← Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat
Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat
The Roswell Incident: UFO Crash, Cover-Up, or Cold War Secret?
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- [00:01]
Dr. Harini Bhatt
This is Rewind. Rewind. In July of 1947, something crashed in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico. At first the military said it was a UFO. Then just hours later, they said it was just a weather balloon. But eyewitnesses describe strange metal that couldn't be cut or burned. Rumors spread about small non human bodies recovered from the wreckage. So why? Why the sudden reversal? Why the secrecy? And why has the story changed so many times over the last 75 years? In this episode, I'll break down what really happened at Roswell, the official story, the witnesses, the evidence, and the theories. By the end, you'll be able to decide for yourself. Was it a simple accident or the moment we first discovered we're not alone. Hi, I'm Dr. Harini Bhatt, and this is Hidden History, a rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories, from science to the supernatural and everything in between, from vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena. I'm looking at it all and I want you to to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. Today's episode is all about the Roswell incident. In 1947, a rancher in New Mexico found strange debris scattered in one of his fields. When he showed it to the military, they initially said the wreckage came from a ufo. And although they tried to lock that back and claim it was just a weather balloon, it was too late. So what crashed in Roswell that day? Was it really a weather balloon? Maybe a top secret government project? Or could it be aliens after all? Let's talk about it.
- [02:18]
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- [03:08]
Dr. Harini Bhatt
This episode is brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session. And this summer Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories and the book to screen favorites. Already read twice off campus Elle every year. After the Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point and more slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. There are places off the beaten path and then there is Roswell, New Mexico. Located in the middle of the desert, the town only existed thanks to the the nearby Roswell Army Airfield or the raaf. And that could have been by design, because Roswell wasn't your average military town. It was home to some of the most highly classified missions and developments of the entire war. It was home base for the 509th Bomb Group, the world's first and only nuclear bomb squadron. They helped develop the atomic bomb and were the ones that dropped the weapon known as Little Boy on Hiroshima in August of 1945. All that to say, the people of Roswell understood the meaning of top secret. They prided themselves on keeping them, especially because the entire country was already on edge over a new threat, the Soviet Union. Ever since the US used atomic bombs at the end of World War II, the government was terrified someone would steal the technology. As the other surviving global superpower, the Soviet Union was the biggest, biggest threat. To do that, rumors of Soviet spies were everywhere. All of a sudden, you didn't know who to trust. That sense of paranoia made its way to Roswell, and people weren't just worried about the Soviets. They were also starting to get the feeling someone or something else was watching. Yeah, I'm talking about aliens. By the summer of 1947, folks were seeing strange things in the sky all around the country, and no one was sure what to call them. Until that June, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of shiny ground objects during a flight over Washington State. At first, he only told a few friends about what he'd seen. But it didn't take long for Wer to get out, and soon enough, reporters came around asking questions. Arnold tried a few different ways to describe the objects themselves and how they moved. But there is one that stuck. Saucer like local outlets started using the term flying saucer, and it seems to have caught on from there. Before long, newspapers around the country were full of headlines announcing more and more flying saucer sightings. And plenty of those reports were coming from Roswell. The encounters varied a bit. Some people saw lights appear and disappear in the distance, While others witnessed actual aircraft that hovered and jerked unlike anything they had ever seen before. And these were people living around an air force base. They saw all kinds of airplanes and knew how they moved, but they were convinced they were seeing something else entirely. These sightings could have been the result of the general sense of paranoia. After all, Roswell was the home of the atomic bomb. Or maybe that was exactly what was drawing the aliens attention. Either way, people were on high alert. And then came the event that would cement all of this in history forever. No one knows exactly when the crash happened, but according to UFO researcher Don Schmidt, it was most likely on the evening of July 2, 1947. That night, there was a massive thunderstorm over the ranching community of Corona, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell. Ranchers