46 Fun Facts About Roswell Incident

In which US state is Roswell?

Roswell is a city in southeastern New Mexico; the debris was found about 75 miles away near Corona, but the air base that handled it was in Roswell.

Which fast-food chain's Roswell restaurant is built in the shape of a flying saucer?

McDonald's built its Roswell branch as a saucer with a metal skin and neon trim; the self-styled UFO capital of the world also has alien-eyed street lamps, a UFO museum and an annual UFO festival.

What did the Air Force conclude in 1994 that the Roswell debris had really come from?

A top-secret spy balloon: the 1994 report said the Army's 1947 cover story had hidden Project Mogul, a classified train of high-altitude balloons carrying microphones.

What was Project Mogul intended to detect?

Soviet nuclear tests were the target: Project Mogul lofted sensitive microphones on high-altitude balloons, hoping to catch the low rumble of a blast half a world away.

Which rancher found the debris on the Foster ranch near Corona in the summer of 1947?

W. W. 'Mac' Brazel found the scattered debris in mid-June and thought little of it until he heard the 'flying disc' talk in early July; a day after the story broke, a headline said he was sorry he had told anyone.

What did the rancher tell the Roswell Daily Record the debris consisted of?

The rancher told the Roswell Daily Record the debris was rubber strips, tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks, and the paper added that no engine, propeller or metal parts had been found.

From which base was the Mogul balloon train launched on 4 June 1947?

Alamogordo Army Air Field is where a New York University team launched Flight 4 on 4 June 1947; its tracking batteries died within 17 miles of the ranch, and the balloon train was never recovered.

Whose sighting near Mount Rainier on 24 June 1947 set off the flying-saucer craze?

Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, reported nine shiny objects skimming past Mount Rainier; newspapers had them as flying saucers within days, and he later insisted he had only meant their motion, like a saucer skipped across water.

Roswell's 509th Bomb Group was already famous in 1947 for which wartime mission?

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan made the 509th unique: two years on, at Roswell, it was still the only military unit in the world with access to nuclear weapons.

Which network aired the 2019 reboot of the teen alien drama Roswell?

The CW was formed in 2006 when The WB and UPN shut down and pooled their shows; those two networks had each aired the original Roswell, so the reboot landed with the heir to both.

What did Roswell Army Air Field's first press release, on 8 July 1947, announce the recovery of?

A flying disc, said the release put out by the base press officer, Walter Haut; his superiors retracted it within a day, and decades later Haut became a founder of Roswell's UFO museum.

What did General Roger Ramey tell reporters in Fort Worth the Roswell wreckage really was?

A weather balloon, said Brigadier General Roger Ramey of the Eighth Air Force, who posed with the foil and sticks in his Fort Worth office; newspapers ran the correction and let the story drop for three decades.

Which rock band released its 1995 debut album on its own Roswell Records label?

Foo Fighters took their name from Second World War pilots' slang for UFOs, and Dave Grohl named his label Roswell to match; he recorded the debut almost alone after Nirvana ended.

Which tale of a 1948 saucer crash, later exposed as a con, gave UFO lore its 'little men' and indestructible alien metal?

The Aztec story was sold by two con men to Variety columnist Frank Scully, whose 1950 book spread it; a reporter's sleight-of-hand sting later showed their 'indestructible' saucer metal was pots-and-pans aluminium.

'Hangar 18', where legend says recovered corpses were kept, is supposedly at which Ohio installation?

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, housed the Air Force's UFO investigations until 1969; a 1974 claim put alien bodies in its 'Hangar 18', and the Air Force says the base has never had a hangar by that number.

Which nuclear physicist turned ufologist revived the Roswell story by interviewing Jesse Marcel in 1978?

Stanton Friedman met the retired intelligence officer in 1978, and Marcel's belief that the debris was not of this world revived a story the press had forgotten for three decades.

Which TV series, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, aired Jesse Marcel's Roswell account in 1980?

