In the late 1940s the whole world was recovering from World War II, as the USA and USSR were careening madly into the Cold War. Meanwhile, perhaps not coincidentally, much of the civilized world was immersed in the "UFO Fever" which sparked the Sci-Fi revolution in the B-movies and pulp comics of the 1950s. On July 4, 1947 the local paper of a small southwestern town reported that the nearby military base had captured a downed "Flying Saucer" - a term that would soon be catapulted into worldwide status.

The next day, the Roswell Daily Record printed a retraction. The official statement from Air Force Authorities was that a rancher had discovered the remains of a weather ballon. In the retraction story, Major Jesse Marcel (the government's scapegoat) is shown holding the poplar and tinfoil debris (left). From the expression on his face, it is obvious that this is not what he saw in the desert on the previous afternoon.

More recent disclosures by these gallant, daring defenders of our skies have manifested in a book - released just a few weeks before the Roswell 50th Anniversary Convention of UFO fans (strategic timing, in response to mounting public inquiry into the issue). Many believers, and even abductees, attended - but the press coverage was extremely, and predictably, tongue in cheek. The book outlines a "Top Secret" military weather balloon experiment, in which plastic dummies were supposedly dropped from extreme heights. However, unofficial investigation revealed that those projects actually took place in the late 1950s, not in the summer of 1947.

In addition, no weather balloon could possibly have left debris of the scope and scale that Major Jesse Marcel discovered on Mac Brazel's ranch. Wreckage was strewn over several square miles

By the time military and intellegence personnel made it out to Mac Brazel's ranch, the crash site was at least a week old. A little girl was told by a suspicious character in a dark suit that she had not seen any of this, and it had never happened. When she insisted that she had, and it did, the man emphasised again, until he became frustrated and simply told her that it was a very big desert out there, and if she disappeared, the only thing anyone would find of her one day would be bleached bones.

This is the same treatment, if explained better, that all civilians received, who seemed to have the slightest idea what was really going on. A nurse, who claimed to be present at the autopsy, told her tale to a friend - and was never heard from again.

Major Marcel's son still recalls with vivid memory the strange artifacts he beheld on his kitchen floor early one morning - definately metallic, but extremely lightweight - and they could not be harmed in any way, no matter how hard they tried. Some pieces was banged with a hammer endlessly, but refused to dent, not even a scratch after hours of effort. Another piece was "paper thin" and crumpled easily, but it immediately assumed its original shape everytime. Fire was equally ineffective on the materials, of which modern comparisons still pale, and were hardly dreamed of at the time. One piece the son discovered, a small I-beam, appeared to have strange writing on it in certain light, reminiscent of Egyptian heiroglyphics. Major Marcel was unable to identify the language

The artifacts came into their possession when the officer reluctantly went out to the crash site to investigate the report that the rancher made to the local sheriff, who called the Air Force Base at Roswell, thinking it must have been one of their planes that had gone down. There were no flights reported missing however, and no one at the base took the call very seriously ~ at first.

From the air, the crash site looked like someone had spilled popcorn on a clean rug ~ an easy eyesore for anyone flying within several miles. After word got back to higher powers within the military, and the subsequent "Spin Doctoring" was released to the press, special clean up crews were dispatched to the quiet little ranch. Hundreds of soldiers combed the area for debris and removed anything and everything not created by mother nature from the desert soil. Press people were denied entry into the site, but almost all of them reported to their editors one of the biggest peacetime military operations on native soil in recent years.

After all the pieces fell where they did, wreckage and other materials (including the dead alien bodies) are said to have been taken, via heavilly guarded trucks in a military convoy, to several different military bases in the general area (Texas, Nevada, California and others), except for what is now Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the mostly in tact of the Roswell spacecraft is rumored to have been kept in that base's Hangar 18 in hopes that its secrets could somehow be uncovered.

Over the years that something was there, security lapsed enough for several credible witnesses to corroborate this story ~ and as more people came forward, still more felt comfortable enough to do so themselves. But many are still spooked enough to wait until they're practically on their "deathbed," and in those cases further investigation into the specifics of their stories is near impossible. One such artifact is a mysterious piece of metal (the metalurgy report is currently unavailable) which is extremely lightweight

All the bases in question are known to have massive underground facilities, and most flourished during the Cold War as major technology and development centers. But by far the most famous is Area 51 in the Nevada desert, just a few hours drive north of Las Vegas, where modern folklore has it that the strange lights of UFOs can be seen flying around at night, doing amazingly acrobatic maneuvers that no man made aircraft is capable of. Because of this, the mountains around the super secret base have become a very popular UFO Hunter / Skywatcher's and sightseer's tourist attraction during the 70s and 80s, until the US Government illegally procured all the land for dozens of miles in every direction. Unmarked white jeeps patrol the area and signs are posted warning that "Deadly Force is Authorized." The base does not appear on any map, but Soviet Spy Sattelite photos clearly show a major military installation in the mountains there.