in the area always pay close attention to rain, since it determined where they could send their livestock to graves. So there were a lot of people out on their porches checking out the storm. Mother Nature put on quite a show that night. But among the thunderclaps and lightning strikes, something else caught their attention. A woman named Marion Strickland described seeing a bright red light streaking through the sky toward her family's ranch. Moments later, she and her husband heard what sounded like an explosion. She thought for sure it was a plane being brought down by the storm. But over the next couple days, there was nothing in the news about any plane crashes. Instead, on the 4th of July, a rancher named Mac Brazel discovered something out in his fields. Actually, he found a lot of something. Mac was the foreman of a place called the Foster Ranch, and on the morning of the fourth, he took his sheep out to a pasture he knew had been soaked by the recent storm. But instead of finding a field of thick green grass, Mack stumbled onto something out of a sci fi novel. The ground was littered with pieces of strange metallic debris. Mac estimated that it was spread over a zone about 200 yards in diameter. He went in for a closer look, but the sheep wanted no part of that. They hung back, refusing to go anywhere near whatever the stuff was. Mac looked around for a while, but he couldn't make heads or tails of the strange metallic material scattered all around his pasture. All he knew was that his flock wasn't going to walk through the message, so he herded them around it. Once the sheep were settled, Mac went back and gathered some of the material he wanted to show somebody. So he drove to his closest neighbors, the Proctors. Mr. Proctor wasn't home at the time, but his wife, Loretta, was. She let Mac inside, and he laid out all the pieces on her kitchen table. Most of it looked like metal, but not any metal that Loretta had ever seen. It was shiny, like tin foil, but a lot thinner. Mack showed her how it could be bent, folded, and even crumpled into a tiny ball. But when you laid it flat again, it didn't show any signs of damage. Loretta was just as mystified by it as Mac was. She told him he should probably take it to the sheriff in Roswell. Mac agreed, but the round trip from Corona to Roswell wasn't quick, and he had the ranch to take care of. But he had a day off coming up. So on Sunday, July 6, Mack put two boxes of debris in his truck and drove the 75 miles to Roswell and delivered the samples to Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox had been the county Sheriff for almost 20 years, so he pretty much assumed that anything he couldn't identify had something to do with the military. And when he saw the strange debris, he called up the base and asked to speak to the commander of the 509th. But apparently the 509th didn't know what it could be either. So the commander decided to send their intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, to figure it out. On either July 7th or 8th, Major Marcel met Mac Brossel back on the Foster ranch in Corona. The army had sent their own intelligence officer, too. The second they go out to that field, they knew they were dealing with something important. From how much material there was. Something pretty big must have crashed in the area. According to Marcel's later recollection, the debris field was much bigger than 200 yards, like Mac Brosel thought. In his estimation, it covered a stretch about three quarters of a mile long and more than 100ft wide. And yet he couldn't think of anything that would leave behind the kind of wreckage he saw scattered around the desert. There was a lot more of the tinfoil, like metal tangled up in the shrubs and fluttering in the desert breeze. But there were also more solid bits that seemed like they could have been structural, along with what looked like the thinnest cables Marcel had ever seen. It took him and the other officer the entire day to document everything. They also collected as much of the debris as they could, which they boxed up and and put in Marcel's car At the end of the day. The army officer stayed behind while Marcel headed back to the raaf. But he didn't go straight to the base. Marcel wasn't usually a rule breaker, but he was pretty sure that the second his superiors got their hands on the materials he'd collected, no one would hear about it ever again. Something about the situation was weird enough that Marcel just had to tell someone. So he stopped at his house to show the debris to his wife and son. It was around 2 in the morning, but Marcel promised this was worth waking up for. Because the Major didn't think what he'd found came from the Soviets or any Earth based enemy. He was sure that he had pieces of a flying saucer. As Marcel's family looked through what he collected, his son Jesse Marcel Jr. Reportedly picked up what looked like a mission miniature beam of some kind. It was about an inch or so wide and surprisingly lightweight. But what really caught Jesse Jr. S attention was the symbols that ran along the inside of the beam. They looked like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, only there weren't any of the typical images you'd expect. Eventually, Major Marcel knew he had to get going. So he packed everything back up and finished the drive to the base. He