Roswell Incident Trivia
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46 free Roswell Incident trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Roswell incident trivia separates what happened in July 1947 from the legend that grew up thirty years later. A rancher found tinfoil, rubber, tape and sticks; the local air base announced a captured 'flying disc'; a general held up a weather balloon the next day; and the story died for three decades until a retired intelligence officer told a ufologist the balloon had been a cover story. He was half right: it covered Project Mogul, a top-secret attempt to hear Soviet nuclear tests with balloons. This quiz follows the whole arc: Kenneth Arnold and the summer of the saucers, Mac Brazel and Sheriff Wilcox, Walter Haut's press release, the Fort Worth press conference, Jesse Marcel and his son's 'hieroglyphics', the 1980 book that added alien bodies, the Majestic 12 hoax and Bill Moore's confession, Glenn Dennis and the nurse who never existed, the 1994 and 1997 Air Force reports, crash-test dummies and body bags, Ray Santilli's autopsy footage, Philip Corso and Strom Thurmond, presidents from Clinton to Trump, and the town that turned it all into a festival. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen Independence Day; the expert tier is for skeptics and believers alike. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the incident and its cast, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which US state is Roswell?
New Mexico
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.
Q 02Which fast-food chain's Roswell restaurant is built in the shape of a flying saucer?
McDonald's
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.
Q 03What did the Air Force conclude in 1994 that the Roswell debris had really come from?
A top-secret spy balloon
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.
Q 04What was Project Mogul intended to detect?
Soviet nuclear tests
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.
Q 05Which rancher found the debris on the Foster ranch near Corona in the summer of 1947?
W. W. 'Mac' Brazel
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.
Q 06What did the rancher tell the Roswell Daily Record the debris consisted of?
Rubber strips, tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks
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.
Q 07From which base was the Mogul balloon train launched on 4 June 1947?
Alamogordo Army Air Field
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.
Q 08Whose sighting near Mount Rainier on 24 June 1947 set off the flying-saucer craze?
Kenneth Arnold
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.
Q 09Roswell's 509th Bomb Group was already famous in 1947 for which wartime mission?
Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan
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.
Q 10Which network aired the 2019 reboot of the teen alien drama Roswell?
The CW
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.
Q 11What did Roswell Army Air Field's first press release, on 8 July 1947, announce the recovery of?
A flying disc
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.
Q 12What did General Roger Ramey tell reporters in Fort Worth the Roswell wreckage really was?
A weather balloon
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.
Q 13Which rock band released its 1995 debut album on its own Roswell Records label?
Foo Fighters
Q 21Which TV drama's 1999 episode 'The Unnatural' features an alien playing baseball in 1940s Roswell?
The X-Files
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.
Q 22The forged 'Majestic 12' papers claimed which president had set up a secret committee to study the Roswell saucer?
Harry S. Truman
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'.
Q 23Which thrash metal band's 1990 song 'Hangar 18' is named after the building said to hide the Roswell wreckage?
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.
Q 14Which tale of a 1948 saucer crash, later exposed as a con, gave UFO lore its 'little men' and indestructible alien metal?
The Aztec story
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.
Q 15'Hangar 18', where legend says recovered corpses were kept, is supposedly at which Ohio installation?
Wright-Patterson
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.
Q 16Which nuclear physicist turned ufologist revived the Roswell story by interviewing Jesse Marcel in 1978?
Stanton Friedman
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.
Q 17Which TV series, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, aired Jesse Marcel's Roswell account in 1980?
In Search of...
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.
Q 18What did the 'hieroglyphics' Jesse Marcel's son saw on Roswell debris match?
Symbols on tape from a New York toy manufacturer
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.
Q 19Charles Berlitz, co-author of the first Roswell conspiracy book in 1980, was already famous for a bestseller about what?
The Bermuda Triangle
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.
Q 20Which film hero is forced by Soviet agents to find the crated remains of a Roswell alien in a 2008 sequel?
Indiana Jones
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.
Megadeth
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.
Q 24Glenn Dennis, who in 1989 became the chief witness for alien bodies at Roswell, had what job in 1947?
Mortician
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.
Q 25Glenn Dennis's tale of an alien autopsy at Roswell relied on which witness, whom no researcher could ever trace?
An Army nurse
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.
Q 26Which TV programme staged a dramatised re-creation of the Roswell story in a 1989 episode?
Unsolved Mysteries
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.
Q 27Which supermarket tabloid interviewed Jesse Marcel in 1979 and brought his Roswell debris story to a mass audience?
National Enquirer
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.
Q 28Which animated series sent its crew back to 1947 in 'Roswell That Ends Well'?
Futurama
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.
Q 29Which British entrepreneur claimed in 1995 to have footage of an alien autopsy from Roswell?
Ray Santilli
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'.
Q 30Which US network scored a big ratings hit in 1995 with a special built around the 'alien autopsy' film?
Fox
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.