In Search of... opened its 1980 season with an episode on UFO cover-ups, giving the retired officer a national audience two years after a ufologist first tracked him down.

What did the 'hieroglyphics' Jesse Marcel's son saw on Roswell debris match?

Symbols on tape from a New York toy manufacturer fit the memory: the balloon team had used the tape, printed with pastel flower-like designs for children, to reinforce their radar targets.

Charles Berlitz, co-author of the first Roswell conspiracy book in 1980, was already famous for a bestseller about what?

The Bermuda Triangle had made Berlitz a bestselling author of mysteries; in 1980 he and Bill Moore gave Roswell the same treatment in The Roswell Incident, recasting a forgotten story as a government cover-up.

Which film hero is forced by Soviet agents to find the crated remains of a Roswell alien in a 2008 sequel?

Indiana Jones opens Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 1957, marched into a vast government warehouse to pick out one intensely magnetic crate; the same warehouse hides the Ark of the Covenant.

Which TV drama's 1999 episode 'The Unnatural' features an alien playing baseball in 1940s Roswell?

The X-Files let Duchovny write and direct this flashback tale of Josh Exley, an alien who falls for baseball and hides in plain sight as a home-run hitter for the Roswell Grays.

The forged 'Majestic 12' papers claimed which president had set up a secret committee to study the Roswell saucer?

Harry S. Truman supposedly created 'Operation Majestic-12' in 1947 to analyse the crashed saucer; the papers surfaced in the 1980s, and the FBI official who assessed them wrote that they were 'completely bogus'.

Which thrash metal band's 1990 song 'Hangar 18' is named after the building said to hide the Roswell wreckage?

Megadeth put 'Hangar 18' on Rust in Peace; Dave Mustaine had carried the music since the band he was in before Metallica, while the UFO theme came from drummer Nick Menza, who believed in aliens as Mustaine did not.

Glenn Dennis, who in 1989 became the chief witness for alien bodies at Roswell, had what job in 1947?

Mortician Glenn Dennis, then 22, worked at Roswell's Ballard Funeral Home and claimed the air base rang him in July 1947 to ask about child-sized caskets and how to preserve bodies left out in the elements.

Glenn Dennis's tale of an alien autopsy at Roswell relied on which witness, whom no researcher could ever trace?

An Army nurse, Dennis said, told him of an autopsy on three small bodies and then vanished; base hospital records for 1947 showed no such nurse had ever served there, and even leading Roswell researchers dropped the story.

Which TV programme staged a dramatised re-creation of the Roswell story in a 1989 episode?

Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by Robert Stack, gave much of one show to the re-creation; the national exposure drew out new 'witnesses', and their tales of alien bodies came to dominate the Roswell story.

Which supermarket tabloid interviewed Jesse Marcel in 1979 and brought his Roswell debris story to a mass audience?

The National Enquirer's Bob Pratt interviewed Marcel, who told him he had shot down five enemy aircraft in the war; his service file records no such kills and shows that he was never a pilot.

Which animated series sent its crew back to 1947 in 'Roswell That Ends Well'?

Futurama strands the Planet Express crew in 1947 Roswell, where the army grabs Zoidberg and gives him the full captured-alien treatment; the episode won the 2002 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program.

Which British entrepreneur claimed in 1995 to have footage of an alien autopsy from Roswell?

Ray Santilli, a London producer, released the 17 minutes of grainy film in 1995; in 2006 he admitted on British television that he had built a set and hired actors, and called the result a 'restoration'.

Which US network scored a big ratings hit in 1995 with a special built around the 'alien autopsy' film?

Fox repeated Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction twice, then in 1998 aired another special that exposed the footage as a hoax; the film's promoter did not admit staging it until 2006.

Which senator demanded his foreword be removed from Philip Corso's 1997 book The Day After Roswell?

Strom Thurmond had supplied a foreword believing the book was a memoir of Corso's military career; when its alien claims came out he asked the publisher to remove it.

Annie Jacobsen's 2011 Area 51 book claimed the Roswell 'aliens' were child-sized aviators created by whom?

