An alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell
| An alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell | |
|---|---|
| FALSE | |
| "In 1947 an alien spacecraft crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, and the US military recovered the wreckage and alien bodies and covered it up." | |
| Domain | Paranormal & Supernatural |
| Tactic | Conspiracy Theory |
| Era | Historical |
| First seen | July 1947 |
| Origin | A Roswell Army Air Field press release on July 8, 1947, announcing the recovery of a "flying disc," revived by UFO authors from the late 1970s |
| Last reviewed | 2026-10-29 |
| Further reading: books on Paranormal & Supernatural | |
The Roswell incident began in July 1947, when the Roswell Army Air Field announced it had recovered a "flying disc" from a ranch. The next day the military said the debris was a weather balloon. Decades later, UFO researchers claimed a cover-up of an alien crash. US Air Force investigations in the 1990s concluded the debris came from Project Mogul, a classified program using balloon trains to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
The claim
Books from 1980 onward described alien bodies, autopsies and a secret recovery.
What the evidence shows
- Project Mogul. The 1994 Air Force report identified the debris as material from a Mogul balloon train, whose purpose explained the secrecy and the false "weather balloon" story.
- Alien bodies. A 1997 Air Force report suggested that later accounts of bodies conflated memories of crash-test dummies dropped in the 1950s and other incidents.
- Alien autopsy film. A 1995 "autopsy" film was later admitted to be staged.
See also
Sources
- US Air Force, The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (1995).
- US Air Force, The Roswell Report: Case Closed (1997).