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Tonight, a strange discovery in the New Mexico desert sparks a mystery that's

endured for nearly 80 years.

We know something crashed in that cheap field on Roswell in 1947, but the parts

of the puzzle just don't add up.

Eye beams, silken strands of fiber optics. No one is able to identify this

strange material.

This was a 200 -yard swath of debris, which...

when it was all gathered up, only weighed five pounds. How is that

The deeper researchers dig into what witnesses saw, the more questions are

raised. Were they actual aliens or human guinea pigs?

Whether people are skeptics or believers, something crashed.

But the question is what?

We know that there was a government cover -up because the government

as such, but...

We don't even know if that's the whole story.

Now, we'll explore the top theories surrounding one of America's most

incidents. This would possibly explain all the different elements of the

crash. Some people saw bodies, some people didn't. By now, there's so much

speculation. We don't know, and we may never know.

What really fell out of the sky in 1947 in Roswell?

June 14, 1947, 80 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, a sheep rancher

Mack Brazel comes across something highly unusual.

He was tending to some of the sheep, and he noticed that they wouldn't cross a

particular field.

So he sets out and explores and finds this debris field in the middle of

nowhere.

It looks like something was moving at a high speed and crash landed and just

spread out there for 200 yards.

Given the remote nature of this site, the logical conclusion must be that this

thing could only have come from the sky.

He wants to bring it in and turn it over to some authorities, out of concern

that it might be some form of aviation accident.

But Brazel's trip to Roswell is delayed.

And by the time he reaches the sheriff's office with the crashed debris, two

other Roswell residents have also witnessed something they can't explain.

On July 2nd, Dan Wilmoth is sitting on his porch with his wife Mary

Grace, and suddenly they see this strange object in the sky.

It's oval -shaped.

It's... very brightly illuminated as if it's got its own internal light source,

and there's virtually no sound.

The object was about 10 to 20 feet in diameter.

He thinks it was moving around 400 to 500 miles per hour, and they observe it

for about a minute, and then it goes away.

After Brezel delivers the material, the concerned sheriff immediately calls the

nearby army airfield.

The Roswell crash took... against the backdrop of the modern flying saucer

phenomenon.

This all started on June 24th, 1947, with Kenneth Arnold, a

pilot flying a light aircraft.

He claims that he has seen nine disc -shaped aircraft flying in formation

Mount Rainier, flying at 1 ,200 miles an hour, which is...

Three times as fast as the fastest aircraft.

And the media really takes this up.

Newspapers quickly dubbed the objects flying disks or flying saucers.

After his report becomes publicized, it inspires other people to report that

they have also seen bizarre phenomena in the skies. And we are in the midst of

flying saucer fever.

In that period between June and July 1947, there are hundreds of people

who report seeing flying saucers in the sky.

Banner headlines day after day through every news source around the country.

What are these flying saucers? Where are they from?

But what Brazel discovered is an altogether different story.

It's nothing fleeting in the nighttime sky.

It's something recovered.

It's something that had crashed.

It escalates the whole situation to a completely different level. The army

this extremely seriously.

And they actually send one of their brightest and best, the base

officer, Jesse Marcel, out to investigate.

They know.

that whatever it is, it's not a U .S. military aircraft crash.

So now the situation is this. If it's not the U .S. military, who or what is

On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Airfield puts out a press release saying

that they have found pieces of a flying saucer.

We've had two weeks of flying saucer fever, and now the U .S. military have

of these things.

The press release goes out, and it's near hysteria.

The public takes it a lot more seriously than could have possibly been expected.

Later that day, Major Marcel flies the debris to Texas for further examination.

They arrive in Fort Worth. General Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Air Force at

Carswell Army Airfield, wants to have a press conference.

Then something really weird happened.

Within 24 hours of telling the world that the U .S. military has recovered a

flying saucer, they flipped the narrative.

General Ramey announced it to the press.

It was all a mistake.

It was all a overreaction. It's nothing more than a very standard weather

balloon with a radar reflector type.

To help alleviate concerns from the public, they release a photo with Major

Marcel hosing with what is said to be debris from this weather balloon.

The cover story was totally believed.

