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Roswell, New Mexico. It has become synonymous with UFOs and government secrecy. In 1947,

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some say Roswell was visited by something we can't explain.

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That it is not a weather balloon, nor an aircraft, nor a missile. It is something else.

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In centers of classified government research, officials have always been quiet, which only

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stokes the flames of conspiracy.

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And I always felt that the government had not disclosed everything, that there was something

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out there.

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But with so little proof, people are looking for any scrap of evidence to support their

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theories.

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I've got it.

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And Roswell continues to cash in on the legend.

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You would never have heard of Roswell if it weren't for the fact that aliens are claimed

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to have decided this was the place on earth that they wanted to visit the most.

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Now, with 50-year-old military programs finally coming to light, will it explain the truth

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or just explode the myth?

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The government did lie about what the crash debris in New Mexico was. We didn't find out

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until recently what they were really doing.

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The battle between fact and fiction continues in the desert today. Explore the shifting landscape

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of Roswell.

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Unidentified flying objects. They've been reported in our skies for decades. Thousands

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of UFO sightings have been documented in official government files. Most have logical, scientific

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explanations. Yet some cases remain unexplained, classified, unidentified. Can newly released

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files reveal the truth behind these UFO encounters?

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The story begins with a loud explosion over one of the least populated places in the United

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States, the New Mexico Desert.

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Rancher Mack Brazel is one of the area's few occupants. At daybreak, Brazel decides to head

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out to investigate whatever made the sound.

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Deep in the desert, Brazel reports finding an incredible scene. A huge debris field of

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wreckage. Something reduced to pieces that can't be identified. Whatever it is, it will

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become the crux of a controversy that for some will never die.

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Brazel loads an assortment of pieces onto his truck. He drives to the nearest town, 75

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miles southeast, which happens to be Roswell. The sheriff in Roswell is just as puzzled

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by the wreckage as Brazel. He directs him to the local military base, home of the Army

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Air 509th Bomber Group. The base intelligence officer is Major Jesse Marcell, who became

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a critical player in the Roswell story. Jesse Marcell is the lead intelligence officer

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of the 509th Bomber Group. Donald Schmidt has been researching the incident for 30 years.

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He contacts his base commander, Colonel William Blanchard. Blanchard's impressed enough with

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the material that he sends out not only Major Marcell, but also his head of counterintelligence,

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Captain Sheridan Cabot. In the event it's something foreign. The three men pick through

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the debris. Pieces of something they can only speculate on. It could very well be a downed

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aircraft, but they don't know about any downed aircraft. Nothing's been reported. Marcell

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and Cabot were baffled by the strange material, so they collect some pieces to take back to

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the base. They believe it could have come from anywhere, including outer space, because

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at that very moment, the nation is in the midst of a flying saucer frenzy. The thing

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about Roswell is that it didn't happen in a vacuum. Richard Dolan is a UFO researcher

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and author. It was in the midst of a very significant wave of flying saucer sightings

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that were being reported over the whole western part of the United States. Around the same

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time as the debris discovery near Roswell, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported

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a series of strange connected objects flying at high speed in Washington state. He described

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a series of airplanes or aircraft of some kind that seemed to move like saucers skipping

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on water. Michael Shermer is a science author and publisher of Skeptic Magazine. Halsey

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Met was by saucer was they were acting like a saucer skipping on what not that they were

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saucer shape, but somehow that got confabulated as oh, they were saucer shaped and all of

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a sudden flying saucers. The media made headlines and the government took notice. They were

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unknown when they're unknown that concerns the Air Force because the Air Force is responsible

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for protecting the airspace the United States. Richard Weaver wrote the official U.S. Air

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Force report about the Roswell incident. Something's flying around in there that we

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don't know about it can't stop or can't identify, but it may be a threat to the security of

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the United States. Arnold's sighting and the publicity that followed set off a wave of

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others. People reported UFOs all over the U.S., Canada and Europe. Back at the Roswell

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Army Air Base, Major Marcel Mayiff had flying saucers on his mind when he saw the crash

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debris for the first time. So he reported that he may have found the debris of a crashed

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flying saucer. Then his superior officer, Colonel Blanchard, issued a public statement

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using that phrase and fueling a fire. At the peak of the flying saucer frenzy, the government

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reported that it had one. Newspapers went crazy. But the next day, the Army held a press

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conference and changed its story. Brigadier General Roger Ramey, Blanchard's superior

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officer, said that the debris was of a crashed weather balloon. Major Marcel posed with

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the material but did not speak. That story seemed plausible but not as exciting as a

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flying saucer. So the Roswell incident faded away. For decades, it was completely forgotten.

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In 1959, there was a report issued of the top 500 UFO sightings of all time. And Roswell

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isn't even on the list. It's not even one of the most interesting top 500. And by 1980,

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it's the most important thing that ever happened. Okay, how does that happen?

