The Roswell Incident: UFO Crash, Cover-Up, or Cold War Secret?

At first, the military said it was a UFO.

Then, just hours later, they said it was just a weather balloon. But I witnessed this described strange metal that couldn't be cut or burned. Rumors spread about small, non-human bodies recovered from the wreckage. So why the sudden reversal, why the secrecy, and why has the story changed so many times over the last 75 years?

In this episode, I'll break down what really happened at Roswell. The official story, the witnesses, the evidence, and the theories. By the end, you'll be able to decide for yourself.

“Was it a simple accident or the moment we first discovered we're not alone?”

I'm Dr. Hermini But, and this is hidden history of rewind original powered by paid studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained, and examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural, and everything in between. From veric civilizations and doze prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena,

I'm looking at it all, and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rage, review, and follow hidden history. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. Today's episode is all about the Roswell incident. In 1947, a rancher in New Mexico found strange debris scattered in one of his fields.

When he showed it to the military, they initially said the wreckage came from a UFO, and although they tried to walk that back and claim it was just a weather balloon, it was too late. So what crashed in Roswell that day? Was it really a weather balloon?

“Maybe a top secret government project, or could it be aliens after all?”

Let's talk about it. There are places off the bean path, and then there is Roswell, New Mexico. Located in the middle of the desert, the town only existed thanks to the nearby Roswell Army Airfield, or the RAAF, and that could have been by design. Because Roswell wasn't your average military town, it was home to some of the most highly

classified missions and developments of the entire war.

It was home base for the 509th bomb group, the world's first and only nuclear bomb squadron.

They helped develop the atomic bomb and were the ones who dropped the weapon known as Little Boy on Hiroshima in August of 1945. All that to say, the people of Roswell understood the meaning of top secret. They provided themselves on keeping them, especially because the entire country was already

“on edge over a new threat, the Soviet Union.”

Ever since the US used atomic bombs at the end of World War II, the government was terrified someone would steal the technology. As the other surviving global superpower, the Soviet Union was the biggest threat to do that. Rumors of Soviet spies were everywhere, all of a sudden you didn't know who to trust. That sends a paranoia made its way to Roswell, and people weren't just worried about

the Soviets, they were also starting to get the feeling someone or something else was watching. Yeah, I'm talking about aliens. By the summer of 1947, folks were seeing strange things in the sky all around the country, no one was sure what to call them until that June when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of shiny round objects during a flight over Washington State.

At first, he only told a few friends about what he'd seen, but it didn't take long

for words to get out. It soon enough, reporters came around asking questions. Arnold tried a few different ways to describe the objects themselves and how they moved, but there was one that stuck, saucer-like. Local outlets are using the term flying saucer, and it seems to have caught them from there.

For a long newspapers around the country were full of headlines announcing more and more flying saucer sightings. And plenty of those reporters were coming from Roswell. The encounters vary a bit. Some people saw lights appear and disappear in the distance, while others witnessed actual

aircraft that hovered and jerked, unlike anything they had ever seen before. And these were people living around an air force base, they saw all kinds of airplanes and knew how they moved, but they were convinced they were seeing something else entirely.

Roswell was the home of the atomic bomb.

“Or maybe that was exactly what was drawing the aliens' attention.”

Either way, people were unhigh alert. And then came the event that was cement all of this in history forever. No one knows exactly when the crash happened, but according to UFO researcher Don Schmidt, it was most likely on the evening of July 2nd 1947. That night, there was a massive thunderstorm over the Rancho Community of Corona, about

75 miles northwest of Roswell.

Ranchers in the area always paid close attention to rain since it determined where they

could send their livestock to graves. So there are a lot of people out on their porches checking out the storm. Mother Nature put on quite a show that night, but among the thundercloths and lightning strikes, something else caught their attention. A woman named Marion Strickland describes seeing a bright red light streaking through the sky

toward her family's ranch.

“Moments later, she and her husband heard, was sounded like an explosion.”