Roswell just disappears from the narrative for 30 years.

All is quiet until 1978, when Major Jesse Marcel opens the floodgates on

Roswell witness statements.

Marcel is 71 years old. He's retired from the military. But after 30 years,

he finally decides that it's time to go public with this secret that he's been

hanging on to for all this time.

Jesse Marcel does an interview with astronomer Stanton Friedman, during

confesses that he was told to stick to the story that this is a weather balloon

and nothing else.

Marcel claims...

Those were not actually all of the materials that he had recovered from the

near Roswell.

There's much more debris that's not in the photos.

And he describes the material that he found as being not of this earth.

There are silken strands like microfilament fishing lines.

There are I -beam structures of a pinkish -purplish hue with strange

that... Run the length of each piece.

And then Marcel describes the most amazing material of all.

Paper thin, metal -like material, practically weightless in your hands.

material you can crush, you can fold, you can crease.

And each and every time it assumes its original shape and size.

Today, we call this type of alloy a shape memory alloy.

Shape memory alloys weren't widely manufactured until the 1960s, though,

crash was in 1947.

It's easy to see why people would believe Marcel.

He's a credible source, he's a former intelligence officer, and he is now

that what the government said is not true.

And this really is the beginning of this idea that... there really might be a

massive government cover -up.

After speaking with Marcel, Friedman begins collecting dozens of other

accounts from Roswell that describe a second crash and a massive cover -up of

who was in it.

It's one thing to hear Jesse Marcel say that it wasn't a weather balloon and

that whatever fell out of the sky came from outer space.

But these are witnesses.

who are claiming to have seen something that wasn't even human. The same day

that Jesse Marcel came back with the debris from the ranch, a local

mortician, Glenn Dennis, also gets drawn into a very weird part of the story

because as well as being a mortician, he sometimes drives an ambulance.

He was delivering an injured person to the airfield when he witnesses the

arrival of these materials and he also sees this beam with purple and pink

hieroglyphic writing on it.

And he says because of his work in the local funeral home, he is asked, do you

have a number of child -sized caskets?

And of course he's horrified.

And only later do people start to put this together and say, well, wait a

minute, maybe it wasn't dead kids, but dead aliens.

One of the witnesses who comes forward all these 40 years later has some

and evidence of a second crash site near Roswell.

A crew chief with the Roswell Fire Department named Dan Dwyer comes forward

he wants to talk about the crash that he'd heard about on the plains of San

Augustine. He says that he and another fireman go to the site, but when they

there, they find that there's a government recovery effort taking place.

Well, if this is just a regular crash, why is the government involved?

Dwyer claims to have witnessed essentially the collection of alien

He says there were two of them on stretchers inside mortuary bag and a

that appeared to be severely injured.

Dwyer is not the only person who reports bodies at this crash site.

An Air Force sergeant named Melvin Brown claims that he was sent there to guard

the crash site. While he's there, he claims that he sees two alien bodies.

Dennis Dwyer and Brown.

aren't the only ones. There are many more witnesses who are claiming they saw

something. Now, whether it's debris or bodies or lights in the sky, whatever

crashed in Roswell that night led to people insisting that they saw something

extremely unusual.

When you take into account all of these eyewitness testimonies and people seeing

these strange things, it's easy to see why this flying saucer theory

might endure.

We may never know what happened, but we have credible witnesses who have seen

things that are difficult to explain and make it hard for the theory of the

weather balloon to really hold up.

Despite a flurry of additional eyewitness accounts in the 1970s and

detailing new theories on what really happened at Roswell, the Air Force

consistently maintains that what crashed was only a weather balloon.

Part of the reason they stick with that story is the story's working fine.

With the exception of arguably a niche community, there's been no one really

challenging the official narrative.

Finally, in 1993, a congressman from New Mexico, Stephen Schiff, starts to

pressure the federal government to release more information.

In 1995...

The government releases the Roswell Report facts versus fiction. It includes

shocking new revelation.

What crashed actually belonged to a classified military program called

Mogul. The Air Force said we were keeping a secret from people, but the

we were keeping wasn't aliens, it was a spy program.

Highly classified.

