← History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
Did aliens land at Roswell?
00:49:51
Dr David Clarke investigates the conspiracy theory that claims the US government has been hiding the existence of alien life from us all
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- [01:51]
Rob Attar
July 1947, some unusual debris was discovered at Roswell Army Airfield in New Mexico. Was this the remains of a crashed military balloon or something from much, much further away? Has the American government spent the past 75 years hiding proof of alien life from us all? Welcome to History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories, exploring some of the most persistent conspiracy theories about the past. I'm Rob Attar, and for this episode I was joined by Dr. David Clark of Sheffield Hallam University to discuss the legend of Roswell and how the conspiracy theory has twisted and turned over the decades.
- [02:36]
Dr. David Clarke
To begin with, could you please take us back to the summer of 1947? What actually happened at Roswell, New Mexico?
- [02:43]
Well, I think before we start with Roswell, New Mexico, I think we need to go back two weeks before what became the Roswell Incident and what happened then on the 24th of June, 1947 in the afternoon. This is before anyone had ever heard of flying saucers, although flying saucers were known about, but not in the context of UFOs. A guy called Kenneth Arnold, who was a private pilot, was out flying a small aircraft over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. And he, he was, I think he was on a joyride, but he was told to look out for the wreckage of another aircraft that crashed somewhere in the mountains. So he was sort of on the alert. And as he was flying towards Mount Rainier in the distance, he saw what he described as a formation of strange aircraft. And they were flying in echelon formation, the sort of the way that you'd expect if you saw geese or ducks flying. That may be what he saw, but that's another thing we can explore possibly later. But he thought these were incredible supersonic aircraft. And don't forget, this is before the sound barrier was broken, which was later that year by Chuck Yeager. So he worked it out that these craft were traveling at some fantastic speed, faster than the speed of sound. And he radioed what he'd seen to the ground at Yakima Air Base. And when he landed, the grapevine had transmitted all around the United States that this guy had seen some weird objects in the sky. He was surrounded by newspaper reporters and he was asked, what did you see, you know, describe it? And his actual description was batwing shaped objects, a bit like a stealth bomber, B2 bomber today. And he was convinced he'd seen secret aircraft of some description that was being tested by the US Navy. Don't forget, this is immediately after the end of the Second World War. Lots of captured aircraft coming over from Germany, that kind of thing, to be examined. And he was asked to describe it. He couldn't really describe it, so he said, well, it moved in such a weird way. Like if you imagine you got a saucer and you skipped it across a pond, it skipped like that. And someone in a newspaper office somewhere in the American Midwest thought saucer flying came up with the phrase flying saucer. So that story, it effectively went viral, to use a modern expression. So within 48 hours of Kenneth Arnold reporting what he'd seen, flying saucers were on the news wires across the United States, across North America, Europe, and people started seeing and reporting saucer shaped flying objects in the sky. And at that stage, they didn't necessarily associate them with beings from outer space, even though obviously there was a lot of science fiction magazines, pulp magazines, that kind of thing, Flash Gordon and War of the Worlds. People had an idea that aliens may be visiting us. But if you look at the. There was an opinion poll done by the Gallup organization within a few weeks of Kenneth Arnold's sighting. And most people thought it was a hoax or they were some kind of secret weapon. Tiny tiny. Probably about 5% of the respondents said aliens from another planet. So the Roswell incident happened two weeks later, the second week of July. So all that happened at Roswell. You've got to see it in the context of the fact that people certainly in North America and across the world were reading about these mysterious things in the sky called flying saucers. The US Air Force was obviously, or the US Army Air Force as it then was, was really, really concerned about these things. Thought they might be some kind of Russian long range aircraft or missile. And when this rancher, Mac Brazell, in very remote part of New Mexico came across this wreckage in the desert, Think about it. What are you going to think if you're in the middle of nowhere and you come across something completely that you just do not, your eyes just won't take it in. It's something completely unknown that you've never seen before in the desert. It's not unnatural to think it's one of those flying saucers. And that is exactly what he thought. Went back into town to the Roswell, which coincidentally happened to be near the Roswell Army Air Force Base, which was the only base in the world at the time that had nuclear weapons stored on it, and reported what he'd seen. And the rest, as they say, is history.
