Roswell incident

Alamogordo

Clovis

Kirtland

Carlsbad

Deming

Fort Sumner

Hobbs

Roswell

Corona debris

Roswell was one of many Army Airfields in New Mexico when debris was recovered from a ranch near Corona. Researchers at Alamogordo Air Field, less than 150 miles from Roswell, were launching classified balloons during the prior weeks.

Historian Kathryn S. Olmsted notes that "The Roswell 'incident' occurred at the dawn of the nuclear age and the cold war, just months after President Harry Truman had officially announced his administration's intention to fight communism all over the globe".[5] In 1946 and 1947, the United States's top-secret Project Mogul launched thousands of balloons designed to listen for Soviet atomic tests.[6] On June 4, 1947, researchers from New York University launched one such experimental balloon, Flight 4, from Alamogordo Army Air Field and tracked it flying northeast toward Corona; Contact was lost when the balloon was within 17 mi [27 km] of where debris would later be discovered.[2] During June and July 1947, MOGUL balloons continued to be test-launched at Alamogordo and White Sands Missile Range.[7]

1947 flying disc craze
Headline from July 6, 1947
Events
Kenneth Arnold Flight 105 Roswell Rhodes photographs Twin Falls hoax Maury Island

The Roswell incident took place amid the flying saucer craze of 1947.[8] On June 26, at the beginning of the first summer of the cold war, media nationwide reported civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold's story of seeing what became known as "Flying Saucers".[5] Historians would later chronicle over 800 "copycat" sightings that were reported after the Arnold story was published.[9] On July 4, United Airlines Flight 105 reported seeing multiple 'flying discs'.[10]

In June 1947, rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel found debris – tinfoil, rubber, and thin wooden beams – scattered across a square mile near Corona, New Mexico. Brazel gathered it and pushed it under some brush to dispose of it.[11] The ranch had no phone and no radio, leaving Brazel unaware of the on-going flying saucer craze.[11] On Saturday night, July 5, Brazel drove into Corona, where he heard stories of silvery flying discs.[11] On July 7, Brazel transported some of the debris to the sheriff's office in Roswell; The sheriff called Roswell Army Air Field, which assigned the matter to Major Jesse Marcel. Brazel took Marcel back to the debris site, and the two gathered up more pieces of rubber and tinfoil. Marcel took the material home on Monday night.[11]

On Tuesday morning, July 8, Marcel took the material to his base commander, Colonel William Blanchard. Blanchard reported the finding to General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth Army Air Field (FWAAF). General Ramey ordered the material flown to FWAAF immediately. Marcel boarded a B-29 Superfortress and made the flight to FWAAF.[11]

External audio
ABC News radio broadcast on Roswell disc

On July 8, 1947, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that personnel from the field's 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disc", which had landed on a ranch near Roswell.

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.
The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.
Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.[12]

Decades later, Roswell radio announcer Frank Joyce recalled contacting Haut by telephone to verify the release. Recalled Joyce: "I said 'Walter, don't run this story. If you do, you're going to be in trouble. They'll ship you out to Siberia.' I remember mentioning that, that was a common phrase in those days".[13]

At Fort Worth Army Air Field, Major Jesse A. Marcel posing with debris on July 8, 1947.

As soon as Marcel brought the material to General Ramey's office, both Ramey and his chief of staff Colonel Thomas Dubose identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon kite.[11] The FWAAF weather officer on duty explained to reporters that such rawin (misreported as 'ray wind') radar targets that were used at about 80 weather stations across the country.[11][14] The balloons were attached to a six-pointed reflective device that looked like a silver star. After launch, the balloon expanded with increasing altitude before bursting around 60,000 feet with pieces then dispersing in their fall to the ground.[11]

As described in the July 9, 1947, edition of the Roswell Daily Record:

The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been 12 feet [3.5 m] long, [Brazel] felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards [180 m] in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet [1 m] long and 7 or 8 inches [18 or 20 cm] thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches [45 or 50 cm] long and about 8 inches [20 cm] thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds [2 kg]. There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine, and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No strings or wires were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.[15]

Brig. General Roger Ramey, left, and Col. Thomas J. DuBose pose with debris.