made it just in time for the morning officers meeting. As he presented his findings, the base's commander, Colonel William Blanchard, listened carefully and inspected the evidence. Then he said something nobody was expecting. He agreed with Marcel's suspicions. But instead of slapping a classified sticker on everything and hiding it away, Blanchard decided to go public. He ordered the public affairs officers to issue a press release telling everyone they'd captured a flying saucer. Let's pause here for a second because this is huge. Think about it. A high ranking officer in the US Military was saying, yeah, this is a ufo. Aliens are here and one of their spaceships just crashed in the desert. This is the kind of announcement that wouldn't just change history, it would change our entire concept of the universe. And Colonel Blanchard was so sure of what he saw that he was okay with putting it out there for everyone to know. As you can imagine, the announcement did not take long to spread beyond the local newspapers and radio stations around Roswell. We're talking globally. It was truly one of the earliest instances of news going viral. Viral. Which is why Brigadier General Roger Ramey, the commanding officer of the 8th Air Force, ordered Major Marcel to bring his materials to Fort Worth, Texas immediately. So by late afternoon, Marcel was on a plane. And when he landed in Texas, Marcel was escorted straight to the general's office. According to him, here's what happened next. After the usual pleasantries, Marcel Showed General Raimi what he'd brought. The men looked it over together for a while. Then Raimi said he had something to show Marcel in another room. When they came back to the general's office, something was off. The debris Marcel had brought was gone. Instead, the strange, otherworldly metal had been replaced by the tattered remains of a weather balloon. Marcel was still, still processing everything, when the room suddenly filled with cameramen and just one single reporter. General Ramey had called a press conference. He said the officers in Roswell were wrong. They hadn't found the remains of a flying saucer. After all. It was just a downed weather balloon. Marcel agreed to pose for pictures, but otherwise he didn't participate much in the conference. Even if the reporter asked him a question, the general stepped in to answer. Once they were all gone, Marcel was ordered to never speak about what happened, and he was sent home. General Ramey's correction, along with the pictures of Marcel with the weather balloon pieces were published the next day. Others back at the Roswell airfield were also allegedly told to stay quiet. They just had to wait for it to all blow over. And that, the air Force hoped would be that. Their plan worked. For a while. The story died down. People didn't follow up on it. The real story became nothing more than whispers and rumors. But no matter how well you bury a secret, time has a way of revealing everything. And when people decide to dig deeper, they uncovered something explosive. Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you turn, tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic Expedia and visit Scotland. Invite you to come. Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com visitscotland for 31 years, Major Jesse Marcel didn't talk about what he'd seen in the debris field. All he knew was that it wasn't from a weather balloon. But he was a loyal soldier, and Marcel believed the Military had its reasons for keeping it classified. And he also wanted to believe those reasons were always in the public's best interest. But as the decades went by and Marcel eventually retired, he started to wonder if this was a secret worth keeping. Then in 1978, he received a surprising visitor. Retired nuclear physicist turned professional ufologist Stanton Friedman. He'd received a tip about Marcel's experience, experience in Roswell, and he wanted to know more. After years of silence, Marcel was ready to finally tell someone the truth. Once Friedman heard what he had to say, he decided to look into it further. And two years later, in 1980, he published his findings in a book called the Roswell Incident. Just like that, everyone knew what Jesse Marcel claimed to have seen out there in the desert. And a lot of them agreed that there was more to the story. Starting in the mid-80s, New Mexico Congressman Stephen Schiff was flooded with letters and phone calls about Roswell. Now, Schiff didn't necessarily believe the Air Force was hiding aliens, but he did feel like it was his duty to get the answers to his constituents questions. So in early 1993, he reached out to the Secretary of Defense who was then put in touch with an Air Force colonel. That colonel told Schiff to contact the National Archives. Then the Archives came back saying they didn't have anything about Roswell. This is when Schiff said he knew he'd been, quote, getting the runaround and he wasn't going to stand for that. His next move was getting in touch with the General Accounting Office, an investigative group that works for Congress. They agreed to work with him, and two years later, in 1995, they came to Schiff with something big. Apparently the Roswell airfield administrative records and all outgoing messages from 1947 had been destroyed. That meant all their internal communications about the crash