The Confusion of Roswell: The Numerous Theories For What Happened (Or What Didn't...)

Although there is an almost accepted assumption that Roswell either involved a spacecraft from another world or a Mogul balloon of the U.S. military, the fact is that thereis a mountain of explanations for what happened - and that’s even without the “human experiment” angle that I added to the mix. I mention this to specifically demonstrate that, regardless of your personal opinion on the story this book tells, Roswell is nowhere near as resolved as many pro-E.T. champions would have you believe. As you’ll now see. The late Jim Keith was the author of a number of conspiracy / UFO-themed books, including Casebook on the Men in Black; The Octopus (co-written with Kenn Thomas); and Black Helicopters Over America. In a small article titled Roswell UFO Bombshell, Keith described his clandestine meeting with “a longtime researcher / instructor of engineering at a school in New Mexico” who claimed to know the truth of Roswell.

As for what Keith was told, it goes like this: “According to my source, the true story behind the alleged UFO crash was that there was an accident involving a B-29 flying from the Army Air Force Base in Sandia (Albuquerque) to Roswell…my source states that either an atomic bomb or what is termed a ‘bomb shape,’ or ‘test shape,’ the shell of a nuke lacking explosives and atomic capability, and sometimes filled with concrete to add weight, was accidentally or purposefully jettisoned above Corona, New Mexico, directly on the flight path between Sandia and Roswell. Along with the bomb, metal foil used for radar jamming, termed ‘chaff,’ may have also been dropped.”

In 2010, Anomalist Books published the final title from the late Mac Tonnies: The Cryptoterrestrials. Highly thought-provoking and deeply controversial in equal measures, the book focused on the idea that UFOs are not the products of alien races, but of very ancient, terrestrial people that dwell deep underground and who masquerade as extraterrestrials to camouflage their true identity. Tonnies speculated that the Cryptoterrestrials are likely very impoverished, but utilize subterfuge, hologram-style technology, and staged-events to suggest otherwise to us. He even theorized they may have made use of large, balloon-style craft, too. And on this very matter – of the Cryptoterrestrials using balloons in covert missions – Tonnies said: “Maybe the Roswell device wasn’t high tech. It could indeed have been a balloon-borne surveillance device brought down in a storm, but it doesn’t logically follow that it was one of our own.”

Annie Jacobsen’s book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, created a huge wave of controversy when it was published in 2011, and chiefly for one, specific reason.  The book includes a story suggesting that the Roswell craft and bodies were, in reality, the diabolical creations of a near-Faustian pact between the notorious Nazi (and “Angel of Death),” Dr. Josef Mengele and Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin. The purpose of this early Cold War plan, said Jacobsen, was to plunge the United States into a kind of War of the Worlds-style panic by trying to convince the U.S. Government that aliens were invading. And how would the plan work? By placing grossly deformed children (courtesy of the crazed Mengele) inside a futuristic-looking aircraft designed by the previously referenced Horten brothers, and then trying to convince the U.S. of the alien origins of both. Unfortunately for Stalin – we are told - the plot failed when a storm brought down the craft and its “crew” in the wilds of New Mexico; an event that did not lead to widespread panic, but which instead was hastily covered-up by U.S. military authorities.

The Collins Elite is a quasi-official group within the U.S. Government that believes the UFO mystery is one of demonic origins. Yes, fork-tails, horns, fiery pits, and maybe even spinning heads and green vomit - those kind of things. It must be stressed that the conclusions of the group were chiefly belief-driven, rather than prompted by hard evidence.  One of the conclusions of the group was that Roswell was nothing less than a brilliant Trojan- Horse. For the members of the Collins Elite, deceptive demons had, essentially, used a kind of “cosmic alchemy” to create both (a) the so-called “memory-metal” found by Mack Brazel on the Foster Ranch, and (b) the curious bodies – or body-parts – also located on the ranch. In other words, Roswell – perceived by the Collins Elite, at least – was an ingenious ruse, a staged-crash, designed to have us believe vulnerable E.T.s are in our midst, when it’s really the all-powerful minions of Satan. Hellfire!

Although no longer active in the UFO community, Timothy S. Cooper provoked a wealth of controversy in the 1990s, “thanks” to an enormous body of allegedly leaked, and, supposedly highly secret, documentation in his possession. They were documents which covered everything from crashed UFOs to alien autopsies and from sinister deaths in the UFO field to alien viruses. One such document –titled UFO Reports and Classified Projects – offers a non-UFO-themed explanation for what occurred at Roswell. The relevant extract reads as follows: “One of the projects underway at that time incorporated re-entry vehicles containing radium and other radioactive materials combined with biological warfare agents developed by I.G. Farben for use against allied assault forces in Normandy in 1944. When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site and a cover story was immediately put out that what was discovered was the remains of a radar tracking target suspended by balloons.”

