History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s06e01 Episode Script

Roswell

Tonight, a strange discovery
in the New Mexico desert
sparks a mystery that's
endured for nearly 80 years.
We know something crashed
in that sheep field
out in Roswell in 1947,
but the parts of the
puzzle just don't add up.
I-beams, silken
strands of fiber optics.
No one is able to identify
this strange material.
This was a 200-yard
swath of debris
which, when it was
all gathered up,
only weighed five pounds.
How is that possible?
The deeper researchers
dig into what witnesses saw,
the more questions are raised.
Were they actual aliens
or human guinea pigs?
Whether people are
skeptics or believers,
something crashed, but
the question is, what?
We know that there
was a government coverup
because the government
admitted as such,
but we don't even know if
that's the whole story.
Now, we'll explore
the top theories
surrounding one of America's
most infamous incidents.
This would possibly explain
all the different elements
of the Roswell crash.
Some people saw bodies,
some people didn't.
By now, there's so much
speculation, we don't know,
and we may never know.
What really fell out of
the sky in 1947 in Roswell?
June 14th, 1947.
80 miles northwest of
Roswell, New Mexico,
a sheep rancher named Mac Brazel
comes across something
highly unusual.
He was tending to
some of the sheep and
he noticed that they wouldn't
cross a particular field.
So he sets out and explores
and finds this debris field
in the middle of nowhere.
It looks like something
was moving at a high speed
and crash-landed and just
spread out there for 200 yards.
Given the remote
nature of this site,
the logical conclusion must be
that this thing could only
have come from the sky.
He wants to bring it in
and turn it over
to some authorities
out of concern that it might be
some form of aviation accident.
But Brazel's
trip to Roswell is delayed,
and by the time he reaches
the sheriff's office
with the crash debris,
two other Roswell residents
have also witnessed something
they can't explain.
On July 2nd,
Dan Wilmot is
sitting on his porch
with his wife Mary Grace,
and suddenly they see this
strange object in the sky.
It's oval shaped, it's
very brightly illuminated
as if it's got its own
internal light source,
and there's virtually no sound.
The object was about 10
to 20 feet in diameter.
He thinks it was moving around
4 to 500 miles per hour.
And they observe it
for about a minute
and then it goes away.
After Brazel
delivers the material,
the concerned sheriff
immediately calls
the nearby Army airfield.
The Roswell crash took
place against the backdrop
of the modern flying
saucer phenomenon.
This all started
on June 24th, 1947,
with Kenneth Arnold,
a pilot flying light aircraft.
He claims that he has seen
nine disc-shaped aircraft
flying in formation
near Mount Rainier
flying at 1,200 miles an hour,
which is three times as fast
as the fastest aircraft.
And the media really
takes this up.
Newspapers
quickly dub the objects
"flying discs," or
"flying saucers."
After his report
becomes publicized,
it inspires other
people to purport
that they have also seen
bizarre phenomena in the skies,
and we are in the midst
of flying saucer fever.
In that period between
June and July 1947,
there are hundreds of people
who report seeing flying
saucers in the sky.
Banner headlines, day after day,
through every news source
around the country.
What are these flying saucers?
Where are they from?
But what Brazel discovered is
an altogether different story.
It's nothing fleeting
in the nighttime sky.
It's something recovered.
It's something that had crashed.
It escalates the whole situation
to a completely different level.
The Army takes this
extremely seriously
and they actually send one
of their brightest and best,
the base intelligence
officer Jesse Marcel,
out to investigate.
They know that whatever it is,
it's not a US military
aircraft crash.
So now the situation is this.
If it's not the US
military, who or what is it?
On July 8th, 1947,
the Roswell Army Airfield
puts out a press release
saying that they have found
pieces of a flying saucer.
We've had two weeks
of flying saucer fever
and now the US military
have one of these things.
The press release goes out
and it's near hysteria.
The public takes
it a lot seriously
than could have
possibly been expected.