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It happened because 30 years after the incident that few people even remembered, Jesse Marcel

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gave an interview. One thing I was certain of, being familiar with all our activities, that it

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was not a weather balloon, nor an aircraft, nor a missile. It was something else of which we didn't

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know what it was. Marcel didn't believe the military's weather balloon story. Instead, he

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recounted an incident full of mystery and a hint of conspiracy, including new details that raised

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new questions. The newsmen saw very little of that particular, very small portion of it. They wanted

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me to tell them about it and I couldn't say anything. And when a general came in, he told me

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not to say anything that he would handle it. In the 1978 interview, Marcel also revealed that he

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stopped home on the way back to the airbase to show his family the strange debris he had found.

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Marcel also told this story to Don Schmidt. Two o'clock in the morning, Tuesday, July 8th,

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Jesse Jr. He's growls from his sleep by his father. Jesse, I want to show you something. Come out to

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the kitchen and all this unusual metal-like debris. A lot of it had a lot of little members

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with symbols that, to me, are called hieroglyphics because I could not interpret them. It could not

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be read. These little members could not be broken. We even tried making a dent in it with a 16-pound

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sledgehammer. Still no dent in it. Marcel nicknamed one piece of the debris memory metal because it

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appeared to retake its original shape no matter how he crumpled it. In 1980, Marcel's story appeared

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in the National Enquirer, visible to everyone at the supermarket checkout counter. That was the spark

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that lit a thousand conspiracy theories. Well, the Roswell incident in 1947 has taken on this

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character as being kind of the genesis story of UFOs in the United States.

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Dr. Roger Launius is from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. And it wasn't really until

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the 80s and 90s that this began to take on this large cultural phenomenon. A cottage industry

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began to take shape, fueled by old questions, new allegations, and the timeless art of making a buck.

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Thirty years after the incident, an anonymous town suddenly becomes anonymous with alien secrets

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and government conspiracies. There seems to be a general phenomenon in UFology actually,

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in which there's some incident and then the whole thing fades.

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Seth Shostak is the lead astronomer for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Then somebody resurrects it and says, no, no, no. There was some sort of cover up or there was

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information you didn't know about. I've interviewed some more people, whatever. Suddenly it comes out

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of the shadows again with renewed vigor. This happens over and over again. It certainly happened

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with Roswell. Roswell went away. It was a discredited story for a long time. And then people started

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writing books. Many came forward with new allegations, building the Roswell incident into a modern myth.

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Frankie Rose says her father was sent to the crash site as a firefighter.

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They thought they were going to a crash site of an airplane,

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but when they got out there, it was a flying saucer. She says her father gave her a piece

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of metal from the crash, echoing the story of Jesse Marcell and his family from 40 years earlier.

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It was a piece of material that was so soft that my dad could wad it up into his hand

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and then drop it. It had no wrinkles at all. The matching stories could be a sign of accuracy

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or a sign of one person's accounts seeping into another's decades later.

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Tales like this fuel the Roswell legend, which has grown far beyond simple crash debris.

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Among other beliefs are alien bodies hidden in a government warehouse. Their images are now

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embedded in pop culture. The stories have grown more bizarre over time. Roswell itself is morphed.

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It gets more mythical as you go on. New things keep coming up and new people keep coming forward

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after all these years. It's a business now. The business continues to grow with the continuous

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seeding of government conspiracy theories. I always felt that the government had not disclosed

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everything, that there was something out there. Even New Mexico's former governor Bill Richardson

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is suspicious when the government keeps quiet. Everything seemed to be classified. I would ask

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questions. They'd say, what's classified? National security. I said, well, come on. I'm a member of

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Congress. What do you know? What can you tell me? And the government would just stare blankly, say

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nothing. When it comes to classified programs, most politicians accept some secrecy as part of the

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deal. Sometimes the government has to lie to keep something secret. And so when UFOlogists say,

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yeah, the government lies, it's like, well, yeah, duh. I mean, you just figured that out. I mean,

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I mean, you've been paying attention. But the fact that they lie about this over here doesn't mean

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they're lying about the thing you would like to be true. So if someone wants UFOs to be true,

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a secret government offers a wide open window to endless speculation.

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Some are putting their own Roswell theories to the test under the baking sun of the New Mexico

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desert. The exact location of the 1947 crash site near Roswell, New Mexico is not marked on any map.

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Rancher Mack Brazils family has kept the site a secret to avoid curious, uninvited visitors.

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Only a select few claim to know where it is. And one of those people is UFO researcher Donald Schmidt.