were just gone. The GAO also couldn't figure out who had given the order to destroy those records when the order had gone out, or why they had done it. When this information went public, it sent the alien conspiracy believers into overdrive. They were so, so vocal. The Air Force finally decided to take action. They launched their own investigation and released the Roswell Report in 1995. And get this, the report admitted that yes, there had been a cover up. However, it wasn't aliens. No. The Air Force said they'd been protecting top secret experiments codenamed Project Mogul. The gist of it was that military scientists had had been using high altitude balloons to float sound equipment over the Soviet Union. The goal was to listen for nuclear explosions so the US Would know If and when the Soviets developed their own bombs. One of these balloons had been launched just weeks before the debris was found in Roswell, and then the military just lost track of it. So could the Roswell wreckage be one of these balloons? It was a perfectly logical explanation that even managed to take some accountability for all the lies up to this point. But for many, it still wasn't enough. Is it really possible that the government was still hiding the truth? Let's dig into it, starting with the official explanation that the whole thing was a top secret balloon blown way out of proportion. Okay, so Project Mogul was a codename for the Constant Altitude Balloon Project. It was based out of Halman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, about 100 miles east of Roswell and south of where the debris was found. As I mentioned, their mission was to use giant high altitude balloons to float microphones in Soviet airspace and listen for any nuclear explosions. Now, this was a lot more complicated than just strapping a recording machine to a balloon and sending it on its way. There was a lot of equipment involved, which meant they had to use more than one balloon to get it all airborne. So each Mogul balloon was actually a chain of 20 or more tethered together. So why balloons? Well, they were the ultimate stealth technology at the time. They were lightweight and silent. And since there were no humans on them, they could go into the upper atmosphere, which also had help them avoid detection. Also, when I say balloons, I'm not talking about big versions of party balloons. They're closer in size to a hot air balloon, like hundreds of feet tall. And they were made out of neoprene, the same rubbery material they use for scuba suits. Once they were released into the sky, they looked weird. The balloons couldn't follow any sort of flight path, so their movements appeared erratic. They'd float on the breeze until they were knocked this way and that. They were completely silent and round. Sometimes towing equipment with blinking lights. Sound familiar? In fact, it's possible balloon chains like the type used by Project Mogul might have been responsible for terms like flying saucer and flying disc to begin with. Remember Kenneth Arnold, the pilot who kicked this whole thing off before giving his icon iconic saucer like description? He said he saw a chain of objects. He thought maybe it was a formation of some new kind of jet. Except there were no tails. We can assume he meant contrails, the streaks of white condensation that follow planes. But what could fly without leaving one of those? It would have to be something without an engine. Maybe a balloon. But it's not just the existence of Project Mogul and its proximity to Roswell that makes this a compelling explanation. There's also the timeline. On June 4, 1947, the project launched balloon number four. They tracked it on radar for as long as they could, but eventually it was lost. A month later, Mac Broswell discovered the debris field on his ranch. Now, you might be thinking, if this really was a crash Project Mogul balloon, why wasn't the military frantically looking for it? Well, experts have said it was because the materials themselves were easily replaced. What mattered was the data they were able to get from it while it was flying. And they couldn't have gotten anything useful before it crossed into Soviet airspace. When the balloon chains did crash somewhere that was easy for them to get to, the government did go collect them. But they didn't waste time chasing every balloon down. They might have drawn unwanted attention to their project, which is exactly what happened at Roswell. And when people start asking questions, the first reaction was to blame it on UFOs and try to move on. But when that backfired, they went with the weather balloon explanation. Ironically enough, it was the attempt to maintain secrecy that drew the most attention and birthed a conspiracy that just was won't die. Which brings us to the next part of this explanation. Why was it so important to keep Project Mogul a secret? And why did the COVID up backfire so spectacularly? Well, with the threat of nuclear war constantly around the corner, it's easy to understand why military leaders were obsessed with keeping things confidential. The Cold War started almost immediately after World War II and kept escalating through the 1950s and 60s. Even civilians lived with increased apprehension and paranoia. But at first those feelings were pointed toward outside enemies. People were pretty willing to trust that the government had their best interests at heart. However, all of that changed dramatically during the 1970s. First, there was the epic failure of the Vietnam War, which inspired massive protests and led to a large lot more eyes on the government and the military. And then came Watergate. As a quick overview, Watergate was the failed burglary of the Democratic national committee offices in 1972. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It turned out that the Nixon administration had been involved in a ton of illegal activities like secret wiretaps and money laundering. It was so bad President Nixon resigned and 1974. To say that Watergate left a bad taste in American's mouths would be an almost comical understatement. It broke the average person's trust in the government. It showed that cover ups and lies could go all the way to the very top. So naturally, when Jesse Marcel came forward in 1978 and confessed that he had been part of a cover up at Roswell, it hit hard. And the military didn't do themselves any favors by dodging questions for another 15 years. By the time the Air Force released its official report in 1994, it was too little too late. The seeds of distrust had grown into full on conspiracy theories. Especially because it didn't answer one huge question about what people had seen at Roswell. If it was just a top secret experimental balloon, how did the air first explain the bodies? This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online@statefarm.com like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [27:33]
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- [28:03]
Dr. Harini Bhatt
All right, let's talk about aliens. A lot of people never bought the project mobile explanation for the Roswell cover up, and that's because of the flood of witness accounts that came out after Jesse Marcel talked about his explosion experience. Turns out Marcel wasn't the only person who saw things they couldn't explain, and the military seemed extremely motivated to make sure no one shared their stories. But once Stanton Friedman published his findings, it couldn't be contained. After Friedman's investigation, more ufologists flocked to Roswell throughout the 1980s to do their own research. This included researchers Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt, who went on to write multiple books about Roswell. According to Randall and Schmidt, they've interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and a lot of the people they talked to were the descendants of people who were involved in the events of 1947. We've already gone over Jesse Marcel's version of what happened, but there was someone else even closer to things than he was. Mack Brossel the way he told it, things got intense. And after he and the sheriff went to the Air force, once the 509th put out that first press release that the wreckage was from a ufo, the local media was clamoring to talk to the rancher who'd found it all. So Mack agreed to be interviewed by the radio station kgfl. But before that could happen, he was reportedly intercepted by military police and taken to the base. He claims he was held there for five, five days and interrogated around the clock. And before they finally released him, two military police officers brought Mac to the newspapers and radio stations. They kept a close eye on him as he answered the reporter's questions. In a 1989 interview, Mack's son said that he tried to talk to his dad when he came back from Roswell, but Mack would only say that he promised the Air Force that he keep his mouth shut. And Mac Broswel wasn't the only one apparently threatened into silence. Personnel from the airfield reportedly went to see anyone who'd spoken to Mack or who claimed to know anything about the crash. If they shared their stories or anything they'd heard, they could be looking at legal consequences. At the time, it seemed like a serious overreaction to someone finding a simple weather balloon. Knowing what we know now that it was supposedly evidence of a top secret project, it makes a little more sense, but it's still a pretty harsh way to treat civilians. And that might be because the truth was a lot bigger than a secret military project. Apparently, Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt found people with stories about much more than debris, like the family of Roswell sheriff George Wilcox. According to Wilcox's granddaughter, she was at her grandparents house watching the moon landing in 1969 when her grandmother Inez started acting strange. She locked the door and shut the blinds and said there was something about Roswell that she and George had been hiding. After telling the Air Force about the debris back Broswell had brought them, Sheriff Wilcox drove out to the site himself. He said the military had already arrived and were securing the area. But before they could make him leave, Wilcox saw something he'd never forget. A spaceship. Wilcox also noticed some of the personnel out in the field weren't people at all. He'd later tell his wife. They were human like, only smaller, with very large eyes, and they were dressed in what looked like silk robes. Some were alive and others were not, but they were all being loaded up into military vehicles. When the soldiers noticed Wilcox, he was ordered to return to his office and wait for someone to debrief him. He wasn't about