Alien recoveries

The two Air Force reports on the Roswell UFO incident, published in 1994/5 and 1997, form the basis for much of the skeptical explanation for the 1947 incident, the purported recovery of aliens and their craft from the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico.

The first report, “The Roswell Report: Fact verses Fiction in the New Mexico Desert,” identified a secret military research program called Project Mogul as the source of the debris reported in 1947. The second report, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed” concluded that reports of alien recoveries were likely misidentified military programs or accidents.

Based on the evidence which could be gathered, the report concluded that the 1947 incident was not an airplane crash, a missile crash, a nuclear accident, or the recovery of an extraterrestrial craft. Obviously, the latter conclusion was the key one. “…the research indicated absolutely no evidence of any kind [italics in original] that a spaceship crashed near Roswell or that any alien occupants were recovered therefrom, in some secret military operation or otherwise.”
The overwhelming focus of the military at the time was on something more down-to-earth, the report noted: “All the records… indicated that the focus of concern was not on aliens, hostile or otherwise, but on the Soviet Union.”

While the report acknowledged that there would be some who would label the report itself as part of the “cover up,” and would probably assert that evidence corroborating alien recoveries at Roswell or nearby remained hidden or was destroyed, an assertion nearly impossible to disprove, evidence showing the increased activity which would surely be associated with a cover up operation of such a seminal event was also completely lacking, making the assertion that something was being hidden extremely unlikely. “There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a higher tempo of operational activity reported that would be logically generated if an alien craft, whose intentions were unknown, entered US territory.” The report also refuted claims that several specific high-ranking military personnel were engaged in activities surrounding a recovery of aliens and a cover-up during the time in question by tracing their actual documented activities.

In eliminating an alien recovery as the source of the incident, the report concluded: “… if some event happened that was one of the ‘watershed happenings’ in human history, the US military certainly reacted in an unconcerned and cavalier manner. In an actual case, the military would have had to order thousands of soldiers and airmen, not only at Roswell but throughout the US, to act nonchalantly, pretend to conduct and report business as usual, and generate absolutely no paperwork of a suspicious nature, while simultaneously anticipating that twenty years or more into the future people would have available a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act that would give them great leeway to review and explore government documents. The records indicate that none of this happened (or if it did, it was controlled by a security system so efficient and tight that no one, US or otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system had been in effect at the time, it would have also been used to protect our atomic secrets from the Soviets, which history has showed obviously was not the case). The records reviewed confirmed that no such sophisticated and efficient security system existed.”