- [07:15]
Okay, so he sees some wreckage out in the desert, he reports what he's seen. Is he the first person who suggests this might be from an alien craft? How does that idea come up?
- [07:26]
Well, what happened was he collected some of it up and took it into town and showed it to the sheriff. The sheriff contacted the Army Air Force base at Roswell where the press officer Walter Haut immediately got this stuff. And because obviously he and everyone on the base was talking about flying saucers, he put out a press release effectively saying the US Army Air Force has captured a flying saucer at the time, that they were bringing this debris into the base before it had actually been examined and it had been decided where it had come from, simply because this is what press offices do. You know, I mean, I used to be one. I'm sure if I was working at Roswell Army Air Force Base at the time and flying saucers were in the news and news came in of some mysterious wreckage that had been found nearby. Quite sort of, maybe jokingly you'd say, well, we're on top of things here and we solved the mystery of flying saucers. Even if it wasn't a serious sort of claim. This is the sort of thing that sometimes happens in pr. You know, it's not necessarily even to be taken seriously, but it was taken seriously, or it was in later years taken seriously. So what happened was some of this debris came back to the base. The base sent out two army intelligence officers, one of whom was a guy called Sheridan Cavett, and the other one, Jesse Marcel, Major Jesse Marcel. And he's the one everyone remembers. His story is the one that's carried on down through the ages, because Sheridan Cavett, who was interviewed by the US Air Force in the late 1990s, his account simply was, I went out to this ranch. Yeah. There was a big debris field. There was all this stuff lying on the ground. Some of it looked like balsa wood, some of it looked like metallic strips, the sort of thing you'd associate with a balloon train. And he was just. That's what he was. It remains of a balloon, not a familiar balloon, nothing that. An ordinary weather balloon, but definitely nothing unusual. Now, the thing is, Jesse Marcel was quite an unusual person, and he was telling a completely different story right from the beginning. When he started handling this stuff, he convinced himself quite clearly, in his own words, that it was something very, very unusual and not something that was manufactured in the United States. So these two people who went out, collected this stuff, put it in the back of a truck, took it back to the Army Air Force base. Right from day one, they were going in different directions. One thought something or nothing. It's nothing unusual. It's not a flying saucer. And Jesse Marcel, for whatever reason, decided it was something unusual. And he said that at the time. And he continued telling this story when 20, 30 years later, he was approached by ufologists when the story was rediscovered. And basically he retold the story and by that point it had been transformed into a classic sort of crashed flying saucer legend.
- [10:29]
Yes, that's right. So in the 70s, it really developed, doesn't it? And where do some of these new aspects of the story come from? For example, there's this idea of an alien autopsy having taken place in. Is that a 1970s edition?
- [10:40]
Yes. It's difficult to understand this now because we know everything that we think we know about the legend. But in 1947, it was just a flash in the pan. It was a story that was actually reported around the world when the US Army Air Force Base put this press release out to say they'd captured a flying saucer. And naturally it would do, because it's a sensational claim. Even in my local paper here in Yorkshire, the Sheffield Telegraph, it was on the front page. U.S. army Air Force captured Flying Saucer. But within 48 hours, the wreckage had been sent to Fort Worth where it had been examined by the meteorological office there, who basically said it's a weather balloon. There was a press conference called. There's some very famous photographs of people holding the wreckage. And I think even some of the proponents accept that what is being held is the actual wreckage. It hadn't been switched or anything. If you look at those photos, it doesn't look anything otherworldly at all. It looks exactly what you would expect from kind of balloon, you know, with strips of wood and bits of metallic paper, things hanging from it and a radar reflector, that kind of thing. It's exactly what you would expect. And then the story was completely forgotten about. If you look, I mean, I've got a huge collection of books on UFOs and flying saucers from the 1950s up to the present. It is not mentioned. The Roswell incident is not mentioned in any of those books and articles and magazines during the 1950s, during the 1960s. It's not until 1980 when the book the Roswell