to argue with them and did as he was told. Except Wilcox wasn't debriefed. According to him, he was intimidated. Wilcox claims he was told to keep silent or he and his family would be killed. The threat felt so real, his wife still lived in terror 22 two years later, and she passed the warning on to their granddaughter. It's terrifying stuff. Although I do have to point out there's a hole in the story here because Matt Brossel and Jesse Marcel said they only found scattered debris, while George Wilcox said he saw an entire ship. But rather than write his experience off, I want to pose another what if Wilcox didn't see the ship at the ranch? Is it possible there was a. A second crash site? The more people that Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt talked to, the more convinced they were that the answer was yes. Especially when they heard stories like the one told to them by a woman named Frankie Rowe. Frankie was about 12 years old in 1947. Her father was part of the Roswell Fire Department, and she said that one evening in July, her dad came home from a long shift. Only he didn't seem tired like he normally did after working that hard. Instead, he was extremely excited about something. He told Frankie and her mom that his crew had gotten a call about a crash just north of Roswell. So they headed out thinking there was a grass fire or something like that. Only when they reached the location, there wasn't any fire or a plane. Instead, Frankie said they found a craft that her dad could only describe as, quote, not of this world, end quote. And lying on the ground beside it were two small bodies. It seemed like they were probably dead, but there was another who was up and walking around. According to Frankie's dad, all these beings were about the size of a child with large heads and eyes a lot like the ones George Wilcox described. Frankie and her family was were mesmerized by her dad's story and maybe a little scared. But Frankie said her dad told them there was no reason to be afraid and that was that. They didn't talk about it again. Then a couple days later, Frankie was at the fire station with her dad when a state policeman came rushing in. She thought he had the same giddy energy as her father did when he told them about the, quote, little people, end quote. According to Frankie, the officer gathered everyone in the firehouse kitchen, then pulled pulled out what looked like a bit of tin foil out of his pocket. He said that he'd helped clean up some of the crash debris and had managed to Sneak away with this small piece. It didn't look like much, all wadded up in his hand, but when he dropped it onto the table, it spread itself out flat. Everyone was eager to get a chance to mess with it, including Frankie. She said she waited patiently while the men tried all sorts of things, like cutting it with her pack pocket knives or burning it with their lighters. Nothing they did even left a mark. When it was finally Frankie's turn, she was surprised by how light the foil felt in her hands. It was truly weightless, like nothing she'd ever handled before. Then, about three or four days later, a military car pulled up in front of their house. While Frankie's dad wasn't home, a man knocked at the door and asked to talk to Frankie. He told her to forget everything she'd seen and heard at the fire station. It never happened. She was never there. The man went on to say that if Frankie, a little girl, ever talked about it again, they would make her entire family disappear. Once he was sure that he'd gotten his point across, he finally left. Like all the other witnesses who'd allegedly been threatened, into silence. Frankie and her family knew, never spoke a word about it. Even decades later, when Kevin Randall came to ask for an interview. It took him two years to convince Frankie to share her story. But for the UFO community, it was worth the wait. These stories were so compelling that the military was forced to respond yet again. In 1997, three years after releasing the original Roswell report, the Air Force released another another document. This one came with a mic drop of a subtitle. The Roswell Report case closed. This time they held a press conference to go over their findings. According to the Air Force, any bodies that might have been observed were probably just crash test dummies. They were used in experiments to develop pilot ejection mechanisms in planes. But this explanation didn't hold up, and reporters at the press conference came prepared. One correspondent pointed out that those experiments didn't start until the 1950s, well after the Roswell incident. The best explanation the Air Force could come up with was basically that the witnesses had mixed up their dates. That maybe they misremembered something they saw in the 50s as being part of the 1947 incident. For a lot of people in the UFO community, that was all the proof they needed that the Air Force was still covering their tracks. No matter what the government says, nothing will be good enough until they show proof of alien life. In the end, it all comes down to belief. Which is why to this day, the mystery of The Roswell incident remains unsolved. But the story of Roswell is also about so much more than whether or not aliens exist. It's about the authority structures in our lives and whether we can ever take what they say at face value.