In 1947, the United States is the only nuclear power on Earth. It's very clear

to the Americans, though, that the Soviets desperately want to develop

atomic weapon, but we don't have a good way of knowing how well the Soviets are

doing in that pursuit.

Project Mogul is spearheaded by Maurice Ewing, a U .S.

geophysicist, and is basically this operation by the U .S. government to

spy balloons.

to sense the detonations of atomic weaponry all the way around the globe by

Soviet Union.

The idea is to put microphones on weather balloons, send them to this high

altitude, so if a particular nuclear blast goes off and three of these

microphones receive that signal, they can triangulate back to its original

source. This is what makes... a high altitude balloon such an effective tool

here because it can float, remain steady and be in the air for a really long

time. Some of these weather balloons associated with Project Mogul are

They're 400 to 500 feet in diameter.

They're built to hover in place and they fly at 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 feet.

They have to be able to carry 500 pounds worth of equipment.

They have to be both lightweight and really strong. So they need to be made

really, really advanced composite materials.

They also have metallic substances that are very light reflective, so they might

appear to glow.

Based on the shape, the dimension, and the behavior of the Project Mogul

balloons, you can see why somebody might conclude that these objects are flying

saucers. Between 1947 and 1949, Project Mogul conducts a total of 110

top -secret research flights.

Most of these tests are happening initially on the East Coast, but there's

much commercial traffic, so they decide to launch these balloons instead from

Alamogordo Air Base in the Tularosa Basin in southern New Mexico.

According to declassified documents about Project Mogul,

First flight launched from Alamogordo goes as far as Arabella, New Mexico.

Supposedly, on June 4th, 1947, it came smashing down to Earth with all of its

radar reflection materials and other sensors.

Looking back at the old photos, we see what looks like radar reflectors. We see

what looks like shredded polyethylene plastic.

The average person in 1947 wouldn't know anything about that.

It doesn't really look like part of a terrestrial aircraft, and so they're

fairly certain of what it's not.

But that doesn't mean that they actually recognize what it is.

Even the highly trained people like Jesse Marcel wouldn't recognize all of

material. So they'd be saying, yeah, look, I know what a weather balloon

like, and this ain't it.

The report also has an explanation for the purple hieroglyphics described by

witnesses.

The engineers that cobbled together some of the early balloons for Project Mogul

had to use whatever materials they had available.

Despite this being a highly classified program, this was still the post -war

period. There were some shortages.

Occasionally, even the military had to just make do.

And apparently, they used some commercially available adhesive tape.

The tape that they're using is actually just some leftovers that were unsold

from a children's toy company.

It's designed to attract a child's attention.

It's just covered with colorful shapes in pink and purple.

This tape is what the government explained as the source of those

reports of the purple and pink hieroglyphics on the metal beam.

By 1949, two years after Roswell, Project Mogul is completely shut down.

For a number of reasons, Project Mogul was terminated in...

1949, cost, security, practical concerns, the most obvious of

which was that by that time the Soviets had detonated their own bomb.

So we know they have it, and there is no longer any need to listen for it.

Despite the declassification of these documents, rumors persist that the

government is not being entirely transparent.

The government's explanation of Project Mogul.

Seems to make sense, and it seems to be consistent with what people saw, except

that there's all these witnesses who claim that they saw bodies.

There's nothing in Project Mogul that included bodies.

So what is the story there?

In the 1990s, five decades after the Roswell crash first made headlines in

The public's demand for answers reaches a fever pitch.

By the 1990s, Americans have been through Watergate, Iran -Contra, and the

Vietnam War. And Americans realize that the federal government, and particularly

the U .S. military, is keeping a lot of secrets.

And it makes sense that the Project Mogul disclosure by the U .S. government

met with some skepticism because UFOs, alien abductions, visits from another

planet, this was all in the zeitgeist and it was reflected by the movies and

shows that we were watching.

We've got Star Wars, Independence Day, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Aliens were at the top of people's minds.

And a lot of Americans still genuinely believe that aliens landed in Roswell,

New Mexico in 1947.

It hasn't gone away.

Roswell continues to grow in relevance.

And there's more and more talk about the bodies.

