“Unsolved Mysteries”: The True Story of the Roswell UFO Incident — and What Experts Are Still Trying to Debunk

In 1947, the United States Air Force claimed that a "flying disk" had been recovered in New Mexico, but quickly retracted the findings

Ufologists call the Roswell incident the “ultimate cold case file."

On the night of July 2, 1947, amid a severe lightning storm, ranchers outside of Roswell, N.M., recall hearing what sounded like an explosion. The next day, W.W. "Mack" Brazel discovered debris in a field near his home — unlike any he'd ever seen.

After handing over the wreckage to the United States Air Force, the Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release stating that they'd captured a flying saucer. Word spread around the world but the claims were quickly retracted 24 hours later. The Air Force's revised statement informed citizens that the wreckage was not from a UFO, but merely remnants of a weather observation balloon that had crashed.

It's been nearly 80 years since the Roswell incident, and there are countless theories about what was found in New Mexico. Ufologists Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, who have been trying to uncover the truth since 1989, believe Roswell is the "one case that could solve the entire UFO mystery overnight." Their findings about an alleged government cover-up are documented in Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries, volume 5, episode 4.

"I believe that the military experienced the recovery of an alien spacecraft. It’s where the evidence is leading us," Randle claimed in the episode. "The Air Force says they have no evidence it was extraterrestrial. I think that the files were gathered up and are in a different repository hidden deep in the archives of the government and therefore there was no paper trail to it."

Here's everything to know about the Roswell incident that has left many mystified.

What is the Roswell incident?

On July 2, 1947, a crash took place in the desert 75 miles outside of Roswell, N.M. According to Schmitt and Randle's research, rancher W.W. "Mack" Brazel discovered metal-like debris in a field near his home the following day.

Brazel loaded up what wreckage he could into his truck and drove to Roswell where the 509th Composite Group was stationed. This was the same unit of the United States Air Force that deployed the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Major Jesse Marcel, the head of intelligence, received the materials from Brazel, and on July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release claiming that they'd captured a flying saucer. Marcel was immediately ordered to board a B-29 bomber and deliver the wreckage to Brigadier General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth, Texas.

Upon his arrival, Marcel dropped the materials off in Ramey's office and the pair visited the map room. When they returned, the wreckage was allegedly gone, with a clump of rotting neoprene rubber balloons and a shredded radar reflector kite in its place.

After allegedly instructing Marcel not to breathe a word of what happened to reporters or his family, Ramey held a press conference, claiming that the wreckage was remnants of a weather observation balloon crash.

Marcel stayed silent for 30 years. After becoming terminally ill, he spoke out in 1980 on the TV series In Search Of... about what he believed to be true.

“I knew that I had never seen anything like that before, and as of now, I don’t know what it was. It was not anything of this Earth. That I’m quite sure of," he said before describing the materials. "You couldn’t even bend it. You couldn’t dent it. Even a sledgehammer would bounce off of it."

Following Ramey's press conference, the military sent troops to the desert to pick up evidence from the wreckage site. Meanwhile, a team of archeologists from Western Texas Tech searched for the impact site and came across a pod — an egg-shaped craft the size of a Volkswagen Beetle 27 miles away from the debris field. They allegedly discovered bodies that were not human.

Captain Oliver “Pappy” Henderson of the First Air Transport Unit flew the alleged bodies out of Roswell to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

"My husband told me the bodies were small, the heads were larger and the eyes were rather sunken and little slanted. They were not of this Earth," Henderson's wife, Sappho, once said in an interview, according to Unsolved Mysteries. "When my husband, who was a man of truth, tells me this story, I believed him."

What does the U.S. government claim happened in Roswell?

Since 1947, the U.S. government has attempted to explain what happened in Roswell in several reports. The first — a 231-page report titled The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert — was released in 1994 and co-written by special agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations Richard Weaver.

"I really wanted there to be something there but there was almost nothing in any Air Force records about Roswell and then we found out about Project Mogul," Weaver said in Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries.

Project Mogul was a top-secret Air Force project whose primary purpose was to detect Soviet nuclear explosions and ballistic missile launches using "naval acoustical sensors, radar reflecting targets and nylon fibers carried by a train of weather balloons." Based on this, Weaver concluded that a Project Mogul balloon crashed in Roswell.

In 1997, the Air Force released The Roswell Report written by Captain James McAndrew, which addressed the alleged bodies found in New Mexico. The report claimed that the bodies were test dummies that were carried by high-altitude research balloons.

What have expert researchers said about the Roswell incident?

In episode 4 of Unsolved Mysteries, Schmitt and Randle shared their counterarguments to the government's two reports. While they have no concrete evidence that what was found in Roswell was extraterrestrial, they believe the Air Force is covering something up.

Regarding The Incident at Roswell report, Schmitt and Randle looked into Project Mogul. They discovered that the project itself was classified but the materials used were not.

"The Mogul equipment was off-the-shelf weather balloons, off-the-shelf radar targets," Randle, a retired lieutenant colonel who served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot and in Iraq as a battalion intelligence officer, said in the series. "There was no reason for Jesse Marcel Senior not to be able to recognize it."

The report also stated that the crash in Roswell was related to Project Mogul flight No. 4. However, the ufologists also learned that flight No. 4, slated to take place on June 4, 1947, had been canceled due to weather.

"If the flight was canceled, well, it couldn't have left the debris," Randle said. "One thing is clear, everybody agrees something fell, but what was it?"

As for The Roswell Report, Schmitt and Randle felt the Air Forces' attempt to explain the bodies was laughable.

"They're talking about crash test dummies, which didn't even come into existence until 1952, five years later," said Schmitt, former co-director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. "So none of our witnesses to the bodies in '47 could have been witnesses to the crash test dummies."

In September 2024, PEOPLE spoke with Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official for a top-secret Pentagon program that investigated UFOs and the author of Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs. He was able to speak candidly about the U.S. government's possession of non-human biological samples.

"I want to be careful saying 'bodies' because a body infers that you have an intact, entire cadaver or corpse. What I can say is that biological samples have been recovered," he said before describing the "non-human" tech he once held in his hands.

"It was a metallic surface that was beveled and had multiple layers of material inside it. It had all sorts of interesting electrical properties. It was not natural. It was definitely engineered. When we showed it to scientists at one of the top aerospace corporations in the world, they just scratched their heads and said it can’t be manufactured. And yet there it was."

What other theories are out there about the Roswell incident?

The Roswell incident has given birth to several conspiracy theories. According to Blaze, some people believe the alleged UFO was of Nazi origin. Theorists claim that a craft called The Bell, a machine propelled with electric particles, dropped out of the sky during a test flight.

Meanwhile, Charles Berlitz and William Moore, authors of The Roswell Incident published in 1980, believe a spaceship, which was keeping an eye on U.S. nuclear weapons activity, was flying over New Mexico when it was hit by lightning and crashed.

More recently, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen, who wrote Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base in 2011, theorized that Russia's Joseph Stalin sent a spacecraft with “grotesque, child-size aviators” to fly over the U.S. and generate hysteria, per The Seattle Times.

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