Later that day,
Major Marcel flies
the debris to Texas
for further examination.
They arrive in Fort Worth.
General Roger Ramey,
head of the Eighth Air Force
at Carswell Army Airfield,
wants to have a
press conference.
Then, something
really weird happens.
Within 24 hours of
telling the world
that the US military has
recovered a flying saucer,
they flip the narrative.
General Ramey
announces to the press
it was all a mistake, it
was all a overreaction.
It's nothing more than a
very standard weather balloon
with a radar reflector kite.
To help alleviate
concerns from the public,
they release a photo
with Major Marcel posing
with what is said to be debris
from this weather balloon.
The cover story
was totally believed.
Roswell just disappears from
the narrative for 30 years.
All is quiet until 1978,
when Major Jesse Marcel
opens the floodgates
on Roswell witness statements.
Marcel is 71 years old, he's
retired from the military,
but after 30 years,
he finally decides
that it's time to go public
with the secret that
he's been hanging onto
for all this time.
Jesse Marcel does an interview
with astronomer
Stanton Friedman,
during which he confesses
that he was told
to stick to the story that
this is a weather balloon
and nothing else.
Marcel claims those were not
actually all of the materials
that he had recovered from
the site near Roswell.
There's much more debris
that's not in the photos.
And he describes the
material that he found
as being not of this Earth.
There are silken strands like
microfilament fishing line.
There are I-beam structures
of a pinkish-purplish hue
with strange symbols that
run the length of each piece.
And then Marcel describes the
most amazing material of all.
Paper-thin, metal-like material,
practically weightless
in your hands.
This material you can crush,
you can fold, you can crease,
and each and every time,
it assumes its original
shape and size.
Today, we call this type of
alloy a shape memory alloy.
Shape memory alloys
weren't widely manufactured
until the 1960s, though,
and the crash was in 1947.
It's easy to see why
people would believe Marcel.
He's a credible source,
he's a former
intelligence officer,
and he is now saying
that what the government
said is not true.
And this really is the
beginning of this idea
that there really might be a
massive government coverup.
After speaking with Marcel,
Friedman begins collecting
dozens of other witness
accounts from Roswell
that describe a second crash
and a massive coverup
of who was in it.
It's one thing to
hear Jesse Marcel say
that it wasn't a weather balloon
and that whatever fell out of
the sky came from outer space.
But these are witnesses
who are claiming to
have seen something
that wasn't even human.
The same day that
Jesse Marcel came back
with the debris from the ranch,
a local mortician, Glenn Dennis,
also gets drawn into a very
weird part of the story
because as well as
being a mortician,
he sometimes drives
an ambulance.
He was delivering an
injured person to the airfield
when he witnesses the
arrival of these materials
and he also sees this beam
with purple and pink
hieroglyphic writing on it.
And he says, because of his work
in the local funeral
home, he is asked,
"Do you have a number of
child-sized caskets?"
And of course, he's horrified.
And only later do people
start to put this together
and say, "Well, wait a minute.
Maybe it wasn't dead
kids, but dead aliens."
One of the witnesses
who comes forward
all these 40 years later
has some details and evidence
of a second crash
site near Roswell.
A crew chief with the
Roswell Fire Department,
named Dan Dwyer, comes forward
and he wants to talk
about the crash
that he'd heard about on
the plains of San Augustin.
He says that he and another
fireman go to the site,
but when they get
there, they find
that there's a government
recovery effort taking place.
Well, if this is
just a regular crash,
why is the government involved?
Dwyer claims to have witnessed
essentially the collection
of alien bodies.
He says there were two
of them on stretchers
inside mortuary bags
and a third one that appeared
to be severely injured.
Dwyer is not the only person
who reports bodies
at this crash site.
An Air Force sergeant
named Melvin Brown
claims that he was sent there
to guard the crash site.
While he's there, he claims
that he sees two alien bodies.
Dennis, Dwyer, and Brown
aren't the only ones.