The Pentagon is compelled.

to come up with an explanation because balloons don't have pilots.

Two years after the report revealing Project Mogul, the government offers a

explanation. In 1997, the Air Force puts out its second study called the Roswell

Report Case Closed.

1997 is the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident. And of course, the

Pentagon has to go and spoil the party.

First, they double down on Project Mogul, but then they address the issue

bodies, and they say it's all due to a program called Project High Dive.

After World War II.

Plane technology revolutionized, and they began flying faster and higher than

anyone had ever thought possible. And the Air Force wondered, if our pilots

to eject at a very high altitude, could they survive a landing?

So hundreds of mannequins are deployed from the atmosphere and studied as they

tumble back towards Earth.

There are at least 67 of the high dive mannequin drops in the eastern

New Mexico area.

Some of them begin to spin at very high rates and that sends them off course and

some of them actually land in civilian areas.

The Air Force concludes the most likely explanation for people claiming to have

seen dead alien bodies was that it's possible that they actually had come

the aftermath of a high -altitude situation where something went wrong and

experiment came plunging back to Earth.

So Project High Dive...

regularly sent scientists and soldiers to recover these mannequins regardless

where they fell even in the most remote places so the people that are coming

forward and claiming to have witnessed soldiers with alien bodies might in fact

have just simply seen one of these recovery efforts given the velocity with

which these mannequins hit the ground you can see why witnesses might have

understood them to be small alien bodies because they likely shattered and were

mangled upon impact.

Though this theory provides one explanation, it raises new questions.

At the press conference in which the Air Force is unveiling this report, the

media points out that the report explicitly says that Project High Dive

in the 1950s while...

The Roswell events happened a couple years before that in 1947.

Faced with this apparent contradiction, the Air Force present an idea that is

basically in the heads of the witnesses.

They put forward what is known as time compression.

Time compression is when people are remembering important events at a

of many decades. They may conflate two important events and remember them as

though they happened at the same time.

However, it seems unusual that people would have compressed together memories

such import.

It's possible. It's possible. But it also kind of strains credibility.

And that caused a lot of UFO researchers to be absolutely convinced this was

just another government cover -up.

Despite what the Air Force is saying, many of these Roswell witnesses stand by

their memories.

So if we believe that they saw actual bodies, where did they come from?

It may be that there is a darker explanation connected to some of the

associated with Roswell. There are still questions that remain unanswered.

By the end of the 1990s, the United States military had admitted that its

initial statement about the Roswell crash was intentionally misleading.

and has offered two very different explanations for what witnesses claim

saw in 1947.

But in 2000, a Polish journalist's research uncovers a shocking new

for what actually fell out of the sky in Roswell.

We still haven't got all the answers.

It's still a mystery. But now there's a new theory which suggests that the

reason the government is covering all this up... is because it involves Nazi

technology. There are a lot of people that are convinced that what was

witnessed in the American Southwest were secret Nazi programs.

People forget that in many areas, Nazi technology was actually

much more advanced than Allied technology.

The Nazis developed the first operational jet fighter.

The Nazi V1, and in particular the V2, were superweapons developed

by Wernher von Braun.

The Allies were desperate to get their hands on von Braun and all the other

people who worked with him.

Following World War II, the United States government started Operation

Paperclip, which brought around 1 ,500 German scientists.

to the United States and put them to work developing all kinds of technology

the American military.

And paperclip was not just highly classified but very sensitive because of

course we just had the Nuremberg trials.

We just had the footage of the concentration camps and people were

bringing some of these Nazi scientists over and putting them on the payroll.

That would not have played well with the US public.

Some people think that the Roswell event is related to early tests of these

former Nazi scientists and engineers performing work in the US.

In 2000, the Polish journalist Igor Witkowski...

publishes a book about the research and development of a particular type of

German aircraft known as D -Glock.

This top -secret German aeronautical program called D -Glock, or the Bell, is

essentially a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

The idea is to have a jet engine that effectively fires straight down,

lift. kind of like a rocket, but with an air -breathing jet engine instead.

By changing the direction of the vanes within the aircraft, you would be able

then move it laterally throughout the sky.