She thought for sure it was a plane being brought down by the storm. But over the next couple days, there was nothing in the news about any plane crashes. Instead, on the 4th of July, a rancher named Mack Braswell discovered something out in his fields.

Actually, he found a lot of something.

Mack was the formant of a place called the Foster Ranch. And on the morning of the 4th, he took a sheep out to pasture he knew he had been soaked by the recent storm. But instead of finding a field of thick green grass, Mack stumbled onto something out of sci-fi novel.

The ground was littered with pieces of strange metallic debris. Mack estimated that it was spread over his own about 200 yards in diameter. He went in for a closer look, but the sheep wanted no part of that. They hung back refusing to go anywhere near whatever the stuff was. He looked around for a while, but he couldn't make heads or tails of the strange metallic

material scattered all around his pasture.

All he knew was that his flock wasn't going to walk through the mess, so he heard them around it. Once the sheep were settled, Mack went back and gathered some of the material. He wanted to show somebody, so he drove to his closest neighbors, the proctors. Mr. Proctor wasn't home at the time, but his wife Loretta was.

She let Mack inside and he laid out all the pieces on her kitchen table. Most of it looked like metal, but not any metal that Loretta had ever seen. It was shiny, like tin foil, but a lot thinner. Mack showed her how it could be bent, folded, and even crumpled into a tiny ball, but when you lay it flat again, it didn't show any signs of damage.

Loretta was just as mystified by it as Mack was. She told him he should probably take it to the sheriff in Roswell. Mack agreed, but the round trip from Corona to Roswell wasn't quick, and he had the ranch to take care of. But he had a day off coming up.

So a Sunday, July 6th, Mack put two boxes of debris in his truck and drove the 75 miles to Roswell and delivered the samples to Sheriff George Wilcox. Wilcox had been the county sheriff for almost 20 years, so he pretty much assumed that anything he couldn't identify had something to do with the military. And when he saw the strange debris, he called at the base and asked to speak to the commander

of the 509. But apparently, the 509 didn't know what it could be either, so the commander decided to send their intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel to figure it out. On either July 7th or 8th, Major Marcel met Mack Brossle back on the foster ranch in Corona. the army has sent their own intelligence officer to.

“The second they go out to that field, they knew they were dealing with something important.”

From how much material there was, something pretty big must have crashed in the area. According to Marcel's later recollection, the debris field was much bigger than 200 yards, like Mack Brossle thought. In his estimation, it covered a stretch about three quarters of a mile long and more than 100 feet wide, and yet he couldn't think of anything that would leave behind the kind

of wreckage he saw scattered around the desert. There was a lot more the tinfoil-like metal tangled up in the shrubs, and fluttering in the desert breeze, but there were also more solid bits that seemed like they could have been structural, along with what looked like the thinnest cables Marcel had ever seen. They took him and the other officer the entire day to document everything.

They also collected as much of the debris as they could, which they boxed up and put in

At the end of the day, the army officer stayed behind while Marcel headed back to the

“RAAF, but he didn't go straight to the base.”

Marcel wasn't usually a real breaker, but he was pretty sure that the second his appears

got their hands on materials he collected, no one would hear about it ever again. Something about the situation was weird enough that Marcel just had to tell someone. So he stopped at his house to show the debris to his wife, it's fun. It was around two in the morning, but Marcel promised this was worth waking up for. Because the major didn't think what he'd found came from the Soviets or any Earth-based

enemy, he was sure that he had pieces of a flying saucer. As Marcel's family looked through what he collected, his son, Jesse Marcel Jr., reportedly picked up what looked like a miniature beam of some kind. It was about an inch or so wide and surprisingly lightweight, but what really caught Jesse Jr.'s attention was the symbols that ran along the inside of the beam.

They looked like ancient Egyptian hairlifts, only there weren't any of the typical images you'd expect.

“Eventually, Major Marcel knew he had to get going, so he packed everything back up and”

finished the drive to the base. He made it just in time for the morning officers meeting. As he presented his findings, the base's commander Colonel William Blanchard listened carefully and expected the evidence. Then he said something nobody was expecting.