There are many more witnesses
who are claiming
they saw something.
Now, whether it's debris or
bodies or lights in the sky,
whatever crashed in
Roswell that night
led to people insisting
that they saw something
extremely unusual.
When you take into account
all of these
eyewitness testimonies
and people seeing
these strange things,
it's easy to see why this flying
saucer theory might endure.
We may never know what happened,
but we have credible
witnesses who have seen things
that are difficult to explain
and make it hard for the
theory of the weather balloon
to really hold up.
Despite a flurry of additional
eyewitness accounts
in the 1970s and '80s
detailing new theories on what
really happened at Roswell,
the Air Force
consistently maintains
that what crashed was
only a weather balloon.
Part of the reason they
stick with that story
is the story's working fine.
With the exception of
arguably a niche community,
there's been no one
really challenging
the official narrative.
Finally, in 1993,
a congressman from New
Mexico, Steven Schiff,
starts to pressure
the federal government
to release more information.
In 1995, the government releases
"The Roswell Report:
Fact vs Fiction."
It includes a shocking
new revelation.
What crashed actually belonged
to a classified military
program called Project Mogul.
The Air Force said,
"We were keeping a
secret from people,
but the secret we were
keeping wasn't aliens.
It was a spy program,
highly classified."
In 1947, the United States is
the only nuclear power on Earth.
It's very clear to
the Americans, though,
that the Soviets
desperately want
to develop their
own atomic weapon,
but we don't have a
good way of knowing
how well the Soviets are
doing in that pursuit.
Project Mogul is
spearheaded by Maurice Ewing,
a US geophysicist,
and is basically this
operation by the US government
to develop spy balloons
to sense the detonations
of atomic weaponry
all the way around the
globe by the Soviet Union.
The idea is to put
microphones on weather balloons,
send 'em to this high altitude,
so if a particular
nuclear blast goes off
and three of these microphones
receive that signal,
they can triangulate back
to its original source.
This is what makes a
high-altitude balloon
such an effective tool here
because it can
float, remain steady,
and be in the air for
a really long time.
Some of these weather balloons
associated with Project
Mogul are enormous.
They're 400 to 500
feet in diameter.
They're built to hover in place
and they fly at 100,000
to 200,000 feet.
They have to be able to carry
500 pounds worth of equipment,
they have to be both
lightweight and really strong,
so they need to be made
of really, really advanced
composite materials.
They also have
metallic substances
that are very light reflective,
so they might appear to glow.
Based on the
shape, the dimension,
and the behavior of the
Project Mogul balloons,
you can see why
somebody might conclude
that these objects
are flying saucers.
Between 1947 and 1949,
Project Mogul conducts a total
of 110 top secret
research flights.
Most of these
tests are happening
initially on the East Coast,
but there's too much
commercial traffic,
so they decide to launch
these balloons instead
from Alamogordo Airbase
in the Tularosa Basin
in Southern New Mexico.
According to declassified
documents about Project Mogul,
the first flight
launched from Alamogordo
goes as far as
Arabela, New Mexico.
Supposedly, on June 4th, 1947,
it came smashing down to Earth
with all of its radar
reflection materials
and other sensors.
Looking back at the old photos,
we see what looks
like radar reflectors,
we see what looks like
shredded polyethylene plastics.
The average person in 1947
wouldn't know
anything about that.
It doesn't really
look like parts
of a terrestrial aircraft,
and so they're fairly
certain of what it's not,
but that doesn't mean that
they actually recognize
what it is.
Even the highly-trained
people like Jesse Marcel
wouldn't recognize
all of this material,
so they'd be saying,
"Yeah, look,
I know what a weather balloon
looks like and this ain't it."
The report
also has an explanation
for the purple hieroglyphics
described by witnesses.
The engineers that
cobbled together
some of the early
balloons for Project Mogul
had to use whatever
materials they had available.
Despite this being a
highly-classified program,
this was still the
post-war period,
there were some shortages,
occasionally even the
military had to just make do,
and apparently they used
some commercially
available adhesive tape.
