Secrets of the Roswell UFO Crash, Revealed

Washington, DC, April, 2011, the FBI releases thousands of files as part of its online FBI vault. One particular file draws the attention of the media and independent researchers. The memo, dated March 22, 1950, is a briefing to FBI Director Jay Edgar Hoover regarding informant information about three flying saucers that were recovered in New Mexico.

Investigators immediately connect the memo to the infamous Roswell incident, a purported UFO crash that many people believe was covered up by the military in 1947. But this document is just the latest in a series of government files that have been released in recent years, suggesting there may be more to the Roswell crash than the public was told. As an investigative reporter, I think what I am amazed by is how many leaked documents from the 1940s have actually come out into the world and lay out details about what really happened at Roswell.

On July 4, a rancher named Mac Brazel finds all kinds of strange silver debris. He knows he doesn't understand what he's walking through. He decides to go into Roswell and tell the sheriff something has crashed on my ranch.

Intel, coming out of Roswell Army Airfield, get a sign to go to the debris field and these men are told that they are to pick up every single thing that is in the debris field on the Mac Brazel Ranch. Everything is to be picked up. The headline on the front page of the Roswell daily record reports that the military had retrieved a flying saucer.

But the following day, the official story is suddenly changed to suggest it was nothing more than a failed weather balloon. Roswell was the home of the 509th bomb group. This was the only atomic bomb capable squadron anywhere in the world.

These people were the best of the best. The idea that intelligence personnel at this base would mistake a weather balloon for something exotic is preposterous. So that, arguably, is the start of the UFO cover-up.

Weather balloons, swamp gas, meteorite, it doesn't matter. It's always something else but a UFO. The Roswell crash was covered up.

The fact that they retracted the story of having captured a flying saucer, in my opinion, it was quick PR damage control. The world was told, nope, just a weather balloon. And for more than 30 years, that's where it was left, until witnesses started to surface, saying, no, it was actually an extraterrestrial craft.

And people saw alien bodies. Central New Mexico, October 19, 2019. Investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe has invited ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Succulos to join her on a trip to a spot in the desert just outside Roswell, very near what is known as the Skip Site.

According to eyewitnesses, one of the three UFOs seen in the sky in July 1947 first crashed to Earth near this location, then was propelled back into the air, skipping like a stone in a pond before finally coming to rest. Linda was contacted by geologist Frank Kimbler, who wants to show her mysterious metal fragments that he found here and search the area for more. Linda, this is so exciting.

I have not been here in a couple of years. So I'm really looking forward to meeting Frank. Well, I'm glad that we've got a geologist who's helping, because the geologist looks at land and says, if there is debris, there's going to be some kind of a drift with the land.

And just from what I know, he has studied some areas meticulously. Right. Giorgio and Linda arrive at the Skip Site and meet Frank Kimbler, a local geologist and professor of Earth science.

How are you? Good to see you. All right.

Linda, finally. Yes, you and I have been chasing these artifacts. Chasing the metals, looking for parts.

Professor Kimbler has spent nearly a decade searching areas beneath the purported trajectory of the Roswell craft with infrared technology and metal detectors. When an object crashes, they're going to scatter a variety of materials around knobs, control devices, plastic, wires, whatever. If it's coming apart, it's going to leave those pieces behind.

And those are the kinds of pieces that I want to find and have found some of. Since 2011, Professor Kimbler has uncovered more than a dozen metal fragments that he is subjected to scientific testing and found to be highly unique. That's what we want to go out there and see where you be getting this.

Frank. Yeah. What's inside the case?

Oh, this is the magic right here. This is some of the material that I have found out here using a metal detector. Interesting.

This stuff is very interesting. It's all twisted and mangled up. Something that you would expect to happen from a crash is to have metal that's compact and twisted.

When Professor Kimbler laid out his box of his pieces of metal, the first thing that struck me is these were tiny, tiny, tiny fragments. Could they possibly be from wreckage? These pieces are small, which is things that the government would have missed.

They wouldn't have been able to. Yeah, and here's my magic. Let's get a comparison here.

Oh, look at that. Look at that. Look at it.

It's like a snow field. After all these years, all of the pieces, they look absolutely pristine. That's the magnesium zinc side.

This has got layers to it. That's amazing. But I bet you've never seen anything like this.

Being an earth scientist, being a geologist, I've seen lots of all kinds of materials that are out there. I have never, ever seen anything like this. This fragment that Linda is showing me, that stuff is absolutely amazing.

I've never seen anything like it before in my life. And what's interesting about it is that it has some layers, some banding on it. And that banding is very similar to some of the banding that I found in photomicrographs of the material that I have from out here.

I think, as Giorgio is holding this, he's holding something made by another intelligence from someplace we don't understand. And this is truly extraterrestrial. In July of 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed to earth in the desert just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

It is today the most famous UFO event on record, in part, because it was the Army itself that reported the craft as a flying disk. July 8 and 9, the newspaper headlines. Army captures flying disk outside of Roswell.

How did the newspaper get that story? Walter Hout. He was the official public information officer at the Roswell 509, who gave the story to the newspaper.

