It was June of 1947, and William Brazel was working out at a ranch in the deserts of New
Mexico.
This was a weird time to live in the American Southwest.
Only a few years ago, and surprisingly not far from William the United States detonated
its first atomic bombs.
It seemed as if the world was moving all sorts of weird directions and science had gone crazy.
Then, William saw debris.
He and his son found scraps of rubber, paper, sticks, and what he described as tin foil.
He didn't think much of it and returned a few weeks later to gather up the remains.
The next day, this mysterious debris took on a whole new gravity, as news reports suggested
there were sightings of flying disks.
He decided to report it, and what followed would be a strange tale of state secrets,
conspiracy theories, and media hype run amok.
Let's tell the real story of what happened at Roswell New Mexico.
Oh, and it wasn't aliens.
Hi, I'm Tristan, and this is Step Back.
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Even this week, which was… hoo boy.
William reported the debris to the local Sheriff, who passed it over to the Major of the Roswell
Army Air Field, a man named Jesse Marcel Jr.
You see, the debris was part of a military balloon program, and the Army wanted to get
ahold of whatever survived the crash.
He sent an unnamed someone out of uniform to go check out the crash site with William
and looked around for small scraps left over.
Not finding much as the report goes.
A couple days later, the public information officer at the airfield made a press release
saying they had recovered one of those flying discs from the news, assuming what these reports
were, and they likely were, the balloons they had released.
They were big balloons made of a reflective material in the summer sun, flying disk is
not an inadequate description.
Now, the army made the first mistake to set off Roswell's infamous legacy.
This was a radar balloon they were testing to study nuclear bomb tests.
Because these projects were still weapons research and they didn't want information
about atomic bomb testing to go public, they acted cagey and claimed it was a simple weather
balloon.
They thought the story would die there, and it did for over three decades.
You see, the events of what ACTUALLY happened in Roswell are mundane.
We have a secret research project related to nuclear weapons go down, some guy finds
it, they write it off as a weather balloon.
State secrets weren't uncommon, and it was about to become way more common as the cold
war would pick up.
However, when sensationalist authors and tight-lipped defence departments meet, sometimes people
can run wild with the story.
And that's what happened in the late 70s.
See, 30 years later a bunch of dudes came out of the woodwork with new stories about
what they saw at Roswell, and documents were “leaked” showing a more sinister chain
of events.
According to their reports, it was not a weather balloon, but a crash-landed flying saucer
from OUTER SPACE.
This is how the story of the government having secret knowledge of little green men began.
Over the next 20 years, numerous books and films came out telling this new story.
It seemed the more money you could get selling stories of space aliens, the more people “remembered”
seeing space aliens at Roswell.
This fringe story became so popular, it started to become the new mainstream account of what
happened there.
This came to a head when in 1997 a poll showed it was what a majority of Americans believed
happened.
Even Marcel, the major at the air field's story seemed to change as numerous authors
and filmmakers tried to talk to him.
They considered him credible, never mentioning his propensity for exaggerated tales, changing
accounts, and multiple other false claims relating to his military service.
But who cares ALIENS!
The fiction became so massive and so convoluted that by the mid-90s there were two different
space alien accounts of the Roswell Incident.
They held entire conferences debating who saw what where and what locations the crash
could have happened.
Because if there was a specific site, then someone might be able to do studies.
That would make their story falsifiable, and we can't have that, so they concluded they
just don't know where the definitely real spaceship landed.
The realness of the spacecraft and the aliens were of course never up for debate.
Here's how a lot of these new accounts came about.
Hundreds of people were interviewed by UFOlogists for the many many MANY pieces of media made
about Roswell, but a pitiful few were people who claimed to have seen these spaceships
themselves.
The vast majority of it was hearsay.
Something that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend.
It doesn't eliminate something as evidence since as historians, we often have to work
with whatever we can take, but there's a hierarchy of evidence, and the more removed something
is from the event, the more sceptical you must be of the account.
Of the over 300 testimonies gathered, only about 40 claimed to have seen the debris,
and of them, only about 20 could have reasonably done so.