The tape that they're using
is actually just some
leftovers that were unsold
from a children's toy company.
It's designed to attract
a child's attention.
It's just covered with colorful
shapes and pink and purple.
This tape is what
the government explains
as the source of those
eyewitness reports
of the purple and pink
hieroglyphics on the metal beam.
By 1949,
two years after Roswell,
Project Mogul is
completely shut down.
For a number of reasons,
Project Mogul was
terminated in 1949.
Cost, security,
practical concerns,
the most obvious of which
was that by that time,
the Soviets had
detonated their own bomb.
So we know they have it
and there is no longer
any need to listen for it.
Despite the declassification
of these documents,
rumors persist
that the government
is not being
entirely transparent.
The government's
explanation of Project Mogul
seems to make sense and
it seems to be consistent
with what people saw,
except that there's
all these witnesses
who claim that they saw bodies.
There's nothing in Project
Mogul that included bodies.
So what is the story there?
In the 1990s,
five decades after
the Roswell crash
first made headlines in 1947,
the public's demand for
answers reaches a fever pitch.
By the 1990s, Americans
have been through Watergate,
Iran-Contra and the Vietnam War,
and Americans realize that
the federal government
and particularly
the US military,
is keeping a lot of secrets.
And it makes sense that
the Project Mogul disclosure
by the US government
is met with some skepticism,
because UFOs, alien abductions,
visits from another planet,
this was all in the zeitgeist
and it was reflected by
the movies and TV shows
that we were watching.
We've got "Star Wars,"
"Independence Day,"
and "Close Encounters
of the Third Kind."
Aliens were at the
top of people's minds.
And a lot of Americans
still genuinely believe
that aliens landed in
Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
It hasn't gone away.
Roswell continues
to grow in relevance
and there's more and more
talk about the bodies.
The Pentagon is compelled to
come up with an explanation
because balloons
don't have pilots.
Two years after the report
revealing Project Mogul,
the government offers
a new explanation.
In 1997, the Air Force
puts out its second study
called "The Roswell
Report: Case Closed."
1997 is the 50th anniversary
of the Roswell incident
and of course, the Pentagon
has to go and spoil the party.
First they double
down on Project Mogul,
but then they address
the issue of the bodies
and they say it's all due
to a program called
Project High Dive.
After World War II, plane
technology revolutionized
and they began flying
faster and higher
than anyone had ever
thought possible,
and the Air Force wondered,
if our pilots have to eject
at this very high altitude,
could they survive a landing?
So hundreds of mannequins are
deployed from the atmosphere
and studied as they
tumble back towards Earth.
There are at least 67 of
these High Dive mannequin drops
in the Eastern New Mexico area.
Some of 'em begin to
spin at very high rates
and that sends them off course
and some of them actually
land in civilian areas.
The Air Force concludes
the most likely explanation
for people claiming to
have seen dead alien bodies
was that it's possible that
they actually had come across
the aftermath of a
high altitude situation
where something went wrong
and the experiment came
plunging back to Earth.
So, Project High Dive
regularly sent
scientists and soldiers
to recover these mannequins
regardless of where they fell,
even in the most remote places.
So the people that
are coming forward
and claiming to have witnessed
soldiers with alien bodies
might in fact have
just simply seen
one of these recovery efforts.
Given the velocity
with which these
mannequins hit the ground,
you can see why witnesses
might have understood them
to be small alien bodies,
because they likely shattered
and were mangled upon impact.
Though this
theory provides one explanation,
it raises new questions.
At the press conference
in which the Air Force
is unveiling this report,
the media points out that
the report explicitly says
that Project High Dive
occurred in the 1950s
while the Roswell
events happened
a couple years
before that, in 1947.
Faced with this
apparent contradiction,
the Air Force presents an idea
that it's basically in the
heads of the witnesses.
They put forward what is
known as time compression.