He agreed with Marcel's suspicions. But instead of slapping a classified sticker on everything and hiding it away, Blanchard decided to go public. He ordered the public affairs officers to issue a press release telling everyone they'd captured a flying saucer.

Well, let's pause here for a second. Because this is huge. Think about it. A high-ranging officer in the US military was saying, "Yeah, this is a UFO. These are here, and one of those spaceships just crashed in the desert."

This is the kind of announcement that wouldn't just change history. It would change our entire concept of the universe. And Colonel Blanchard was so sure of what he saw that he was okay with putting it out there for everyone to know. As you can imagine, the announcement did not take long to spread beyond the local newspapers

and radio stations around Roswell. We're talking globally. It was truly one of the earliest instances of news going viral, which is why Brigadier General Roger Ramey, the commanding officer of the 8th Air Force, ordered Major Marcel to bring his materials to Fort Worth, Texas, immediately.

So by late afternoon, Marcel was on a plane. And when he landed in Texas, Marcel was escorted straight to the General's office.

According to him, here's what happened next.

After the usual pleasantries, Marcel showed General Ramey what he'd brought. The men looked it over together for a while. Then Ramey said he had something to show Marcel in another room. When they came back to the General's office, something was off. The debris Marcel had brought was gone.

Instead, the strange, other, roly, metal had been replaced by the tattered remains of a weather blue. Marcel was still processing everything when the room suddenly filled with cameraman and just one single reporter. General Ramey had called a press conference.

He said the officers in Roswell were wrong. They hadn't found the remains of a flying saucer after all. It was just a downed weather blue. Marcel agreed to pose for pictures, but otherwise he didn't participate much in the conference. Even if the reporter asked him a question, the general stepped in to answer.

Once they were all gone, Marcel was ordered to never speak about what happened and he

was sent home. General Ramey's correction, along with the pictures of Marcel with the weather blue pieces, were published the next day. Others back at the Roswell airfield were also allegedly told to stay quiet. They just had to wait for it to all blow over, and that the airfers hoped would be that.

Their plan worked for a while. The story died down, people didn't follow up on it. The real story became nothing more than whispers and rumors.

“But no matter how well you bury a secret, time has a way of revealing everything.”

And when people decide to dig deeper, they uncovered something explosive. For 31 years, Major Jesse Marcel didn't talk about what he'd seen in the debris field.

believed the military had its reasons for keeping it classified.

“And he also wanted to believe those reasons were always in the public's best interest.”

But as the decades went by, and Marcel eventually retired, he started to wonder if this was a secret worth keeping. But in 1978, he received a surprising visitor. Retired nuclear physicist turned professional geophologist, Stanton Friedman. He'd received a tip about Marcel's experience in Roswell and he wanted to know more.

After years of silence, Marcel was ready to finally tell someone the truth.

Once Friedman heard what he had to say, he decided to look into it further. In two years later, in 1980, he published his findings in a book called the Roswell incident. Just like that, everyone knew what Jesse Marcel claimed to have seen out there in the desert. And a lot of them agreed that there was more to the story. Starting in the mid-80s, New Mexico Congressman Stephen Schiff was flooded with letters and

phone calls about Roswell. Now, Schiff didn't necessarily believe the Air Force was hiding aliens, but he did

“feel like it was his duty to get the answers to his constituents' questions.”

So in early 1993, he reached out to the Secretary of Defense, who is then put in touch with an Air Force Colonel. That Colonel told Schiff to contact the National Archives.

Then the Archives came back saying they did have anything about Roswell.

This is what Schiff said he knew he'd been "getting the road around." And he wasn't going to stand for that. His next move was getting in touch with the General Accounting Office, an investigated group that works for Congress. They agreed to work with him, and two years later, in 1995, they came to Schiff with

something big. Apparently, the Roswell Air Force Administrative Records and all outgoing messages from 1947 had been destroyed. That meant all their turtle communications about the crash were just gone. The GAO also couldn't figure out who had given the order to destroy those records when the

order had gone out or why they had done it. When this information went public, it sent the alien conspiracy believers into overdrive.

