Roswell Top Secret (1998) Movie Script

- I have no doubt that the

Roswell case is a crash

of an alien spacecraft.

- I'm convinced that

something has been here before

and that something may be here now.

- There is a cover up.

After many years of

investigation, I am certain

that there is a cover

up as far as Roswell.

(dramatic instrumental music)

- 50 years ago, something happened

near the town of Roswell, New Mexico.

That event, known as the Roswell incident,

has become synonymous

with flying saucer crash,

alien visitation, government

cover up, or many say,

a jump to conclusion and

gross distortion of the facts.

Hello, I'm Patrick Macnee.

Mention the name Roswell and chances are,

no matter where you are,

someone will have heard of it,

and most likely will have an

opinion about the subject.

In this program, we'll take

a look at what is known

about Roswell and what is still unknown,

and we'll try to answer the question:

What happened here

and what does the

government know about it?

So why is everyone talking about Roswell?

Well, above all else,

Roswell has become something

of a cultural phenomenon.

A stampede of media attention

fueled by fanatic fascination

by a growing number of both

skeptics and believers,

all coinciding with a 50th anniversary

of the original incident.

The result: Roswell mania.

(lively instrumental music)

Since the late '70s, there

have been dozens of books,

both promoting the theory of

UFO crash and refuting it.

There have been countless

magazine articles,

TV shows, movies, and a burgeoning

presence on the internet.

It seems that everywhere you look,

there's someone saying

something about Roswell.

- I believe that a flying saucer

from another planet crashed.

I believe that a man and

his son found debris,

and I believe that the government,

the United States government

acquired the wreckage

and put it and its inhabitants in storage.

That's what I think happened.

- In the city of the same name,

the craze has grown into a

cottage industry of its own.

There are two UFO museums

within city limits

and a third just outside.

UFO and alien themed

souvenirs are everywhere

and promotional campaigns and slogans

sell every conceivable

product and service.

No one in this city

of almost 50,000 people

can remember anything

like the extravaganza commemorating

the 50 year anniversary.

Rock concerts, lectures,

and other special events

are unprecedented here.

Roswell has become an

internationally known entity

unto itself, all because a single incident

occurred half a century ago.

The question is why after 50 years

are we still talking about Roswell?

What is it about this story

that so intrigues people

and gives rise to such controversy?

In 1947, something crashed

in remote southeastern New Mexico.

After the pieces of the

wreckage were recovered,

the army issued a press release

saying it had captured a flying saucer,

then almost immediately

recanted the earlier statement

and said it was nothing more

than a downed weather balloon.

Not until people who were there started

to tell their stories some 30 years later

did UFO researchers begin

to piece together a story

that has captured the imagination

of people all over the world.

- I've actually read a

lot of books about Roswell

and looked at all the evidence,

and I think that there was some

sort of government cover up.

And I'm pretty sure that

something crashed there

and it wasn't just a weather balloon.

- [Patrick] What we're

talking about is a story

of visitation by beings

from another planet

here on a mission of exploration perhaps,

only to end up casualties.

It is a story of our government

deliberately concealing

details of the incident,

or the whole thing is a

case of misrepresentation

and outright fabrication?

- Something not made on

this earth crashed in 1947.

- So we were quite amused

that they misidentified our

balloon for a flying saucer.

- I would say that I believe

that there was an alien craft

that crashed north of Roswell.

- I'm convinced beyond any doubt

that what happened at Roswell was

that a Project Mogul

train of weather balloons,

about 23 weather balloons,

carrying several aluminum

foil radar targets

so it could be tracked

crashed on the ranch

of man known as Mac Brazel.

- And General DuBose, who

was the Chief of Staff

of 8th Air Force in July

of 1947, told us flat out

that the balloon explanation

was a cover story.

(tense instrumental music)

(lively instrumental music)

- With all the interest

in the incident in 1947,

it's easy to forget that

Roswell is a real place,

a real city with real people.

Located in southeastern New Mexico

in the heart of Chaves County,

Roswell sits in a semiarid region,

3,600 feet above sea level.

The town was first established

in the 1860s by traders

who sold cattle to Navajo

and Apache Indians.

Cowboys were the dominant workforce

in the region for decades.

At the beginning of World War II,

Roswell Army Air Field

opened and became home

to the 509th Bombardment Group,

at one time, the only atomic

bomber wing in the world.

Renamed Walker Air Force

Base after the war,

the air field became a central part

of the Strategic Air Command System.

Though the base closed in the '60s,

the runways are still used

for commercial flights,

general aviation, as well

as a considerable amount

of aircraft testing.

