Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
by Martin Kufus
Decades after it happened, the incident has wide name recognition. To some, “Roswell” suggests a crashed spaceship and a government conspiracy. To others, it’s a hoax for tourists and the gullible.
Myth or reality, the “Roswell Incident” fell within a bigger picture.
The Nuclear Triangle
By the summer of 1947, central New Mexico was unlike any other place on planet Earth. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the human race had crossed one threshold – nuclear weapons – and was working toward another: space travel.
At the southern end of the Army’s White Sands Proving Ground, expatriate German scientists and their American counterparts modified captured Nazi V-2 rockets to launch ever higher toward space, years before there was a NASA. Farther north on the vast proving ground, Trinity Site was still radioactive from the 20-kiloton-yield explosion of the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945.
From Trinity Site’s test on July 16, 1945, through the alleged UFO crash on July 2, 1947, central New Mexico was a unique area on planet Earth. (SOF map by Chris Rodriguez)
Continuing north past Albuquerque, the Los Alamos National Laboratory – source of the Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki bombs – bustled in cutting-edge research and production. And, about 125 miles southeast from Trinity, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) claimed the world’s only strategic military force. This consisted of long-range B-29 bombers, including the famed “Enola Gay,” and an arsenal of A-bombs.
In this Los Alamos–RAAF–Trinity Site nuclear triangle arose the world’s most famous UFO story.
A Crash to Remember
It began like this. According to lore, a spacecraft with humanoid crew crashed during a nighttime thunderstorm on July 2, 1947, roughly between Trinity Site and the town of Roswell. Possibly struck by lightning, the small craft dove, skidded across the ground spreading exotic debris, then regained altitude only to crash miles away.
Locals found the debris field, wrecked spacecraft, and four aliens – three dead, one barely alive – on high-desert ranchlands. They reported this to the county sheriff, who contacted RAAF. From there, the Army took over.
The RAAF flashed a news release across the nation on July 8, 1947. The release reported the remarkable news that a “flying disc” had been recovered.
Within 24 hours, the official story changed to “weather balloon.” Meanwhile, various locals reportedly claimed they were threatened by uniformed or plainclothes men to keep quiet.
A “Dead alien” mannequin, about four feet long, at Roswell’s International UFO Museum & Research Center. (Photo by Martin Kufus)
Later still, purported eyewitness claims of small, dead aliens were officially explained away as conflated memories; that observers misremembered seeing Air Force anthropomorphic test devices – life-sized dummies in flight suits – recovered from high-altitude parachute tests in the early 1950’s.
The official story continued to change.
The Air Force claimed that eyewitness accounts of heightened activity at RAAF’s base hospital – the alleged arrival of dead/dying aliens in 1947 – were erroneous. Officials suggested that the witnesses conflated the sightings with the aftermaths of military aircraft accidents in 1956 and 1959.
In 1994, the Air Force announced the 1947 debris field wasn’t from a weather balloon. Instead, they said, it was the wreckage of a top-secret Project Mogul surveillance craft. This was a train of balloons sending microphones and other devices in cross-country stratospheric reconnaissance for signs of a nuclear-weapon test in the Soviet Union. The prolonged secrecy over the short-lived Mogul (1947–49) might simply be a Cold War artifact, something the Soviets weren’t ever supposed to know. Ufologists didn’t believe it.
More Backstory
America’s “UFO craze” didn’t begin with Roswell.
In WWII, American military aircrews coined the term “foo fighters” for bright globes or balls of fire moving at impossibly high speeds and maneuvering near their aircraft. Some airmen feared they were German secret weapons, although these UFOs weren’t hostile. Immediately after the war, reports of strange aerial objects occurred around the United States, most notably in the Pacific Northwest. From one respected private pilot’s prolonged sighting in June 1947 in Washington state came the term “flying saucer.”
As the public’s UFO reports increased, the U.S. military considered the possibility that the Soviet Union had fielded advanced technology, possibly captured Nazi superweapons. The implications for national security were obvious. There was tremendous pressure on the world’s mightiest air force to come up with answers and secure the sky over America amid growing Cold War fears.
A captured Nazi V-2 rocket, modified for tests and launched from White Sands Proving Ground. (U.S. Army photo, 1946)
For decades, the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago and the Mutual UFO Network in Cincinnati have challenged official findings – those released to the public, that is – and filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Predictably, their efforts have been met with pushback.
The Pentagon Weighs In
Within this context came a Pentagon study. The project was the work of the civilian-led All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). In February 2024, Volume 1 of the results were made public. The report cites events and incidents, along with government, military, and academic investigations dating to 1945. It includes mysteries in outer space and underwater as well as in the atmosphere.
The 63-page document asserts there is no evidence anywhere of captured or recovered alien spacecraft or occupants; no evidence of reverse engineering of alien technology; and no evidence of a cover-up at Roswell or anywhere else.
The report reiterates the Air Force’s earlier explanations for Roswell. The AARO doesn’t dismiss the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe; after all, U.S. government agencies have collaborated with the global Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, known for huge radio-telescope antennas aimed skyward to catch signals from quintillions of miles away.
The AARO never flatly says alien spacecraft don’t exist.
“Examination of UAP sightings is ongoing,” its website states, adding: “We will follow the science wherever it leads.”
In decades of UFO sightings across the globe, Volume I says, most have had mundane explanations: hoaxes, optical illusions, or misidentified commercial or military aircraft, space shots, planets, meteors, satellites, high-altitude balloons, windborne debris, birds, and, increasingly, drones.
Sometimes the data was insufficient. The AARO quotes from the Air Force’s longest investigation, Project Blue Book of 1952–69. The project found that of 12,618 sightings investigated, 701 were unidentified and never solved. About six percent of UFO sightings defied explanation by a military study that arguably was predisposed to deny them.
The AARO website says that anomalous detections include “phenomena that demonstrate apparent capabilities or material that exceed known performance envelopes.” Translation: Some strange objects seem to move much faster and in extraordinary maneuvers no man-made vehicles could achieve or survive.
Back to Roswell
Although a voluminous Air Force report in 1994 declared “case closed” on Roswell, the name nonetheless appears 33 times in the AARO report. Popular media, the Internet, and New Mexico tourism help keep the story going.
Beyond Roswell, though, one phenomenon in particular has defied easy explanation: UFO sightings reported by military personnel at nuclear-weapon sites, such as Air Force intercontinental ballistic-missile silos, during much of the Cold War.
More to come from SOF on UFO’s.
Writer Martin Kufus was a staff editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1995–97. He is a contracted technical editor at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. That work is unrelated to this story. He is the author of a nonfiction memoir, Plow the Dirt but Watch the Sky.