They were so vocal, the Air Force finally decided to take action.

They lost their own investigation and released the Roswell Report in 1995. And get this. The report admitted that, "Yes, there had been a coverup." However, it wasn't aliens. No, the Air Force said they'd been protecting top-secret experiments codenamed Project Mogul.

The gist of it was that military scientists had been using high altitude balloons to float sound equipment over the Soviet Union. The goal was to listen for nuclear explosions, so the U.S. would know if and when the Soviets developed their own bombs. One of these balloons had been launched just weeks before the debris was found in Roswell,

then the military just lost track of it.

“So could the Roswell wreckage be one of these balloons?”

It was a perfectly logical explanation that even managed to take some accountability for all the lies up to this point. But for many, it still wasn't enough. Is it really possible that the government was still hiding the truth? Let's dig it to it.

Starting with the official explanation that the whole thing was a top-secret balloon blown way out of proportion. Okay, so Project Mogul was a codenamed for the constant altitude balloon project. It was based out of Halvin Air Force Base in Alma Gordo, New Mexico. About a hundred miles east of Roswell and south of where the debris was found.

As I mentioned, their mission was to use giant high altitude balloons to float microphones in Soviet airspace and listen for any nuclear explosions. Now, this was a lot more complicated than just strapping a record machine to balloon and sending it on its way. There was a lot of equipment involved, which meant they had to use more than one balloon

to get it all airborne. So each mogul balloon was actually a chain of 20 or more tethered together. So why balloons? Well, they were the ultimate self-technology at the time. They were lightweight and silent.

And since there were no humans on them, they could go into the upper atmosphere, which also helped them avoid detection. Also, when I say balloons, I'm not talking about big versions of party balloons. They're closer in size to a hot air balloon, like hundreds of feet tall. And they were made out of neoprene, the same rubbery material they used for our scuba suits.

Once they were released into the sky, they looked weird. The balloons could have followed any sort of flight path, so their movements appeared erratic. They flowed on the breeze until they were knocked this way in that.

Sound familiar?

“In fact, it's possible balloon chains like the type used by Project Mogul might have”

been responsible for terms like flying saucer and flying disk to begin with.

Number Kenneth Arnold, the pilot who kicked this whole thing off, before giving his iconic saucer-like description, he said he saw "a chain" of objects and quote. He thought maybe it was a formation of some new kind of jet, except there were no tails. We assume he meant "contrails", the streaks of white condensation that follow planes. But what could fly without leaving one of those?

It would have to be something without an engine, maybe a balloon. But it's not just the existence of Project Mogul and its proximity to Roswell that makes this a compelling explanation. There's also the timeline. A June 4th, 1947, the Project Launch of Balloon Number 4.

They attracted on radar for as long as they could, but eventually it was lost. A month later, Mac Brasal discovered the debris field on his ranch. Now you might be thinking, if this really was a Crash Project Mogul balloon, why wasn't the military frantically looking for it? Well, experts have said it was because the materials themselves were easily replaced.

What mattered was the data they were able to get from it while it was flying. And they could have gone anything useful before crossed into Soviet airspace. When the balloon chains did crash somewhere, that was easy for them to get to. The government did go collect them. But they didn't waste time chasing every balloon down.

They might have drawn unwanted attention to their project, which is exactly what happened at Roswell.

And when people start asking questions, the first reaction was to blame it on UFOs and try

to move on. But when that backfired, they went with the weather blue explanation. Ironically enough, it was the attempt to maintain secrecy that drew the most attention and burned a conspiracy that just won't die. Which brings us to the next part of this explanation?

“Why was it so important to keep Project Mogul a secret?”

And why did the cover up backfired so spectacularly? Well, with the threat of nuclear war constantly around the corner, it's easy to understand why military leaders were obsessed with keeping things confidential. The Cold War started almost immediately after World War II and kept escalating through the 1950s and 60s.