And of those 20, only 7 have gone full history channel and claimed it was space aliens.
Oh hey before we continue, if you want to help support step back, but don't want to
sign up for the monthly commitment of Patreon, go to Paypal.me/stepbackhistory and help a
historian out.
Ok, back to the show.
So, I realise now the 90s are turning into a distant memory, and a surprising number
of my viewers don't have memories of this...
I'm going go with eccentric decade.
It was a weird time for alien stuff.
Comfortable middle-class white people didn't have a whole lot to worry about in the 90s,
so interest in very serious subjects such as conspiracy theories, especially UFO ones
were popular.
It's why the X-Files was on the air for most of the decade.
In 1995, an “alien autopsy” video supposedly leaked.
There was a Fox TV special.
I remember because I watched it.
It starred Jonathan Frakes so you knew it was legit.
People ate this stuff up, and American citizens legitimately demanded answers from the government
regarding the space aliens at Roswell.
Never one to not give into the demands of the white middle class, Congress held a legitimate
congressional inquiry into… aliens.
They made the Air Force perform an internal investigation of the event.
The first one came out in 1994, and it concluded the balloon found was likely part of an experiment
in the period called Project Mogul.
It was an initiative in which they'd attach microphones to high altitude balloons to listen
for atomic explosions.
Namely, ones coming from somewhere around here.
The second report in 1997 pointed out there were other stories afterwards of accidents
in the area.
Because this was also where the army was testing out experimental aircraft.
Some of these accidents involved casualties, and the news reported on those.
So, memories likely got mixed up in the 30 years between the events at Roswell, and when
the UFO people got interested in it.
They also tried out programs of high altitude paratroop dropping, and when testing it, they
used dummies.
Stories about that likely also joined the weirdness of living near army experiments
to create space alien narratives.
Given what we know about memory since the 90s, this seems to make sense.
We can't be told to reliably remember anything with any amount of detail.
However, this was no longer a search for the truth, it was now full atomic age mythology.
UFO people dismissed these reports as obvious disinformation.
Always remember the rule of Ancient Alien Razor.
The solution requiring the least amount of assumptions, that assumption being aliens,
must be true.
The credibility that “science” channels such as the history channel gave to this stuff
also boosted the conspiracy's credibility.
Folklorists even study Roswell now as showing the process of how a culture develops myths.
They call it Roswellian syndrome.
As someone who used to be a researcher of myths, history, narratives and whatnot, I
found this interesting.
You see the exact same pattern emerge in the development of the 9/11 truth movement, the
Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, and even the moon landing deniers.
The US government in a cold war context kept a lot secret.
In the case of Roswell and the moon landings, it was technology to fight the Soviets.
In the case of Kennedy, it was covering information about the CIA spying on a bunch of countries.
Even after the cold war, on 9/11 it was how intelligence organisations messed up royally,
and the military dropped the ball on defence.
Questions are met with state secrets and redactions, and against that mystery, people fill in their
own narrative.
The more outlandish, the better, whether it be aliens, or that the US managed to pull
off the biggest black ops operation in human history, change governments three times, and
not have a single leaker anywhere.
Oh, and to preempt the comments and tweets about me not mentioning it, Area 51 fits this
story as well.
They were working on the stealth bomber.
History work is challenging in these areas.
Often historians butt heads with what the government doesn't want public and depending
on your work, you have to fill out endless requests for information, and deal with half
stories.
Researchers even use machine learning to de-redact documents.
If you want to learn more about this frustrating part of being a historian, my buddy Cypher,
the Cynical Historian is doing an episode of his signature Diatribes series on these
sorts of problems.
You can go over to his channel and check it out over there.
He also provided several photos for this video, so thank him for that.
Thank you to 12 Tone for the theme and the patronage of Don and Kerry Johnson, Kolbeinn
Mani, Scott Smith, Martin King, and new 20 dollar patron Michael Kirschner.
Thanks, Mike!
Come back next week for more Step Back.