The Roswell Incident [1947]

The allegation is that it was a project mogul balloon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul

Which was part of a secret project.

Not sayingthat was what crashed at Roswell but perhaps the Roswell headlines were meant to prevent everyone looking elsewhere at the time. Were there any other incidents that received very little publicity at about that time?
 
While a balloon doesn't seem like much of a 'secret project' these days, I think the fact that it was part of a nuclear test monitoring programme meant it would have been taken very seriously. And yes, having it splashed across the newspapers probably didn't do Blanchard, Marcel and Haut's careers much good.

I believe this and the general paranoia of the time might explain the military briefly taking an interest in Brazel and other witnesses - they would have wanted to check that they didn't have any unusual political party memberships, past convictions, dubious lodgers, Russian 'pen pals', etc.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
A balloon is a secret project?
I don't buy it.
Neither did Mac Brazel.
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The subject of the debris being associated with any secret project wasn't discussed with Brazel at the time, and as far as I know he never rendered any opinion as to whether he believed in any such association.

The 9 July (1947) newspaper article in which Brazel recounts his role in the incident:

See: https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/is-roswell-finally-dead.64180/post-2147951

... specifically states Brazel and Marcel thought the debris might have represented some sort of kite or lightweight framework carried by a balloon. Brazel stated he'd previously found the remains of two weather observation balloons at the ranch, but that this new debris didn't match those other two items known to have been balloons. He also stated there had been no metal items among the debris.
 
One of these days when we move, I will find all my old 'Fate Magazines' from the 1940s and 1950s and onward,
with all the early, actual reports on Roswell, Kenneth Arnold, etc.
 
Fate Magazine only mentioned Roswell once, in the 1940s/1950s, and not at all in the 1960s or 1970s. This was in a short article by Frank Edwards, published in 1959.

Edwards got the year wrong, (he said it happened in 1949), and he said that the debris was explained away by the military as a 'box kite'. Neither of these things are true, which seems to demonstrate how reliable Fate Magazine was in this matter.

To find the article concerned, "look inside" the book advertised on this page.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Roswe...?asin=1931942544&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1
The article about Roswell is the first one, a couple of paragraphs titled 'Keep an eye on Venus' (Edwards thought the Roswell debris came from Venus, which is extremely unlikely).
 
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Former curator of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum, Roger Launius, claims that the Roswell Crash was the breaking point about UFOs in 1947 but not the full picture.

Roger says that in the summer of 1947 in all states in the U.S. people were reporting UFO sightings and this caused the “perfect storm” and UFO craziness.

So when the Army announced they had captured a UFO, it was like a match that was thrown on the gun powder.

The whole country was at that time UFO crazy.
 
MrRING said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/08/roswell-flying-saucer-ufo/
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If you are old enough, you can remember a time before 1977 when Roswell wasn't even a thing. The event that changed all that was the release of Charles Berlitz's book, The Roswell Incident. It was only after that that Roswell blossomed into the cottage industry it is today. If you look at most of the UFO books written in the 50s or 60s, Roswell only rarely warrants a mention.

The incident that really touched things off was the Kenneth Arnold sighting on June 24, 1947. Roswell happen a couple weeks later and added fuel to the fire, but it burnt-out quickly with the weather balloon explanation. I'd like to know why Roswell was a big nothing-burger for thirty years and then, only after Berlitz cashed-in, did all the rest of these people start coming out of the woodwork.
 
SkepticalX said:
If you are old enough, you can remember a time before 1977 when Roswell wasn't even a thing. The event that changed all that was the release of Charles Berlitz's book, The Roswell Incident. It was only after that that Roswell blossomed into the cottage industry it is today. If you look at most of the UFO books written in the 50s or 60s, Roswell only rarely warrants a mention.