Any advanced Nazi rocket technology would have been developed by Wernher von

Braun. Even though the Nazis never unleashed the Glocka on the battlefield,

Allies specifically pick up von Braun so that he can bring his designs with him

to an army research base at White Sands, New Mexico.

The book describes this incredible machine as a glowing bell -shaped object

too dissimilar from the shape of a flying saucer.

The similarities in shape, size, color, and movement between Witkowski's

description of de Glocka and other witness reports lead to the theory that

Braun is actually developing and testing a prototype of de Glocka for the U .S.

military in 1947.

Witkowski claimed that the propulsion system for the bell was something called

Xerum 525.

This is apparently a purple fluid that's radioactive and or poisonous.

The night of the Roswell incident, a number of eyewitnesses report that the

objects they saw in the sky did glow with a kind of blue -violet glow, which

the color of the Xerum 525 gas.

So, according to this theory, it was flown from White Sands and it fell apart

during the test and they found a material at Roswell on the Foster Ranch.

Allegedly, the bodies of the aliens that were found there were actually human

bodies, the bodies of test pilots who were selected for their small size in

order to fit into the prototype.

To keep the crash of a Nazi -designed superweapon a secret, they would need to

pretty quickly figure out a cover story.

Given the fact that there was this flying saucer alien craze going on at

time, the government would have thought that, hey, we could divert your

attention away from what's really going on and people could grab a hold to this

ridiculous theory of aliens.

According to this theory, the story was shared, however, without the approval of

higher -ranked officials, and so it had to be quickly retracted, and that's why

the story of the weather balloon was substituted for it instead.

When Project Paperclip was finally declassified, however, there is no

the bell or of the testing of these propulsion systems.

So either it never really happened, or it was completely covered up.

In 2011, Pulitzer Prize -nominated journalist Annie Jacobson proposes a new

theory about the Roswell crash.

Annie Jacobson writes a book contending that what crashed in that field in

Roswell was not, in fact, an alien spacecraft, but a Soviet aircraft.

In 1947, the United States is the only nation on Earth that has the bomb.

The Soviets are desperate to catch up and need to do something to maybe close

the gap.

Jacobson's theory is that the Soviets devised a plan to make the Americans

that they're under attack.

Two German aerospace engineers, the Horton brothers, had been part of a

in Nazi Germany to try to create what we would refer to as a flying wing.

To the outside observer, it looks kind of like a flat, almost oblong shape.

What the flying wing does is tries to extend the range of an aircraft.

The Germans were convinced that if American cities were threatened by

attack, then the Americans would not have the stomach to continue the fight.

Jacobson argues that in the years after the war, the Horton brothers went to the

Soviet Union and began to design new technology and work on projects

for Joseph Stalin.

The brothers come up with this disc -shaped craft based on the plans for

flying wing that is made of high -tech materials that's really good at evading

radar detection.

According to Jacobson's theory, Joseph Stalin saw another potential use for

aircraft. They want to develop nuclear technology of their own so that they can

counter American world domination.

This plot is meant to, as the theory goes, buy Joseph Stalin more time and

Russian scientists more time to develop their atomic weapons.

Stalin comes up with this plan to distract the U .S. military by staging

fake invasion.

Americans will be so freaked out and disturbed by the idea of a UFO that it

will distract the American people, the American government, and stop them from

continuing on with their atomic program.

There is precedence for pandemonium being spurred by a supposed alien

In 1938, there was a radio reading of Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds,

was so convincing that people actually thought we were being invaded by aliens.

Joseph Stalin is pretty convinced that the American public is gullible, and

willing to authorize even the most harebrained schemes to try to convince

Americans of the possibility of invasion from outer space.

As the theory goes, in the first week of July 1947,

Stalin orders the flying disc to be flown into U .S. airspace.

They decide that they're going to stage this incident in the southwestern part

of the United States because there are a lot of bases in that area.

White Sands, Area 51.

Roswell, these are all places where military technology was being developed

where the Soviets hoped that they could distract Americans from that technology.

We don't know how this flying disc, if it was a Soviet flying disc, crashed.

Was it shot down? Did it crash of its own accord?

But however it happened, the theory is that it came down at Roswell.

