The Truth Isn’t As Out There As You Think: The Enduring Power of Roswell
“Did the military conceal the most astounding discovery of the century?”
With those portentous words, Robert Stack ends his introduction to the season 2 premiere of Unsolved Mysteries, which originally aired on September 20th, 1989. He’s talking about a then little-known incident involving the U.S. Army, a handful of locals, and strange debris found after an intense lightning storm at a ranch in southeast New Mexico.
He’s talking, of course, about Roswell.
Today, Roswell is a one-word talisman that rarely needs explaining — like Gettysburg, or Oprah. Even millennials have at least a roundabout familiarity with it, thanks to Roswell, New Mexico, a recent reboot of a 1999–2002 WB show named Roswell. Both are essentially teenage dramas with aliens added for novelty, but their existence is nevertheless evidence of the power of Roswell as a cultural event, however watered-down. As Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, described Roswell in 2017: “like the Kardashians — it’s famous for being famous.”
But when the Unsolved Mysteries segment aired 30 years ago, Roswell was a conspiracy theory just getting its legs nearly 50 years after the events that birthed it. Why on earth did it take so long?
It’s an especially puzzling question considering the military flat-out announced that it had discovered a UFO on the front page of the July 8th, 1947 edition of the Roswell Daily Record: “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”
The article’s lede passes off what UFO author Kevin Randle describes in the UM segment as “the most significant event of the twentieth century and probably the millennium” with a stunning deadpan:
The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.
Perhaps the ho-hum tone helps explain how, just as soon as it began, the story died a strangely quiet death. The next day, the government backtracked. They had made a mistake: the saucer was just a downed weather balloon.
A collective shrug, a “nothing to see here,” and the country turned back to more present, pressing concerns: birthing babies, moving to the suburbs, gawking at the rise of the Iron Curtain, trembling at the possibility of nuclear annihilation.
It’s those concerns, I’d argue, that explain why the Roswell Story went into deep hibernation, the planted seeds of a grassroots conspiracy movement needing decades to flourish¹.
Roswell is interesting less for the events themselves — though we’ll take a look at UM’s impressive production values in dramatizing the version of the tale they chose — than as a shiny, metallic yardstick (decorated with strange hieroglyphs!) for American attitudes toward government at any given moment.
Roswell, in other words, isn’t about what’s out there. It’s about what’s inside us.
The 1990s were, as Joseph Laycock puts it, “a high-water mark for public interest in UFOs and alien abduction.” Or, as Robert Goldberg writes in his excellent study of American conspiracy theories, aliens were “the the smiley face of the 1990s.”² By airing its Roswell segment in the final autumn of the 80s (and rebroadcasting it again in early January 1990), Unsolved Mysteries was part of the vanguard.
With Roswell, it’s crucial to realize that the “fact” of aliens landing on Earth matters slightly less than the government cover-up. The 90s were simply the peak of a growing 20th-century distrust in government that first went mainstream following the JFK assassination. The Vietnam War, the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance program infiltrating leftist and civil rights groups, Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, and then Waco and Ruby Ridge only fed the fire.
These events revealed a government that made misguided, unethical, and even illegal decisions that ultimately — and often deliberately — harmed its own citizens. It’s little wonder that The X-Files, which Goldberg calls “the most important carrier of the Roswell story,” took the basic premise of a government coverup and ran with it.
Little surprise, then, that 71% of Americans in 1996 answered in the affirmative when asked if the government knew more about UFOs than it let on, and a full third surveyed believed a flying saucer did crash at Roswell.³
I can’t remember what I thought when I first saw the Roswell segment on Unsolved Mysteries, though the rash of UFO segments that followed — the Kecksberg and Rendelsham Forest incidents, the Vancouver and Phoenix Lights, the Hudson River Valley and Belgium sightings, the disappearance of Fredrick Valentich and the Allagash Abductions — steadily grew into a mound of evidence my tween- and teenage brain couldn’t ignore. (I also loved The X-Files, though I think UM primed me for that, rather than the other way around.)
In many ways, UM’s first serious engagement⁴ with a UFO story impresses: double the length of the typical piece, filmed across sprawling desert ranches and in ye olde rural town sets, replete with army jeeps and stern uniformed men ordering people not to say anything about what they’ve seen, and salt-of-the-earth farmers talkin’ slow and sayin’ little.