Time compression is
when people are remembering
important events
at a distance of many decades.
They may conflate
two important events
and remember them as though
they happened at the same time.
However, it seems unusual
that people would've
compressed together
memories of such import.
It's possible, it's possible,
but it also kind of
strains credibility.
And that caused a
lot of UFO researchers
to be absolutely convinced
this was just another
government coverup.
Despite what the
Air Force is saying,
many of these Roswell witnesses
stand by their memories.
So if we believe that
they saw actual bodies,
where did they come from?
It may be that there
is a darker explanation
connected to some
of the phenomena
associated with Roswell.
There's still questions
that remain unanswered.
By the end of the 1990s,
the United States
military had admitted
that its initial statement
about the Roswell crash
was intentionally misleading,
and has offered two very
different explanations
for what witnesses
claim they saw in 1947.
But in 2000, a Polish
journalist's research uncovers
But in 2000, a Polish
journalist's research uncovers
a shocking new possibility
for what actually fell
out of the sky in Roswell.
We still haven't
got all the answers.
It's still a mystery.
But now there's a new
theory which suggests
that the reason the government
is covering all this up
is because it involves
Nazi technology.
There are a lot of
people that are convinced
that what was actually witnessed
in the American Southwest
were secret Nazi programs.
People forget
that in many areas,
Nazi technology was
actually much more advanced
than Allied technology.
The Nazis developed the first
operational jet fighter.
The Nazi V-1, and in
particular the V-2,
were super weapons developed
by Wernher von Braun.
The Allies were desperate to
get their hands on Von Braun
and all the other people
who worked with him.
Following World War II,
the United States government
started Operation Paperclip,
which brought around
1,500 German scientists
to the United States
and put them to work developing
all kinds of technology
for the American military.
And Paperclip was not
just highly classified,
but very sensitive
because, of course, we just
had the Nuremberg Trials.
We just had the footage
of the concentration camps
and people were outraged.
Bringing some of these
Nazi scientists over
and putting them on the payroll,
that would not have played
well with the US public.
Some people think
that the Roswell event
is related to early tests
of these former Nazi
scientists and engineers
performing work in the US.
In 2000, the Polish
journalist Igor Witkowski
publishes a book about the
research and development
of a particular type of German
aircraft known as Die Glocke.
This top secret German
aeronautical program
called Die Glocke, or The Bell,
is essentially a vertical
takeoff and landing aircraft.
The idea is to have a jet engine
that effectively
fires straight down,
providing lift, kind
of like a rocket,
but with an air-breathing
jet engine instead.
By changing the direction of
the vanes within the aircraft,
you would be able to
then move it laterally
throughout the sky.
Any advanced Nazi
rocket technology
would have been developed
by Wernher von Braun.
Even though the Nazis
never unleashed Die Glocke
on the battlefield,
the Allies specifically
pick up Von Braun
so that he can bring
his designs with him
to an Army research base
at White Sands, New Mexico.
The book describes
this incredible machine
as a glowing, bell-shaped object
not too dissimilar from the
shape of a flying saucer.
The similarities in shape,
size, color, and movement
between Witkowski's
description of the Glocke
and other witness reports
lead to the theory that
Von Braun is actually
developing and testing a
prototype of the Glocke
for the US military in 1947.
Witkowski claimed that the
propulsion system for the Bell
was something called Xerum 525.
This is apparently
a purple fluid
that's radioactive
and/or poisonous.
The night of the
Roswell incident,
a number of eyewitnesses report
that the objects
they saw in the sky
did glow with a kind
of blue-violet glow,
which is the color
of the Xerum 525 gas.
So, according to this theory,
it was flown from White Sands
and it fell apart
during the test,
and they found a material at
Roswell on the Foster Ranch.
Allegedly the bodies of the
aliens that were found there
were actually human bodies,
the bodies of test pilots
who were selected
for their small size
in order to fit
into the prototype.
To keep the crash
of a Nazi-designed
super weapon a secret,
they would need
to pretty quickly
figure out a cover story.