When personnel at the Roswell Army Air Field announced, in July 1947, that they had recovered a crashed flying disc, one thing was one hundred percent absent: any mention of bodies. And, needless to say, the body angle was also absent from the hasty follow-up explanation of a weather-balloon recovery. The body angle was also denied in the Air Force’s July 1994 report on Roswell (titled Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident), as the following extract shows: “It should also be noted here that there was little mentioned in this report about the recovery of the so-called ‘alien bodies.’ The wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon. There were no ‘alien’ passengers therein.” Three years later, however, things had changed. In a new document – The Roswell Report: Case Closed – it was stated by the Air Force: “‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research…The  reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.”

Then there is the matter of time travel. One of those who revealed his thoughts on this particular scenario was Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso, co-author with William Birnes of the much-debated, both championed and denounced UFO-themed book: The Day after Roswell. The unusual bodies found within the wreckage of the craft, Corso claimed, were genetically created beings designed to withstand the rigors of space flight, but they were not the actual creators of the UFO itself. Right up until the time of his death in 1998, Corso speculated on the distinct possibility that the U.S. Government might still have no real idea of who constructed the craft, or who genetically engineered the bodies found aboard. Notably, Corso gave much consideration to the idea that the Roswell UFO was a form of time machine, possibly even one designed and built by the denizens of the Earth of a distant future, rather than by the people of a faraway solar-system.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, numerous German scientists were brought to the United States via a program called Operation Paperclip. And many of those same scientists went to work at the New Mexico-based White Sands Missile Range (or the White Sands Proving Ground, as it was known back then). This has led to a scenario involving a highly secret program to test-fly radical Nazi aircraft captured after Hitler and his cronies went belly-up. Someone who has deeply addressed the Nazi/Roswell links is Joseph P. Farrell, the author of Roswell and the Reich: The Nazi Connection. Farrell, however, takes things in a decidedly different direction. He concludes the Roswell event was not caused by the flight and crash of a German craft flown from White Sands. Rather, Farrell believes that “what crashed may have been representative of an independent postwar Nazi power – an extraterritorial Reich monitoring its old enemy, America…”

The Flying Saucer was a science-fiction novel published in 1948 and written by Bernard Newman, a man who penned more than a hundred books on subjects including real-life espionage, global politics and current affairs. It was his foray into the weird world of crashed UFOs that was perhaps most notable of all, however. The book was published just eleven months after the alleged recovery by the U.S. military of a flying saucer in Lincoln County, New Mexico in July 1947. The Flying Saucer tells the story of a secret cabal that stages a series of hoaxed UFO crashes, with the express purpose of attempting to unite the world against a deadly alien foe that, in reality, does not exist. That Newman had numerous, high-level connections to officialdom has given rise to the theory that (a) Roswell was, itself, a staged event – one designed to scare the Soviets into thinking the United States had acquired alien technology; and (b) Newman based his “novel” on data secured by sources with top secret knowledge of the Roswell ruse.

In an article titled Roswell Explained – Again (which was published in Fate magazine in September 2005, Kevin Randle stated that during the early part of the 1990s, he “interviewed a man who worked with NASA at the White Sands Missile Range.” The man in question was Gerald Brown. Randle continued that Brown speculated “some kind of flying wing had crashed while carrying five chimps dressed in silver flying suits.” So far, no evidence has surfaced to suggest that the alien body stories can be explained away via the chimpanzee scenario. On the other hand, there is no hard, undeniable evidence for any theory when it comes to Roswell.

On July 28, 1995, a report surfaced from the National Security and International Affairs Division of the General Accounting Office (today called the Government Accountability Office) that disclosed the results of its investigation of the Roswell affair. Commenting on an Air Force report on Roswell published in July 1994, the GAO noted the following: “DOD informed us that the U.S. Air Force report of July 1994, entitled Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident, represents the extent of DOD records or information concerning the Roswell crash. The Air Force report concluded that there was no dispute that something happened near Roswell in July 1947 and that all available official materials indicated the most likely source of the wreckage recovered was one of the project MOGUL balloon trains. At the time of the Roswell crash, project MOGUL was a highly classified U.S. effort to determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research using balloons that carried radar reflectors and acoustic sensors.”

And that’s where things stand to this very day. They are theories that range from the plausible to the unlikely, and with others hazily hovering somewhere in between. A few of those scenarios may be the work of hoaxers or “Walter Mitty”-types. Others – probably most of them - are almost certainly born out of the clandestine worlds of disinformation and psychological warfare. Somewhere, in this confusing mass (and mess) of theories, the truth of Roswell exists. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, and despite having all of these scenarios, we're still in a collective state of confusion. Maybe, someone wants all that confusion. It would be the ideal way to hide the real story.