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Schmidt believes this is the scene of the Roswell crash and the debris field was secretly cleaned

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out by the US military in 1947. Well, what we have during the course of two and a half to three days,

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you had 50 to 60 men that came out as far as in trucks and they would line up shoulder to shoulder,

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even get down and hands and knees. As one of the MPs described to us, their orders were,

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if it doesn't move, bag it. But more than 50 years later, some think there may still be crash debris

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hidden in the vast desert and they will go to extreme lengths to look for it.

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Geologist Frank Kimbler teaches Earth Sciences in New Mexico. He hopes the remoteness of the site

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has kept some evidence from being disturbed. It's too remote. It's clean. And so the things that you

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get in a metal detector are the types of things that might be odd, especially since this area

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is the debris field from the crash site. So the potential for finding something is really good

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because it has not been contaminated. But covering such a vast expanse on foot makes it very time

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consuming. I have been out here many times in the past searching the area for hours on in. The search

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for some kind of concrete debris is intense because you got to have it. It's what we skeptics are

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demanding. That's a nice story. But what have you got to show me? Does Kimbler have a chance of finding

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any useful evidence in the sand a half century later? Another mysterious crash site offers hope that

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he does. In 1986, something crashed in a mountainous desert near Bakersfield, California. Government

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officials kept everyone out and cleaned it up themselves, which roused a lot of suspicion.

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In many ways, this incident parallels the classic UFO crash stories. Peter Merlin is an

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investigator who has visited over 100 aviation crash sites. An unknown vehicle crashed in a

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remote rural area. The government took control of the site and security was extremely high.

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Armed guards everywhere. Controlled perimeter. No fly zone. A decade later, the incident was

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declassified. The report reveals it was not an alien spacecraft, but an F-117, the famed stealth

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fighter. The stealth fighter represented at that time the pinnacle of military aviation technology.

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It was absolutely cutting edge. An airplane that was virtually invisible to radar detection.

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The Air Force didn't want pieces of that falling into enemy hands. It was imperative that they try

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to clean up as much as possible. The F-117 crashed on a remote mountain, deep in the wilderness.

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Merlin knows the military swept the site. Now, he wants to find out if anything got left behind.

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At the time this airplane crashed, it was a top secret special access program.

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They tried to clean up the site, but as you can see it's very rugged terrain.

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It's a steep mountainous canyon with lots of rocks. They had a couple hundred guys out here

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working in the dead of summer. A lot of rattlesnakes, heat. Finding debris at the Bakersfield site

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could offer hope that something could still be found near Roswell. Merlin scans an area near

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the edge of the debris field. Almost three decades after the crash, the chance of finding anything

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seems like a long shot. But then Merlin gets a hit.

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Got something here.

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Yep, here's a piece.

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Looks like a piece of aluminum.

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Then another. And another. Merlin finds over a dozen pieces of something.

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Got a little piece of aluminum structure here. If the Roswell incident involved the crash of an

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actual space vehicle, I would expect that you would be able to go there today and find physical

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evidence. If you can find pieces of a known black project, surely you can find pieces of a UFO.

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Merlin's logic may not so easily translate into success for Frank Kimbler near Roswell,

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but that won't stop him from trying. Working in a grid, Kimbler combs an area he's never examined

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before. He searches for two hours.

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Oh, I got a hit. I got a nice clean ping on this, so it doesn't sound like iron, so I need to dig it up,

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see what's there.

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It's in this thing, it's in that one.

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There we go.

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This tiny piece of metal could be anything, but the distorted and stressed appearance

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raises Frank Kimbler's hopes that it's a piece of debris from the crash site.

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That's what's exciting about this. When you come out here and find pieces like this that might be from a space

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craft, now we have some proof in hand and it goes back to a lab to be tested and it just doesn't get any better than this.

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A 20th century mystery is about to get some 21st century analysis. Did Kimbler find earthly junk

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or otherworldly material? Is he about to break an old UFO cold base wide open?

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Today is a wonderful day.

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Roswell, New Mexico.

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Geologist Frank Kimbler has discovered a tiny piece of metal in the desert where something crashed in 1947.

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The Genesis of the Roswell UFO legend.

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I think it's fantastic.

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Kimbler's hope to unearth new evidence now hangs in the analysis of this mysterious piece of metal.

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You know what? The next thing we need to do is we need to take this into a lab and we need to get it tested to find out exactly what it is

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and hopefully find out where it came from, which is the key point.

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He sends it to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

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Mike Spildy studies minerals from extreme environments, including Mars.

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The university's electron microscope can reveal exactly what it is.

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Spildy mounts tiny fragments on an epoxy disc.

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We need a very fine smooth surface for the micro probe analysis.

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He then puts the sample in an electron microscope, which can measure every element in the metal.

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So now the sample's inside underneath the electron column.

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Edx will give us a spectrum of the metal.

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Let's see what it is.

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Spildy begins to interpret the readout.

