The World of Mysteries - Re-examining Roswell

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The world's most famous UFO case was recently reduced to a laughing stock when a series of "new" photographs showing a dead alien were ridiculed across the globe. For critics of The Roswell UFO Incident, it is the final nail in the coffin of a conspiracy theory that's been dividing opinion for seven decades.
The recent events should not disguise the truth of this compelling mystery - there's still enough evidence to suggest that something unsettling did take place in this protected military enclave deep in the American desert...

It was billed as the "Smoking Gun" for UFO enthusiasts - newly discovered pictures which promised to prove once and for all that alien craft did crash land in scrubland surrounding Roswell, New Mexico, USA, back in 1947. These so-called "Roswell Files" - a series of old Kodakchrome photographs - were discovered by journalist Adam Dew and were claimed to show the corpse of an extraterrestrial creature.
The world waited with bated breath as Dew prepared to show them for the first time, but when he and his associates finally unleashed the promised images, audiences - including those who had paid $20 to watch the big reveal via online link - were left utterly underwhelmed.

(Photograph of alleged alien body. Source)

Critics immediately pointed out the similarity between Dew pictures - allegedly found hidden in a collection of snaps owned by geologist Bernard Ray and his wife Hilda Ray, who have both deceased - and mummified remains of children widely found in Egypt and displayed in museums worldwide. As far as detractors were concerned, the snaps were at best a case of mistaken identity and at worse an act of fakery and fraud.

That doesn't mean that Roswell myth has been proved to be bogus, because it still has some level-headed experts scratching their heads.
The facts, as we know them are as follows:
On or around 2nd July, 1947 something crashed on remote ranchland not far from military base at Roswell. A local farmer alerted the U.S. Army and the wreckage was taken back to the base by intelligence officer Jesse Marcel. The military then put out one of the most bizarre press releases in history.
It read, "The many rumours regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc."
Within next 24 hours, the military retracted the story, said that they had made a huge mistake, and claimed that the object recovered was nothing but a weather balloon.
Those in the know, were puzzled to say the least. Weather balloon launches were common in the area and it seemed hard to believe that highly trained military personnel would mistake one for a downed alien craft. While eyewitness reports told of wrecked spaceship and the bodies of otherworldly pilots strewn across the ground, the government went quiet.

(Jesse Marcel inspecting crash debris. Source)

That was, however, until The Nineties, when the U.S. Air Force launched a series of official inquiries in response to media and public pressure. It transpired that many documents from the period had been destroyed without proper authorisation.
Conspiracy theories had a field day.
The U.S. Air Force claimed that the weather balloon had been carrying top secret testing equipment looking for evidence that Soviets had developed an atomic bomb. The odd press release was, then, nothing but misinformation to bamboozle the Russians.
They went on to say that any strange bodies seen at the time were crash test dummies that had been dropped in high altitude parachute tests. That only confused things, as Roswell crash took place in 1947 while the parachute tests did not start until 1954. The story became more and more convoluted and fact quickly blurred into fiction. A film supposedly showing and alien autopsy emerged in 1995 but was condemned as a hoax.

One man who knows more than most about the Roswell mystery is Nick Pope, who investigated UFO sightings for the UK's Ministry of Defence between 1991 and 1994. He is convinced that something weird took place there but like the rest of us is none the wiser as to what.
As having investigated UFOs for the MoD, he has been accused of being a part of this conspiracy theory himself.
So what's his verdict?
It's still unknown. Something crashed at Roswell, but with the records lost, the witnesses dead and the event now over 60 years old, chances are we'll never find out what happened.

(Former Ministry of Defence employee Nick Pope. Source)

Indeed, on August 23rd, 2013, Dr Jesse Marcel Jr - the son of the intelligence officer first dispatched to intercept the wreckage - passed away aged 76. He had been the last living witness involved in the incident.
Marcel had been just 10 years old when his dad woke him up and showed him strange debris that he said came from crashed alien spacecraft. In his book, The Roswell Legacy, Marcel Jr described how he is adamant his father was cruelly hung out to dry by an official cover-up.
This career military man who served in a helicopter unit during the Iraq war in 2004, wrote:
"This was clearly like nothing that had been seen on Earth before. But neither my dad nor I had any notion of the profound influence that Roswell incident would have on the popular culture in the coming years. To his dying day, my father was absolutely firm in his conviction that the material we examined was as he described it, 'not of this Earth', and that the truth about Roswell had yet to be revealed to the public".

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THE OTHER THEORIES

Secret military testing

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The so-called "Area 51" is a strictly classified off-shoot of Nevada's Edwards Air Force Base. It's existence was only officially recognised by the CIA in 2013, and if you stray too close to the borders you can be shot for trespassing, with signs warning "use of deadly force is authorised".
Several witnesses have come forward to claim that files concerning Roswell - located some 900 miles to the east - are held there. It is a base that has long been at the very cutting edge of new military technology and many have speculated that the events of Roswell simply involved a crashed prototype originally dispatched from Area 51 and quickly silenced by worried bigwigs, eager to conceal groundbreaking new weapons from the enemy.

Two crashes, not one

(Lt. Col. Richard French. Source)

In 2010 Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. French, who served in the military for more than 27 years, broke his silence to claim that there were two strange UFO crashes near Roswell, not one.
He said, "The first one was shot down by an experimental U.S. airplane that was flying out of White Sands, New Mexico, and it shot what was effectively pulse-type weapon that disabled and took away all the controls of the UFO, and that's why it crashed."
French said that his source informed him that there was another crash few days later.
"We think that the reason they were in there at that time was to try and recover parts and any survivors of the first crash. I'm referring to the people from outer space - the guys whose UFO it was".

Nazi scam

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It wasn't little grey men that crashed in Roswell, it was Nazis!
So says the American author Annie Jacobsen, who reckons that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin recruited former SS leader Josef Mengele to produce "grotesque, child sized aviators" to be remotely piloted and landed in America in order to spread mass hysteria and panic, as the human race feared a real-life alien invasion.
Jackobsen reckons that the bodies found at the crash site were genetically engineered children around 12 years old with oversized heads and abnormal large eyes - human guinea pigs, which were quickly spirited away by the U.S. Air Force.

Thank you for reading,
@claudia

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