- [Narrator] Maybe the most well known alien conspiracy
surrounds the infamous Roswell UFO incident,
so what really happened?
Is there a logical explanation for this event
or is there a chance that it actually is
an alien encounter?
Let's find out in today's episode
of "Colossal Mysteries".
It all started on June 14th of 1947
when a rancher in New Mexico named William "Mac" Brazel
found something strange while out on horseback
about 30 miles north of a small town called Roswell.
He came across clusters of wreckage and debris
that looked like some kind of plane
had come crashing down from the sky.
The crash site was full of large hunks of metal,
rubber strips, tinfoil and all kinds
of strange bits and bobs.
Puzzled by the peculiar find the rancher decided
to collect the materials from the site.
The next day Brazel read reports in the paper
about an unidentified object flying over the area at night.
Two days later Mac Brazel got up the nerve
and told the local Sheriff what he found,
but if Brazel is to be believed
the Sheriff whispered to him that he may have found
a "flying disk" and that he should keep it confidential.
The Sheriff then contacted Roswell Army Airfield
who visited Brazel's ranch, collected the wreckage
and asked him to keep things under wraps.
Of course, he didn't and almost overnight
local newspapers and tabloids were writing stories
about the unidentified crash.
More stories ran about the witnesses
seeing strange, charred creatures inside the airfield
and before long the well known
UFO conspiracy theory was born.
So, is there a chance that Mac Brazel
stumbled across an authentic alien crash site
near Roswell, New Mexico all those years ago
or is there an explanation for what they found?
Immediately following the incident
the US mIlitary announced that the so called flying saucer
was nothing more than a run of the mill
weather balloon that had crashed during a windstorm.
Newspapers who printed headlines
about flying saucers issued corrections
and the Roswell flying saucer incident seemed to be over.
The Roswell story quickly faded from the headlines,
but interest in aliens and UFOs
kept growing across the country.
It seemed as though the Roswell incident
was all but forgotten until the early 1980s
when two UFO researchers wrote a book about the incident.
In their book the duo claimed
it was all a government coverup,
aliens were actually found at the crash site of the UFO.
Experts, government agencies
and members of the military all disputed
and debunked the books claims,
but by this point it was too late
a spark was lit and before long
more conspiracy theories started popping up
around Roswell and other possible UFO sites
across the country and as it turns out
skeptics and conspiracy theorists
weren't entirely wrong to doubt
the official Roswell story.
The government wasn't telling the whole truth
when they claimed a weather balloon crashed near Roswell.
In 1994, the US Air Force finally admitted
that the weather balloon that crashed near Roswell
wasn't your average aircraft,
it was a secret US spy balloon
that was part of a top secret program
called Project Mogul.
Their objective, monitor Soviet nuclear tests
by detecting sound waves in the upper atmosphere.
The tech was quickly surpassed
by other more advanced methods,
but it took the military over 40 years
to disclose the truth.
Since the balloon was involved in a Cold War coverup
rumors could grow and what about those charred alien bodies
people reported seeing at Roswell Army Airfield,
well turns out there's an explanation for them too.
A 1997 Air Force report determined
that the alien bodies
were actually parachute crash test dummies
that had been burned up in an accident,
but for those who still believe
all these explanations amount to nothing more
than a giant government coverup
and it's safe to say nothing
is going to change their minds on that.