Incident, which was co authored with Charles Berlitz and Robert Moore, was published. And a guy called Stanton Friedman, who was very important Canadian nuclear physicist, sadly now dead, who was very much pushing this idea of there being a huge cover up by the US military of what they knew about UFOs. They got together and produced this book and they went and re interviewed some of the people who were there at the time who were still alive in 1980, Jesse Marcel for instance. And he, there's no other way to describe him. He was a UFO believer. He basically bought into the whole idea that flying saucers were craft from outer space. And unusually, if we go back to that Gallup poll that I was talking about, very small number of people in 1947 thought that these things that people were seeing were craft from outer space. But Jesse Marcel clearly was one of those people. And when he found this wreckage, he just would not have it that this was something that was made on Earth and he was still telling that story in 1978. But by that point, as with all stories, this is how folklore works. If you imagine a snowball that starts at the top of a slope and it rolls down and the snowball gets bigger and bigger and bigger and. And when someone keeps telling a story, anyone will know this from stories that you tell yourself to your group of friends, and then it gets to a bigger group of friends. You embellish it, you put extra details in, you leave things out and over the 20 or 30 years between 1947 and 1978, this story had turned into this was a crash flying saucer. There was a huge cover up. The material was switched and substituted for something else that people were threatened. Bullets are cheap was the phrase that was used, I think in one of the stories. Lots of other people then came out of the woodwork claiming, yes, we were there, we saw bodies of aliens. And there's people who worked in the morgue, apparently the hospital morgue at Roswell, who said that they remembered this truck turning up with armed guards and these more bodies of creatures being offloaded. And I think this is where the idea for the alien autopsy came from, although it was then turned into a film that has emerged was completely a hoax. But the idea that this thing had crashed and that there was creatures inside it and they were autopsied came from some of these stories that grew out of the original story. You've got to look at it in context, because it wasn't the only story about a crashed flying saucer or a crashed spaceship that came from that part of America at the time. And going even further back in time to the Victorian period in 1896, 1897, there was a wave of similar sightings of strange objects in the sky over the Midwest. And these were described as phantom airships. And again, the newspapers played up these stories. This was an object that was seen at night with searchlights on it. And sometimes people said it had landed and they'd met the crews and it was some sort of secret inventor, you know, like a Jules Verne character who perfected this lighter than air craft. And there's a really legendary story from a tiny town in Texas about how this airship crashed into a windmill. And the townspeople ran to the wreckage and found it was actually a craft from Mars. And they retrieved the body of this Martian pilot, buried it in the local cemetery, and they retrieved bits of metal from this airship that, that had got hieroglyphics on. Now, it sounds very much like the Roswell Incident, but this was in 1897. And it's since emerged that that was actually a hoax by a newspaper. And the little town, the railroad had missed it. And it was sort of an attempt to get people to come to this little town called Aurora in Texas. But that's almost like a carbon copy of the Roswell incident. And again, going even further forward in time, in 1950, there was a book called behind the Flame Saucers that was written by a guy called Frank Scull, a journalist, and that claimed that six flying saucers had crashed at a place called Aztec in New Mexico and that the American military had retrieved these objects and they'd broken into these sources and found hieroglyphics inside and small creatures. You know, the classic little green men. So what we're talking about here is. It's a legend. It's something that's been going on for centuries. And Roswell is just one tiny sort of manifestation of it, the one that's caught people's attention.
- [16:56]
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- [17:25]
Dr. David Clarke
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Dr. David Clarke
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- [18:24]
Dr. David Clarke
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- [18:28]
What do you think the people who believe in this conspiracy theory, why do they think the US Military or other US Officials would seek to cover up something like this? What would the motive be?
