International UFO Museum and Research Center

Let’s face it, there’s only one reason you’d be in Roswell, New Mexico, and that’s to figure out what happened in 1947. Was there a UFO or not?

Our first stop in solving “The Roswell Incident” was the International UFO Museum and Research Center. At this museum there is no question – I mean, no question – that the 1947 event was a UFO crash that was covered up by the government. There was a good-sized exhibit specifically on the Roswell Incident, followed by many displays on other UFO sightings and abductions around the country.

Some of these incidents have subsequently been proven to be hoaxes, but that information was not to be found in the museum.

A design for the *Making Monsters* show on the Travel Channel.

Got us some world-class exhibits in the museum.

The initial narrative is this: in the summer of 1947, a rancher near Roswell found metallic and rubber debris in his fields. He said it was strange material, which he couldn’t crush or burn (because you know how you try to burn strange debris you find?). He reported it to the authorities, who, not knowing what they’d found, contacted the Roswell Army Air Field. They came out and cleaned up the debris, and issued a press release saying they had found a “flying disc.”

This obviously caused a bit of a media stir, but the press release was almost immediately retracted. In its place, the government issued a new press release complete with photos: it was just a conventional weather balloon.

Now, it seems clear it was not just a weather balloon.

What’s in the picture does not look as though it crashed into a dusty New Mexico field and sat there a few days, it seems suspect that the Air Field personnel would not have been able to recognize a weather balloon, and the look on Major Marcel’s face clearly says “I am being forced to pretend this is the debris that was found” (among other things people say is “wrong” with the pictures).

So if you are a believer, this is obviously a cover up for a UFO that crashed.

If you have questions about this story –– and honestly, it’s hard not to –– you might consider that yes, something crashed that the government didn’t want the public to know about, but it’s not a big leap to believe it was just a top-secret project.

Mortician Glenn Dennis claimed in 1994 (but not before then) that he had been contacted by the Air Base regarding hermetically sealed coffins on the day the supposed crash was found (because apparently we were going to give the aliens a proper burial). He also said a nurse friend who worked on the base made drawings, which she gave to him but he subsequently lost. Glenn had these drawings recreated from his memory of the original set. Dennis is one of the founders of the museum.

For context, this is just two years after we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, our government was most certainly working on “things” which many Air Field personnel would not be in-the-know about.

Additionally, the summer of The Incident had experienced a flying disc craze, with Americans suddenly reporting hundreds of flying saucer sightings. Of course, this begs the question: were sightings up because they were feeding on one another, or because there truly were UFOs amongst us that summer?

Anyway, UFOs were on peoples’ minds that summer.

Interestingly, the UFO conspiracy theory took 30 years to get going. After the initial hubbub in 1947, the story sat dormant.

In 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel was interviewed, at which time he stated that the weather balloon story was a cover-up; he personally had collected and handled the debris (no concerns about handling UFO debris, apparently), and could ascertain that it was of extraterrestrial origin.

He is also the man pictured in the amended press release holding the suspiciously clean conventional weather balloon, and looking none-too-pleased about it.

A 1980 book, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz (affiliate link), truly launched the cover-up story, and there’s been no looking back. You may be wondering about the Roswell aliens, why haven’t I mentioned them? Well, they first appear in the narrative in the 1980 book! That’s right, there was no mention of aliens by the farmer, the military, or Jesse Marcel up to that point!

For the sake of full disclosure, the museum presents the story as though four aliens were mentioned right from the get-go.

In 1994, the United States Air Force revealed that what had been found was a top-secret surveillance balloon (Project Mogul), whose intended use was the detection of Soviet nuclear tests. Researchers at Alamogordo Air Field –– which is about 150 miles from Roswell –– had been launching the classified balloons in the weeks leading up to the discovery at the ranch. They had lost contact with one of these just 17 miles from where the Roswell Incident debris was subsequently discovered.

The museum had exhibits on lots of other incidents, including the Betty and Barney Hill abduction in New Hampshire. We’re looking forward to exploring that more one day!

Another representation of what the crash site may have looked like! Doesn’t look like much of a debris field, if you ask me.

For extra fun, read the Wikipedia entry on this topic. A total counter-point to the museum, the story is presented as unequivocally the top-secret surveillance balloon, with no consideration that a UFO was in any way involved.

They state that 1980 book “became the basis for long-lasting and increasingly complex and contradictory UFO conspiracy theories, which over time expanded the incident to include governments concealing evidence of extraterrestrial beings, grey aliens, multiple crashed flying saucers, alien corpses and autopsies, and the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology, none of which have any factual basis.” Me-ow.