UFO Roswell Incident (Full Episode) | Undercover History Updates | National Geographic

On July 8, 1947, the U.S. Army claimed to have found a flying saucer. I have to believe this was something from another civilization. But within hours, they retracted the statement. More than 70 years later, the debate is still raging. You truly are dealing with something off the planet. It's right out of a 1950s science fiction movie. Did the U.S. military recover extraterrestrial beings and their spaceship? If true, the U.S. government has kept one of the greatest secrets in history, that we are not alone in the universe. It's the most important story of the millennium. At the largest gathering of UFO witnesses ever, believers call on the U.S. government to expose the truth. What really happened at Roswell? In the summer of 1947, rancher Mack Brazel came across some unusual debris in one of his fields. Brazel loaded his truck with some of the material and drove 75 miles to Roswell, New Mexico. He took it to show Sheriff George Wilcox. While he was there, local radio reporter Frank Joyce called in to see if the sheriff had any good stories. Yeah, Sheriff Wilcox, this is Frank Joyce. How's it going? The officer passed the phone to Mack Brazel. He told the radio reporter that he might have found the remains of a flying saucer. I thought I have a real crank here, a guy who has picked up some information about something, and he's got it all wrong, you know? This was a hoax. To get rid of the likely hoaxer, Joyce told him to get in touch with the military. Welcome back. This is Frank Joyce with KGFL, Roswell, New Mexico. Two days later, Frank Joyce received a visitor. It was Lieutenant Walter Hote, press officer for America's only nuclear bomb squad, the 509th, stationed at Roswell. He owed me a story. I had complained to him recently about he had given a story to somebody else, and I'd been left off the list. So he brings this in. I picked it up, and as I glanced, I knew instantly it was the man on the phone. The press release stated that the U.S. Army Air Corps had recovered a flying disc from a ranch north of Roswell. Frank Joyce drew only one conclusion. The U.S. Army Air Corps says they have a flying saucer. It's got to be from outer space. Joyce broadcast the extraordinary story to his local audience. It was possibly the biggest news scoop of all time. It's still the only time in the history of the United States where the government has said we've got a flying saucer. The release revealed a few other details. It stated that a local couple had seen an unusual craft in the sky on July 2nd. Major Jesse Marcel had recovered the debris, and it was now being taken to higher military headquarters. The incredible story was quickly picked up by the Associated Press and released around the world. As soon as this story came out, all hell broke loose. New York calls, London calls. The world wanted to know about this. Just two weeks prior, the world was introduced to the idea of flying discs or flying saucers. On June 24th, a respected pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing nine objects flying over Mount Rainier like saucers skipping over a pond. Well, at about 2.15, I took off from Tehalus, Washington, and I noticed to the left of me a chain which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with sort of a convex triangle in the rear. Even though Arnold described the craft as having bat-like wings, the image of a flying saucer lodged with the public and the term stuck. Over the next few weeks, hundreds of sightings of these flying saucers were reported. News that one had been recovered near Roswell gave Americans hope that they would soon have answers. What were these craft? How did they travel so fast? And were they from this world or another? I don't believe that it was anything belonging to the United States. I don't believe it was anything belonging to Russia. The news of the recovery was important enough that FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover asked to be kept informed. The mystery material was flown to Fort Worth, Texas for analysis. Four hours later, Base Commander General Roger Ramey called a press conference. He told the media that contrary to earlier reports, the debris was from nothing more than a weather balloon and certainly not a flying saucer. Major Marcel, who had collected the material, posed with the mundane-looking debris. The public quickly accepted the military's explanation. Most people don't realize that back 60 years ago, things were a lot different than they are today. If you were told by the government that it was a pink elephant, you would accept that. Overnight, one of the greatest headline stories became nothing but a footnote. And it may have remained just a blip on the radar if it weren't for one eyewitness, whose testimony would reopen the Roswell case and shock the world. So, tell me what happened back in 1947. In late 1978, a UFO researcher was introduced to retired Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who'd collected debris from the original crash site. I went down and visited him when I was in Florida. Got first-hand testimony from him sitting closer than you and I are right now. It was very impressive. Marcel declared that there had been a cover-up. A weather balloon that had crashed up there. He said that the weather balloon material shown to the press had been switched. What he'd found in Roswell in 1947 was not from this planet. This foil-like material that you could fold and fold and fold again, it would unfold on its own. Memory metal. Very thin, very lightweight. You couldn't cut it. The I-beams, the weight of balsa wood. But it wouldn't burn. This stuff wouldn't cut. It had strange symbols on it. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was a spaceship. Maybe there were aliens out there. I don't know. But I know it wasn't a weather balloon. Stanton Friedman searched for more eyewitnesses. Over the next two years, we've found 62 people connected with Roswell. The resulting book, The Roswell Incident, painted a very different picture from the Army's weather balloon story. It involved a crashed spaceship, alien bodies, and a ruthless government cover-up that inspired a nationwide obsession. Today, Roswell, New Mexico, is the UFO capital of the world. Every year, thousands descend on the town to pay homage to the home of E.T. Toys and T-shirts depict the aliens believed to have landed here in 1947. A museum is dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the Roswell legend. While some come out of curiosity, most ufologists are convinced that the government has been hiding the evidence of E.T. for 70 years. One survey in 2012 found that 77% of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth. Self-proclaimed UFO investigators like Dennis Bothiser have been coming here for years to try to piece together the Roswell Enigma. Something happened here in 1947 that was covered up. No single piece of physical evidence from the 1947 crash has ever surfaced publicly. Declassified documents hadn't revealed any compelling evidence. But then, on June 24, 1997, the United States Air Force broke their silence on the Roswell controversy. And now this from the Pentagon. 50 years after a mysterious something landed in the Arizona desert, the Air Force has issued a 231-page report on what's become known as the incident at Roswell. But the report seems to raise just as many questions as it tries to answer. The report only enraged ufologists, as they argued it was full of inconsistencies. UFO campaigners must rely almost solely on individual testimony. Together, these witness accounts shape the Roswell legend. Since 1978, over 100 witnesses have been persuaded to talk about their experience in Roswell. The witnesses to me are key. Those are key ingredients to solving this. Now, getting the witnesses to talk is a different story. Many of them, like George Newling, offer little more than glimpsed memories. What I've seen, it wasn't made in this world. 17-year-old Private Newling was working on B-29s at Roswell in 1947 when he remembers catching sight of something he thinks was part of a spaceship. The first thing that caught my eye was this object that was in the bomb racks. And it was the color that fascinated me. It was gray, but nothing I've ever seen then or before or after. Testimonies like this, made decades after the event, have been pieced together to tell the Roswell legend in a series of sensational books. Postman-turned-UFO author Don Schmidt has been following the Roswell mystery for nearly three decades. His numerous books on the subject have made him one of the key champions of the legend. Schmidt's witnesses have convinced him that the government actually recovered a flying saucer back in 1947. All of our witnesses are telling us it was the first press release. That was the correct one. They recovered the flying saucer. Thanks to these accounts, the UFO community often cites Roswell to be the best proof that extraterrestrials have been here. But they face a wall of scientific disagreement. Eyewitness accounts are completely unreliable. And we know this from a huge amount of research done in the 1990s following the false memory, recovered memory business of people recovering memories of things that happened decades before that, in fact, never happened. The legend begins with why aliens noticed Earth in the 1940s. In 1945, the first atomic bomb exploded, creating a flash that could be seen from outer space. I think they were here to scope out the activity here. You'd want to find out about the military? Other Roswell champions think the aliens had come here to save us. Maybe they came to help us. Roswell is less than 100 miles from where the atomic bomb was set off two years before the incident happened. Were they sitting out there wondering, what are these clowns up to? Are they going to self-destruct? Don Schmidt has interviewed military witnesses who were called monitoring UFOs in New Mexico in June 1947. We had talked to one of the radar operators up at Kirtland Army Airfield up in Albuquerque at that time and admitted to us that they had tracked a number of unknowns throughout the state, a number of days leading up to the actual incident. On Independence Day 1947, the rancher who found the debris, Mack Brazel, recalled there being a violent electrical storm. Between the thunderclaps, Brazel told friends he might have heard some kind of explosion. The Roswell story tells that one of the alien spaceships was struck by lightning, causing major damage. Debris from the spaceship fell onto Mack Brazel's field before crashing into the ground 35 miles away. So when did you say you found it? I just drove out and it was all over the place like this. Once the story reached the Roswell Army Airfield, two intelligence officers were dispatched to evaluate and collect the debris. Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cabot filled several sacks with the material. That night, Major Marcel took some of the debris home and showed it to his 11-year-old son, Jesse Jr. And when I walked in, I thought, why are you waking me up just to look at some garbage here? And he says, no, look at this carefully because this is not anything you'll ever see again. And he says, I think this is parts of what they call flying saucers. In the meantime, they've also learned that there's another site much closer to town, also based on civilian testimony. A now-dead witness, Jim Ragsdale, professed to have been with his girlfriend when he saw the spaceship crash 50 miles northwest of Roswell. Move, move, move! In an affidavit, Ragsdale described how the military quickly arrived and removed both the crashed alien spaceship and its dead crew. North of town, they are loading onto a flatbed and loading into ambulance trucks. The remains of a ship and crew. According to Ragsdale's testimony, four extraterrestrial bodies were found in the wreckage. The aliens were said to be small, with large heads and huge eyes. We have talked to witnesses who are first-hand witnesses, second, third, fourth-hand witnesses. Their stories pretty well collaborate the description of the bodies that were found. Oh, it's probably just a witness. Radio reporter Frank Joyce remembers that Mack Brazell told him there were alien bodies at the first debris site. The key question I asked him was, look, were there any passengers? He said, yes, there were little people. They were not human, and they were dead. In other words, he had some dead aliens out there. If any of these reports were accurate, a crashed alien craft and its dead crew were on the hands of the U.S. military. Several witnesses claim the military then took the debris and bodies to Hangar 84 at Roswell's Army Airfield. I have interviewed a witness who claims to have seen a body in the hangar where the debris was taken prior to being shipped to Wright Field up in Ohio. Wright-Patterson Airfield in Ohio is a top-secret military base for examining enemy aircraft. Only secondhand testimony exists of alien materials being flown there, but it has become an accepted part of the Roswell legend. Back in Roswell, eyewitnesses like Jim Ragsdale testified that there was a huge recovery operation. 50 to 60 troops were up at the debris field on hands and knees, shoulder to shoulder, picking up every last shard of that wreck. Yeah, that's good. The Roswell defenders also claim that the military ransacked media offices as part of the cover-up. We have numerous accounts from the radio stations as well as the newspapers describing how military MPs went from office to office confiscating, ransacking desks and file cabinets. UFO promoters report that a number of witnesses like rancher Mack Brazell were threatened to keep the story quiet. And when he's finally allowed to return home, he's sworn to secrecy. He was, by all accounts, a broken man. It's quite clear that the government resorted to very extreme measures in keeping this quiet. The Roswell legend only came to life in the late 1970s, 30 years after the fact. But strangely, it follows almost the exact same storyline as a 1950s UFO hoax. Coincidence or not? In 1945, Americans faced a much greater threat than extraterrestrials. The fear of a nuclear war was suddenly very real. The Cold War was upon us. We were deathly afraid of the Russians and hydrogen bombs and attacks of all sorts. Reports of flying objects two years later in 1947 only added to public concern. Were these flying saucers Russian spy planes? Or were they our own? Or were they literally from another world? Hundreds of UFO movies, books and comics played to the public's fascination. Here we had flying saucers, aliens in spaceships playing on television and movies. And while they were frightening, they were entertainment that took us away from the real fear, which was the Russians. Then, in 1950, a non-fiction book offered proof that aliens were visiting us. Behind the flying saucers, written by Hollywood columnist Frank Scully, was a sensational account of a crashed UFO. Frank Scully was a well-regarded author, and he wrote a book essentially about what two men had told him about this incident in Aztec, New Mexico. Scully's two informants had revealed that, like Roswell, a crashed flying saucer and dead aliens were recovered in New Mexico in 1947. There was some kind of a crash out on the highway. Bodies were retrieved and taken to a military base in northern New Mexico. The story parallels Roswell in many ways. The alien craft was made from some kind of lightweight but indestructible metal. There was a type of hieroglyphic writing. The alien bodies are said to have been 3 1⁄2 feet tall with skinny, human-like bodies. And, like Roswell, the extraterrestrial evidence was hidden at a secret military base. But strangely, the book had nothing to do with Roswell. Frank Scully's 1950 publication is set in Aztec, New Mexico, nearly 400 miles from Roswell. The Roswell story, which shadows so much of the Aztec book, would not be told for another 30 years. Behind the flying saucers was a bestseller, and most believed it to be true. Then, in 1952, the two informers of the book, Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer, were convicted of fraud. Their Aztec story was a complete hoax. But reports of the scam had little impact on the public. By then, the idea of extraterrestrial visitors in flying saucers had already captured the public's imagination. The