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So on these lighter regions we have a lot of aluminum, some silicon, some manganese, and some iron.

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We can determine what type of alloy it is by measuring the aluminum, silicon, iron and manganese, which we'll do next down here.

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He consults a chart of known alloys.

206
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So we look for fairly high concentration of manganese.

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So we've got one there.

208
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Then we want to match up with silica and magnesium.

209
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The results are still unclear.

210
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Kimbler's piece is some kind of aluminum alloy and contains a significant amount of magnesium.

211
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It's the magnesium that could unlock the secret to where this metal comes from.

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Magnesium isotopes are kind of a chemical signature.

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David Thomas is a scientist at New Mexico Tech.

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If you had some spaceship from another star system that was made of magnesium and it crashed, on earth its magnesium content would be different.

215
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It's like a fingerprint.

216
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So we use isotopes to identify strange materials.

217
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An isotope test will reveal the exact physical structure of this mystery metal and determine whether it comes from earth or elsewhere.

218
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Frank Kimbler is one of many who are thirsting for new information about the Roswell incident.

219
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From 1947 to 1978, this was not on America's radar screen.

220
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Roswell had not been associated with UFOs and there was little reason to doubt the government's story at the time.

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It was a crashed weather balloon.

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But while the Roswell story remained dormant, the flying saucer craze swept America.

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It was fueled by constant media exposure, triggering all manner of claims and debates.

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There's kind of a feedback cycle when it comes to UFO sightings because as soon as you talk about flying discs and they start talking about those in 1947, then suddenly you're getting reports of a lot of flying discs.

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So by the time Jesse Marcell resurfaced and recast a 30 year old story nobody knew,

226
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and while Jaro came in,

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into a story everyone needed to hear, the Roswell incident grew into the great American mystery.

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And the quintessential government conspiracy story.

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America is very fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

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If there are things being seen in the sky all the time and you think that they are not just UFOs but actual alien craft and the government says no they're not,

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well what are you going to do?

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You could either change your mind or you could assume that maybe they're covering up.

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And I think for Americans it's a great temptation to assume yeah they're probably covering up.

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For years rumors swirled and stories flew and the government said little.

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It frustrated even those inside government.

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Finally at the request of Congress the U.S. Air Force officially reopened the case.

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In 1994 Colonel Richard Weaver led the official U.S. government investigation into the Roswell incident.

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I did go into this with a really open reasonable mind.

239
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The first part is something that would probably be one of the greatest things in history.

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How cool would that be?

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Weaver says his orders were to investigate all possibilities no matter where the evidence led him.

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The result is a comprehensive report that runs almost 1,000 pages.

243
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One theory he explored.

244
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The craft was a top secret project inherited from Nazi technology.

245
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At the time in New Mexico were a number of captured V-2s and their variants that we took from the Germans.

246
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The V-2 was the world's first long-range missile.

247
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Developed by the Nazis and seized by the U.S. immediately after the war.

248
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Weaver's team considered whether a secret V-2 crashed at Roswell.

249
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Because it wasn't a very reliable rocket it was kind of a point and shoot and hoped that it landed kind of where you wanted it to.

250
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But they uncovered no evidence to support this idea.

251
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Another theory. A top secret nuclear project gone awry.

252
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We looked at a nuclear accident because the 509th at the time was the only people in the world that had nuclear weapons.

253
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So it was a pretty big deal to see if something had gone wrong involving a nuclear weapon.

254
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And there was nothing there.

255
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With no evidence of a downed missile or radioactive debris.

256
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Weaver's team looked at mistaken identity for experimental planes.

257
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There were German aircraft developers that had advanced aircraft that the Nazis had been working on.

258
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We wanted to get our hands on. The Russians wanted to get their hands on.

259
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They looked at those to see if this possibly could have been something that had been exploited.

260
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But there was just nothing out there to support any of that kind of conjecture.

261
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The Air Force investigators examined classified files and interviewed witnesses and experts from every angle.

262
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They looked everywhere to find an explanation. Earthly or alien.

263
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And finally found something extraordinary.

264
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Army Intelligence Officer Jesse Marcell was right.

265
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It was nothing he had ever seen before.

266
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That it was not a weather balloon.

267
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Nor an aircraft nor a missile.

268
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It was something else which we didn't know what it was.

269
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In 1947 a rancher found a crash debris in the New Mexico desert.

270
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The mysterious materials baffled authorities.

271
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The military called it a crashed flying saucer.

272
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And the legend of Roswell was born.

273
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It is the most talked about UFO incident in history and the most controversial.

274
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But it is not included in the government's most famous compilation of UFO investigations.

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In 1952 the U.S. Air Force responded to a hailstorm of UFO sightings by starting project Blue Book.

276
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They were determined to investigate UFO phenomena.