Ranching and agriculture

have always played a big part

in this area, and the

same is still true today.

Many other industries call

Roswell home now, of course,

and the city has come

through the past 50 years

with its eye on a future full of promise.

Mostly, Roswell is just

like any other small city in America.

Well, almost.

(eerie instrumental music)

The story of the Roswell incident

has been painstakingly researched,

pieced together from public

records and eyewitness accounts.

The basic sequence of

events which transpired here

half a century ago is well documented

and generally accepted as fact.

Speculation aside, we

have a pretty good idea

of what happened, and in what order.

Let's go back a moment

to early summer 1947.

Beginning in the month of June,

there was an unprecedented

wave of UFO sightings

around the country.

All over, people were reporting

seeing strange unidentifiable

aerial phenomena.

The army seemed to be at a loss

to explain the observation.

(lively instrumental music)

- [Narrator] Army fighter

planes are on patrol

for flying saucers.

The control tower's in

touch and on the watch.

So are a whole lot of people these days.

They're seeing flying saucers everywhere.

- July the 4th in southeastern New Mexico

was marked by some

of the most violent

thunderstorms on record.

A ranch foreman named William Mac Brazel

heard what he described as

an odd sort of explosion.

The searchers have since

established the sequence

of events that followed.

On Saturday July the 5th

while out riding horseback

on the ranch, Brazel

discovers a large quantity

of lightweight metallic debris.

The material was scattered

over an area 3/4 of a mile long

and several hundred feet wide.

The following morning, Brazel

makes the 75 mile drive

into Roswell and reports his find

to Chaves County Sheriff,

George A. Wilcox,

who in turn, upon witnessing

the debris himself,

decides to notify the military authorities

at Roswell Army Air Field.

In the meantime, Wilcox

speaks to Frank Joyce,

an announcer for local radio

station KGFL in Roswell

looking for anything newsworthy.

The following day, Brazel

escorts intelligence officer

Major Jesse Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt

of the Counterintelligence

Corps to the debris field.

The two then gather

and load up some debris

and return to Roswell.

The next day, Tuesday the 8th,

troops are deployed from

the base to begin recovery

at the debris field.

By now, soldiers are already stationed

at a second location some distance away,

believed to have been

an actual crash site.

Colonel William H. Blanchard

instructs leftenant Walter

Haut to issue a press release

disclosing that the Army

has recovered the remains

of a flying disc.

That afternoon, the

story hits the news wires

and the phone lines in Roswell are jammed.

Evening papers all over

the west pick up the story.

Also that afternoon, Major

Marcel is sent with some debris

to Fort Worth, Texas to meet

with Brigadier General Roger Ramey.

Ramey announces that the identification

of the recovered debris as a flying saucer

has been a mistake, and that

it is actually nothing more

than the remains of a

downed weather balloon

with attached radar reflector.

The following morning,

the Roswell Daily Record

runs the revised version of the story.

For a few brief hours, the lid was off

on one of the most fantastic

stories of human existence,

then suddenly the lid was slammed shut.

Two months later, Chuck Yeager

would break the sound barrier

and America would find itself

taking the first small steps

towards its own program

to travel into space.

Everyone moved on and the

wild flying saucer story

was forgotten by all except

those who were there.

30 years would pass before

troubling memories prompted some

of those participants to start talking.

By now, almost everyone who

has examined this case agrees

that something did crash near Roswell.

The question is: what?

Was it, as the military

claimed at the time,

nothing more unusual than

a downed weather balloon?

Or could it actually have

been some kind of craft

from another planet?

(machine beeping)

- [Reporter] Headline

Editions, July 8th, 1947.

The Army Air Force has

announced that a flying disc

has been found and is now in

the possession of the army.

Army officers say the missile,

found sometime last week,

has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico,

and sent to Wright Field,

Ohio for further inspection.

Colonel William Blanchard of

the Roswell Air Base refuses

to give details of what the

flying disc looked like.

In Fort Worth, Texas where

the object was first sent,

Brigadier General Roger Ramey

says that it is being shipped

by air to the AAF Research

Center at Wright Field, Ohio.

- I have no doubt that the

Roswell case is a crash

of an alien spacecraft.

- [Patrick] No stranger to Roswell,

investigator Kevin Randle

first came to follow up

on the reports that had

intrigued others before him.

- Now what we thought would

happen is we would come down

to Roswell, we'd spend three

or four days down here,

talk to the witnesses and

discover the plausible explanation

for it, blow out of town.

Didn't happen that way.