Given the fact that there was
this flying saucer alien
craze going on at the time,
the government would've
thought that, "Hey,
we could divert
your attention away
from what's really going on,"
and people could grab ahold
to this ridiculous
theory of aliens.
According to this theory,
the story was shared, however,
without the approval of
higher ranked officials
and so it had to be
quickly retracted,
and that's why the story
of the weather balloon
was substituted for it instead.
When Project Paperclip was
finally declassified, however,
there is no mention of The Bell
or of the testing of
these propulsion systems,
so either it never
really happened
or it was completely covered up.
In 2011,
Pulitzer Prize-nominated
journalist Annie Jacobsen
proposes a new theory
about the Roswell crash.
Annie Jacobsen writes
a book contending
that what crashed in
that field in Roswell
was not in fact an
alien spacecraft,
but a Soviet aircraft.
In 1947, the United States
is the only nation on Earth
that has the bomb.
The Soviets are
desperate to catch up
and need to do something
to maybe close the gap.
Jacobsen's theory is that
the Soviets devise a plan
to make the Americans think
that they're under attack.
Two German aerospace
engineers, the Horten brothers,
had been part of a
program in Nazi Germany
to try to create what we would
refer to as a flying wing.
To the outside observer,
it looks kind of like a
flat, almost oblong shape.
What the flying wing does
is tries to extend the
range of an aircraft.
The Germans were convinced
that if American cities were
threatened by German attack,
then the Americans would
not have the stomach
to continue the fight.
Jacobsen argues that in
the years after the war,
the Horten brothers
went to the Soviet Union
and began to design
new technology
and work on projects
for Joseph Stalin.
The brothers come up
with this disc-shaped craft
based on the plans
for their flying wing
that is made of
high-tech materials
that's really good at
evading radar detection.
According to Jacobsen's theory,
Joseph Stalin saw another
potential use for this aircraft.
They want to develop nuclear
technology of their own
so that they can counter
American world domination.
This plot is meant
to, as the theory goes,
buy Joseph Stalin more time,
and Russian scientists more time
to develop their atomic weapons.
Stalin comes up with this plan
to distract the US military
by staging this fake invasion.
Americans will be so freaked out
and disturbed by
the idea of a UFO
that it will distract
the American people,
the American government,
and stop them from continuing
on with their atomic program.
There is precedence
for pandemonium
being spurred by a
supposed alien invasion.
In 1938, there was
a radio reading
of Orson Welles' "The
War of the Worlds"
which was so convincing
that people actually thought
we were being invaded by aliens.
Joseph Stalin is
pretty convinced
that the American
public is gullible
and he's willing to authorize
even the most
harebrained schemes
to try to convince the Americans
of the possibility of
invasion from outer space.
As the theory goes, in the
first week of July 1947,
Stalin orders the flying disc
to be flown into US airspace.
They decide that they're
going to stage this incident
in the southwestern part
of the United States
because there are a lot
of bases in that area.
White Sands, Area 51, Roswell,
these are all places
where military technology
was being developed
and where the Soviets hoped
that they could distract
Americans from that technology.
We don't know how
this flying disc,
if it was a Soviet
flying disc, crashed.
Was it shot down?
Did it crash of its own accord?
But however it happened,
the theory is that it
came down at Roswell.
And what's funny about this
is that if Jacobsen's
theory is correct,
then the original story
put out by the military
saying that it was a flying
disc or flying saucer
that was recovered, is
pretty much the true story.
Annie Jacobsen's theory
is this was all designed
to sow as much
confusion as possible.
But the military changed
their story within 24 hours,
and this second
official explanation
immediately scuppered
Stalin's plan
because if it's a
weather balloon,
clearly there's
gonna be no panic.
Now to close that nuclear gap,
Stalin's best bet then becomes
putting all the resources
into developing the bomb,
which the Soviet Union
actually does in 1949.