whole business of a flying saucer is classic myth-making. From a single source saying they were skipping along like saucers on water, and from there, all science fiction authors, movie makers, they all say, okay, we have to construct a model that looks like, you know, a saucer. Science fiction was becoming science fact. Many of these 1950s sci-fi movies were set in the deserts of New Mexico, a hotbed of top-secret projects, from nuclear bombs to B-2 rockets, to experimental crafts and other deadly weapons. All these projects were shrouded in secrecy and intense security. Such covert action eventually created suspicion among the public. Science fiction started to paint the military as the bad guys. Then, in the 1960s, came the Vietnam War. It was the first war the Americans weren't likely to win. The huge loss of life and clandestine operations changed Americans' image of their government. Richard Nixon's disastrous administration added to the nation's growing distrust. What else was the government covering up? Anything seemed possible, even extraterrestrials. Against this backdrop of mistrust, conspiracy rumors circulated that the military was hiding alien technology at secret military bases. Secret places like the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and especially Area 51 are like Rorschach inkblots on our imaginations to just see what it is we want to see that's in there because you're not going to get in there. How can we check and find out? So that allows the imagination to just run amok. For more than 30 years, the story of a recovered flying saucer outside Roswell had lain completely dormant. It wasn't even mentioned in UFO books. Then in 1978, Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who'd collected the debris 31 years earlier, retold his memories. Were his recollections influenced by three decades of science fiction? It's right out of a 1950s science fiction movie. It's perfect. We're ready to believe it could have happened because we had these 50s to lean back on. So America was ready to accept it. TV series and movies like The X-Files and Stranger Things have continued to lend weight to the Roswell legend. One poll conducted in 2013 shows that 50% of Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists. Aliens have been here, they're here now, and maybe we're their children. Do half of Americans believe in E.T. because they've been shown compelling evidence? Or is it because decades of science fiction have been masqueraded as science fact? UFO advocates fervently believe that the government is hiding an alien craft and its dead crew. Something did crash. Something was recovered. Whatever was recovered, the government still has it in its possession. Sensational books and films have made bold claims of an incredible military cover-up. But demands on the government to make public any secrets on extraterrestrials have failed to uncover any relevant information. One organization is devoted to searching space for any signal of extraterrestrial intelligence, the SETI Institute. The facts are that we haven't found the signal from space that would tell us that there's somebody out there. Whatever the truth about Roswell, the fact remains that from June 1947 onwards, there were UFO sightings all over America. In 1948, the Pentagon responded with an investigation known as Project Blue Book to gather military and civilian testimony. In June that year, just 12 months after the supposed Roswell incident, a Project Blue Book advisory committee met in secret to discuss their findings. Colonel Howard McCoy, Chief of Intelligence for the Army, confirmed at the secret meeting that the military had never recovered a flying saucer. He then went on to make a statement that is devastating to the Roswell case. McCoy said, and I quote, I can't even tell you how much we would give to have one of those crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are. If the alien story of Roswell were true, such a recovery would have generated a huge military paper trail. But no compelling evidence has ever emerged to support the UFO claims. Their only evidence comes from the many witness accounts. This long list of witnesses is very curious because they didn't come out of the closet, so to speak, until the 1980s when Roswell became the Roswell incident, the mecca of UFOlogy, and that tells us more about modern myth-making than it does about eyewitness accounts. Dennis Balthaser acknowledges the Roswell story is littered with unreliable witnesses. Some witnesses have decided to elaborate on their stories. Some have outright lied. Some weren't involved at all but have given the impression that they were. The false testimony and many hoaxes in the Roswell legend are reminiscent of the 1950 novel Behind the Flying Saucers. The only concrete part of the Roswell legend is that some kind of debris was found in Mack Brazell's field in 1947. When Jesse Jr. saw the debris as an 11-year-old boy, his father was already convinced it was extraterrestrial. He just said something like he thought this was parts of a flying saucer. Again, I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that. Jesse Marcel is the only person who has consistently claimed to have handled the material found that night in 1947. His testimony is held up as key to proving the Roswell incident was extraterrestrial. But Dr. Michael Shermer argues that a young boy would be strongly influenced by his father's opinion. An 11-year-old boy is going to be