In fact, the first couple of

days, it didn't go very well,

but then we talked to Bill Brazel,

the son of the man who

found the debris field

up near Corona, New Mexico.

And once we talked to him, we

realized there was much more

to the story, that more had to be done.

There were more people

we needed to talk to.

- [Patrick] One of the

pioneers of UFO research,

Stanton Friedman, is generally credited

with breaking the Roswell case

after a TV station manager

first told him of Jesse Marcel.

- Out of the blue, no previous connection

to anything we'd talked about,

he says, you know, the guy you ought

to talk to is Jesse Marcel.

Who's he?

Oh, well, he handed pieces

of one of these saucers

when he was in the military.

That got my attention, as you can imagine.

I said, well, is he alive?

Do you know him?

Oh yeah, he lives over in Houma.

I hadn't the faintest idea

where Houma, Louisiana was then.

I've been there since, of course.

We're old ham radio buddies.

- [Patrick] Shortly before Marcel's death,

Friedman was able to record an interview

in which the former intelligence officer

recollected that incident.

- One thing I was certain of,

being familiar with all air activities,

that it was not a weather

balloon nor aircraft,

nor a missile.

It was something else of which

we didn't know what it was.

There were just fragments

strewn all over the area,

an area about 3/4 of a mile long

and several hundred feet wide.

So we proceeded to pick up the parts.

A lot of it had a lot of

little numbers with symbols

that, to me, I call them hieroglyphics

because I could not interpret them.

They could not be read.

They were just like symbols of something

that meant something.

These little numbers could not be broken,

could not be burned.

I even tried to burn that.

It would not burn.

See, that stuff weighs nothing.

It's not any thicker than tin

foil in a pack of cigarettes.

He says I tried to bend the stuff.

Says it will not bend.

He says we did all we could to bend it.

It would not bend.

He says, we even tried making a dent in it

with a 16 pound sledgehammer.

He says, still no dent in it.

- [Patrick] Don Schmitt,

coauthor of UFO Crash at Roswell,

along with Kevin Randle,

is likewise convinced

that the crashed object

was a craft from space.

- We have over 500 witnesses testifying

through sworn affidavit

or video deposition

that what was recovered

out here at this site

and at the debris field

site just 40 miles from here

was not manufactured on this earth.

- [Patrick] Waler Haut was

stationed in Roswell in 1947.

As the Public Information

Officer of the 509th,

it was he who issued the press release.

- I got the information

from Colonel Blanchard.

There had been a number of

newspaper and radio reports

on flying saucers, and it really

didn't upset me that much.

If the boss man said that

we had a flying saucer

in our possession, we had one.

That was it.

I was just told to put

out a press release.

- [Patrick] Later that

day, Haut remembers,

the official story changed.

- They said it was a weather

balloon and that's it.

- [Patrick] Many people have

challenged the weather balloon story,

while at least as many

have rejected the notion

of a crashed UFO.

The Air Force recently

commissioned its own investigation

into the enduring mystery

and allegations of cover up.

- Retired Colonel Richard Weaver

is convinced something crashed in Roswell,

just not a flying saucer.

- We found in our study,

our research on Roswell,

that ultimately the explanation

that's the most plausible

was that the debris that

was found was from a project

which in 1947 was classified top secret

called Project Mogul,

which was a high altitude,

constant level balloon research

project which was designed

to detect Soviet military

nuclear explosions

which we weren't able to

detect by any other manner

during that time.

- Despite the conclusion

of the Air Force's report,

the story of something

vastly different persists

to this day.

While no photographs of any

crashed disc are obtainable,

there have been a number of eyewitnesses

who have spoken to investigators.

Some of these individuals have been able

to provide detailed descriptions

of what they remember seeing.

Sworn affidavits, hand drawn sketches,

and various documents have been obtained

from a number of sources.

- We probably conducted between

2,500 and 3,000 interviews

with 500 different people,

and what we're talking

about is not only people

who saw some part of the

story or who were in Roswell

and knew part of the story,

but who were family members,

secondhand witnesses, if you will.

My father told me this story,

my uncle told me this story.

- [Patrick] One of those who

was there was Glenn Dennis,

employed by the Ballard Funeral Home.

- I got a call in the

afternoon from a gentlemen

that called and said that

he was a mortuary officer

and he was wanting to know if we...

how many and if we had some baby caskets,

3'6" or four foot long that

were hermetically sealed,

airtight, waterproof, and all this,

and I informed that we

always kept a four foot.

He wanted to know how many

and I said one in the display,

one in the storeroom.

And he said, how long

would it take to get more?