Even civilians lived with increased apprehension at paranoia, but at first, those feelings

were pointed toward outside enemies. People were pretty willing to trust that the government had their best interests at heart. However, all of that changed dramatically during the 1970s. First there was the epic failure of the Vietnam War, which inspired massive protests and led to a lot more eyes on the government and the military.

And then came Watergate. As a quick overview, Watergate was the failed burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in 1972. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It turned out that the Nixon administration had been involved in a ton of illegal activities,

like secret wiretaps and money laundering. So it was so bad President Nixon resigned in 1974. To say that Watergate left a bad taste in American's mouths would be an almost comical understatement. It broke the average person's trust in the government and showed that corrupts and lies

could go all the way to the very top. So naturally, when Jesse Marcel came forward in 1978 and confessed that he had been part of a corrupt at Roswell, it hit hard. And the military didn't do themselves any favors by dodging questions for another 15 years. By the time the Air Force release is officialed for in 1994, it was too little too late.

The seeds of distress had grown into full on conspiracy theories. Especially because it didn't answer one huge question about what people had seen at Roswell.

“If it was just a top-secret experimental balloon, how did the Air Force explain the bodies?”

I'm Shankar Vidantam, here to tell you about a great mystery. That mystery is you. As the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain, I explore big questions about what it means to be human. It's like where do our emotions come from? Why do so many of us feel overwhelmed by modern

life? How can we better understand the people around us? Discover your hidden brain. Find us wherever you get to your podcasts. Alright, let's talk about aliens.

And that's because of the flood of what is accounts that came out after Jesse Marcel talked

about his experience.

“Turns out Marcel wasn't the only person who saw things they couldn't explain.”

And the military seemed extremely motivated to make sure no one shared their stories. But once Stanton freed and published his findings, it couldn't be contained. After Freeman's investigation, more UFOologists flocked to Roswell throughout the 1980s to do their own research. This included researchers Kevin Randall and Don Schmitt, who went on to write multiple books

about Roswell. According to Randall and Schmitt, they've interviewed hundreds of witnesses. And a lot of the people they talked to were the descendants of people who were involved in the events of 1947. We've already gone over Jesse Marcel's version of what happened.

But there was someone else even closer to things than he was, Matt Brossle. The way he told it, things got intense after he and the sheriff went to the Air Force.

Once the 509th put out that first press release that the wreckage was from a UFO, the

“local media was clamoring to talk to the rancher who'd found it all.”

So Matt agreed to be interviewed by the radio station KGFL. But before that could happen, he was reportedly intercepted by military police and taken to the base. He claims he was held there for five days and interrogated around the clock. And before they finally released him, two military police officers brought Matt to the

newspapers and radio stations. They kept a close eye on him as he answered the report's questions. In 1989 interview, Matt Sun said that he tried to talk to his dad when he came back from Roswell. But Matt would only say that he promised the Air Force that he keep his mouth shut.

And Matt Brossle wasn't the only one apparently threatened into silence. Personnel from the airfield reportedly went to see anyone who's spoken to Matt or who claimed to know anything about the crash. If they share their stories or anything they'd heard, they could be looking at legal consequences. At the time, it seemed like a serious overreaction to someone finding a simple weather

balloon. Knowing what we know now, that it was supposedly evidence of a top secret project, it makes a little more sense, but is still a pretty harsh way to treat civilians. And that might be because the truth was a lot bigger than a secret military project. Apparently Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt found people with stories about much more than

debris, like the family of Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox. According to Wilcox's granddaughter, she was at her grandparents' house watching the moon landing in 1969 when her grandmother and Nez started acting strange. She locked the door and shut the blinds and said there was something about Roswell that she and George had been hiding.

After time the air force about the debris back Brossle had brought them, Sheriff Wilcox drove out to the site himself. He said the military had already arrived and were securing the area.

“But before they could make him leave, Wilcox saw something he'd never forget, a spaceship.”