- [18:39]
What I'm saying is I'm not making any comment on the reality or otherwise of the actual original story. Clearly something happened. As a folklorist, to me, it's got all the hallmarks of what we call urban legends. And Professor Jan Brunvand, who was the Canadian academic who originally invented that phrase, urban legend. He wrote a whole series of books and he classified different types of urban legends. And he was one of the first people to recognize that the Roswell story is an urban legend. And he wrote a book in 1984 called the Choking Doberman. And he actually explains what he thinks the function of the legend is. And he says it's part of a group of stories about government conspiracies. And he calls it the land and Martians. And just to quote from his book, he says supposedly a UFO from another planet with a number of humanoid creatures aboard crashed in the Midwest many years ago. And U.S. air Force personnel recovered part of the craft and, and its occupants, one of them still alive before the rest of the spacecraft was destroyed in the resulting fire and explosion. Now you could say that's Roswell. You could also say it's the Aztec incident. It's very, very similar. And the legend then becomes bigger and more elaborate. The remaining UFO parts and the creatures were moved to an isolated hangar in the deserts of the U.S. southwest. It could be Area 51. That's what is now known as the home of the wreckage. And the men involved in the action were sworn to secrecy or lied to about the nature of their mission. Various documents alleged to have been based on interviews with these men that pieced together the true story continue to circulate among UFO and science fiction buffs from time to time. And he called this the secret truth. And he claimed it's such a world changing truth that if the truth actually emerged and the government owned up to this, people would panic, they would lose all faith in government institutions. You know, a bit like the famous War of the Worlds broadcast that Orson Welles did in 1938, where people started running into the streets and that kind of thing. So he's saying that the idea is that it's covered up simply because the government doesn't trust the people with the truth and thinks that it's going to undermine trust in government. Now the irony here is that trusting government has been in decline ever since the. It's certainly in America since the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then of course the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers and all these things one after another, 9, 11 conspiracies is the most recent one. So Roswell has become part of that distrust. So that you've got to see it in the context of this sort of the idea that the government is lying to the public, particularly the American government. And at the end of the day, it's all this kind of story that inspired Chris Carter, the creator of the X Files, he used the Roswell incident effectively the COVID up, the supposed cover up, as the main story arc of the X Files. So that shows how much it's become a part of the collective American imagination almost to rival the JFK conspiracies.
- [21:51]
So actually, would you say that popular culture has played a really important part in the dissemination of this legend or conspiracy theory?
- [21:58]
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, right from, I think, one of the earliest films that were made of it. I remember seeing this as a teenager. It's an awful film called Hangar 18 that came out in the early 1980s. And it was all about a crash of a UFO, I think, involving. I think the space shuttle was involved. I can't remember the exact plot, but again, it was the same sort of elements, that it crashed in a remote area, that the government retrieved the bodies and hid them away in a hangar. And then the hero of the story, which I suppose would be like Fox Mulder in the X Files, there's always someone who's cracked the conspiracy, who's cleverer and who gets to the bottom of this and who finds the truth. But then if anyone's ever watched an X Files episode, you know that the actual hard evidence is always stolen away by someone at the end. So it's a good story. People like that kind of story, and that's why the Roswell legend has lived on. But it is part of pop culture. And I was amazed. A few years ago, just as part of the research I was doing into the relationship between fiction and ufology, I came across what turned out to be the very first book written on flying saucers. And it was called the Flying Saucer. And it was written by a guy who used to work for MI5 in the Second World War, Bernard Newman. He wrote a whole series, dozens of detective novels. And he wrote this book in 1948. And effectively it tells the story of the Roswell incident. And it's all about what is supposed to be a Martian spacecraft that crashes somewhere in the American Southwest. The American military break into this. He describes it as a missile rather than a flying saucer, because obviously people were obsessed with V2s at the time. And this was one of a whole series of crashes. There's one in Russia, there's one in America, there's one in England. And what happens is it turns out that the whole thing is manufactured by the different powers after the Second World War and made out to be an invasion from outer space. And actually it's an attempt to bring all the countries of the world together after the trauma of the Second World War. And they're using the sort of alien crashes to sort of say, well, we've all got to face this alien foe. Now, I think that is a fictional story that Bernard Newman came up with in 1948. Remember, he worked for the intelligence services, as did Jesse Marcel. He was a U.S. intelligence officer. And it does make you wonder whether this idea was something that was sort of doing the rounds of all the post World War II intelligence services, both in the UK and in the US, because quite often fiction writers, you know, 007, all those sort of spy and spy dramas and what have you, the people who write espionage books often work for the intelligence services and they get ideas for plots from stories that are actually circulating on the grapevine. Urban legends, effectively.
