On This Day: Air Force Issues Report Debunking Roswell Incident

On June 24, 1997, the U.S. Air Force issued its second report in three years regarding the alleged government cover-up of the 1947 UFO sightings in Roswell, N.M. The report revealed that supposed alien bodies were actually crash dummies and repeated the Air Force’s earlier claim that the wreckage discovered near Roswell was a balloon from a top secret project. In June 1947, William Ware “Mac” Brazel, a rancher living in a remote area 30 miles east of Corona, N.M., stumbled upon “a large area of bright wreckage made up on rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks” while walking with his son, reported the reported the Roswell Daily Chronicle on July 9, 1947. Brazel thought little of the debris and left it alone. A few weeks later, however, after hearing reports that pilot Kenneth Arnold had spotted what the press dubbed “flying saucers” over Mount Rainier, Wash., Brazel returned to the scene with his family to collect some of the debris. On July 7, he told local Sheriff George Wilcox, who alerted the Roswell Army Air Field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel. On July 8, the RAAF announced that it had “come into possession of a flying saucer.” The story made national news. That same day, the Army Air Force base in Fort Worth, Texas, which had been sent the debris for analysis, announced that the debris was nothing more than the wreckage of a weather balloon. Brazel, in his interview with the Daily Chronicle, said that he had previously seen crashed weather balloons, but in this case, “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”...more