Wilcox also noticed some of the personnel out in the field weren't people at all. He'd later tell his wife they were human-like, only smaller, with very large eyes. And they were dressed in what looked like silk robes. Some were alive and others were not, but they were all being load up into military vehicles. With a soldier's notice Wilcox, he was ordered to return to his office and wait for someone

to debris him. He wasn't about to argue with them and did as he was told. It said Wilcox wasn't debris, according to him, he was intimidated. Wilcox claims he was told to keep silent, or he and his family would be killed. The threat felt so real, his wife still lived in terror 22 years later, as she passed

the warning onto their granddaughter. It's terrifying stuff, although I do have to point out there's a hole in the story here. Because Mac Brossle and Jesse Marcel said they only found scatter debris. While George Wilcox said he saw an entire ship. But rather than right his experience off, I want to pose another question.

What if Wilcox didn't see the ship at the ranch?

Is it possible there was a second crash site?

The more people that Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt talked to, the more convinced they were that the answer was guess, especially when they heard stories like the one told to them by a woman named Frankie Row. Frankie was about 12 years old in 1947. Her father was part of the Roswell Fire Department, and she said that one evening in July,

her dad came home from a long shift. Only he didn't see a tire like he normally did after working that hard. Instead, he was extremely excited about something.

So they headed out thinking there was a grass fire or something like that.

“Only when they reached the location there wasn't any fire or a plane.”

Instead, Frankie said they found a craft that her dad could only describe as "not" of this world and "enlight on the ground beside it" were two small bodies. It seemed like they were probably dead, but there was another who was up and walking around. According to Frankie's dad, all these beings were about the size of a child with large heads and eyes.

A lot like the ones George Wilcox described. Frankie and her family were mesmerized by her dad's story, and maybe a little scared. But Frankie said her dad told them there was no reason to be afraid, and that was that. They didn't talk about it again. Then a couple days later, Frankie was at the Fire Station with her dad when a state policeman

came rushing in. She thought he had the same giddy energy as her father did when he told them about the quote "little people," and quote, "according to Frankie, the officer gathered everyone in the Firehouse kitchen, then pulled out what looked like a bit of tinfoil out of his pocket.

“He said that he'd helped clean up some of the crash debris and had managed to sneak”

away with this small piece. It didn't look like much all watered up in his hand, but when he dropped it onto the table, it spread itself out flat. Everyone was eager to get a chance to mess with it including Frankie. She said she waited patiently while the men tried all sorts of things like cutting it with

their pocket knives or burning it with their lighters. Nothing they did even left a mark. When it finally Frankie's turn, she was surprised by how light the foil felt in her hands. It was truly weightless, like nothing she'd ever handled before. Then about three or four days later, the military car pulled up in front of her house

while Frankie's dad wasn't home. A man nodded with a door and asked to talk to Frankie. He told her to forget everything she's seen and heard at the fire station.

It never happened, she was never there.

The man went on to say that if Frankie, a little girl, ever talked about it again, they would make her entire family disappear. Once he was sure that he'd gone his point across, he finally left. Like all the other witnesses who'd allegedly been threatened into silence, Frankie and her family never spoke a word about it.

Even decades later, when Kevin Randall came to ask for an interview, it took him two years to convince Frankie to share her story. Before the UFO community, it was worth the weight. These stories were so compelling that the military was forced to respond yet again. In 1997, three years after releasing the original Roswell Report, the Air Force released

another document. This one came with a mic drop of a subtitle. The Roswell Report case closed. This time, they held a press conference to go over their findings. According to the Air Force, any bodies that might have been observed were probably just crash

test dummies. They were used in experiments to develop pilot ejection mechanisms in place. But this explanation didn't hold up and reports that the press conference came prepared. One corresponded out that those experiments didn't start until the 1950s, well after the Roswell incident.