On July 9, Brazel told the Roswell Daily Record that the debris consisted of "large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks."[15] He paid little attention to it but returned later with his wife and daughter to gather up some of the debris.[15]

On July 9, Marcel explained: "[We] spent a couple of hours Monday afternoon [July 7] looking for any more parts of the weather device", said Marcel. "We found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber."[11] That day, papers told how Brazel had reported the debris after hearing stories about "flying discs" and wondering if that was what he had picked up, then going to see Sheriff Wilcox where he "whispered kinda confidential like" that he may have found a flying disc.[15]

In 1994 and 1997, US Government reports concluded that the Roswell Incident stemmed from a Project MOGUL balloon.

By the 1990s, a scholarly consensus emerged concluding that the military decided to conceal the true purpose of the crashed device—nuclear test monitoring—and instead inform the public that the crash was of a weather balloon.[1] The balloon had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field a month earlier. It carried a radar reflector and classified Project Mogul sensors for experimental monitoring of Soviet nuclear testing.[16]

Air Force declassification officer Lieutenant James McAndrew concluded:

When the civilians and personnel from Roswell AAF [...] 'stumbled' upon the highly classified project and collected the debris, no one at Roswell had a 'need to know' about information concerning MOGUL. This fact, along with the initial mis-identification and subsequent rumors that the 'capture' of a 'flying disc' occurred, ultimately left many people with unanswered questions that have endured to this day.[7]

In 1950, journalist Frank Scully publicized a tale of a crashed saucer in Aztec, New Mexico that was later proved to be a hoax by two con-men. The story told of humanoid bodies about three feet tall, metal that was much stronger than those found on Earth, and alien writing found in the wreckage—these elements would later reappear in some versions of the Roswell myth.[24]

After the Scully debacle, tales of crashed saucers faded from UFO circles until the mid 1970s, when UFO conspiracy theorists Robert Spencer Carr and Leonard H. Stringfield revived the Aztec story along with other tales of the military recovering alien bodies and saucer wreckage.[24] Their story included a nurse who witnessed an alien autopsy.[25] In 1980, their claims were dramatized in the science fiction film Hangar 18.

The event at Roswell was largely forgotten until 1978. That year, the sensationalist tabloid National Enquirer reprinted the original, uncorrected article from July 8, 1947.[26] In February 1978, Jesse Marcel, the army officer who had accompanied the debris from the ranch to the Fort Worth press conference, was interviewed by ufologist Stanton Friedman. In that interview, Marcel said he believed the Roswell debris was extraterrestrial.[3]

External video
Interviews with Jesse Marcel Sr. and Jr. included in an Unsolved Mysteries episode
Interview with Jesse Marcel Jr.

On December 19, 1979, Marcel was interviewed by Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer, and on February 28, 1980, the tabloid brought large-scale attention to the Marcel story.[27] On September 20, 1980, the TV series In Search of... aired an interview where Marcel described his participation in the 1947 press conference:[28]

They wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't at liberty to do that. So, all I could do is keep my mouth shut. And General Ramey is the one who discussed – told the newspapers, I mean the newsman, what it was, and to forget about it. It is nothing more than a weather observation balloon. Of course, we both knew differently.[29]

In all his statements, Marcel consistently denied the presence of bodies.[30] Marcel's son Jesse A. Marcel Jr. M.D. spent 35 years stating that in 1947, when he was 10 years old, his father had shown him alien debris recovered from the Roswell crash site, including, "a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics on it".[31]

Between 1978 and the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman, William Moore, Karl T. Pflock, and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed several dozen people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947.[32]

The 1980 book The Roswell Incident made the first claims that "alien bodies" were associated with Roswell.[33]

In October 1980, Marcel's story was featured in the book The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. The authors had previously written popular books on fringe topics such as the Philadelphia Experiment and the Bermuda Triangle.[1]