And I said, hey, what's

going on out there?

What's your problem?

And he said, well, we want to

know how well-prepared you are

in case we should have an

epidemic or something out here

with the base children and all that.

- [Patrick] Bill McDonald

is a forensic sketch artist

who uses techniques employed

by many police departments

to create pictorial profiles of suspects.

- They brought me into the

case for the specific purpose

of reproducing the

spacecraft and the bodies

using forensic methodology standards

that you would expect from either FBI

or homicide detectives.

I worked with the witnesses directly.

I do not re-do their work.

The ship at Roswell, as I

said before, was not a disc.

It was a stingray shaped winged vehicle.

It was 25 feet wide in

wingspan by 28 feet in length

and was covered from wingtip to wingtip

and from the bow to the stern

with a hexagonal beehive

pattern of power cells

that glowed when powered

and provided either

anti-gravitational lift

or electromagnetic fields

that separated the ship

from the ground.

- [Patrick] One of the most

important witnesses in Roswell

in 1947 was Major Marcel's

11-year-old son, Jesse Marcel Jr.

Marcel is a physician with

a practice in Montana.

- My dad came into the house very excited.

He wanted my mother and myself

to look at what he

gathered up in the field

off of a ranch northwest of Roswell.

At that point, I was not quite sure

what a flying saucer was,

but I was sure eager to see

why he was so excited.

I've lived with this for 50 years

and again, I'm not sure what it was,

but I do know what it wasn't.

It does not fit the description

of what the Air Force

tells me, a mobile balloon,

what this debris looks like.

(tense instrumental music)

- [Patrick] Marcel Jr.

recalls the night his father

brought home the strange pieces of debris.

- The material that I saw on

our kitchen floor that night

did not fit the description

of a weather balloon

nor any kind of target device

that would have been used

for radar reflection.

I was a little familiar with radio myself

because I was with my dad

as a ham radio operator

and into this, and again,

it just did not fit the

description of what I now know

to be a radar target nor a

weather balloon, of course.

- [Patrick] Nevertheless,

there have been skeptics

who have called into question

Major Marcel's ability

to identify the materials back in 1947.

- Why he did not know

that this was ordinary

meteorological material

is simply explained by the fact

that he didn't know what it was,

that he had no prior experience,

no knowledge of what it was,

and so he simply could not identify it.

- He used to bring some

weather balloons home

for me to play with in

these big envelopes.

So what this was, there's

no balloon component

to the wreckage that we saw.

I guess other people say that

well, it was a radar target.

Well, he went to radar school

to study radar reflectors

and things like that, and if was that,

he would have not even

bothered to show it to us.

- The balloons that we used

on the early June flight

were made of neoprene.

They were large size

meteorological balloons

of the sort that are

used to carry radiosondes

to measure temperature,

pressure, and humidity

in the upper air.

The radar targets were some

special pre-production models

that were left in stock at

Fort Monmouth after the war,

and they consisted of aluminum foil

laminated onto a fairly tough

parchment-like white paper

and they were deployed

on sticks of balsa wood.

- Other parts of the debris

were more unusual though.

There was some beams and I

recall them as being metal.

Other people recall them as being wood,

but my recollection is

these were metal beams.

I don't think they were wood

because I was very familiar

with balsa wood because

I built balsa wood models

all that time.

- There were markings on the radar targets

and the manufacturer had to use some tape,

something like scotch tape to

attach the reflective panels

to the balsa sticks,

and appears that the

manufacturer used some tape

that happened to be on had

that had some pinkish

purple flower-like designs,

tulip petal shape figures

on the back of the tape.

- [Patrick] Yet Marcel

insists that the markings

on the material were

something other than pieces

of decorative tape on the balsa wood.

He has since commissioned

a replica of the debris

that he witnessed.

- The strange thing in the whole debris,

the whole types of debris

that I saw was the I-beam

or the beam.

It was a metal rod, 12 to 18 inches long

with the purple-violet hue figures

written along the inner surface.

When I picked this beam

up off the kitchen floor,

I looked at it and really

didn't see anything too unusual

until I held it up like

this to get the light

from the overhead light

that was over my shoulder

reflecting along the inner surface,

and that's when I saw the symbols.

They were very faint and

unless you held this up against

or with light,

they would have been easily missed.

- [Patrick] That was the last

time the Marcels would speak

of the debris for years.

- After we had loaded the

debris back on the car,

I went to bed.

My mother went to her room

and I did not see my dad

for maybe the next day.

I'm not sure exactly how long he was gone,

but when he came back

in, he was very serious

about never describing this again.