- [25:00]
And at any point have the US authorities sought to try to discredit this conspiracy theory? Have they made any public pronouncements about Roswell?
- [25:11]
Yes, they have. We've just said that the book was published, the first book on this was published in 1980. And then there was a steady outpouring of books and people coming forward saying that they'd had direct experience or they were there. In fact, there was a US Army Colonel, Philip Corso, who actually wrote a book called the Day After Roswell. He again was an intelligence officer and he said that he'd been involved in the recovery of the Roswell saucer. And he was basically saying that the U.S. army had back engineered some of this alien technology and used it to build stealth experimental aircraft. And this was in 1997. But before that there'd been such pressure on the US Congress that a Senator, Stephen Schmidt, managed to get some backing to get the US Air Force to do an investigation, to look back in the records and see what they had on Roswell. And they produced quite a two volume report in 1994, I think it was, that tried its best to get to the bottom of this. And as with a lot of military organisations, they don't retain records, particularly of events that were seen to be, I don't know, trivial at the time. And despite doing a considerable trawl of the National Archives material and the records from the base that had survived, they found virtually nothing, apart from one teletype that simply referred to what was obviously some kind of balloon crashing on or being retrieved, which is the original story. What did emerge is that there was a top secret program underway at the time, codename Mogul, where the US Navy and the CIA were launching enormous balloon trains from Alamogordo Air Force Base not far from Roswell. The U.S. navy wanted to know what was going on with the Russian experiments in nuclear energy. They wanted to know how far they'd progressed, where the nuclear bases were, where they might be testing the H bomb, that kind of thing. So they were sending these enormous balloons up and they were riding the jet stream across the Atlantic, and they had like a gondola underneath with cameras inside it and a radiosonde where they could track the balloons. And ironically, some of these balloons were seen by civilian aircraft and reported as flying saucers, which is one of the ways that they kept tags on where they were. One of these balloon trains in the logbook from Alamogordo was lost in the desert shortly before the debris was found. Now, we don't know where it was lost, and we can't say for sure that that was the balloon that was found by Mac Roselle, but the circumstances do seem to suggest the two things were connected. And if you think about how the debris was described, you know, it was like flexible bits of balsa wood with strange markings on it. It was like metallic foil. And I mean, what I should have said earlier is that the story was that this debris couldn't be broken, it couldn't be burnt. It was so weird in that, you know, you couldn't slash it, you couldn't break it. It adds weird properties. But the description of it doesn't sound like a structured craft. You know, there was no sort of cabin or engines or anything like that. It was just balsa wood, exactly the sort of thing you'd expect. That's what the report in 1994 concluded, that they couldn't say for sure, but they knew there was absolutely no evidence that was a cover up, that there was no spacecraft retrieved, that the only thing that they were concerned with at the time was the Cold War with the Russians. And there must be a connection, or it's likely that there was some connection with this top secret program called Mogul. So there was a cover up in some respects in that when they made the formal press release that this thing that had been found was just a weather balloon, that wasn't true because it wasn't just a weather balloon. It was a top secret balloon experiment that remained top secret until well into the 1960s or 70s because it was so sensitive and the balloon program was largely ineffective. They sent hundreds of these balloons over Russia. The cameras were dropped, some of them were retrieved, but it wasn't really working. And in the mid-1950s it was replaced with the U2 spy plane, which started flying from what became Area 51. So you can see how all these rumours and legends and things about spy planes and flying saucers all became connected. And there was also a later report that was published by the US Air Force, I think, in 1997, that followed the stories in a bit more detail, and it tried to explain where some of the ideas about bodies being retrieved from the desert came from. And as part of that later investigation, it turned out that they were actually throwing dummies from aircraft over the desert and that these had been, you know, just to see, to test ejection seats and to test the effects of falling from high altitudes, which was obviously, they needed to know for the Apollo program what would happen if Apollo astronauts bailed out. So they, again, they weren't suggesting that this explained the stories about bodies being retrieved from the desert, but they did say these experiments were going off and maybe people who had vague memories of bodies being brought into air bases in lorries. That might be the seed of the rumor about where these small alien bodies began. This is how rumors work. You get someone saying, oh, I saw something, and they pass it on to someone else, and they pass it on to someone else and it becomes like a series of whispers that become bigger and bigger and then they become part of the legend.