The book argues that an extraterrestrial craft was flying over the New Mexico desert to observe nuclear weapons activity when a lightning strike killed the alien crew and, that after discovering the crash, the US government engaged in a cover-up.[1]

The Roswell Incident featured accounts of debris described by Marcel as "nothing made on this earth."[34] Additional accounts by Bill Brazel,[35] son of rancher Mac Brazel, neighbor Floyd Proctor[36] and Walt Whitman Jr.,[37] son of newsman W. E. Whitman who had interviewed Mac Brazel, suggested the material Marcel recovered had super-strength not associated with a weather balloon. Anthropologist Charles Zeigler described the 1980 book as "version 1" of the Roswell myth.[6] Berlitz and Moore's narrative was dominant until the late 1980s when other authors, attracted by the commercial potential of writing about Roswell, started producing rival accounts.[38]

The book introduced the contention that debris which was recovered by Marcel at the Foster ranch, visible in photographs showing Marcel posing with the debris, was substituted for debris from a weather device as part of a cover-up.[39][40] The book also claimed that the debris recovered from the ranch was not permitted a close inspection by the press. The efforts by the military were described as being intended to discredit and "counteract the growing hysteria towards flying saucers".[41] Two accounts of witness intimidation were included in the book, including the incarceration of Mac Brazel.[42]

The authors claimed to have interviewed over 90 witnesses, though the testimony of only 25 appears in the book. Only seven of these people claimed to have seen the debris. Of these, five claimed to have handled it.[43]

In The Roswell Incident, Marcel stated, "Actually, this material may have looked like tinfoil and balsa wood, but the resemblance ended there ... They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less-interesting metallic debris ... The stuff in that one photo was pieces of the actual stuff we found. It was not a staged photo."[44] Timothy Printy points out that the material Marcel positively identified as being part of what he recovered is material that skeptics and UFO advocates agree is debris from a balloon device.[45] After that fact was pointed out to him, Marcel changed his story to say that that material was not what he recovered.[45] Skeptics like Robert Todd argued that Marcel had a history of embellishment and exaggeration, such as claiming to have been a pilot and having received five Air Medals for shooting down enemy planes, claims that were all found to be false, and skeptics feel that his evolving Roswell story was simply another instance of this tendency to fabricate.[46]

Corona debris
(1947)

Barnett Legend (1980)

Aztec Hoax (1948)

Roswell Army Air Field
(1947)

In 1947, officers from Roswell Army Air Field investigated a debris field near Corona. By the 1980s, popular accounts conflated the debris investigation with two separate myths of humanoid bodies over 300 miles away from Roswell.[47]

The Roswell Incident (1980) was the first book to introduce the controversial second-hand stories of civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university encountering wreckage and "alien bodies" while on the Plains of San Agustin before being escorted away by the Army.[33] The second-hand Barnett stories, set 150 miles to the west of Corona, were described by ufologists as the "one aspect of the account that seemed to conflict with the basic story about the retrieval of highly unusual debris from a sheep ranch outside Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947".[48]

Many alleged first-hand accounts of the Roswell incident actually contain information from the Aztec, New Mexico, UFO incident,[49] a hoaxed flying saucer crash which gained national notoriety after being promoted by journalist Frank Scully in his articles and a 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers.[49][50]

On May 29, 1987, a team consisting of Friedman, Moore, and television producer Jaime Shandera released the "Majestic Twelve documents". On December 11, 1984, Shandera had received the documents in the mail from an unknown source.[51] The MJ-12 documents purported to be a 1952 briefing prepared for President Eisenhower. They have been called "version 2" of the Roswell story.[52] In this variant, the bodies are ejected from the craft shortly before it exploded over the ranch. The propulsion unit is destroyed and the government concludes the ship was a "short range reconnaissance craft". The following week, the bodies are recovered some miles away, decomposing from exposure and predators. [53]

On July 1, 1989, Bill Moore gave a speech at the MUFON annual symposium where acknowledged spreading "disinformation", claiming he did so on behalf of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.[54][55] By 1991, the documents were exposed as forgeries, with a signature and stray marks copied from a different letter.[56]

