech searched for the impact site and came across a capsule – an egg-shaped vehicle the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, 27 miles from the debris field. They allegedly discovered corpses that were not human.

Captain Oliver “Pappy” Henderson of the First Air Transport Unit flew the presumed bodies from Roswell to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

“My husband told me that the bodies were small, the heads were larger and the eyes were more sunken and slightly slanted. They are not from this earth,” Henderson’s wife Sappho once said in an interview Unsolved mysteries. “When my husband, who was a man of truth, told me this story, I believed him.”

According to the US government, what happened in Roswell?

Since 1947, the U.S. government has attempted to explain the events at Roswell in several reports. The first – a 231-page report entitled The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert – was published in 1994 and co-written by Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent Richard Weaver.

“I really wanted there to be something, but there was almost nothing in the Air Force records about Roswell, and then we found out about Project Mogul,” Weaver said in the Netflix series Unsolved mysteries.

Project Mogul was a top-secret Air Force project whose primary purpose was to detect Soviet nuclear explosions and ballistic missile launches using “naval acoustic sensors, radar reflecting targets, and nylon fibers carried by a train of weather balloons.” On this basis, Weaver concluded that a Project Mogul balloon had crashed in Roswell.

In 1997 the Air Force was decommissioned The Roswell Report written by Captain James McAndrew, who dealt with the bodies allegedly found in New Mexico. The report claimed that the bodies were test dummies carried by high-altitude research balloons.

What have experts said about the Roswell incident?

In episode 4 of Unsolved mysteriesSchmitt and Randle shared their counterarguments to the government's two reports. Although they have no concrete evidence that what was found in Roswell was extraterrestrial, they believe the Air Force is covering something up.

Regarding The Roswell Incident In a report, Schmitt and Randle examined Project Mogul. They found that the project itself was classified, but the materials used were not.

“The Mogul equipment consisted of commercial weather balloons and commercial radar targets,” Randle, a retired lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot and in Iraq as a battalion intelligence officer, said in the series. “There was no reason for Jesse Marcel Sr. not to be able to recognize it.”

The report also states that the Roswell crash is related to Project Mogul Flight No. 4. However, the ufologists also learned that flight number 4, which was scheduled to take place on June 4, 1947, had been canceled due to weather.

“If the flight had been canceled, the debris could not have been left behind,” Randle said. “One thing is clear, everyone agrees that something fell, but what was it?”

What The Roswell ReportSchmitt and Randle found the Air Force's attempt to explain the bodies ridiculous.

“You're talking about crash test dummies that didn't come out until 1952, five years later,” said Schmitt, former co-director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. “So none of our witnesses to the bodies in 1947 could have witnessed the crash test dummies.”

In September 2024, PEOPLE spoke with Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official in a top-secret Pentagon program that studied UFOs and the author of Coming Up: The Pentagon's UFO Hunt. He was able to speak openly about the US government's possession of non-human biological samples.

“I want to be careful when I say 'corpses,' because a body suggests that you have an intact, whole carcass or corpse. What I can say is that biological samples have been recovered,” he said, before describing the “non-human” technology he once held in his hands.

“It was a metallic surface that was beveled and had multiple layers of material inside. It had all sorts of interesting electrical properties. She wasn't natural. It was definitely constructed. When we showed it to scientists from one of the leading aerospace companies.” In the world they just scratched their heads and said it couldn't be made. And yet it was there.

What other theories are there about the Roswell incident?

The Roswell incident has spawned several conspiracy theories. Accordingly BlazeSome people believe that the alleged UFO was made by the Nazis. Theorists claim that a spacecraft called The Bell, a machine powered by electric particles, fell from the sky during a test flight.

Meanwhile, Charles Berlitz and William Moore, authors of The Roswell Incident The study, published in 1980, suggests that a spacecraft keeping an eye on U.S. nuclear weapons activities was flying over New Mexico when it was struck by lightning and crashed.

More recently, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen wrote Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Theorized in 2011 that Russia's Joseph Stalin was supposed to fly a spaceship with “grotesque, child-sized planes” over the United States and create hysteria The Seattle Times.