Original subtitles

- 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 sheep field out in Roswell in 1947,

but the parts of the puzzle just don't add up.

- I-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 possible?

- 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 coverup

because the government admitted 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 infamous incidents.

- This would possibly explain all the different elements

of the Roswell 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?

[dramatic music]

- [Laurence] June 14th, 1947.

80 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico,

a sheep rancher named Mac 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.

- [Laurence] But Brazel's trip to Roswell is delayed,

and by the time he reaches the sheriff's office

with the crash debris,

two other Roswell residents have also witnessed something

they can't explain.

- On July 2nd,

Dan Wilmot 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 4 to 500 miles per hour.

And they observe it for about a minute

and then it goes away.

- [Laurence] After Brazel delivers the material,

the concerned sheriff immediately calls

the nearby Army airfield.

- The Roswell crash took place against the backdrop

of the modern flying saucer phenomenon.

This all started on June 24th, 1947,

with Kenneth Arnold,

a pilot flying light aircraft.

- He claims that he has seen nine disc-shaped aircraft

flying in formation near 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.

- [Laurence] Newspapers quickly dub the objects

"flying discs," or "flying saucers."

- After his report becomes publicized,

it inspires other people to purport

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 takes this extremely seriously

and they actually send one of their brightest and best,

the base intelligence officer Jesse Marcel,

out to investigate.

They know that whatever it is,

it's not a US military aircraft crash.

So now the situation is this.

If it's not the US military, who or what is it?

- [Laurence] On July 8th, 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 US military have one of these things.

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

- The public takes it a lot seriously

than could have possibly been expected.

- [Laurence] Later that day,

Major Marcel flies the debris to Texas

for further examination.

- They arrive in Fort Worth.

General Roger Ramey,

head of the Eighth Air Force at Carswell Army Airfield,

wants to have a press conference.

- Then, something really weird happens.

Within 24 hours of telling the world

that the US military has recovered a flying saucer,

they flip the narrative.

[tense music]

- General Ramey announces 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 kite.

- To help alleviate concerns from the public,

they release a photo with Major Marcel posing

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.

- [Laurence] 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 the secret that he's been hanging onto

for all this time.

- Jesse Marcel does an interview

with astronomer Stanton Friedman,

during which he 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 site 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.

[tense music]

- There are silken strands like microfilament fishing line.

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

with strange symbols 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.

This 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,

and the 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 saying

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 coverup.

- [Laurence] After speaking with Marcel,

Friedman begins collecting

dozens of other witness accounts from Roswell

that describe a second crash

and a massive coverup 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."

[tense music]

- One of the witnesses who comes forward

all these 40 years later

has some details and evidence

of a second crash site near Roswell.

- A crew chief with the Roswell Fire Department,

named Dan Dwyer, comes forward

and he wants to talk about the crash

that he'd heard about on the plains of San Augustin.

He says that he and another fireman go to the site,

but when they get 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 bodies.

He says there were two of them on stretchers

inside mortuary bags

and a third one 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.

- [Laurence] Despite a flurry of additional

eyewitness accounts in the 1970s and '80s

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, Steven Schiff,

starts to pressure the federal government

to release more information.

- [Laurence] In 1995, the government releases

"The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction."

It includes a shocking new revelation.

What crashed actually belonged

to a classified military program called Project Mogul.

- The Air Force said,

"We were keeping a secret from people,

but the secret we were keeping wasn't aliens.

It was a spy program, highly classified."

[tense music]

- 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 their own 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 US geophysicist,

and is basically this operation by the US government

to develop spy balloons

to sense the detonations of atomic weaponry

all the way around the globe by the Soviet Union.

- The idea is to put microphones on weather balloons,

send 'em 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 enormous.

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

of 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.

- [Laurence] 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 too much commercial traffic,

so they decide to launch these balloons instead

from Alamogordo Airbase in the Tularosa Basin

in Southern New Mexico.

- According to declassified documents about Project Mogul,

the first flight launched from Alamogordo

goes as far as Arabela, 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 plastics.

The average person in 1947

wouldn't know anything about that.