External video
Unsolved Mysteries segment 9/20/1989 that led to Dennis's call
Interview with Glenn Dennis, 11/19/1990
Glenn Dennis's story as dramatized by Unsolved Mysteries 9/18/1994

On August 5, 1989, Stanton Friendman interviewed former mortician Glenn Dennis. Dennis claimed to have received "four or five calls" from the Air Base with questions about body preservation and inquiries about small or hermetically sealed caskets; he further claimed that a local nurse told him she had witnessed an "alien autopsy". Glenn Dennis has been called the "star witness" of the Roswell incident.[57]

On September 20, 1989, an episode of Unsolved Mysteries had included second-hand stories of "Barney" Barnett seeing alien bodies captured by the Army and pilot "Pappy" Henderson transporting bodies from Roswell to Texas. The episode was watched by 28 million people.[58] Mortician Glenn Dennis called the show's hotline claiming to have knowledge of the events.

In September 1991, Dennis co-founded a UFO museum in Roswell along with former RAAF public affairs officer Walter Haut and Max Littell, a real estate salesman.[59] Dennis appeared in multiple books and documentaries repeating his story. In 1994, Dennis's tale was dramatized in the made-for-tv movie Roswell and by the television show Unsolved Mysteries.[60]

In 1991, Glenn Dennis and Walter Haute opened a UFO museum in Roswell.

Pflock observed that Dennis's story "sounds like a B-grade thriller conceived by Oliver Stone."[61] Randle deemed Glenn Dennis one of the "least credible" Roswell witnesses. Randle said Dennis was not credible "for changing the name of the nurse once we had proved she didn't exist."[62] Scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning concurs that Dennis cannot be regarded as a reliable witness, considering that he had seemingly waited over 40 years before he started recounting a series of unconnected events. Such events, Dunnings argues, were then arbitrarily joined to form what has become the most popular narrative of the alleged alien crash.[63] Some prominent UFOlogists including Karl T. Pflock,[64] Kent Jeffrey,[64] and William L. Moore[64] have become convinced that there were no aliens or alien spacecraft involved in the Roswell crash.

The 1994 film Roswell: The UFO Cover Up, based on the 1991 book, depicted a Roswell alien as a "gray", like those from the 1977 Spielberg blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

In 1991, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt published UFO Crash at Roswell, which has been called "version 3" of the Roswell story.[65] They added testimony from 100 new witnesses,[38] including those who reported an elaborate military cordon and debris recovery operation at the Foster ranch. The book included the new claims of a "gouge ... that extended four or five hundred feet [120 or 150 m]" at the ranch.[66]

Randle and Schmitt reported Gen. Arthur Exon had been directly aware of debris and bodies, but Exon disputed his depiction, saying his comments had been based exclusively on second-hand rumors.[67] The 1991 book sold 160,000 copies and served as the basis for the 1994 television film Roswell.[68] Also in 1991, retired USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who had posed with debris for press photographs in 1947, publicly acknowledged the weather balloon cover story, corroborating Marcel's previous admissions.[69]

External video
Thomas DuBose interview in Recollections of Roswell (1992)

The Barnett "alien body" accounts were mentioned in the 1991 book, though the dates and locations were changed from the accounts found in 1980's The Roswell Incident. In this new account, Brazel was described as leading the Army to a second crash site on the ranch, at which point the Army personnel were supposedly "horrified to find civilians [including Barnett] there already."[70]

Mortician Glenn Dennis's claims of an alien autopsy was detailed in the book.[71]

Though hundreds of people were interviewed by various researchers, only a few of these people claimed to have seen debris or aliens. Most witnesses were just repeating the claims of others. Pflock notes that of these 300-plus individuals reportedly interviewed for UFO Crash at Roswell (1991), only 41 can be "considered genuine first- or second-hand witnesses" and only 23 can be "reasonably thought to have seen physical evidence, debris". Of these, only seven have asserted anything suggestive of otherworldly origins for the debris.[72]

