But perhaps the strangest aspect of all of this involved Fred Crisman.
In 1968, he was called before a congressional committee to testify about his whereabouts on November 22, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
12
What Happened at Roswell?
Probably the most publicized flying saucer incident in history is known as the “Roswell Crash.” Even people with only a passing interest in the UFO phenomenon know at least a little bit about it.
On or around July 4, 1947—just days after Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting, and while the United States was caught in the throes of saucer mania — a spacecraft reportedly crashed on a ranch in a remote part of New Mexico. A local ranch hand spotted the impact site and recovered bits of wreckage that looked a lot like aluminum foil and pieces of balsa wood. These items were scattered over a wide area.
The ranch hand took some of the fragments to Roswell, New Mexico, which was actually about 30 miles away from the debris field. He contacted local authorities, and soon enough, the military was involved.
Close to the town of Roswell was Roswell Army Air Field. At that time, the Roswell base was the only military facility in the United States whose aircraft were equipped to carry atomic weapons. This only added to the crash mystery.
The air force eventually took ownership of the ranch hand’s fragments as well as all the debris found on the ranch itself, though a few civilians managed to view several of the pieces beforehand.
After looking over these remains and hearing the ranch hand’s story as well as stories of other residents who’d seen a strange object flying over the area during the night in question, the air force made a startling announcement: They said they’d captured a flying saucer.
This declaration, issued in the form of a press release by Roswell’s base commander, was accompanied by a photo showing some of the “saucer’s” pieces.
The story made the local headlines, and soon enough the events at Roswell were news across the country. Again, it helps to remember that at the time, the summer of 1947, people from every state in the union were reporting flying saucers. Now it seemed as if the great flying saucer mystery was about to be solved.
But the excitement only lasted one day. Twenty-four hours after making the startling announcement, the air force reversed itself and said the debris found — the aluminum strips and the balsa wood — were actually parts of a weather balloon that had crashed on the remote ranch.
And for the most part, the public believed the air force. The story went away — for more than thirty years.
It was revived in 1978 when a UFO researcher interviewed a military officer who was part of the original air force team that retrieved the Roswell wreckage. For the first time this officer said he believed the debris wasn’t a balloon, but rather was part of a wrecked alien spacecraft and that the military had covered up the crash.
This interview led to an article in the National Enquirer. Then came books touting an almost completely different version of the previously accepted events. By the early 1980s, the speed and range of the media had increased a hundredfold from 1947. The “new” story of Roswell suddenly took off.
This time around it was claimed that the debris found on the desolate ranch had possessed incredible properties. The aluminumlike foil now had superstrength and the ability to “unfold itself.” The balsa sticks now had indecipherable hieroglyphics written on them. And people were coming forward to say they’d seen alien bodies taken from the crash site as well.
Most damning was the claim that the air force’s retraction back in July 1947 wasn’t a retraction at all. It was the beginning of a massive cover-up.
The tale quickly grew to immense proportions, including reports of a top secret U.S. military mission to retrieve more crashed saucers and more dead and dying aliens, at the same time terrifying the local citizenry and threatening witnesses with bodily harm if they didn’t remain silent. Suddenly there were claims of almost a dozen UFO crash sites in the Roswell area, with alien bodies strewn about everywhere.
Finally, two UFO authors, Kal Korff and Karl T. Pflock, brought most people back down to earth. Korff’s The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know and Pflock’s Roswelclass="underline" Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe pretty much sought to blow the lid off the Roswell “crash.”
Korff, for instance, went after the so-called witnesses involved with one of the most extreme books perpetuating the Roswell myth. Though ninety people were supposedly interviewed for this book, only twenty-five names actually appeared in it, of which only seven actually saw the “crash debris” and only five had actually handled this debris.
Pflock did some similar digging, revealing that of the three-hundred-plus people supposedly interviewed for another disputed Roswell book, only forty-one could be considered credible, only twenty-three of them might have actually seen the debris and of them only seven mentioned the fragments might be of an extraterrestrial origin.
Both authors also pointed out that anyone who’d come forward claiming to have seen alien bodies either had credibility problems or had changed their stories frequently.
The U.S. Air Force released two reports in the 1990s dealing with the controversy. In them they revealed the debris was not from a crashed alien spacecraft but rather from a top secret intelligence-gathering balloon, as well as its “kite,” which was the nickname for a radar reflector that helped track the balloon on its flight.
The balloon’s purpose, as revealed by the air force, was to drift close to the Soviet Union and pick up sound vibrations that might indicate the Russians were testing a nuclear weapon.
The U.S. military was loath to give out this information back in 1947, so to a certain extent there was a cover-up. But it might not have been the cover-up everyone thought it was. In this case, at least, it seems the air force could be believed.
Books still come out promoting the more fantastic Roswell line. The town itself is a huge tourist attraction, complete with a UFO museum. Roswell has been featured in movies, TV shows, comic books, sci-fi novels and even toys.
But after all is said and done, if the question is: What happened at Roswell — or more specifically, did some kind of extraterrestrial event happen at Roswell? Then the answer is: Probably not.
13
Opportunity Lost
In the wake of the Arnold sighting and the tidal wave of flying saucer reports that followed, by midsummer of 1947, the fledgling U.S. Air Force found itself forced to investigate the UFO phenomenon.
The bulk of this scrutiny fell to the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC). It was the part of the air force charged with studying problems facing America’s national security, such as new weapons being developed by potential enemies. By all reports, the personnel at the ATIC were high-quality, clearheaded scientists and engineers, all well respected within the military community.
So when in September 1947 they generated their preliminary internal report on the flying saucer matter, the air force took it seriously. And as it turned out, the ATIC investigators came up with a startling conclusion: They believed flying saucers were real. As recounted in the renowned Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, their exact words were: “The phenomenon is not visionary or fictitious.” The ATIC urged the mystery be studied further.