277
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Blue Book was an effort by the Air Force to find out what these phenomena may have been

278
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if they were a threat to national security.

279
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In 2017 straight years the Air Force investigated thousands of UFO reports all over the country.

280
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Out of genuine concern and caution.

281
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Typically what they would do is they would bring together a dozen or so experts.

282
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And these were very expert experts.

283
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These are people who knew about upper atmosphere physics.

284
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They knew astronomy. They knew aeronautics.

285
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They knew the things that you would need to know to try and figure out what these things were.

286
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Because the Roswell incident didn't resurface as a UFO mystery until much later.

287
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It was not investigated by Project Blue Book.

288
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But there is an incident within these pages that mirrors the circumstances of Roswell.

289
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A possible UFO crash.

290
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It's called the Kecksburg Incident.

291
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Which occurred in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada.

292
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The event happened late on the afternoon of December 9th 1965.

293
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Stan Gordon was 16 at the time.

294
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He's been researching the incident ever since.

295
00:29:10,040 --> 00:29:16,040
There were multitudes of eyewitnesses from Ontario Canada over Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania

296
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that observed this brilliant fireball moving across the sky.

297
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And that object whatever it was came in over the greater Pittsburgh area.

298
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And reportedly fell in a winter ravine for a close to where we're standing outside of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.

299
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Many people saw this object making turns making kind of a slow landing.

300
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Leslie Kane is an investigative journalist who has written extensively on the Kecksburg Incident.

301
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Some people saw it make turns. Some people saw a fire coming out the back of it.

302
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And it crashed in the woods.

303
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Was it a meteor? A fallen satellite?

304
00:29:55,000 --> 00:29:59,000
Air Force investigators interviewed eyewitnesses and searched the area.

305
00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:01,000
But they reported finding nothing.

306
00:30:01,960 --> 00:30:05,960
Officials concluded that the object was probably a meteor.

307
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Hear that?

308
00:30:09,960 --> 00:30:11,960
But locals near Kecksburg tell a far different story.

309
00:30:11,960 --> 00:30:15,960
In 1965 I was out cruising in my convertible.

310
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When I heard on WHJB that something had landed in Kecksburg.

311
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I come down the hill through Kecksburg and there was some people standing alongside a farm road.

312
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I stopped and asked them what had happened.

313
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They said well back this road something had landed.

314
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And I looked down in through the field into the woods.

315
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And I could see where something had tore up the underbrush and the trees as it landed.

316
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And I could see a blue bluish light like a welder's light that was getting bright.

317
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And then real dull and it continued to do that the whole time I was here.

318
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Locals say the military moved in quickly and forcefully to protect the site.

319
00:31:09,960 --> 00:31:13,960
The military were everywhere. They were going in every which direction.

320
00:31:13,960 --> 00:31:19,960
They were being positioned throughout the fields along with the state police.

321
00:31:19,960 --> 00:31:25,960
And then after that the state police and the military come up and they told everyone to leave.

322
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Those who claim to be eyewitnesses told a story that sounds nothing like the official explanation of a meteor.

323
00:31:33,960 --> 00:31:39,960
And though government investigators scoured the purported landing site and found nothing.

324
00:31:39,960 --> 00:31:45,960
Locals recall mysterious events on the ground.

325
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They described an object in the woods large metallic and shaped like an acorn big enough for a person to stand inside.

326
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They're estimating from the debris around it that this thing is maybe 10 to 12 feet or more in length.

327
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Approximately maybe 8 to 10 feet or so in diameter.

328
00:32:03,960 --> 00:32:09,960
And of course what's interesting is that back part with what they call the ring gear, the bumper, it's raised up on the back of the acorn.

329
00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:17,960
Raised up on that with these unusual markings that look more like symbols than writing.

330
00:32:17,960 --> 00:32:25,960
Bill Weaver says he saw men carrying a large wooden box.

331
00:32:25,960 --> 00:32:29,960
They was carrying a box about 4 to 5 foot square.

332
00:32:29,960 --> 00:32:36,960
And they walked down through the field into the woods toward this blue light that was flashing off and on.

333
00:32:36,960 --> 00:32:44,960
But when I left they hadn't come back out yet.

334
00:32:44,960 --> 00:32:47,960
Mike Slater was 14 years old at the time.

335
00:32:47,960 --> 00:32:55,960
All that remains of his childhood home are the steps where he says he had an encounter with the military.

336
00:32:55,960 --> 00:33:01,960
I was sitting on the steps of my home when we heard that there was a possible landing on top of Kexburg Hill.

337
00:33:01,960 --> 00:33:07,960
And as I was sitting there I had noticed a jeep coming into town.

338
00:33:07,960 --> 00:33:11,960
Slater says the jeep stopped right in front of his house.

