The Government Knew the Weird Truth About the Roswell UFO—But Kept it Secret for 47 Years

3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:In 1947, a U.S. spy balloon, part of the top-secret Project Mogul, crash-landed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. Project Mogul was part of an early Cold War effort at aerial surveillance and possible detection of nuclear-weapons testing in the Soviet Union.While the project remained classified for nearly 50 years, alien conspiracy theories grew in its absence, and Roswell remains a fixture of a UFO culture even after the project’s declassification.As the embers of World War II still smoldered, the world looked to the future with trepidation as the two superpowers emerging from the global conflict—the U.S. and the Soviet Union—began drawing new battle lines. The front lines of the two world wars were gone. Instead, the new boundary lines were drawn with conferences, doctrines, and covert intelligence. By 1947, the Cold War was well underway, and the U.S.’s covert surveillance of its geopolitical adversary began in earnest.One of those early top-secret initiatives was known as Project Mogul, a sophisticated system of aerial microphones designed to travel into the ionosphere to monitor sound waves emanating from the Soviet Union. After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only two years earlier, the U.S. feared the Soviet Union would soon develop fission weapons of its own (a fear that was eventually realized 1949).Scientists at New York University developed constant-level balloon technology that allowed balloons to fly at a consistent altitude, as well as telemetering equipment capable of relaying information gathered from the upper atmosphere to ground stations.“Project MOGUL branched out into many areas related to the geophysical properties of the upper atmosphere, including radiowave propagation, radar propagation, ionospheric physics, solar physics, terrestrial magnetism, meteorological physics, and weather forecasting,” says one U.S. Air Force Reserve report. “Considerable resources were devoted to Project MOGUL which included numerous bomber and transport aircraft and two oceangoing vessels. At one point the staff, exclusive of contractors, numbered over 100 persons.”While the science behind the idea was sound, and though Project Mogul provided a model for balloon-based top-secret projects in later decades, the cost and feasibility of the program severely limited its usefulness. Eventually, fixed-wing aerial reconnaissance replaced monitoring balloons. Still, Project Mogul made it into the history books—just not in a way that anyone intended.On June 14, 1947, a rancher named W.W. Bazel and his son, Vernon, discovered unexplainable wreckage in the desert 80 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. On July 7th, Bazel brought the strange debris to George Wilcox, the sheriff of Roswell, who was similarly perplexed by it, and the following day, the local Roswell Daily Record wrote a story saying that the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) had captured a “flying saucer.” Immediately, the military countered the claim saying that the “saucer” was likely a weather balloon. But Bazel, as reported in the next day’s Roswell Morning Dispatch, disagreed with that assessment.Although Roswell looms large in our imagination today, the incident mostly faded from history at the time. That is until the book The Roswell Incident, published in 1980, resurfaced the episode, concluding that the balloon story was a cover up. The engine of conspiracy was now fully primed, and the Roswell incident became one of the most infamous UFO stories in history.Finally, in 1994—nearly 50 years after Project Mogul was originally conceived—the U.S. Air Force issued a report admitting that the Roswell “flying saucer” was actually a spy balloon, specifically NYU Flight 4, that initially launched on June 4, 1947, and crashed into the desert.After half a century, the mystery of Roswell was finally laid to rest—or was it? Today, the small New Mexico town remains the “Alien Capital of the World,” hosts an international UFO museum, and the logo of Roswell’s tourism website features a flying saucer. The obsession of the incident remains, as one retired Air Force officer who worked on Project Mogul told The New York Times back in 1994.“This won’t lay it to rest,” Colonel Albert C. Trakowski said. “The psychology is simple: People believe what they want to believe.”Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.