But the military quickly walked back its story. Within days, the mysterious Roswell UFO was given an earthly origin when the government claimed that the downed craft was merely a weather balloon. They changed it and said it was a weather balloon and everything else.

They said they took it to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. When you really think about this, why on earth would anyone send any kind of weather balloon to Wright Field for technical analysis? None of that makes any sense whatsoever, unless that material was much more exotic and much more scientifically interesting than just a mere balloon.

When you look at the whole Roswell incident, it seems to be a recovery that was very much a scrambled ad hoc thing. And in fact, witnesses had been to the craft site before the military got there. So in the chaos of trying to clean up this crash site, you have to wonder whether they would really get it all.

Where would this material actually go? And would they have left some of it behind just by accident? In April 2011, the FBI released thousands of files as part of its online FBI vault, including a 1950 briefing to FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover regarding informant information about three flying saucers that were recovered in New Mexico. Many researchers believe this corroborates longstanding rumors that the Roswell incident involved not one, but three crashed UFOs. And there were numerous other incidents reported during that time period in the area of Roswell and White Sands' proving ground that remained mostly unknown.

You look at where the world today, when they think of UFO crash, they think of Roswell. Certainly, there have been crashes in New Mexico outside of Roswell. And we know that there were a lot of UFO crashes going from the 40, like 47, 48, 49, and so forth.

How did you come into possession of these pieces? I'll never forget the day that Art Bell called me. And he said, Linda, I've received a box with a letter, and there's some metal pieces in here.

He said, I think they're aluminum, but I want you to start investigating. That would have been in 1996 that spring. Art Bell was the founder and original host of the long-running paranormal-themed radio program Coast to Coast AM.

In 1996, he and Linda began to receive shipments in the mail of small, metallic fragments. We started getting two shipments coming from a man who identified himself in a series of five typed letters and said he was an Army sergeant, that his grandfather had died in 1974 and had left a box that had a diary and metals. And the Army sergeant said, I want you to have this and see what you can find out.

The letters detail how the grandfather extracted the metallic items from a wedge-shaped craft while working as a member of a recovery crew between Roswell and White Sands Proving Ground in 1948. Art Bell turned over these mysterious fragments and letters to Linda Moldenhau for further study. In June of 1996, Linda commissioned university researchers to use a scanning electron microscope and a technique known as X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to analyze the samples.

The analysis revealed alternating microscopic layers of the metals bismuth, magnesium, and zinc, only microns thick. A combination that baffles exotic metal experts. I think we've got technology that we didn't make.

A lot of people have come forward with bits and pieces of the same tail. We are presently analyzing metamaterials that we did not make that's created in a way that is beyond our technology. In April of 2014, ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Succolos traveled to Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico to meet with the city's mayor, Del Journey, and to get a rare look at the hangar, where the Roswell wreckage and extraterrestrial bodies were allegedly first taken.

Wow. This is huge. So what do you think?

Man, I have goosebumps right now. I mean, we're walking on history. It's amazing, isn't it?

Are you familiar where this spot is? Where they actually put it? Well, you know, the information that I have says that it's probably right over here in the corner.

They took them over there, did an examination of the bodies. So this is where it was? This is it.

Yeah, come on in. They have the debris out here in the hangar area, and they bring the bodies inside this room. I really don't know what to say, because, I mean, if this was it, you're standing where extraterrestrial beings might have been.

Where did the debris go? Where did it end up? Well, it ended up with the government, of course.

My understanding is it took the bodies to write Patterson Air Force Base. Certainly, it probably took the debris as well and have it well preserved in a military installation someplace. Roswell researchers suggest a government-sanctioned bond of secrecy has prevented witnesses of the crash and retrieval from coming forward publicly.

But many did choose to come forward later in life, including the first military officer to arrive at the Roswell crash site, Major Jesse Marcel. According to his grandson, Marcel privately shared many details of his experience with the family. My grandfather, Major Jesse Marcel, he was head intelligence for the 509th bombing group.

As a kid, basically around the dinner table, we talked about Roswell. And through conversations, we learned that my grandfather was the lead investigator into what has become known as the Roswell incident. And when he was looking at debris, he couldn't make heads or tails or any sense out of what he was looking at.

He'd gathered some of the debris, and decided to take it home with him. He kind of came to this idea that he said, you know, whatever this stuff is, it's very significant. It's going to change humanity.

And I want my family to be part of it. This is very important. According to the family's story, Major Marcel came home after his first visit to the site and laid the debris out on the floor of their kitchen.

Some of the material was a strange, thin metal similar to foil, except when crumpled up into a ball, it would bounce back to its flawless state. Marcel also claims the metal was not the same material featured in newspaper photographs being held by his grandfather. There's a pretty famous picture of him holding a piece of debris, which is trying to just piece of foil, basically.

And it was weather balloon material. He grudgingly went along with the story, held it. And if you take a look at that, you'll notice that he's not looking at the camera.

He's looking up somebody barking him orders. He fell in line begrudgingly and did what he was supposed to do.