hugely influenced by his father under any conditions. But in this case, his father is a well-respected military officer. Of course he's going to be influenced. Even though he's an important witness, much of what Marcel describes sounds commonplace. There's a lot of metal foil, kind of a thick aluminum wrap type of material, and there was some black plastic material that looked like bakelite at that time. Legend has it that the metal foil had extraordinary qualities, but the young boy saw none. I know that the foil was supposed to have been like metal with a metal where if you bend it, fold it, it would unfold. Well, I didn't see that. Other key witnesses, including Mack Brazel, suggest the debris was quite ordinary. In Brazel's only press interview on June 8, 1947, he claimed he'd found bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, tough paper, and sticks. Captain Sheridan Cabot was the intelligence officer with Major Marcel. In a sworn affidavit, he stated that the debris resembled bamboo-type square sticks, as well as some metallic reflecting material that was very light. UFO advocates refused to accept these statements. They argued that the witnesses may have been confused, or worse, forced to lie by the U.S. government. In 1978, Jesse Marcel Sr. claimed the possible extraterrestrial material he had collected had been switched with the debris from a weather balloon. Major Marcel said until the day he died that what was on the floor was not what he brought in from Roswell, New Mexico. To ufologists, that explains why the debris the public saw in press photos looked like a weather balloon, not a flying saucer. But amazing new testimony from Marcel's own son suggests his father thought the debris reporters saw actually was part of an alien spaceship. There's one curious element, though. My dad said that the reporters saw only a very small part of the real thing. So does that mean that in that mix-up of a balloon wreckage was there parts of the real stuff in there? Jesse Marcel remains convinced that there was one thing in the debris that could only be extraterrestrial. He describes small, metal-like I-beams with hieroglyphic symbols. That metal beam, like a small, miniaturized I-beam, and it had these purplish-violet symbols on the inside edge of it. You know, my dad says something like, this is alien writing. While Marcel Jr. describes metal I-beams, his father remembered them as not being like metal, but looking more like wood. Such contradictions among eyewitnesses are widespread among the Roswell faithful. Other key witnesses also described very earthly debris of wooden sticks, tin foil, tough paper, and rubber strips. Scientists find it hard to believe an alien spaceship would be constructed from such simple materials. If you're going to go from one star system to another, you need a craft that can go a fair fraction of the speed of light. It has to go tens, maybe 100,000 miles a second. Well, a craft like that is going to have to have enormous engines. It's going to be something that's going to, you know, probably be the size of an ocean liner. This is not going to be a little, you know, souped-up motorbike. While the physical abilities of this material remain in question, almost all the key witnesses made reference to seeing unusual markings. The Marcells both think they saw alien hieroglyphics. But other witnesses testified to seeing nothing more than flowered patterns. Throughout the 1980s, suspicion of a cover-up fueled the Roswell legend. Then, in the early 90s, two UFO researchers, Carl Flock and Robert Todd, unearthed a top-secret mission that had long been forgotten. It offered a much simpler and earthly solution to the Roswell mystery. Back in 1945, America exploded the first atomic bomb. It was only a matter of time until the Soviets would develop their own nuclear program. In 1947, testing began on an American secret spying program called Project Mogul. A highly classified mission was set up to listen for any Soviet atomic testing. Mogul was so classified, we didn't know what the classification was. In fact, Mogul was classified as 1A, the same as the H-bomb program. Project Mogul would use some 50 large rubber balloons to carry listening devices, called transponders, into the higher atmosphere. Up here, sound moved much quicker, and a nuclear explosion could, in theory, be detected, even on the other side of the world. I know it worked because I saw a beautiful signal come in one day from the Pacific, and it was an American nuclear bomb explosion, and I was tracking it right here in New Mexico. In 1947, B.D. Guildenberg was a young engineering undergraduate at New York University when the military commissioned his department to work on Project Mogul. The Mogul team started to gather the materials needed for the project. One item that they farmed out to a Brooklyn toy manufacturer was the kite-like radar reflectors called RAYWIN targets. These would be used to track the balloons' movements, and the team needed hundreds of them. They were essentially six-pronged kites with a balsa wood frame covered with silver foil and backed with strong white material. In June 1947, the NYU team traveled with all their equipment to White Sands Testing Range in New Mexico. From this remote desert location, they began experimental launches of their new top-secret mission. This was the first time that constant-level balloons were used in the United States, which we were still learning about and still experimenting