Last year in New Mexico, we checked out Earthships (post here). This year, ships not of this earth
Few incidents have inspired as much fascination and speculation as the one in Roswell New Mexico.
In the summer of 1947, the US Army Air Force sent out a shocking press release announcing that a flying disc had crashed at a ranch near Roswell. This was later redacted by the government, but the ensuing controversy and swirling conspiracy theories put Roswell on the map and led to the establishment of a UFO museum and research center where they’ve attempted to pull together all the facts, including first-hand accounts of the events.
The museum is kitschy for sure, and the town has played it up with larger-than-life little green men outside the local Dairy Queen and the only McDonald’s in the US shaped like a UFO. These distract from what may or may not have happened that fateful summer because behind the town’s UFO mania lies an uneasy truth. The events that transpired are anything but clear-cut with admitted coverups and conflicting accounts about the event.
In the summer of 1947, a rancher named W.W. Mac Braze found wreckage on his property that he believed was made of rubber strips, tinfoil and thick paper. He reported it to the Roswell sheriff who in turn brought it to the attention of Colonel William Blanchard a commanding officer of the Roswell Army Airfield (RAFF).
RAFF released a written statement based on an intelligence officer’s (Major Jesse Marcel) review that “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday…”. The following day a local paper ran a story with RAFF’s UFO conclusion. U.S. Army officers quickly reversed the statement saying that the debris was from a weather balloon and they released news photos with Major Marcel posing with pieces of the balloon. Adding fuel to the conspiracy fires, several witnesses, including a sergeant and a local mortician, indicated that “alien bodies” were taken from the crash site.
Decades later, in 1994 the US Air Force released a report in which they conceded that the weather balloon account was a cover story and that the wreckage was a spy device (a high-altitude balloon equipped with microphones designed to float over Russia as part of a project known as “Mogul”). As for the bodies, in 1997 the Air Force issued a report called “The Roswell Report: Case Closed” that stated witnesses may have seen either parachute crash test dummies, a severely injured airman parachutist or charred bodies from an airplane crash in 1950 that they “consolidated” into a witness account of aliens.
Multiple eye-witness accounts at the UFO museum are compelling but it should also be noted that between 1947 and 1969 during the Cold War there were 12,618 UFO sightings reported to the US Air Force, in something they called Project Blue Book, and experts have indicated that most sightings were confirmed as atmospheric temperature inversions.
In addition to this incident, the UFO museum displays primitive carvings, petroglyphs etc. that display alien-like beings, review other sightings their research deems credible, and discusses our fascination with the topic in pop culture.
Whether you believe a UFO landed in Roswell and aliens were taken in by the US military or you don’t, Roswell’s UFO Museum will at least provide you with some data to consider on both sides of the argument.
If nothing else, you can pose with aliens…who doesn’t want to do that?!