- [37:27]
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Value?
- [37:27]
Dr. Harini Bhatt
It doesn't really matter if they're hiding secret experiments or UFOs. All that matters is that they're hiding something. And if you can't trust them to tell the truth about some wreckage in the desert, then what can you trust? A lot of people feel powerless already. And if you ask me, believing in aliens is a way to reclaim some of that control. Because if there really are others out there, it means there are things beyond everyone's control. And when the truth finally comes out, we'll all be in it together. Okay, so, all that being said, what do I really think happened in Roswell? As much as I would love the alien theory to be true, the Project Mogul explanation seems like the likeliest explanation. It isn't the most exciting answer, but the truth is often disappointingly simple. The Mogul explanation covers so many of the lingering questions. Was there a coverup? Probably. It just wasn't to hide aliens. And why was there so much material? Well, it wasn't a normal weather balloon. It was a massive chain of them. And that chain was carrying all sorts of other equipment, which also explains why a lot of the material was unrecognizable to personnel outside of the project. But then there's the issue of the witness accounts of a second site that's a little more nuanced, honest. To be clear, I don't want to write those stories off. And I believe that those people went through something very real that left a mental and emotional scar. I wouldn't be surprised if they really were intimidated into silence. And that would be terrifying. They had no one to turn to, nowhere to go for protection. And that tear may have left a legacy of personal and generational trauma, which we see in the terrifying details of these stories. In terms of where they went and what they saw, we do have to consider the second and even third hand nature of the sources. Have you ever played a game of telephone? Well, imagine the message being passed down over years rather than seconds. The original story is unlikely to make it through unscathed. Human memory is incredibly flexible and isn't always reliable. It's constantly adapting to new information. And beyond these stories, there just isn't any physical evidence to support the second sight theory, which for conspiracy believers, is evidence in itself. So make of that what you will now does this mean I don't think aliens are out there? Not necessarily. It just doesn't seem likely that they crashed in New Mexico. I honestly don't enjoy the idea of aliens being out there, but I do believe there are, because there's just no way, with how vast our entire galaxy and how vast the universe is, we cannot be the only living organisms in the universe. It's just not possible. If you look at the math, if you listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson, there's just no way. We are definitely not the only living beings. It could be that they're not human. Like, it could be that they're just living organisms, like in the early Earth days. But there's definitely going to be some sort of living organism on a distant planet, on a different universe outside of here. And when I say life, I don't mean you and I running around on another planet. I mean like proto life on early Earth, like something to that extent. If there is something more complex, something that is like a plant or even a little critter, that would be really intriguing and very exciting and totally possible. I would say nothing is impossible. We just probably haven't learned about it yet. So if the Roswell incident were to happen today, how would it all go down? First of all, pictures and videos of the debris would be all over the Internet. It was easy enough to keep quiet when it was just Mac Broswell and Jesse Marcel throwing some stuff in their cars and the Internet didn't exist yet. But imagine if the were live streaming it to social media. There is no putting the lid back on that one. There would be tiktoks and think pieces from professionals and amateurs alike, dissecting every detail. But for a secret this big, the government would still try to put a stop to it. And nowadays there are tools much more powerful than a press conference. Yeah, I'm talking about AI. Nowadays it's easier to fake things than ever. Everyone would be questioning if the footage from Roswell was real. And all it would take is a good old disinformation campaign to muddy the waters. The question is, would we be able to see through it? Or would the truth be just as hard to come by as it was back in 1947. It's hard to say. But for now, keep your eyes on the sky and keep your secrets close to your chest. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of hidden history. I'm Dr. Harneet Bhatt. Join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. What did you think of the Roswell incident. Are you a skeptic or a true believer? Let me know in the comments and I might talk about it in a future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate, review and follow if you're listening on audio so we can keep building this community together. I'll see you next time on Hidden History.
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