with. On June 4th, test flight number four was launched in mid-afternoon. But due to cloud cover, the Mogul team soon lost it on both radar and spotter plane as it drifted northeast towards Roswell. The free-trailing device was some 600 feet long, twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. With up to 50 large balloons, nine shiny RAWIN targets, ballast controls, and transponders, it would have looked very different from a weather balloon. Eventually, the neoprene rubber balloons disintegrated, showering the desert below. Although the mission was top-secret, the equipment itself had considerable value, and the Mogul team deemed its recovery low priority. Brazel's description of the debris, rubber, silver foil, and balsa wood, and lots of it, matches Project Mogul perfectly. The photographs of the debris seem to match. Project Mogul appears to be the perfect solution, but there's one piece to the puzzle that doesn't add up. Jesse Marcel Jr. says the images he saw on the Roswell debris were not from this Earth. The I-beams were apart from everything. This was something from another civilization. He had a point. There seemed to be no reason why Project Mogul would have strange hieroglyphic symbols on any part of it. But closer inspection of the design drawing for the radar reflectors offers a vital clue. It's scotch tape. The toy company in Brooklyn commissioned to make the Raywin targets used what it had at hand. That included kid's scotch tape with flowered patterns set in a purple dye. After a few days in the desert sun, the scotch tape would have peeled off and blown into the desert. In such heat, the purple dye would have imprinted the wood, leaving behind flowered patterns on the balsa wood frame. Some of the tape had these inscriptions from the Brooklyn Toy Department on it. And that's where the hieroglyphics came from. And it was really nothing very exotic. Project Mogul is accepted among most scientists as the rational answer to the Roswell mystery. New testimony suggests that Project Mogul and its successors may have also been responsible for the entire UFO phenomenon. From June 1947 onwards, hundreds of top-secret high-altitude balloons were launched all over America. The balloons and payloads were ever more bizarre. B.D. Guildenberg believes that these balloons were what many people were mistaking for alien crafts. I remember the CIA and they were the ones who were pushing this, said, yeah, let these remain UFO reports as a cover-up for all these secret programs that were coming on board. In 2013, 40 activists, former military witnesses, and panelists from 10 countries converged in Washington, D.C. to give testimony to former members of Congress at the National Press Club. I started doing the walk-around 360 of the object. This was the first time in history that this much evidence had been presented to the public at once. The evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft. I have lost faith in representative government. I truly think we're in gridlock, it doesn't work, and so we need to make a change. We need to know to continue the universe. There's only one way to regain trust, find and tell the truth. Jesse Marcel Jr. was among the witnesses. It tells us that we're not alone in the universe. As a matter of fact, there's other civilizations out there and they're finding Earth-like planets around other star systems every day. And we're still on the precipice of either surviving or not surviving ours, but it means that they did. And if they can do it, we can also survive our nuclear war-like tendencies. Until his death in 2013, Jesse Marcel Jr. was the last living man known to have touched the debris from the 1947 crash in Roswell. Today, the scientific community upholds that the Roswell incident is just a persistent myth. If that's true, why does it continue to captivate so many Americans? We do tend to believe things that are kind of titillating and exciting. The idea that there's beings around, maybe they're even here now, just in orbit with stealth technology and they're watching us, they're taking care of us, all that is very compelling. But then it's time to, you know, move on to something else. Seventy years later, this is what we know for sure. Mack Rizell did discover debris in his field and, just as he reported, it wasn't a weather balloon. The government did cover up the truth. Project Mogul was a Category 1A top-secret spy mission, crucial to national security. It did cause a moment of excitement because no one outside of Project Mogul had seen that configuration of a balloon device before. The local army probably did overreact as they had no idea how sensitive the project or the material was. Wright-Patterson Airfield still remains a top-secret military base responsible for examining strange craft, but of foreign planes, not of E.T. UFO believers have already dismissed Project Mogul as bogus. American trust in government is at an all-time low. Only 20% of Americans have confidence in the U.S. government to do what is right. Some remain convinced that somewhere under lock and key is a secret X-file that outlines an incredible story that alien spaceships traveled through the galaxy to save humanity only to crash in the desert outside Roswell. They refuse to accept the devastating debris of a top-secret military project partially stuck together by scotch tape. Perhaps the real Roswell conspiracy is that so many have been taken in for so long by nothing but a footnote in history.