339
00:33:11,960 --> 00:33:17,960
And he said to me, had there been a lot of people asking for directions to where the site is?

340
00:33:17,960 --> 00:33:20,960
And I went, well yes, they have been and I've been given directions.

341
00:33:20,960 --> 00:33:28,960
He said, you could do your country a great service if you would not give him directions or if you did, don't send him up there.

342
00:33:28,960 --> 00:33:33,960
So I didn't. I either said no or I gave him wrong directions.

343
00:33:33,960 --> 00:33:38,960
After that, Slater says he saw the military remove a large object.

344
00:33:38,960 --> 00:33:43,960
On the flatbed was a tarped object which was sitting more toward the front of the truck.

345
00:33:43,960 --> 00:33:48,960
And it wasn't going that fast. It went by me. I got a great view of it as it left town.

346
00:33:48,960 --> 00:33:56,960
Some have since wondered if instead of a meteor it was a crashed Soviet satellite that the government wanted to keep from the general public.

347
00:33:56,960 --> 00:34:00,960
There has never been a clear answer that satisfies everyone.

348
00:34:00,960 --> 00:34:08,960
So just like the Roswell incident, some are looking for physical evidence to solve the mystery decades later.

349
00:34:08,960 --> 00:34:15,960
In 2003, retired forestry professor Dr. Ray Hicks examined the alleged crash site.

350
00:34:15,960 --> 00:34:22,960
I was given some photographs and as I looked around I found one of the trees that was in the photograph.

351
00:34:22,960 --> 00:34:27,960
Hicks believes he identified the tree that was located in the center of the site.

352
00:34:30,960 --> 00:34:35,960
That tree right there is this one.

353
00:34:38,960 --> 00:34:46,960
This tree right here which was also apparently decapitated, something happened to knock the top out of it.

354
00:34:46,960 --> 00:34:50,960
That tree has broken down and fallen over.

355
00:34:50,960 --> 00:34:55,960
He finds a few damaged trees, isolated in a narrow area in the woods.

356
00:34:55,960 --> 00:35:03,960
I tried to establish what the path was that the object took through the woods and then I found some trees that had damaged to their top.

357
00:35:03,960 --> 00:35:07,960
In fact, the top had been broken out.

358
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:12,960
Core samples taken from the trees put an exact date on when they were damaged.

359
00:35:12,960 --> 00:35:21,960
And I noticed that a very dramatic decrease in growth occurred in a given year and it turned out that that was 1965.

360
00:35:21,960 --> 00:35:26,960
The men wonder what could have caused tree damage like this.

361
00:35:26,960 --> 00:35:36,960
So if we're looking at some type of weather event, whether it be an ice storm, a tornado, even a microburst, you would think it would be more extensive damage,

362
00:35:36,960 --> 00:35:40,960
but it seemed to be isolated just at that path where the tree damaged once.

363
00:35:40,960 --> 00:35:49,960
That tree experienced a very dramatic reduction in growth right at the year that this object had fallen here.

364
00:35:49,960 --> 00:35:55,960
Isolated tree damage could be caused by many factors, including a meteor strike.

365
00:35:55,960 --> 00:36:02,960
But after decades of searching, there is no evidence that anything landed here, let alone a UFO.

366
00:36:02,960 --> 00:36:11,960
Tree rings can tell a tree's story, but they can't confirm a UFO story.

367
00:36:11,960 --> 00:36:16,960
In Kecksburg, its official government report versus local legend.

368
00:36:16,960 --> 00:36:23,960
Without any new evidence, it remains a matter of opinion as to what happened in the Pennsylvania forest.

369
00:36:23,960 --> 00:36:30,960
But in the New Mexico desert, Frank Kimbler hopes he can shed some scientific light on the Roswell incident.

370
00:36:30,960 --> 00:36:38,960
With a tiny metal fragment he found buried in the dirt where many think a UFO crashed in 1947.

371
00:36:38,960 --> 00:36:43,960
New isotope tests on the piece could uncover evidence of non-earthly origin,

372
00:36:43,960 --> 00:36:48,960
and the U.S. Air Force rocks the Roswell case with a shocking discovery of its own.

373
00:36:48,960 --> 00:36:55,960
It was a top secret program that was considered to be as important as the Manhattan Project.

374
00:36:57,960 --> 00:37:06,960
Frank Kimbler uncovered a tiny piece of metal near the reported site of the famous Roswell crash of 1947.

375
00:37:07,960 --> 00:37:14,960
Electron microscope analysis already determined it to be aluminum alloy with a significant amount of magnesium.

376
00:37:16,960 --> 00:37:22,960
That magnesium can now undergo an isotope test to determine the origin of the metal.

377
00:37:25,960 --> 00:37:35,960
At Trent University near Toronto, isotope researcher Bastion Gayorg can discover whether the sample comes from our planet or somewhere else.