- It doesn't really look like parts

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 this material,

so they'd be saying, "Yeah, look,

I know what a weather balloon looks like and this ain't it."

- [Laurence] 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 and pink and purple.

- This tape is what the government explains

as the source of those eyewitness reports

of the purple and pink hieroglyphics on the metal beam.

- [Laurence] 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?

- [Laurence] In the 1990s,

five decades after the Roswell crash

first made headlines in 1947,

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 US military,

is keeping a lot of secrets.

- And it makes sense that the Project Mogul disclosure

by the US government

is 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 TV 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.

- [Laurence] Two years after the report

revealing Project Mogul,

the government offers a new 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 of the 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 have to eject at this 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.

[tense music]

- There are at least 67 of these High Dive mannequin drops

in the Eastern New Mexico area.

- Some of 'em 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 across

the aftermath of a high altitude situation

where something went wrong

and the experiment came plunging back to Earth.

- So, Project High Dive

regularly sent scientists and soldiers

to recover these mannequins

regardless of 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.

- [Laurence] 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 occurred in the 1950s

while the Roswell events happened

a couple years before that, in 1947.

- Faced with this apparent contradiction,

the Air Force presents an idea

that it's 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 distance 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've compressed together

memories of 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 coverup.

- 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 phenomena

associated with Roswell.

There's 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 they saw in 1947.

But in 2000, a Polish journalist's research uncovers

But in 2000, a Polish journalist's research uncovers

a shocking new possibility

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 actually 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 V-1, and in particular the V-2,

were super weapons 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

for 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 outraged.

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.

[tense music]

- In 2000, the Polish journalist Igor Witkowski

publishes a book about the research and development

of a particular type of German aircraft known as Die Glocke.

- This top secret German aeronautical program

called Die Glocke, or The Bell,

is essentially a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

The idea is to have a jet engine

that effectively fires straight down,

providing 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 to 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 Die Glocke

on the battlefield,

the 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

not too dissimilar from the shape of a flying saucer.

- The similarities in shape, size, color, and movement

between Witkowski's description of the Glocke

and other witness reports

lead to the theory that Von Braun is actually

developing and testing a prototype of the Glocke

for the US 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 is 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 super weapon 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 the time,

the government would've thought that, "Hey,

we could divert your attention away

from what's really going on,"

and people could grab ahold

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 mention of The Bell

or of the testing of these propulsion systems,

so either it never really happened

or it was completely covered up.

- [Laurence] In 2011,

Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Annie Jacobsen

proposes a new theory about the Roswell crash.

- Annie Jacobsen 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.

- Jacobsen's theory is that the Soviets devise a plan

to make the Americans think that they're under attack.

[tense music]

- Two German aerospace engineers, the Horten brothers,

had been part of a program 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 German attack,

then the Americans would not have the stomach

to continue the fight.

- Jacobsen argues that in the years after the war,

the Horten 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 their flying wing

that is made of high-tech materials

that's really good at evading radar detection.

- [Laurence] According to Jacobsen's theory,

Joseph Stalin saw another potential use for this 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 US military

by staging this 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 invasion.

In 1938, there was a radio reading

of Orson Welles' "The War of the Worlds"

which 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 he's willing to authorize

even the most harebrained schemes

to try to convince the 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 US 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

and 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 Jacobsen'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 Jacobsen'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

because if it's a weather balloon,

clearly there's gonna 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.

- [Laurence] 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 satellites 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-wing 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

so there's less and less oxygen available.

- So that creates all kinds of challenges for the pilots.

A lot of pilots pass out,

lose consciousness sometimes for minutes at a time.

The US 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.

[tense music]

- 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've crashed in one place,

the gondola with the 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 site

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 he 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 a 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 US wouldn't want to be seen

as engaging in the same behavior as the Nazis.

- Redfern alleges a massive government coverup.

He claims that government functionaries

destroyed all of the records and cremated the bodies

as a means of covering up the horrible research

that was being carried out.

- [Laurence] Like many of the other theories

around Roswell, this one only raises more questions.

- They would've used adults in their tests,

but people who saw the bodies

claim 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,

as 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 at 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 Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.

[mysterious music]