- [30:48]
One thing you mentioned earlier that I thought was interesting is the fact that lots of people who did or purportedly worked for the US authorities, worked at Roswell, have come forward and said they saw alien craft, they saw alien bodies. What do you think explains this? Are these people fantasists, attention seekers? Have they misremembered? Why do you think so many people have come up with these stories when obviously, from what we're saying, these events didn't happen?
- [31:13]
Why do people tell stories that later turn out to be untrue or not entirely accurate? You know, there's many, many examples in there of people who actually believe their own fantasies. And it's quite a common thing for people to sort of hear or read a story and want to become part of it. And maybe they worked there or they knew someone who worked there who had said something that sounded as if it fitted in with the story they'd say, seen on tv. And again, people exaggerate. People's memories change that. Things get added, things get taken away. People have a whole bunch of different reasons to tell stories, to draw attention to themselves. I mean, some of these people have been shown to be simply making the story up. There's no Two ways about it that people do lie, and they lie for a whole variety of reasons. And sometimes they come to believe their own lies. I'm not saying all of them do. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons why people tell stories. Clearly something happened. And anything that involves secret military facilities, you're always going to get these kinds of stories emerging from it. I mean, Area 51, for instance, which has become since Independence Day, the movie depicted the plot there, was that the wreckage of the Roswell flying saucer was stored on Area 51. So when we're attacked by the aliens, the US Defence Department has already been back engineering one of these craft for years. And so we've got some kind of defense against it. Well, there's very good evidence that the US Intelligence services have actually actively encouraged belief that they've captured alien technology and they're back engineering it. There's no two ways about it. There's some very good evidence that they just encourage that story because it's a useful disinformation tool against an enemy. You know, it's almost like saying to the Chinese and the Russians, don't mess with us because we've got alien technology. And it's not something that you have to spend huge amounts of money to actually continue that story because you've got a whole bunch of people out there who want to believe it, who will keep circulating this stuff on the Internet. And it's very interesting from my perspective, looking at this from disinformation point of view, that a lot of the people who are actually circulating the stories are either currently employed as intelligence officers or are ex intelligence officers. Now, we've already mentioned some of them. Jesse Marcel, 1947, Philip Corso, the colonel in 1997 who wrote the book, claiming that he'd been involved in back engineering some of this technology. And more recently, some of your listeners will be aware the stories that are in the newspaper about David Grusch, the intelligence officer who was testifying before Congress, effectively telling the same story, the Roswell story, the urban legend, regurgitating it again for a new audience. Now, I don't know whether what he says is true or false. All I know is it sounds very, very similar to the stories that have been circulating since at least 1947. And my first impression on hearing it was, here we go again. This story is obviously useful to the Pentagon and they want to keep people circulating it. They want people to buy into it. There must be a reason for that. And it's got to be due to the fact that we're now fighting a second Cold War. And the Roswell story came in handy in the first Cold War. So why not get it out again, dust it down and set it off, Keep the flying saucers flying.
- [34:51]
And as you've alluded to several times before, millions of people around the world believe in the Roswell incident. I'm sure if I were to walk down my street and ask people in my street about it, I imagine a fair few people don't want to disparage them. Would, would, would believe in this Roswell story. I know a lot of people I've talked to offhand take it seriously. So there's a couple of follow up questions to that. First of all, why? Why do so many people believe it? And secondly, does it matter? Is it a problem if people believe this theory?