The bedrock of the evidence comes from eyewitness testimony. Or, more accurately, one posthumous video clip of an eyewitness (Maj. Jesse A. Marcel), one live eyewitness (his son, Jess Marcel, M.D.), and a handful of secondhand accounts.
Loretta Proctor underwrites the trope of innocent civilians caught up in something much bigger than themselves when she describes Mac Brazel, the man on whose ranch the debris landed, as “just an old time cowboy, I guess you’d say.” “If he told you something,” she gently insists in a slight country voice cracked with age, “you could pretty well depend on it.” She tells how Mac urged her and her husband Floyd to go see the debris for themselves and laconically notes, “we should’ve, and yet — we didn’t.” (Ho-hum.)
Next, the amazingly-named Vern Maltais explains how his friend soil conservationist Barney Barrett was “just what you would call a real straight guy” and so he knew he was telling the truth when he described seeing alien bodies with “heads . . . larger than the bodies.” “I’d stake my life on his reliability; he would never concoct any story. That’s why I believe it to be true.”
Finally, a woman with the equally amazing name of Sappho Henderson vouches for her late husband, Oliver “Pappy” Henderson, the pilot who purportedly flew the first pieces of wreckage away from Roswell. “He never told anything he wasn’t supposed to . . . and therefore, it was 34 years after this incident happened that I heard about it.” She leaves it to us to resolve the contradiction.
It should come as no surprise that Unsolved Mysteries cherry picks the information it wants you to have (something it committed far more egregiously with some of its true crime segments, to be explored in later episodes of UUMF). The only line taken from Jesse Marcel’s taped interview, for instance, is the following: “I tried to bend the stuff, [indecipherable] it will not bend. I even tried to burn it, [indecipherable] it would not burn . . . . we even tried making a dent in it with a 16-pound sledgehammer, still no dent in it. One thing I was certain of . . . it was not a weather balloon.”
Since he was an army intelligence officer and claimed to be familiar with the latest aerodynamic technology, his bafflement sounds definitive. However, upon listening to a larger excerpt of the interview, it becomes clear that Marcel isn’t actually talking about himself: the indecipherable pieces are actually the words “he says.” On a 1980 episode of In Search Of . . . focused on UFO coverups, Marcel similarly reveals that he, too, is talking about secondhand experience:
One of my boys told me, there’s something unusual here. He said, uh, I tried to make a dent in this metal . . . he says you can’t bent it, you can’t make a mark on it, he says I took a sledgehammer and whammed it . . . the sledgehammer bounced right off of it.
Even more revisions and contradictions arise in the next few years after the segment aired, including books that recast the U. Penn archeology students as Texas Techies instead and moved the whole Barney Barnett incident from the Plains of San Augustin — 125 miles west of the crash site to the site itself.⁵
(UM conveniently avoids mentioning exactly where Barnett was, leaving us to assume he was much closer to Mac Brazel’s ranch than he actually was. It also ominously notes, “all efforts to track down the members of the archaeology dig have been unsuccessful.”)
In other words, every attempt to string together a seamless story of a UFO crash and government cover-up soon became a game of Whac-A-Mole, as each successfully forged narrative connection launched another break in the space-time continuum that required herculean illogic to solder back together.
The government, quelle surprise, does not make an appearance, or even a statement, in the segment. This gaping absence of an authorized response leaves a void far too easily filled by the simple yet not simple-minded people of Roswell: their matter-of-fact openness and calm demeanors, speaking with soft conviction of the strange craft, the unheard-of properties of its materials, and the bizarre admission then backtracking of those in charge of disseminating information back in 1947.
The government, in other words, punted the Roswell Story as badly as it did in its first press release on July 8th. In 1952, the Air Force launched Project Blue Book and the CIA created the Robertson Panel to investigate another rash of sightings. Both investigative groups concluded that ETs did not, in fact, exist, although they were concerned about sightings overwhelming military communications as the Cold War heated up.⁶
To clear those channels, Project Blue Book went on a poorly-planned and executed offensive to discredit UFO theorists, thereby making worse the very problem they had set out to solve. Only after the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966 did the military reluctantly reveal the existence of Project Blue Book, only furthering the impression that the government had something to hide.