The incident that really touched things off was the Kenneth Arnold sighting on June 24, 1947. Roswell happen a couple weeks later and added fuel to the fire, but it burnt-out quickly with the weather balloon explanation. I'd like to know why Roswell was a big nothing-burger for thirty years and then, only after Berlitz cashed-in, did all the rest of these people start coming out of the woodwork.
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I've always thought the sudden success of Berlitz's book was partly down to the context of the times, a post-Watergate mistrust of government motives. Indeed the other day I even saw a reference from the Berlitz era describing it as a 'cosmic Watergate' or something along those lines. Plus the public attitude to the military was quite different in the aftermath of Vietnam, compared to the aftermath of WWII (all this comes with the caveat that Donald Keyhoe embedded the whole concept of the cover-up in ufology right at the start).
 
charliebrown said:
Former curator of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum, Roger Launius, claims that the Roswell Crash was the breaking point about UFOs in 1947 but not the full picture.

Roger says that in the summer of 1947 in all states in the U.S. people were reporting UFO sightings and this caused the “perfect storm” and UFO craziness.

So when the Army announced they had captured a UFO, it was like a match that was thrown on the gun powder.

The whole country was at that time UFO crazy.
Click to expand...
Or . . . more UFO 'aware' ~ maybe?
 
Earlier in this thread I mentioned the Fate Magazine article from 1959 which was one of the very few mentions of Roswell in the period between 1947 and 1981. The Fate article was just a couple of paragraphs and got the details and date wrong.

One of the other scattered mentions was an account by TV personality Hughie Green, who was in the Canadian Air force at the time, and heard about it on the radio. Green then wrote a short account of this event in 1955, in the Flying Saucer Review. The account is reproduced below.
greenfsr.gif

Note that Green did not actually witness anything himself, he just heard about it on the radio. But despite that, this is one of a bare handful of accounts that exist that mention Roswell in the three decades between 1947 and 1981.

Hughie Green was a very interesting chap, and some of you might remember him for various reasons (not all good). But this account is a historical rarity that demonstrates just how obscure the Roswell event was at the time.
 
Watched a documentary on 75 year of Roswell the other night. Einstein's assistant Dr Shirly Wright was interviewed concerning her allegation that Einstein had been asked to examine the wreckage. (A pretty shaky claim anyway)
She evaded the question "If they came all this way safely what caused them to crash in Roswell?"

I'm sure there's a good SF plot here. We back engineer a craft from Roswell, send it a few lightyears to wherever, where it promptly slams into the landscape and is never heard of again.
 
This is an eye-opening article on Roswell that I haven't seen before, with some real details:

The Roswell UFO crash – evidence points to something out of this world​

As the world was talking about the Kenneth Arnold sighting, the inhabitants of Roswell, New Mexico saw a large disc shaped object fly over their sleepy town. Some reported that the craft appeared to be in distress and others reported hearing a tremendous explosion just prior to the crash event.

Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot were sitting on their porch at 105 South Penn. last Wednesday night at about ten o’clock when a large glowing object zoomed out of the sky from the southeast, going in a northwesterly direction at a high rate of speed. In appearance it looked oval in shape like two inverted saucers, faced mouth to mouth, or like two old type washbowls placed together in the same fashion. The entire body glowed as though light were showing through from inside, though not like it would be if a light were underneath. Wilmot said that he heard no sound but that Mrs. Wilmot said she heard a swishing sound for a very short time. The object came into view from the southeast and disappeared over the treetops in the general vicinity of six mile hill. Wilmot, who is one of the most respected and reliable citizens in town, kept the story to himself hoping that someone else would come out and tell about having seen one, but finally today decided that he would go ahead and tell about it. The announcement that the RAAF was in possession of one came only a few minutes after he decided to release the details of what he had seen.

https://www.altereddimensions.net/2012/roswell-ufo-crash

I don't know anything about 'weather balloons', but surely they don't 'zoom out of the sky at a high rate of speed'?
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
This is an eye-opening article on Roswell that I haven't seen before, with some real details ...
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Yes - the Wilmots' sighting ... We've been through this (2018, and again 6 months ago) ...

Whatever the Wilmots saw on 2 July wasn't the same thing as the source of the debris Mack Brazel found out at the ranch and the USAAF collected. Brazel and his son first discovered the debris on 14 June - 2.5 weeks before the Wilmots' sighting.
 
The title of this thread really gets me every time I see it. If you ever went to Roswell (the actual town) you would say oh, yes, it is in it's death throes. The only industry in that town for years has been the military school and the Annual UFO festival, with some tourism because of the UFO story and museum. There may be some oil in the area as well, but most people who are involved in that live in Hobbs. Tourism is the only thing that is going to keep that town alive so, no, the Roswell UFO story is not dead yet.
 