- [35:20]
No. I mean, there's been various studies done of conspiracy theories and one of them, recent one, there's so many, I can't remember who did them all. But there was one recent one that looked at different conspiracy theories, including 9, 11 QAnon. They did actually say in there that of all the conspiracy theories, the Roswell one is actually the most harmless. And why do people believe in it? I mean, just, just referring to one of the opinion polls that have been done over the years, 1997, and this was the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident and the birth of flying saucers. CNN Time did a poll in the United States and they found an incredible 80% of Americans think that their government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms. They had a sample of about just over a thousand adults. So a decent number of respondents, 54% believed intelligent life exists outside the Earth, 64% said that aliens have contacted humans, and 37% believed that they'd contacted the US government. And I'm pretty confident if you ran a poll like that today in the UK, you'd get perhaps not 80% of people saying that, but you get a very decent number. And I think the reason why people believe in this is partly due to the distrust in the message from the authorities on a whole range of different things. And again, I said that this began with jfk. It grew out of all proportion during the Vietnam War. And back then in the 1960s, if you said you were a conspiracy theorist, you were painted as sort of like a nut. You're a member of a sort of a tiny group of people who believe this. And I think what's happened since is it's now become mainstream and People who believe in conspiracy theories are no longer in the minority. They're in the majority even, which is quite scary. The Roswell conspiracy is actually quite a positive one because ultimately, what if you pare it down and looking at this from a folkloric point of view, what we are talking about here is aliens coming from outer space, crashing on Earth is effectively the gods coming from outer space, almost like the Greek gods that lived on the top of a mountain in ancient Greece, came down, gave humans fire and all the things that made. Made us what we are. So effectively, you could see the aliens in the flying sorcerers being, you know, almost representative of gods or angels coming to give us their sacred knowledge. And they always crash in a remote area. They never crash in Tunbridge Wells or anywhere like that. It's always some remote area of desert. And the nasty, evil government doesn't want us ordinary people to have access to the secret truth, you know, the gift of fire from the gods. So it has to be kept secret, and it has to be kept away from the populace in case, you know, we get access to it. And as in the old Greek myths, you have a hero who in this case is the UFO investigator, the person who cracks the conspiracy in the X Files, that's Fox Mulder, the maverick who works for the actual government that turns on his employers to seek out the truth. He does battle with the nasty government, almost like St. George and the dragon, and he retrieves the secret truth and gives it back to ordinary people. So that, to me, is a different way of looking at the Roswell story. It's not saying it's untrue. What I'm saying is it's a modern myth in the same way that the Greeks had their myths. This is a technological myth for a technological Cold War era. When you actually look at it as a story, rather than trying to say is it true or is it false? This is what everyone tries to do. Every journalist that looks at this, looks at it. Either it's a load of nonsense or there's some truth in it. Well, as a folklorist, I think there's nothing to be gained from trying to say what's true and what's false. We know that there was a balloon program. We know that Mike Brazell found this debris. There's a few facts that we can say for certain happened. But the actual story as it's now presented, the Roswell legend. You were saying, Rob, that if you asked an ordinary person walking down the street to the post office, tell me what you think the Roswell story is they'd come out with something, wouldn't they, that's constructed from watching films, TV programs, reading stuff online. That story will have absolutely no connection with the few certain facts which are a rancher in 1947 out looking for his cattle found some bits of balsa wood and metal strips lying on the desert floor. There is absolutely no connection between those two and yet one led to the other. So looking at it from the point of view of it's a good story, people obviously read something into it, they get something out of it. That's why it survived. That's why all good legends survive. Robin Hood, you know, the outlaw in the forest who robs the rich and gives to the poor, struck a chord with people. People are still telling that story a thousand years later. King Arthur. To me, Roswell is a modern myth constructed out of technology for a technological age. And that isn't suggesting it's nonsense. That isn't what I'm saying. It obviously means an awful lot to people. The whole thing about the UFO myth is why did it emerge in 1947? What function does it play in people's lives? And I think it's because at times when people are stressed, they're anxious, they're worried about is there going to be a nuclear war. Now we've got climate change and Covid. I think people are looking for salvation from somewhere else because they're not getting it from the government, they're not getting it from the immediate environment. So they want the gods to come back in some way to sort of save us, to ride to our rescue. And UFOs, alien creatures, the idea that out there in the cold, dead universe, that there is someone who is interested in us, that we're not alone, that they're going to come and save us, they're going to stop us from blowing ourselves to pieces. That's quite a comforting thought. And I think again, like I've said, that out of all the conspiracy theories and myths, this is probably the most positive one of all.