Worst of all was the 1994 release of a thousand-page report insisting that the crash was a product of Project Mogul, a top-secret military program from 1947–49 that attempted to use high-altitude balloons to detect Soviet atomic bomb tests via sound waves. Conspiracy theorists were not convinced.
Older and wiser now, I actually am. Did things happen exactly as the government claims in the 1994 report? Possibly not — not that I plan to read all 1,000 pages to refine that opinion. But I am firmly in the camp that conspiracy theories are, on the whole, attempts to provide a seemingly rational explanation — a process Cold War historian Zachary Johnson Jacobson brilliantly describes as “metastasiz[ing] reason” — for what feel like irrational events: predominantly, events in which less-than-ordinary people (Lee Harvey Oswald the Ur-example) inflict seismic change on the world. It’s a means, in other words, of finding order where only entropy exists.
Nevertheless, the government’s reversals, omissions, denials, and who, me? attitude understandably stoked the conspiratorial fires. For that, they have only their own arrogance and incompetence to blame. They underestimated the faith of their audience, who wanted to believe in their villainy perhaps even more than they wanted to believe in aliens.
If the 90s was the peak of the alien boom, then what deflated that particular weather balloon? Historian Ben Macintyre and others have suggested that the internet effectively enabled skeptics to prevail, given the democratization of information. The flourishing of conspiracy theories today, from anti-vaxxers to Flat Earthers, suggests otherwise.
If you ask me, it all ended on September 11th, 2001.⁷
To believe that your government has secreted away an alien craft and its occupants for half a century belies an impressive belief in that government’s capabilities. This faith shattered along with the glass and the concrete of the World Trade Center. Out of the rubble and the clearing smoke, Americans instead learned that their government sort of/maybe/kinda knew something bad might happen, but complacency and incompetence led to a miserable failure to predict and prevent the magnitude of damage wreaked by 17 guerrilla warriors led by a man hiding out in caves.
In the 50s, Carl Jung hypothesized that believing in UFOs helped citizens of the world manage the stress of living in a new age of potential global apocalypse. Presumably people wanted to imagine a scenario in which the world might join together against a common threat, not unlike the 1996 blockbuster film Independence Day. In the first decade of the 21st century, however, it seems that terror coming from the skies felt far too close to home to be a potential source of deflection or distraction. UFO sightings plummeted, and some UFO groups disbanded for lack of membership.
Our belief in aliens is growing slightly, however, in the wake of that Noughties dip. A 2013 Harris Poll found that 36% of Americans believe in aliens, more than those that believe in witches (29%), but less than the 42% who believe in ghosts. Notably, that question didn’t specify whether or not those aliens had landed — I wouldn’t be shocked if that number were much lower.
If Roswell is the “holy grail”⁸ of UFO incidents, then the mainstream moment of alien conspiracy in the 90s was its Da Vinci Code moment. The Roswell segment meant a lot for Unsolved Mysteries, clearly, because UFO stories would dominate its broadcasts for the next few years — even anchoring season premieres for four years in a row (Seasons 2–5).
We wanted to believe, it turns out, that our government was hiding the truth from us like a parent hiding the wi-fi password. What we didn’t realize at the time was that what we actually wanted to believe in was the power and competence of the government itself.
On our next episode: we’ll look at some of the more memorable UFO segments and explore the significance — and fallibility — of eyewitness accounts.
[1] It’s not as though no one mentioned the Roswell incident until former nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman began a detailed investigation in 1978; the handful of references in books like Harold Wilkins’s 1954 Flying Saucers on the Attack, Frank Edwards’s 1966 Flying Saucers, Serious Business, and Robert Loftin’s Identified Flying Saucers in 1968 all referenced Roswell, but only briefly, as one among many suspicious incidents. Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 193.
[2] Ibid, 223.
[3] 225.
[4] It’s not the first engagement, full-stop: that badge of dishonor goes to the Gulf Breeze UFO incident, which aired on 5 October 1988 and 3 October 1990, the latter an update. It’s not included on the Amazon Prime episodes and has long been accepted in most circles as a hoax. See this charming article for a more detailed look.
[5] Goldberg, 198.
[6] Ibid, 209–15.
[7] It’s a horrible irony that Goldberg’s book was released in 2001 and clearly written before 9/11. We can only imagine how he would have revised and added to the manuscript had publication been delayed.
[8] Goldberg, 190.
