The Roswell incident

In June 1947 rancher W. W. "Mac" Brazel found a field of wreckage on his land northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. Stories of a crashed saucer and its crew grew around it; two later Air Force reports traced the debris to balloon research.

Smithsonian Magazine tells how, on June 14, 1947, Brazel and Vernon, his son, came across debris while driving over ranchland about 80 miles from Roswell, to the northwest. Brazel described a wide spread of shiny wreckage: strips of rubber, tinfoil, stiff paper and sticks.

The United States Air Force looked into the case twice. Its first report, dated 1994 and published in 1995 as The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, said the Air Force found nothing to show the Roswell Incident was a UFO event. It judged that the wreckage most likely came from a Project MOGUL balloon train, a project then classified Top Secret, and found no sign of a cover story prepared in advance. The second, The Roswell Report: Case Closed by Capt. James McAndrew (1997), said the odd military activity in the desert was the launch and recovery of high-altitude research balloons. It said stories of troops arriving to collect a crashed saucer and its crew were accounts of Air Force personnel recovering human-shaped test dummies.

Kendrick Frazier, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2017, named the likely source more closely: New York University's Flight No. 4, a long string of research balloons carrying instruments launched at Alamogordo Army Air Field on June 4, 1947. The team tracked it toward Corona until the batteries for tracking ran out, with the balloons seventeen miles or less from Brazel's ranch. It was never recovered. The U.S. National Archives says it could find no documents about the 1947 Roswell incident among the Project BLUE BOOK records.