As for the accounts from those who claimed to have seen aliens, critics identified problems ranging from the reliability of second-hand accounts to credibility problems with witnesses making demonstrably false claims, or multiple, contradictory accounts, to dubious death-bed confessions or accounts from elderly and easily confused witnesses.[73][74][75] Pflock noted that only four people with supposed firsthand knowledge of alien bodies were interviewed by Roswell authors.[76] All reports of bodies came about a minimum of 31 years after the fact.[4]

In 1992, Stanton Friedman released Crash at Corona, co-authored with Don Berliner.[68] The book, later termed "version 4" of the Roswell story, introduced new "witnesses" and added to the narrative by doubling the number of flying saucers to two, and the number of aliens to eight – two of which were said to have survived and been taken into custody by the government.[68] [77]

In 1994, Randle and Schmitt authored another book, The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell which included a claim that alien bodies were taken by cargo plane to be viewed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.[68] Zeigler refers to the 1994 book as 'version 5' of the Roswell story.[77]

The existence of so many differing accounts led to a schism among ufologists about the events at Roswell.[78] The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), two leading UFO societies, disagreed in their views of the various scenarios presented by Randle–Schmitt and Friedman–Berliner; several conferences were held to try to resolve the differences. One issue under discussion was where Barnett was when he saw the alien craft he was said to have encountered. A 1992 UFO conference attempted to achieve a consensus among the various scenarios portrayed in Crash at Corona and UFO Crash at Roswell; however, the publication of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell "resolved" the Barnett problem by simply ignoring Barnett and citing a new location for the alien craft recovery, including a new group of archaeologists not connected to the ones the Barnett story cited.[78]

After a October 1993 inquiry from US congressman from New Mexico Steven Schiff,[79] the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. The result was summarized in two reports. The first, released in 1994, concluded that the material recovered in 1947 was likely debris from Project Mogul, a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons (and classified portion of an unclassified New York University project by atmospheric researchers[80]). The second report, released in 1997, concluded that reports of recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of accidents involving military casualties with memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs such as the 1950s Operation High Dive, mixed with hoaxes perpetrated by various witnesses and UFO proponents. The psychological effects of time compression and confusion about when events occurred explained the discrepancy with the years in question.[81][82][1]

The Air Force reports were dismissed by UFO proponents as being either disinformation or simply implausible, though skeptical researchers such as Philip J. Klass[83] and Robert Todd, who had been expressing doubts regarding accounts of aliens for several years, used the reports as the basis for skeptical responses to claims by UFO proponents. After the release of the Air Force reports, several books, such as Kal Korff's The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You To Know (1997), built on the evidence presented in the reports to conclude "no credible evidence from any witness has turned out to present a compelling case that the object was extraterrestrial in origin."[32]

Ufologists had previously considered the possibility that the Roswell debris had come from a top-secret balloon. During the final year of World War 2, Japan had launched thousands of paper and silk balloons carrying bombs designed to cause damage and spread panic in the United States.[84][85] In March 1990, UFOlogist John Keel proposed that the Roswell debris had been from a Japanese balloon bomb.[86][87] An Air Force meteorologist roundly rejected the theory, explaining a Japanese balloon "could not possibly have stayed aloft for two years".[88]

In 1990, Ufologist Robert G. Todd had first connected Roswell to Project Mogul.[89]

VHS cover of Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction

In 1995, film footage purporting to show an alien autopsy and claimed to have been taken by a US military official shortly after the Roswell incident was released by Ray Santilli, a London-based video entrepreneur. The footage caused an international sensation when it aired on television networks around the world.[83] Santilli admitted in 2006 that the film was mostly a reconstruction, but continued to claim it was based on genuine footage now lost, and some original frames that had supposedly survived. A fictionalized version of the creation of the footage and its release was retold in the comedy film Alien Autopsy (2006).[90][91]