378
00:37:37,960 --> 00:37:43,960
The question would be really, if you find something that's very abnormal, doesn't fit what we typically see on Earth,

379
00:37:43,960 --> 00:37:51,960
or typically see meteorites from our solar system, could this be an indicator for magnesium being derived from either solar system,

380
00:37:51,960 --> 00:37:55,960
which would then obviously involve interstellar travel?

381
00:37:55,960 --> 00:37:59,960
He includes two other control samples in his test.

382
00:37:59,960 --> 00:38:04,960
One is a piece of aluminum from a 1940s military plane.

383
00:38:04,960 --> 00:38:07,960
The other is a common soda can.

384
00:38:08,960 --> 00:38:10,960
For good measure, we throw in a soda can.

385
00:38:10,960 --> 00:38:18,960
We just wanted to make sure that maybe these artifacts that have been discovered are not just cans that were lying in the desert for 50 odd years.

386
00:38:19,960 --> 00:38:25,960
So now we wait for the last bit of the iron and manganese to drip through into the waste.

387
00:38:27,960 --> 00:38:30,960
The results arrive in real time.

388
00:38:31,960 --> 00:38:37,960
On the screen I see now the isotope, the peak scan of the different isotopes of magnesium.

389
00:38:38,960 --> 00:38:40,960
The science is conclusive.

390
00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:45,960
So the magnesium isotope composition of all these three pieces is identical with an error.

391
00:38:46,960 --> 00:38:50,960
They're all plot in the range of what we would typically see on planet Earth.

392
00:38:53,960 --> 00:38:57,960
The fragment found in the Roswell Desert is not extraterrestrial.

393
00:38:58,960 --> 00:39:02,960
But could it still be an intriguing piece of history?

394
00:39:03,960 --> 00:39:12,960
Back in New Mexico, Michael Spildy performs further analysis on the fragment and discovers that the material is not what you would expect to find in the middle of the desert.

395
00:39:13,960 --> 00:39:17,960
High tensile strength, construction of aircraft structures.

396
00:39:18,960 --> 00:39:20,960
So it's basically an aircraft aluminum.

397
00:39:21,960 --> 00:39:24,960
If it's aircraft aluminum, it could be crash debris.

398
00:39:24,960 --> 00:39:27,960
Spildy dates the alloy and reveals a new mystery.

399
00:39:31,960 --> 00:39:35,960
The material predates the Roswell incident by more than 10 years.

400
00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:49,960
The fragment seems to be from aircraft aluminum developed in the 1930s.

401
00:39:50,960 --> 00:39:54,960
It could be from an unknown plane crash or a piece of military equipment.

402
00:39:55,960 --> 00:39:58,960
But it's definitely not evidence of an alien spaceship.

403
00:40:00,960 --> 00:40:06,960
Frank Kimbler did indeed make a fascinating historical discovery, just not the one he was hoping for.

404
00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:09,960
But he remains undaunted.

405
00:40:10,960 --> 00:40:16,960
I don't give up. I've never given up on anything and I'm certainly not going to give up on hunting Roswell artifacts.

406
00:40:16,960 --> 00:40:19,960
Richard Weaver didn't give up either.

407
00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:27,960
His official Air Force investigation into the Roswell incident had carte blanche to look into every file and under every rock.

408
00:40:28,960 --> 00:40:35,960
Despite decades of rumors, they did not uncover any flying saucer parts or alien bodies.

409
00:40:36,960 --> 00:40:44,960
But they did find something remarkable hidden in the shadows for over 50 years that appears to explain it all.

410
00:40:45,960 --> 00:40:48,960
It's codename Project Mogul.

411
00:40:49,960 --> 00:40:55,960
Project Mogul was a top secret program that was considered to be as important as the Manhattan Project.

412
00:40:56,960 --> 00:41:07,960
Project Mogul was an interesting project and in some respects one of a series of sort of weird ideas that got pursued in the early Cold War era.

413
00:41:07,960 --> 00:41:19,960
And it was a set of balloons that were attached like a guide wire and they have on these sensing instruments that would be able to detect a nuclear blast.

414
00:41:21,960 --> 00:41:33,960
And what they were trying to do was to get evidence by using ionospheric movement of sound waves for the so-called whom they believe were working on an atomic bomb.

415
00:41:33,960 --> 00:41:41,960
The time it was considered to be category A1 top secret because we didn't want the Russians to know that we were monitoring them.

416
00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:50,960
A Project Mogul balloon was actually an array of kite-like objects and instruments measuring an incredible 700 feet long.

417
00:41:51,960 --> 00:41:54,960
Weaver's team thinks they've discovered the smoking gun.

418
00:41:54,960 --> 00:42:01,960
A Mogul Array test flight in June 1947, simply known as number four, went missing.