And what's funny about this is that if Jacobson's theory is correct, Then the

original story put out by the military saying that it was a flying disc or

flying saucer that was recovered is pretty much the true story.

Annie Jacobson's theory is this was all designed to sow as much confusion as

possible. But the military changed their story within 24 hours.

And this second official explanation immediately scuppered Stalin's plan

if it's a weather balloon, clearly there's going to be no panic.

Now, to close that nuclear gap, Stalin's best bet then becomes putting all the

resources into developing the bomb, which the Soviet Union actually does in

1949.

In 2017, an unexpected new theory about the Roswell crash emerges, one

that asks just how far the US government might go.

to keep its edge in the Cold War.

After World War II, the United States government recognizes this need to keep

tabs on the Soviet Union.

And the best way to do that is to develop high -altitude reconnaissance

aircraft. There is no such thing as artificial satellite in 1947.

So what they needed was aircraft that can fly over enemy defenses.

It became strategically imperative for the United States to fly reconnaissance

aircraft at ever higher altitudes.

Prior to 1947, the highest altitude anyone had ever flown at in a fixed

aircraft was 58 ,000 feet.

Mount Everest is 29 ,000 feet high, and most commercial aircraft fly at 36

,000 feet. You are talking significantly above any of that.

And the higher you go, the density of the atmosphere falls off exponentially,

there's less and less oxygen available.

So that creates all kinds of challenges for the pilot.

A lot of pilots pass out, lose consciousness, sometimes for minutes at

The U .S. government was going to have to run a lot of tests on how that would

be possible.

There is a theory that the United States Air Force was conducting human

experiments, using individuals who would not be missed by society.

In 2017, British researcher Nick Redfern makes a connection between these high

altitude weather balloons that were used for these experiments and what fell out

of the sky at Roswell.

So it's Nick Redfern's contention that the Air Force is going to use these

modified weather balloons to start testing how the body responds to such

extremely high altitude.

According to Redfern's theory, the...

People that were being used in these tests were pulled from asylums, prisons,

and places where no one would notice and no one would complain about them being

missing.

Redfern hypothesizes that they attach these gondolas to the balloon, and they

put people in the gondola whom they are forcing to engage in this experiment.

In the case of the Roswell crash, one of these balloons separated from the

gondola and the balloon would have crashed in one place, the gondola with

bodies of the victims in another place.

This would possibly explain all the different elements of the Roswell crash.

Some people saw bodies, some people didn't, some people saw debris at this

and others at a site much further away. You have two different crashes.

of two very different things according to redfern one of the individuals that

interviewed worked at fort stanton about 30 miles away from roswell and claimed

to have been part of a recovery effort rushing a grievously injured individual

to the base facilities one person was treated for injuries but apparently died

week or so later is this where we have the story of the roswell survivor

redfern's theory has some historic plausibility because there was a project

where they did experiments on people. The American government conducted the

famous Tuskegee experiment, where men who were tested to have syphilis were

monitored instead of being cured.

They were used as test subjects.

By the time of the Roswell crash, the world is hearing these stories of

concentration camp victims being experimented on.

And the idea that you could experiment on people who weren't giving their

consent was condemned and banned by the Nuremberg Code.

Certainly the U .S. wouldn't want to be seen as engaging in the same behavior as

the Nazis.

Redfern alleges a massive government cover -up. He claims that government

functionaries destroyed all of the records and cremated the bodies as a

covering up the horrible research that was being carried out.

Like many of the other theories around Roswell, this one only raises more

questions. They would have used adults in their tests, but people who saw the

bodies claimed that they were child -sized. So that doesn't square with

Redfern's theory.

Whatever we believe, whether people are skeptics or believers, Roswell is real.

Something crashed.

But the question is what?

It's not necessarily a...

The military would like to say on Roswell, case closed.

Today, the town of Roswell has become a thriving tourist destination for UFO

fanatics. But that's only one of the possible explanations for what happened

Foster Ranch over 80 miles away.

Whether this was the crash site of a top -secret test flight, a Cold War scheme,

or something truly unearthly,

Most of the eyewitnesses have long since passed away, and the search for answers

continues.

I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.