Andy Simon

The true story of Roswell (from my book Conspiracy): Our story begins on July 7, 1947, when a rancher working just outside Roswell, New Mexico named William W. ‘Mac’ Brazel discovered some unusual debris scattered on the ground. Brazel notified the local sheriff saying that he might have discovered the remains of “one of them flying saucers.” The reference was to a wave of UFO sightings that began the month before, on June 24, 1947, when a man named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State when he saw 9 shiny objects moving quickly across the sky. Arnold initially described them as flying like “geese in formation”—which is what it probably was (I’ve seen such “UFOs” myself)—but then later added that the objects were “crescent shaped” and that they “moved like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” An Associated Press story about the incident then misquoted Arnold as describing what he saw as “flying saucers.” Later, Arnold complained, “They said that I’d said they were saucer-like. I said they flew in saucer-like fashion.” Nevertheless, the “flying saucer” meme caught on as the AP story was picked up by over 150 newspapers, and soon after hundreds of flying saucer reports appeared, with a peak of 850 sightings in the weeks following Arnold’s report. The July 7 story told by Mac Brazel promptly reached the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), at which point a lieutenant named Walter Haut sent out a press release stating that a “flying disc” had been recovered at the ranch. Haut, in fact, had not seen the debris himself, so here begins the distortion of the most famous UFO case in history: The Roswell Incident. The incident, in fact, has nothing to do with extra-terrestrial intelligence and everything to do with terrestrial surveillance. The following day, July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record ran the now famous headline: RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region The next day, July 9, the Roswell Daily Record offered a more sobering description of what was found on the ranch: "When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he [Brazel] estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds." The military described the debris as the remains of a weather balloon, and that was that for the next 30 years, as Roswell disappeared from UFO cultural radar. In fact, in 1967 a report was published by a pro-UFOlogist named Ted Bloecher titled UFO Wave of 1947, which chronicled 853 UFO reports: Roswell wasn’t even on the list! Think about that: the most famous UFO case in history wasn’t even on the radar screen of UFOlogists at the time it happened and the twenty years after! Roswell, then, is really a story of modern myth making, starting in 1980 when the National Enquirer ran a sensationalist UFO story, followed by a popular television documentary called UFOs are Real, then solidified when popular book authors Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore bestseller The Roswell Incident, was published, outlining a government cover-up of the discovery of a crashed alien spacecraft in the New Mexico desert.

In the United States of America, transparency should be the default. Bureaucratic stonewalling is no longer acceptable. Protect whistleblowers and hold government accountable to the people it serves.

When the Pentagon refused to search for emails about "Immaculate Constellation" in the records of Maj. Gen. Derek J. O’Malley, I appealed. Today, I won that appeal, and a search will take place. Always Appeal.