The Roswell Incident
In July 1947 a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico found a field scattered with strange debris. The Army Air Field announced it had recovered a flying disc, then retracted the claim within hours and called it a weather balloon. Decades later the case became the most famous UFO story in the world.
The Roswell case
Strangeness
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"RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.
"Roswell Daily Record front page · 8 July 1947
Who was Jesse Marcel?
Major Jesse Marcel was the intelligence officer at Roswell Army Air Field who recovered the debris. He insisted for the rest of his life that the material was nothing he could identify and unlike any weather balloon he had ever seen. His account kept the case alive for decades.
The 1994 US Air Force report concluded the debris came from Project Mogul, a secret programme of high altitude balloons built to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
Believers point to the rapid retraction, the military questioning of Brazel, and Marcel's lifelong testimony. The full debris was never publicly produced.