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charliebrown said:
If the Army did not announce to the world that they had recovered a flying disc, the Roswell UFO crash would not exist.

It the Army’s fault.
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They didn't realize the chaos which would occur once they let the cat out of the bag!
And why would they even say such a thing, if they didn't believe it to be true. They certainly wouldn't announce it to the world, that was never really explained, just brushed off.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Yes - the Wilmots' sighting ... We've been through this (2018, and again 6 months ago) ...

Whatever the Wilmots saw on 2 July wasn't the same thing as the source of the debris Mack Brazel found out at the ranch and the USAAF collected. Brazel and his son first discovered the debris on 14 June - 2.5 weeks before the Wilmots' sighting.
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There may have been a few crashes in that area, of unrelated vehicles, at different times, it could be a possibility?
I realize I missed all of your previous conversations on this, but there seem to have been more than just one crash, and severe lightning storms, on different nights, so I wonder if we'll ever really know the true facts.
 
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You are right Ronnie Jersey,

Why would the Army say such a thing as a flying disc ?

This question ranks up there like for example what is the universe part of ?
 
Interesting too that it was in 'severe lightning storm conditions' that these crashes occur - so perhaps UFO's are affected by severe lightning?
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
There may have been a few crashes in that area, of unrelated vehicles, at different times, it could be a possibility?
I realize I missed all of your previous conversations on this, but there seem to have been more than just one crash, and severe lightning storms, on different nights, so I wonder if we'll ever really know the true facts.
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According to most stories I have read there were 5 crashes in that area (a large area of desert) in the week of the Roswell crash, which actually happened almost 20 miles from Roswell. It is called the Roswell crash because that was the closest town to that crash. We will never know the facts, there have been too many stories and no way to sift out the actual facts.
 
charliebrown said:
Lighting could be the UFO’s “ Achilles’ Heel “ !
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:headbang: Suppsedly those ships can avoid asteroid belts, sustain themselve in the almost vacume of space and get closer to the sun than we think is safe, they can hide in "plain sight" and move faster than our current physists consider possible but lightning can bring them down? Or radar or any other earthly thing? No. That is just silly.
 
Ronnie Jersey said:
... I realize I missed all of your previous conversations on this, but there seem to have been more than just one crash, and severe lightning storms, on different nights, so I wonder if we'll ever really know the true facts.
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There are certainly other crash stories from that region at that time - the Aztec story (1948; a hoax), multiple other stories set in the Plains of San Agustin area, and multiple claims for crash sites around Corona.

Some of these additional crash stories were promoted as somehow being related to the summer 1947 Brazel / Roswell events even though there's no specific reason to believe they were connected to the debris found on the Foster Ranch.

I don't recall how many, if any, of these other crash stories based their claims on the Wilmots' sighting rather than the Brazel / USAAF debris events.
 
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EnolaGaia said:
There are certainly other crash stories from that region at that time - the Aztec story (1948; a hoax), multiple other stories set in the Plains of San Agustin area, and multiple claims for crash sites around Corona.

Some of these additional crash stories were promoted as somehow being related to the summer 1947 Brazel / Roswell events even though there's no specific reason to believe they were connected to the debris found on the Foster Ranch.

I don't recall how many, if any, of these other crash stories based their claims on the Wilmots' sighting rather than the Brazel / USAAF debris events.
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If the Aztec crash is a hoax, it is a very expensive and intricate hoax. What would the purpose of hoaxing in that area be? Have you ever been to that area? Who based the Aztec crash on the Wimots sightings or the Roswell incident?
 
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Yes, these UFOs sure did crash an awful lot.

The latest one of course is the 'Trinity' crash story, recently promoted by Vallee (of all people) and Paola Harris in last year's book Trinity: The Best Kept Secret. This is a story with remarkable similarities to (ie. was probably largely inspired by) the Barnett/Anderson variants of the Roswell tale, and ultimately the Aztec story. ...
For more about the Trinity crash see:

Trinity Crash (New Mexico; Padilla Ranch; August 1945)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...h-new-mexico-padilla-ranch-august-1945.70001/
 
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