The best explanation the Air Force could come up with was basically that the witnesses

had mixed up their dates. That maybe they misremember something they saw in the 50s as being part of the 1947 incident. For a lot of people in the UFO community, that was all the proof they needed. That the Air Force was still covering their tracks. No matter what the government says, nothing will be good enough until they show proof

of alien life. In the end, it all comes down to belief, which is why, to this day, the mystery of the Roswell incident remains unsolved. But the story of Roswell is also about so much more than whether or not aliens exist. It's about the authorities' structures in their lives and whether we can ever take what

they say at face value. It doesn't really matter if they're hiding secret experiments or UFOs, all that matters is that they're hiding something. If you can't trust them to tell the truth about some wreckage in the desert, then what can you trust?

A lot of people feel powerless already, and if you ask me, believing in aliens is a way to reclaim some of that control. Because if there really are others out there, it means there are things beyond everyone's control.

When the truth finally comes out, we'll all be in it together.

“Okay, so all that being said, what do I really think happen in Roswell?”

As much as I would love the alien theory to be true, the project mobile explanation seems like the likelyest explanation.

The mobile explanation covers so many of the lingering questions. Was there a cover-up probably? It just wasn't to hide aliens. And why was there so much material? Well, it wasn't a normal weather balloon, it was a massive chain of them, and that chain

was carrying all sorts of other equipment, which also explains why a lot of the material was unrecognizable to personnel outside of the project.

But then there's the issue of the witness accounts of a second site, and that's a little

more nuanced.

“To be clear, I don't want to write those stories off, and I believe that those people”

went through something very real that left a mental and emotional scar. I wouldn't be surprised if they really were intimidated into silence, and that would be terrifying. They had no one to turn to, nor to go for protection, and that tear may have left a legacy of personal and generational trauma, which we see in the terrifying details of these stories.

In terms of where they went, and what they saw, we do have to consider the second and even third-hand nature of the sources. Have you ever played a game of telephone? Well, imagine the message that being passed down over years rather than seconds. The original story is unlikely to make it through unscathed.

Human memory is incredibly flexible, and isn't always reliable.

It's constantly adapting to new information. And beyond these stories, there just isn't any physical evidence to support the second site theory, which for conspiracy believers is evidence in itself, so make of that what you will.

“Now does this mean I don't think aliens are out there, not necessarily?”

It just doesn't seem likely that they crashed in New Mexico. I honestly don't enjoy the idea of aliens being out there, but I do believe there are because there's just no way with how vast or entire galaxy and how vast the universe is. We cannot be the only living organisms in the universe. It's just not possible.

If you look at the math, if you listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson, there's just no way. We are definitely not the only living beings. It could be that they're not human-like. It could be that they're just living organisms in the early Earth days, but there's definitely going to be some sort of living organism on a distant planet on a different universe outside

of here. And when I say life, I don't mean you and I running around on another planet. I mean like, proto life on an early Earth, like something to that extent. If there is something more complex, something that is like a plant, or even a little critter, that would be really intriguing and very exciting and totally possible.

I would say nothing is impossible. We just probably haven't learned about it yet.

“So if the Roswell incident were to happen today, how would it all go down?”

First of all, pictures and videos of the debris would be all over the internet. It was easy enough to keep quiet when it was just Mac Roswell and Jesse Marcel throwing some stuff in their cars and the internet didn't exist yet. But imagine if they were alive streaming it to social media, there is no putting the lid back on that one.

There would be TikToks and think pieces from professionals and amateurs alike dissecting every detail. Before a secret, this big, the government was still trying to put a stop to it.

And nowadays there are tools much more powerful than a press conference.

Yeah, I'm talking about AI. Nowadays it's easier to fake things than ever. Everyone would be questioning if the footage from Roswell was real. And all it would take is a good old disinformation campaign to muddle the waters. The question is, would we be able to see through it?

Or would the truth be just as hard to come by as it was back in 1947? It's hard to say, but for now, keep your eyes on the sky and keep your secrets, close to your chest. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History. I'm Dr. Hoony Bought, join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from

the past. What did you think of the Roswell incident? Are you skeptic or a true believer? Let me know in the comments and I might talk about it in a future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate review and follow if you're listening on audio,

so we can keep building this community together. I'll see you next time on Hidden History. [BLANK_AUDIO]