419
00:42:03,960 --> 00:42:08,960
Number four fits the parameters of when this material was found.

420
00:42:09,960 --> 00:42:12,960
Brasel brought this in in the first week of July of 1947.

421
00:42:13,960 --> 00:42:19,960
The timing works out, but do the Project Mogul materials match up with what Mac Brasel found in the desert?

422
00:42:20,960 --> 00:42:26,960
A Mogul balloon was, to say it was a balloon, is kind of a misnomer because it's a balloon train.

423
00:42:26,960 --> 00:42:29,960
Sometimes these things were as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

424
00:42:30,960 --> 00:42:37,960
Part of the array is what's called Array One Target, which is strikingly similar to the materials found by Brasel.

425
00:42:38,960 --> 00:42:49,960
Array One Target is about a big, it's very silvery, it's a metallic substance, but it's like on parchment type of paper or material.

426
00:42:50,960 --> 00:42:55,960
Almost kind of leathery feeling, you know, it's not easily ripped like tin foil that you get at the store,

427
00:42:55,960 --> 00:42:59,960
but it wasn't this miraculous spring back thing that's been described.

428
00:43:01,960 --> 00:43:05,960
Super lightweight, balsa wood, tin foil, weird little symbols, military symbols.

429
00:43:05,960 --> 00:43:08,960
So how would you describe this if you know nothing about it?

430
00:43:08,960 --> 00:43:11,960
Oh, it's really spooky, it's weird, it's whatever.

431
00:43:11,960 --> 00:43:17,960
It has nothing to do with UFOs and extraterrestrials and aliens and astronomy and science.

432
00:43:17,960 --> 00:43:24,960
It has everything to do with myth making, storytelling, how the media operates, you know, how things take on a life of their own

433
00:43:24,960 --> 00:43:28,960
and become an event culturally but not in reality.

434
00:43:29,960 --> 00:43:36,960
Fifty years after the Roswell incident, the U.S. Air Force releases the most convincing explanation yet for the crash debris,

435
00:43:36,960 --> 00:43:40,960
a covert spy balloon that had to be kept secret at the time.

436
00:43:42,960 --> 00:43:49,960
So at first, Jesse Marcell's theory of a crashed flying saucer seemed like a good ruse for the press.

437
00:43:50,960 --> 00:43:55,960
You've got a top secret program that's underway that you certainly don't want the Soviet Union to know about.

438
00:43:55,960 --> 00:44:00,960
It becomes almost a cover story for this particular instance.

439
00:44:00,960 --> 00:44:07,960
That's misdirection of the best possibility in terms of media attention because everybody's chasing flying saucers

440
00:44:07,960 --> 00:44:10,960
and they're not chasing a secret government program.

441
00:44:10,960 --> 00:44:15,960
But perhaps the media attention to the flying saucer story was so immediate and intense

442
00:44:15,960 --> 00:44:22,960
that the Air Force changed the story a day later to a much less interesting crash of a standard weather balloon.

443
00:44:23,960 --> 00:44:33,960
With the discovery of Project Mogul, Weaver is confident that his exhaustive research finally gives the Roswell incident a measure of investigative fact.

444
00:44:33,960 --> 00:44:39,960
As we went through, we had to go where the evidence took us. So I'm satisfied with what we found.

445
00:44:39,960 --> 00:44:48,960
It took almost 50 years for the military to uncover its own secrets and produce a plausible explanation for the Roswell incident.

446
00:44:48,960 --> 00:44:54,960
So that sounded like it just explained everything that had happened at Roswell. Yes, it was something secret, but it didn't involve aliens.

447
00:44:54,960 --> 00:45:01,960
But of course, that's not a very interesting story now, is it? Wouldn't you rather believe that, you know, the aliens had crash landed there?

448
00:45:02,960 --> 00:45:07,960
The Roswell story has grown into a cornerstone of American conspiracy theories.

449
00:45:08,960 --> 00:45:15,960
Despite a case that appears closed, it will provoke more scrutiny and certainly provide more income.

450
00:45:15,960 --> 00:45:28,960
The most quintessentially American thing about the Roswell incident is the free enterprise capitalist system that has grown up around Roswell in the aftermath of it.

451
00:45:28,960 --> 00:45:37,960
There's stores and museums and, you know, all kinds of paraphernalia and the knickknacks you can buy and stuff like that. It's kind of a happening.

452
00:45:37,960 --> 00:45:44,960
That is a part of this whole particular story. I believe that is fundamentally American.

453
00:45:44,960 --> 00:45:53,960
A saucer crash. A spy balloon. A mystery. And a marketing bonanza.

454
00:45:53,960 --> 00:45:58,960
Perhaps Americans will always want Roswell to remain unidentified.