In 2017,
an unexpected new theory about
the Roswell crash emerges,
one that asks just how far
the US government might go
to keep its edge
in the Cold War.
After World War II,
the United States government
recognizes this need
to keep tabs on
the Soviet Union,
and the best way to do that
is to develop high altitude,
reconnaissance aircraft.
There is no such thing as
artificial satellites in 1947,
so what they needed was aircraft
that can fly over
enemy defenses.
It became strategically
imperative for the United States
to fly reconnaissance aircraft
at ever higher altitudes.
Prior to 1947,
the highest altitude
anyone had ever flown at
in a fixed-wing aircraft
was 58,000 feet.
Mount Everest is
29,000 feet high,
and most commercial
aircraft fly at 36,000 feet.
You are talking significantly
above any of that.
And the higher you go,
the density of the atmosphere
falls off exponentially
so there's less and
less oxygen available.
So that creates all kinds
of challenges for the pilots.
A lot of pilots pass out,
lose consciousness sometimes
for minutes at a time.
The US government was going
to have to run a lot of tests
on how that would be possible.
There is a theory that
the United States Air Force
was conducting human experiments
using individuals who would
not be missed by society.
In 2017, British
researcher Nick Redfern
makes a connection
between these high-altitude
weather balloons
that were used for
these experiments
and what fell out of
the sky at Roswell.
So it's Nick
Redfern's contention
that the Air Force
is going to use
these modified weather balloons
to start testing how
the body responds
to such extremely high altitude.
According to Redfern's theory,
the people that were
being used in these tests
were pulled from
asylums, prisons,
and places where
no one would notice
and no one would complain
about them being missing.
Redfern hypothesizes that
they attach these gondolas
to the balloon
and they put people
in the gondola
whom they are forcing to
engage in this experiment.
In the case of
the Roswell crash,
one of these balloons
separated from the gondola
and the balloon would've
crashed in one place,
the gondola with the bodies of
the victims in another place.
This would possibly explain
all the different elements
of the Roswell crash.
Some people saw bodies,
some people didn't.
Some people saw
debris at this site
and others at a site
much further away.
You have two different crashes
of two very different things.
According to Redfern,
one of the individuals
that he interviewed
worked at Fort Stanton,
about 30 miles
away from Roswell,
and claimed to have been
part of a recovery effort
rushing a grievously
injured individual
to the base facilities.
One person was
treated for injuries
but apparently died
a week or so later.
Is this where we have the
story of the Roswell survivor?
Redfern's theory has
some historic plausibility
because there was a project
where they did
experiments on people.
The American
government conducted
the famous Tuskegee experiment
where men who were
tested to have syphilis
were monitored instead
of being cured.
They were used as test subjects.
By the time of
the Roswell crash,
the world is hearing
these stories
of concentration camp victims
being experimented on,
and the idea that you
could experiment on people
who weren't giving their consent
was condemned and banned
by the Nuremberg Code.
Certainly, the US
wouldn't want to be seen
as engaging in the same
behavior as the Nazis.
Redfern alleges a
massive government coverup.
He claims that
government functionaries
destroyed all of the records
and cremated the bodies
as a means of covering
up the horrible research
that was being carried out.
Like many of the other theories
around Roswell, this one
only raises more questions.
They would've used
adults in their tests,
but people who saw the bodies
claim that they
were child-sized.
So that doesn't square
with Redfern's theory.
Whatever we believe,
whether people are
skeptics or believers,
Roswell is real,
something crashed.
But the question is, what?
It's not necessarily,
as the military would like to
say on Roswell, case closed.
Today, the town of
Roswell has become
a thriving tourist
destination for UFO fanatics,
but that's only one of
the possible explanations
for what happened at Foster
Ranch over 80 miles away.
Whether this was the crash site
of a top secret test flight,
a Cold War scheme,
or something truly unearthly,
most of the eyewitnesses
have long since passed away
and the search for
answers continues.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
History's Greatest Mysteries.
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