Operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field and part of the top secret Project Mogul, the balloon was intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

In 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel revealed that the army's weather balloon claim had been a cover story, and speculated that the debris was of extraterrestrial origin.

[7] Amid the first summer of the Cold War,[8] press nationwide covered Kenneth Arnold's account of what became known as flying saucers, objects that allegedly performed maneuvers beyond the capabilities of any known aircraft.

They demonstrated balloon configurations used by the Mogul team as ways to gather meteorological data, offering a plausible explanation for any unusual aspects of the Roswell debris.

[52] The hoax narrative included small grey humanoid bodies, metal stronger than any found on Earth, indecipherable writing, and a government coverup to prevent public panic – these elements appeared in later versions of the Roswell myth.

[67] Decades later, Carr's son recalled that he had often "mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of strangers... [tales of] befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico.

[76][77] On September 20, 1980, the TV series In Search of..., hosted by Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy, aired an interview where Marcel described his participation in the 1947 press conference:[37] They wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't at liberty to do that.

It popularized Marcel's account and added the claimed discovery of alien bodies,[27] found approximately 150 miles west of the original debris site on the Plains of San Agustin.

[88] Friedman, Berlitz, and Moore also connected Marcel's account to an earlier statement by Lydia Sleppy, a former teletype operator at the KOAT radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[89] Sleppy claimed that she was typing a story about crashed saucer wreckage as dictated by reporter Johnny McBoyle until interrupted by an incoming message, ordering her to end communications.

[89] Between 1978 and the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Friedman, Moore, and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed many people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947, generating competing and conflicting accounts.

[101] The Roswell Incident introduced alien bodies – via the second-hand legends of deceased civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett – purportedly found by archaeologists on the Plains of San Agustin.

[104] Some elements of the witness accounts – small alien bodies, indestructible metals, hieroglyphic writing – matched other crashed saucer legends more than the 1947 reports from Roswell.

[107][102] However, during the time that Mac Brazel was alleged to have been in military custody, multiple people reported seeing him in Roswell, and he provided an interview to local radio station KGFL.

"[151] Scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning said that Dennis cannot be regarded as a reliable witness, considering that he had seemingly waited over 40 years before he started recounting a series of unconnected events.

[168] Friedman's description of her typing as "interrupted" by an FBI message and Moore's claim that "the machine suddenly stopped itself" were found to be impossible for the teletype model that Sleppy operated in 1947.

[181] The Air Force provided official responses to Roswell conspiracy theories during the mid-1990s under pressure from New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff and the General Accounting Office (GAO).

[185] Within the UFO community, the Air Force reports were not accepted,[186] and ufologists noted that the GAO probe found no Roswell documents at the CIA and no information about the alleged Majestic 12 group.

[189] Carl Sagan and Phil Klass noted that aspects of the debris reported as anomalous – including the abstract symbols and lightweight foil – matched the materials used by Project Mogul.

[195] In 1995, British entrepreneur Ray Santilli claimed to have footage of an alien autopsy filmed after the 1947 Roswell crash, purchased from an elderly Army Air Force cameraman.

[197][198] The purported cameraman Barnett had died in 1967 without ever serving in the military,[199] and visual effects expert Stan Winston told newspapers that Alien Autopsy had misrepresented his conclusion that Santilli's footage was an obvious fake.

[195] Though thoroughly debunked, core UFO believers, many of whom still accepted earlier hoaxes like the Aztec crash,[203] weighed the autopsy footage as additional evidence strengthening the connection between Roswell and extraterrestrials.

[212] Lacking evidence, the book relied on weight provided by Corso's past work on the Foreign Technology Division, and a foreword from US Senator and World War II veteran Strom Thurmond.

"[214][215] Roswell has remained the subject of divergent popular works, including those by ufologist Walter Bosley, paranormal author Nick Redfern, and American journalist Annie Jacobsen.

[216] In 2011, Jacobsen's Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base featured a claim that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was recruited by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to cause hysteria.

In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man's sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent.

[220] In 2020, an Air Force historian revealed a recently declassified report of a circa-1951 incident in which two Roswell personnel donned poorly fitting radioactive suits, complete with oxygen masks, while retrieving a weather balloon after an atomic test.

[a] Mogul – the classified portion of an unclassified New York University atmospheric research project – was a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons to monitor nuclear tests.

[183] Anthropologists Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart highlight the Roswell Story was a prime example of how a discourse moved from the fringes to the mainstream, aligning with the 1980s zeitgeist of public fascination with "conspiracy, cover-up and repression".

[48] Skeptics Joe Nickell and James McGaha proposed that Roswell's time spent away from public attention allowed the development of a mythology drawing from later UFO folklore, and that the early debunking of the incident created space for ufologists to intentionally distort accounts towards sensationalism.