- [41:37]
So we've looked at the 75 year history of Roswell so far, but how do you think this legend or this myth or this conspiracy theory might develop over future decades?
- [41:48]
Well, it's with all legends that are effective and that are popular, there's so many, if you look back in the history of, even of ufology, there are many other potential rival stories to Roswell that have come and gone that no one remembers. And there's something about the Roswell incident and don't forget like, like we've said Roswell has got many different aspects to it. There's the Aztec story, there's the airship crash, there's all the stories about the American government doing secret deals with aliens. And all these things ensure that that story is going to live on, and particularly if, as is suspected. And there's quite a lot of evidence that this is the case, that the intelligence community is actively promoting the story and spreading it. Occasionally, material, for instance, has been handed to people what are clearly fake documents. I mean, there's a whole set of documents called the MJ12 papers, supposedly a secret committee that was set up by President Truman in the aftermath of the Roswell incident, involving a number of senior scientists at the time who were examining the wreckage. And this is just one of a whole series of documents that appears to have been very cleverly faked and sort of given to ufologists. So I think it will continue to spread and it will transform. And if you go to Roswell today, there's a museum, they have an annual festival. It's become almost like a pilgrimage for people who believe in UFOs and alien visitors. And all of this suggests that the story is not going to go away and it will sort of branch out, it will continue to grow. But ultimately, people, if they're going to believe in it, they want to see some kind of hard evidence. And if we think about this in a logical way, think about all the things in the world that different countries of the world agree upon, can you think of one single thing that every single country in the world agrees upon?
- [43:54]
You'd struggle too many, wouldn't you?
- [43:55]
Yeah, you would. So what we're being asked to believe at the end of the day, and I think this is where people start questioning this, is how is it that aliens from outer space, who must have an incredible technology, managed to travel across vast distances, and as soon as they get to Earth, they crash. And they only crash in America. And the Americans have been able to successfully cover this up for a period of 70 or 80 years. How come there's no crashed sources in Venezuela, North Korea, et cetera, et cetera? So we're being asked to believe that hundreds of thousands of people must have been involved in handling this wreckage, and yet not a single person has come forward and said, here's a bit of the Roswell wreckage that I managed to sneak out. It's an incredible story, but if you think about it logically, it doesn't really add up. And that's why we're back to it being a legend. And I do wonder how many times you can keep telling the same story before people just think, well, yeah, okay, yeah, I'll say I believe it, but where's the evidence? And this is effectively what's happened with the evidence that was given at the US Congress, because I watched the presentation at the NASA headquarters. When NASA launched their report on UAPs, it was a fascinating afternoon. And one of the newspaper journalists who were there who were asking questions of the panel at the end, they actually brought up the story about, effectively, Roswell and the evidence that had been given to Congress and said, surely NASA must be aware of this if the American military have got alien technology. And the answer was, well, yeah, but show us the evidence. Otherwise all you've got are stories that you either believe or you don't believe. And there's lots of things that we would like to believe, but ultimately, I think at the end of the day, people will sort of think, yeah, but this has been going on for so long now. Surely if it was true, we'd be able to see something that demonstrably showed once and for all. You know, this is an alien spacecraft. And scientists get criticized a lot that they're ignoring UFOs and UFO stories, but ultimately they can only base their conclusions on hard evidence. And scientists, I think, are saying the right thing. Bring me some evidence. Let's have a look at it. We can all sit around and examine it. Different countries, different disciplines. If we all look at some object and say, yep, this has not been manufactured on Earth, then that settles the matter once and for all. And to say, oh, yeah, well, the evidence exists, but the CIA have covered it all up is unsatisfying because it's almost like the dog ate my homework. It's an excuse. It's special pleading. Sooner or later, someone's got to blow the lid on the conspiracy. And just simply regurgitating the story isn't proof. It's just telling the story again in a different way to a different audience.
- [46:53]
Rob Attar
That was Dr. David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University. And that is the end of this season. But we'll be back soon to explore more of the most famous conspiracy theories about the past. Thanks for listening. This episode was produced by Jack Bateman.