On July 8th, 1947 the US military issued a press statement claiming to have recovered a ‘flying saucer’ on a ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico. It is the first and only time in American history that such a claim has been made. But just four hours later the Army made a counter-statement saying that all they’d recovered was the remains of a weather balloon.
For over thirty years the story remained dormant, not even mentioned in UFO literature. Then in 1978 retired Major, Jesse Marcel, gave an interview that kick-started the legend we know today as the Roswell Incident.
Back in 1947 Major Marcel had collected some of the ‘flying disk’ debris and had always been convinced that it was much more than just a weather balloon. After three decades of silence he decided it was time to reveal that the military had switched the debris he’d recovered.
His story opened the floodgates, and within a decade UFO authors had found dozens of eyewitnesses, offering sensational testimony of a long forgotten incident. By the end of the 1980’s the Roswell Incident had grown to mythic proportions with a crashed spaceship and its dead alien crew hidden for sixty-years by a secretive government.
Today the city of Roswell, New Mexico is the flourishing UFO capital of the world. Every street corner has a reminder that it’s the home of extraterrestrials. But does Roswell have any legitimate claim for such a unique status? Or is the public simply being sold a modern myth masquerading as fact?
No physical, nor documentary, evidence has ever emerged that proves an alien spaceship crashed sixty-years ago. Psychologists point out that eyewitness accounts are unreliable, especially memories of events from several decades earlier.
The Roswell Incident bears a suspicious resemblance to a story set four hundred miles away in Aztec, New Mexico. A non-fiction book ‘Beyond the Flying Saucers’, published in 1950, told of how a crashed alien spaceship and its dead crew were recovered and hidden at a secret military base. But within two years the story was recognized as a hoax. Is it coincidence that Roswell mirrors so much of the fictitious Aztec story?
The Real Roswell Conspiracy investigates the legend to reveal what really crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947.
Credits
Produced, Written & Directed by
PHILIP J. DAY
Producer
AMY YAP DAY
Editor
COLIN HARGRAVES
Narrator
JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY
Cinematographers
DANIEL PFISTERER
KRIS DENTON
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NICK BALLARD
SCOTT FARR
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CURTIS PEPPER AND TIM BOLIN
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JEAN-PIERRE CANER
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BRUCE HANIFAN
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PHIL SPITLER
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This program contains excerpts from a motion picture
held under copyright and licensed by Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
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Special Thanks
INTERNATIONAL UFO MUSEUM AND RESEARCH CENTER
NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF SPACE HISTORY
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WAYNE O. MATTSON
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SYDNEY SUISSA
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