In 1997, former Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso reported in his autobiographical book The Day After Roswell that the Roswell Crash did happen and that when he was assigned to Fort Riley (Kansas) in July 1947, a Sergeant showed him purportedly-nonhuman bodies that were from an "air crash".[92] Corso further claimed that years later, he helped oversee a project to reverse engineer recovered crash debris. Philip Klass analyzed his claims line by line and exposed many inconsistencies and factual errors.[93] Corso's story was noted for its similarities to the film "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" which had been released six years prior; In that film, civilians secretly attempt to reverse-engineer extraordinary technology of unknown origin.[94]

In 2007 Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey published the book Witness to Roswell, which prominently featured a document said to be a sworn affidavit by Walter Haut, who had written the first Army press release about the Roswell crash in 1947.[95] The document, alleged to have been left by Haut and opened only after his death in 2005, includes a description of the 1947 crash debris having been discussed by high-ranking staff and how Haut had seen alien bodies.[95][96] The claims, however, drew an unimpressed response even from ufologists: Dennis Balthaser said that the document was not written by Haut, and that by 2000 Haut's mental state was such he could not recall basic details about his past, making the detail contained in the affidavit seem dubious.[95] Physicist and skeptic Dave Thomas commented: "Is Roswell still the 'best' UFO incident? If it is, UFO proponents should be very, very worried."[95]

In 2011, American journalist Annie Jacobsen's Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base featured a claim that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was recruited by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to cause hysteria.[97] The book was criticized for extensive errors by scientists from the Federation of American Scientists.[98] Historian Richard Rhodes, writing in The Washington Post, also criticized the book's sensationalistic reporting of "old news" and its "error-ridden" reporting. He wrote: "All of [her main source's] claims appear in one or another of the various publicly available Roswell/UFO/Area 51 books and documents churned out by believers, charlatans and scholars over the past 60 years. In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man's sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent."[99]

In September 2017, UK newspaper The Guardian reported on Kodachrome slides which some had claimed showed a dead space alien.[100] First presented at a BeWitness event in Mexico, organised by Jaime Maussan and attended by almost 7,000 people, days afterwards it was revealed that the slides were in fact of a mummified Native American child discovered in 1896 and which had been on display at the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado, for many decades.[100]

In February 2020, an Air Force historian revealed a recently declassified report of a circa-1951 incident in which two Roswell personnel donned poorly fitting radioactive suits, complete with oxygen masks, while retrieving a weather balloon after an atomic test. On one occasion, they encountered a lone woman in the desert, who fainted when she saw them. The personnel could have appeared, to someone unaccustomed to then-modern gear, to be alien.[101]

A classic "Grey Alien" as depicted on the exterior of the Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada

In popular lore, "grays are said to be the creatures whose flying saucer crashed near Roswell in 1947. Various claims have the grays' bodies found among the wreckage while others assert that some survived".[108] However, no mention of alien bodies related to the Roswell incident occurs until 1980.[33]

In the interval between 1947 and 1980, the idea of Grey aliens had entered the public consciousness beginning with the Betty and Barney Hill incident. In December 1963, Betty Hill and her husband Barney sought out a psychiatrist after Betty experienced recurring nightmares. On February 10, 1964, the ABC Network broadcast an episode of the science fiction television show The Outer Limits that featured an extraterrestrial with large, wrap-around eyes. Twelve days later, during a hypnosis session, Barney Hill told his psychiatrist a story about a being with wrap-around eyes.[109] Modern psychiatric consensus is that Hill experienced false memory syndrome, in which therapy methods such as hypnosis lead to confabulations.[110]

On October 20, 1975, the NBC network aired a made-for-TV movie inspired by the Hills starring James Earl Jones. Depictions of Grey aliens would go on to appear in a number of books, films, and television shows, such as the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.[111] Greys would later be incorporated into the Roswell legend.[112]

• Broad, William J. (September 18, 1994). "Wreckage in the Desert Was Odd but Not Alien". The New York Times.
• Sobel, Dava (1995). "The truth about Roswell". Omni. Vol. 17, no. 8. pp. 90–99.
• Frazier, Kendrick; Karr, Barry; Nickell, Joe (1996). The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573921319.