Roswell Incident Site
Debris from a ranch north of Roswell prompted an Army press release on July 8, 1947, announcing a captured flying disc, reversed within 24 hours. The Air Force explained it twice in the 1990s, and a government audit found the base's outgoing messages for those years had been destroyed.
Field Guide Entry
24 hours in July
W.W. Brazel, a ranch foreman, collected foil, rubber, and sticks from a pasture and brought them to Sheriff George Wilcox in Roswell. The sheriff called Roswell Army Air Field. On July 8, 1947, the base issued a press release saying it had recovered a flying disc, and the wire services carried it within hours.
The same day, Eighth Air Force headquarters at Fort Worth laid the debris out on a floor in front of photographers and called it a weather balloon. That reversal inside 24 hours is the foundation of everything built since.
For 30 years almost nobody wrote about it. Interest restarted in 1978, when Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who had handled the material, told interviewers the balloon had been a cover story and that the foil had not behaved like foil.
Two reports, and a gap in the filing
In February 1994, Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico asked the General Accounting Office to locate the records. What came back is more awkward than either side usually allows.
The Air Force answered first, in "The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert," identifying the debris as Project Mogul, a classified program flying long balloon trains carrying acoustic sensors to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. The materials fit and so does the secrecy. A second report followed in 1997, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed," 232 pages by James McAndrew, which addressed the bodies as high-altitude crash test dummies dropped in the 1950s and remembered later into 1947.
The GAO reported in July 1995. It found that outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field covering October 1946 through December 1949 had been destroyed, with no record of who ordered it, when it happened, or under what authority. The audit does not claim a cover-up. It says the paper is gone.
What the town did with it
The International UFO Museum and Research Center opened in 1991 in a former 1930s movie theater on North Main Street, and it has run on the incident and the argument about it ever since. The UFO Festival takes over the town each July.
The debris field is on private ranch land outside town, unmarked and closed to visitors.
Visiting Information
The International UFO Museum and Research Center on North Main Street is the thing to visit: a former movie theater holding affidavits, newspaper front pages, and the competing official explanations laid out side by side, with a research library attached. It opens daily and most people spend about an hour.
The UFO Festival runs over the first weekend of July and fills the hotels for a wide radius, so a summer visit in that week wants booking well ahead.
The debris site itself is on private ranch land and there is no public access and nothing marked. Tours advertising a trip to the crash site are selling a drive past rangeland, which is worth knowing before paying for one.
There is one place connected to the 1947 story that the public can legitimately walk to, and it is not the ranch. The Bureau of Land Management maintains what it calls the Alleged UFO Skip Site on public land near Corona, with a parking lot off Lincoln County Road B007 and about a mile of open desert walking to reach it. BLM's own recommended approach is US 285 north to New Mexico 247, then County Road B007, chosen to avoid GPS errors. Nothing is signed, and there is no water, shade, or toilet at either end of the walk.
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