Air Force Denies Aliens: UFO Claims Dismissed in 1997

The United States Air Force published a 231-page report explaining that aliens had never visited Roswell, New Mexico. Released on June 24, 1997, fifty years after the alleged incident, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed" concluded that the alien bodies witnesses claimed to have seen were actually anthropomorphic test dummies dropped from high-altitude balloons during Project High Dive in the 1950s, and that the wreckage recovered in 1947 came from a classified nuclear monitoring balloon called Project Mogul. The Roswell incident had begun in early July 1947, when rancher Mac Brazel found debris scattered across a field northwest of Roswell. The Army Air Field initially issued a press release stating that a "flying disc" had been recovered, then quickly retracted the statement, calling the debris a weather balloon. The story faded until the late 1970s, when UFO researchers interviewed aging witnesses and published books reviving the alien spacecraft theory. By the 1990s, Roswell had become the centerpiece of American UFO mythology. The Air Force’s 1994 report had already identified Project Mogul as the source of the debris, but it could not explain the alien body claims. The 1997 follow-up tackled this directly, arguing that witnesses had conflated events from different years. The crash test dummies, used between 1954 and 1959, bore a superficial resemblance to alien descriptions: they were hairless, about four feet tall, and were transported in body bags to military facilities after recovery. The report argued that over decades, witnesses compressed these separate memories into a single narrative. The report satisfied few believers. Critics pointed out that the dummy drops began seven years after the 1947 incident and questioned how witnesses could confuse plastic mannequins with alien beings. Roswell remains the most investigated and debated UFO case in history, and the town itself has embraced its extraterrestrial reputation, drawing hundreds of thousands of tourists annually to its museums, gift shops, and annual festival.