50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which US state is Roswell?
New Mexico
The debris was actually found near Corona, about 75 miles away, but the air base that handled it was in Roswell.
Q 02In which year did the Roswell incident take place?
1947
It came in the first summer of the Cold War, weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting launched the flying-saucer craze.
Q 03What did the Roswell debris actually come from?
A Project Mogul balloon train
The linked balloons and equipment were designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests; the weather-balloon story was the cover.
Q 04What was Project Mogul intended to detect?
Soviet nuclear tests
It flew from 1947 to early 1949 and was superseded by cheaper seismic detectors and air sampling.
Q 05Which rancher found the debris on the land he managed near Corona?
W. W. 'Mac' Brazel
He had no phone or radio and only heard about 'flying disks' from his uncle on 5 July.
Q 06What did the rancher tell the Roswell Daily Record the debris consisted of?
Rubber strips, tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks
The paper also noted that no engine or metal parts had been found.
Q 07From which base was the Mogul balloon train launched on 4 June 1947?
Alamogordo Army Air Field
Contact was lost within 17 miles of Brazel's ranch; the Air Force later pinned the debris on Flight No. 4.
Q 08Whose sighting near Mount Rainier on 24 June 1947 set off the flying-saucer craze?
Kenneth Arnold
The private pilot saw nine shiny objects he estimated at 1,200 mph; over 800 similar reports followed.
Q 09What was Roswell Army Air Field notable for in 1947?
It housed the only unit able to deliver nuclear weapons
The 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force was based there.
Q 10Which two officers were sent with the rancher to gather the material from the ranch?
Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt
Cavitt later swore he thought at the time, and still thought, that it was a crashed balloon.
Q 11Who issued the 8 July 1947 press release announcing the recovery of a 'flying disc'?
Walter Haut, the base public information officer
Decades later he co-founded Roswell's UFO museum with Glenn Dennis and Max Littell.
Q 12Which general identified the material as a weather balloon at a Fort Worth press conference?
Roger Ramey
Weather officer Irving Newton said similar radar targets were used at about 80 weather stations.
Q 13A hoax 'crashed disc' days after Roswell, in Twin Falls, Idaho, turned out to be built from what?
Parts of a jukebox
Q 21According to the 1980 book, what killed the alien crew?
A lightning strike
The saucer was supposedly observing nuclear weapons activity over New Mexico.
Q 22What was 'Majestic 12'?
A purported secret group in faked documents sent to ufologists
The photographs of documents arrived anonymously in 1984; Bill Moore later confessed to feeding fake evidence to researchers.
Q 23Which famous astronomer mocked the Majestic 12 papers as 'something out of a fairy story'?
Carl Sagan
Four teenagers made it; broader saucer reporting faded soon after.
Q 14Which 1948 con introduced small grey bodies and super-strong metal to UFO lore?
The Aztec story
Con artists sold the story to Variety columnist Frank Scully.
Q 15'Hangar 18', where legend says recovered corpses were kept, is supposedly at which Ohio installation?
Wright-Patterson
The Air Force says no such hangar exists; the story echoes a 1968 novel, The Fortec Conspiracy.
Q 16Which ufologist rekindled interest by interviewing Jesse Marcel in 1978?
Stanton Friedman
A nuclear physicist based in Canada, he later found Glenn Dennis too.
Q 17Which TV series, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, aired Marcel's account in 1980?
In Search of...
'We both knew differently,' Marcel said of the weather-balloon explanation.
Q 18Marcel's son recalled 'purple-hued hieroglyphics' on a beam. What did they match?
Symbols on tape from a New York toy manufacturer
Project Mogul used the toy-company tape; Brazel's daughter remembered foil showing 'pastel flowers'.
Q 19Who wrote the 1980 book The Roswell Incident, the first Roswell conspiracy book?
Charles Berlitz and Bill Moore
Berlitz had already written about the Bermuda Triangle; Friedman was credited only as an investigator.
Q 20What did The Roswell Incident add to the story that Marcel himself never mentioned?
Extraterrestrial corpses
They were supposedly found on the Plains of San Agustin, about 150 miles from the debris field.
A Truman signature on the papers proved identical to one on a genuine 1947 letter to Vannevar Bush.
Q 24Which Air Force disinformation officer admitted feeding fabricated UFO material to researchers from Kirtland AFB?
Richard Doty
Bennewitz was the target of the earliest known 'MJ Twelve' document, in 1981.
Q 25What was Glenn Dennis's profession when he became Roswell's 'star witness' in 1989?
Mortician
He claimed calls from the base about small caskets and a nurse who saw an alien autopsy.
Q 26What happened when researchers checked on the woman Glenn Dennis said had witnessed the autopsy?
No such person existed, and he admitted inventing her name twice
Naomi Self became Naomi Sipes; leading ufologists concluded no bodies were recovered at all.
Q 27Which TV programme's 1989 Roswell episode was watched by 28 million people?
Unsolved Mysteries
It also dramatised Dennis's account in 1994, the year of the TV movie Roswell.
Q 28Which congressman's 1993 inquiry led to the Air Force reports of the 1990s?
Steven Schiff
The General Accounting Office directed the Secretary of the Air Force to investigate.
Q 29What did the 1994 Air Force report admit about the weather-balloon explanation?
It had been a cover story for Project Mogul
The 1995 follow-up, Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, tied the debris to Mogul Flight No. 4.
Q 30The 1997 report Case Closed explained stories of alien bodies as memories of what?
Parachute test dummies from high-altitude balloons
Operation High Dive dropped dummies over the desert in the 1950s and retrieved them in casket-shaped crates and insulation bags.