Josef Mengele, for Stalin, had surgically altered children to pose as aliens aboard a Soviet craft, the book claimed on the word of one unnamed engineer; reviewers called the account absurd and error-ridden.

Slides unveiled as a dead Roswell alien at a 2015 show in Mexico City actually showed what?

A mummified child, a boy of two, lay in a museum case: days after the show, sceptics ran software over a blurred placard in the slide and read 'MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY'.

Which former president told Jimmy Kimmel in 2014 that he had 'all the Roswell papers reviewed' while in office?

Bill Clinton said that with the 50th anniversary approaching he knew the letters would pour in, so he had everything checked; he found no aliens, though he said a visit one day would not surprise him.

Which 1996 blockbuster reveals a Roswell crash and cover-up, complete with experiments on alien corpses?

Independence Day turns the wreck into a weapon: the Roswell ship, refurbished at a secret base, is flown into the alien mothership to upload the computer virus that knocks out the invaders' shields.

In which Deep Space Nine episode do the characters travel to 1947 and trigger the Roswell incident?

'Little Green Men' (1995) sends Quark, Rom and Nog crashing into Roswell in 1947; its director James L. Conway had also made the 1980 film Hangar 18.

In 1997 the Air Force said Roswell witnesses' 'alien bodies' were probably what?

Crash test dummies were dropped from high-altitude balloons to test parachutes; believers scoffed, since those drops began only in the 1950s, years after the supposed crash.

Which rocket pioneer tested his liquid-fuel rockets outside Roswell through the 1930s?

Robert H. Goddard, ridiculed in the press for proposing a rocket to the Moon, moved his liquid-fuel tests to the open country outside Roswell in 1930, once Charles Lindbergh had helped him win Guggenheim money.

Which future Grey's Anatomy star played alien teenager Isabel Evans in the WB drama Roswell?

Katherine Heigl played Isabel in Roswell from 1999 to 2002; as Izzie Stevens she won a 2007 Emmy, then pulled out of the next year's race, saying the material she had been given did not warrant a nomination.

When the rancher drove his strange debris into Roswell in July 1947, whom did he report it to first?

The county sheriff, George Wilcox, alerted Roswell Army Air Field, which sent its intelligence officer out to the ranch; the base's famous press release credited 'the sheriff's office of Chaves County'.

Which Air Force UFO project logged more than 12,000 sightings by 1969, yet never opened a file on Roswell?

Project Blue Book closed with about 700 cases still unexplained, but archivists find nothing on Roswell in its records; the Air Force says the Army's 1947 explanation of the debris ended Roswell as a UFO matter until the late 1970s.

Which skydiver lifted off from Roswell in 2012 and became the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall?

Felix Baumgartner rode a helium balloon 24 miles up from Roswell, then stepped off and fell faster than sound; Joe Kittinger, whose 1960 record he broke, was the one voice from mission control in his ear.

Which Twin Peaks actor played Major Jesse Marcel in Showtime's 1994 TV film Roswell?

Kyle MacLachlan played Marcel across thirty years, from the 1947 debris field to a 1977 reunion where he sets out to clear his name; the Showtime film was based on the 1991 book UFO Crash at Roswell.

Which 2002 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, produced by Steven Spielberg, builds its decades-long story on a 1947 crash at Roswell?

Taken ran for 20 hours over ten weeknights, following three families down the decades: a captain who investigates the crash, a wartime pilot the aliens keep taking, and a lonely wife who shelters an alien that survived it.

Fans of the WB teen drama Roswell mailed the network thousands of bottles of what to win it a second season?

Tabasco sauce is the alien teenagers' favourite food in the show, so fans mailed thousands of bottles to The WB's executives and won a second season; a year later they posted thousands more to UPN, which picked the show up.

Which American Dad! character is an alien who crashed at Roswell?

Roger, the wig-wearing grey alien, has been on Earth for some sixty years; he got out of Area 51 with help from CIA man Stan Smith, and has lived with the Smith family ever since.