Even though Area 51 was known for it's nuclear testing, it's main claim to fame is an alleged extraterrestrial technology research site.
It all started on June 14th, 1947, when a ranch foreman named W.W. “Mac” Brazel and his son Vernon were driving across Foster homestead, some 80 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, when they encountered something they’d never seen before. Brazel’s said it was “a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper, and sticks.”
The metallic-looking, lightweight fabric was scattered, shredded across the gravel and sagebrush of the New Mexico desert.
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Brazel paid little attention to the newfound items, but on July 4th he returned with his with Vernon, his wife and his 14 year-old daughter Betty and collected all of the mysterious wreckage he could find.
On July 7, he drove it all to Roswell, delivering the goods to Sheriff George Wilcox.
Seeking answers, Wilcox contacted Colonel “Butch” Blanchard, commander of the Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th Composite Group, located just outside of town. Blanchard decided to contact his superior, General Roger W. Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas.
Blanchard also sent Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer from the base, to investigate more thoroughly.
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Accompanied by the sheriff and Brazel, Marcel returned to the site and collected the rest of the wreckage.
"[We] spent a couple of hours Monday afternoon [July 7] looking for any more parts of the weather device", said Marcel. "We found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber.
On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that personnel from the field's 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disc", which had crashed on a ranch near Roswell.
The body of the story contained this memorable sentence:
“The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into the possession of a Flying Saucer.”
The U.S. military claimed the unidentified object that crashed was just a weather balloon and it's "kite", while conspiracy theorists insisted it was an alien spacecraft and was then taken from the Roswell ranch property to Area 51 for reverse-engineering. It also was thought that perhaps there was a large-eyed alien "gray" dwelling inside?
Between 1978 and the early 1990's, UFO researchers and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed several hundred people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947. Hundreds of documents were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, along with other documents such as Majestic 12, an alleged secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, formed in 1947 by an executive order by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to facilitate recovery and investigation of alien spacecraft, that were supposedly leaked by insiders. Their conclusions were at least one alien spacecraft crashed near Roswell, alien bodies had been recovered, and a government cover-up of the incident had taken place.
In 1978, nuclear physicist and author Stanton T. Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel to Fort Worth where reporters saw material which was claimed to be part of the recovered object. The accounts given by Friedman helped elevated Roswell from a forgotten incident to perhaps the most famous UFO case of all time.
The narrative that Charles Berlitz and William Moore, famous authors of the first conspiracy book about Roswell,The Roswell Incident (1980), put forward is that an alien craft was flying over the New Mexico desert observing US nuclear weapons activity, but crashed after being hit by lightning, killing the aliens on board; a government cover-up duly followed.
Charles and William claimed to have interviewed over ninety witnesses. Unaccredited, Friedman carried out some research for the book. The Roswell Incident featured accounts of debris described by Marcel as "nothing made on this earth." In the book, the contention is that debris that were recovered by Marcel at the ranch, visible in photographs showing Marcel posing with the debris, was substituted for debris from a weather device as part of a cover-up and that no close inspection by the press was permitted.
The efforts by the military were described as being intended to discredit and "counteract the growing hysteria towards flying saucers". Two accounts of witness intimidation, including the incarceration of Mac Brazel was included in the book along with the introduction of the the secondhand stories of civil engineer Barney Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university seeing alien wreckage and bodies while in the desert.
In 1991, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt published UFO Crash at Roswell. They added 100 new witnesses and they included several "sinister" new twists, such as accounts of a "gouge ... that extended four or five hundred feet" at the ranch and a new account, of Brazel that was described as leading the Army to a second crash site on the ranch. When they got there, the Army personnel were supposedly "horrified to find civilians [including Barnett] there already."
Glenn Dennis was a supposedly important witness in 1989, after calling the hotline when an episode of Unsolved Mysteries featured the Roswell incident. He was first to describe alien autopsies at the Roswell Army Air Base.
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In 1992, Stanton Friedman came out with his own book Crash at Corona, co-authored with Don Berliner, an author of books on space and aviation. Friedman introduced new "witnesses", and claimed that their were two flying saucers and eight aliens, two of which were said to have survived and been taken by the government.
The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994), by Randle and Schmitt, added several new details, including the claim that alien bodies were taken by cargo plane to be viewed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Day After Roswell (1997), former Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso's autobiographical book, claimed that the Roswell Crash did happen and that when he was assigned to Fort Riley (Kansas) in July 1947. That 5 trucks of 25 tons and some semi trailers entered the base from Fort Bliss Texas. He said while he was patrolling the base he was brought into the medical facilities by Sgt. Brown and shown the remnants of bodies that were from an "air crash".
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In September 1994, the Air Force released a report with a stating the wreckage was an atomic monitoring balloon meant to detect far-off nuclear testing blasts as a part of a military surveillance program called Project Mogul.
In 1997, government reports said that the recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of accidents involving military casualties with memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs such as the 1950s Operation High Dive.
American journalist Annie Jacobsen published a book in 2011 called Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. It is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51. In her book she quotes one unnamed source as claiming that Josef Mengele, a German Schutzstaffel officer and a physician in Auschwitz who was recruited by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Stalin wanted him to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to be remotely piloted and landed in America in order to cause hysteria. The aircraft, however, crashed and the incident was hushed up by the Americans. The bodies found at the crash site were children around 12 years old with large heads and abnormally-shaped, oversized eyes. They were human guinea pigs.
