Authors Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt believe that the answer to that question lies in a 1947 UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico that has come to be known as the Roswell Incident. In their new book, Witness to Roswell, Carey and Schmitt present 60 years of compiled evidence to make the case that on July 3, 1947, an alien spacecraft went down over the New Mexico desert, leaving a debris field several hundred yards long and an even longer line of witnesses. These include: Mack Brazel, the simple rancher on whose property the vehicle crashed and the man who brought it to the attention of the U.S. Air Force by fragments of wreckage in a cardboard box; citizens of New Mexico who poured into the area from all over the state, lured by stories of a crashed flying saucer and an alien encounter; and scores of military personnel brought in to secure the site, which not only included cleanup of the debris, but also covert shipping of the discovered craft and the bodies of its extraterrestrial pilots as well as the intimidation of potential witnesses to the incident.
Casey and Schmitt also attack the veracity of the weather balloon story itself. If the object was merely a weather balloon, why the need for such extreme secrecy and security measures enacted at the crash site, including armed guards, riflemen, and military police? Why was Mack Brazel detained for four days and subjected to intimidation and interrogation while cleanup operations were taking place on his ranch? Why was he given an armed military escort to media outlets such as The Roswell Daily Record and radio stations KGFL and KSWS to retract his initial claim of discovering a flying saucer? Finally – if whatever it is that crashed was part of a military operation, why weren’t they looking for it in the first place? Why did Mack Brazel have to drive 75 miles in order to bring them pieces of debris?
Unfortunately, this reliance on interviews (some of which are secondhand stories) often undermines the overall effectiveness of their argument. Recollections of 80-year-old men are not necessarily airtight, to say the least – and the motivations of secondhand witnesses are unclear. The bottom line is that in the case of this conspiracy, while the circumstantial evidence is strong, the direct evidence is scant. For example, the authors argue repeatedly that in the days before the Army arrived at Brazel’s ranch to secure the site, people from all over the state flocked to the area and combed through the debris field recovering pieces of what is known as the “Holy Grail of Roswell.” These, of course, are pieces of the craft itself, referred to as memory metal. Witnesses describe small fragments of a thin metal about the consistency of aluminum, lightweight yet strong, but with a fantastic ability to be manipulated into any shape before snapping back into its original form. Casey and Schmitt provide numerous accounts of eyewitnesses performing homemade tests on this material, including contorting it, holding it to a flame, even shooting it with rifles, and in each case the metal proved indestructible. If this is true, and this remarkable technology exists, why hasn’t a single piece of this material surfaced in the past sixty years?
The nature of conspiracy theories doesn’t allow all of the potential questions to be answered – that’s the beauty of a good theory – but Witness to Roswell does an admirable job of highlighting the points of discussion and provoking thought. So what was it that crashed out there in the desert on that night in 1947? We may never know the whole truth, but it sure is fun to ponder the possibilities.
Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-year-old Cover-up, New Page Books (a division of Career Press) www.newpagebooks.com