Treat this as a nonevent, didn't happen.

- [Patrick] Nearly 40 years

would pass before father and son

would discuss their memories of Roswell.

- Shortly before he died, I'd call,

the subject came up

and I said, what do you recall

those I-beams looking like?

And he re-described again

what the figures were.

I said, what color were they?

And oh, they were purple,

kind of a shiny violet hue.

So that coincides with my memory too.

I said, is there any possibility of any

of this still being out there?

Maybe under some rocks or something?

He says no.

His exact words were "They went out there

"and they vacuumed the place up."

- [Patrick] As one of the few

remaining witnesses willing

to come forward and discuss the event,

Marcel believes he knows some

of the truth about Roswell.

He's also aware of the implications.

- They're something I'll never forget

because it opened my eyes as

to what's actually out there.

Our solar system is just a grain of sand

tucked away in an out of the way place

in a very ordinary galaxy.

- Oh my god.

- [Patrick] In 1994, Showtime

released an original movie

based on Randle and Schmitt's

book, UFO Crash in Roswell.

In this scene, Major Marcel,

played by Kyle MacLachlan,

is shown the field of

debris by Mac Brazel,

played by Dwight Yoakam.

- [Man] You know those

Japanese balloon bombs?

- Yeah, made of rice paper,

about 30 feet in diameter.

They don't come apart when they land

unless the bomb goes off.

Then you see char marks everywhere.

- Right.

(gentle instrumental music)

Was this gouge here before?

- Nope.

- [Patrick] Even with what UFO researchers

consider an overwhelming

abundance of evidence,

the weather balloon story persists.

- There's certainly no

evidence that balsa wood

and aluminum foil are the sorts of things

that spacecraft would be made of,

so I think it's highly probable

that our balloon caused that incident.

- It's a preposterous explanation

that makes absolutely no sense.

The documentation does not

corroborate what they say

and yet too often the news

media and the skeptics say,

oh yes, Project Mogul, case closed.

- The question of what

crashed outside of Roswell

is almost equally as

intriguing to researchers

as the mystery of what happened

to the remnants of the wreckage.

After the original carload

of debris was taken

to Roswell Army Air Field by Jesse Marcel,

orders were sent to secure

the remaining material

at the Foster Ranch.

The balance of the debris

was heavily guarded

at Roswell Air Field while

some, accompanied by Marcel,

was flown to Fort Worth to be

inspected by General Ramey.

It is well-documented

that wreckage was sent

to Wright Field, which at the

time was the Army's center

for top secret technological research.

This is where captured German

and Soviet military hardware

was dismantled and studied.

Many believe that this was

where the initial work was begun

to attempt to reverse engineer

the recovered alien craft.

There is also evidence that

within hours of the initial reports,

a satchel of the material

was flown to Washington

for a briefing with President Truman.

Why was the material handled

under such high security?

And why would a routine recovery

require the immediate attention

of so many high ranking officials,

including the President

of the United States?

A new generation has grown up

since the Roswell incident.

Some of the people you would most expect

to be excited about Roswell are the people

who call Roswell home.

Curiously, many of the town's residents

say they've never even

heard of the 1947 incident

or that it's of no concern to them.

- What?

And I tell my husband, what is this?

And he's from Texas,

and he says, well I've already

heard about this years back.

And I just never had heard

about it till, like I tell you,

two years ago.

- I just ignore it in my life.

- I can't even get on

the phone when they say

let me have your address and

I say Roswell, New Mexico

and they just tell me, oh,

that's where the UFO landed.

I just kind of, oh, I guess.

- I've heard of it but

I don't believe in it.

I think it's like a bunch

of stuff made up and stuff.

- Well, Roswell's my hometown.

I've lived here all my

life, like I tell you,

and this is great, but

I'm just not into it.

- So who are the ones

asking the questions?

Surprisingly, many of the

strongest voices speaking out

about Roswell are not new age eccentrics,

but are from the scientific community.

Stanton Friedman is a nuclear

physicist who has worked

on advanced aerospace technologies

and nuclear power plant systems

for companies such as General

Electric, Westinghouse,

General Motors, and TRW.

Bruce Maccabee has been

a Naval Optical Physicist

for over 20 years

and has been personally

researching the subject

of extraterrestrial intelligence

for the past 25 years.

Lee Shargel is a material scientist

who has been a consultant for both NASA

and the Department of Defense.

(gentle instrumental music)

These scientists are convinced

that what crashed at Roswell

was from another world.

To fully investigate a persistent mystery

as intriguing as Roswell,

researchers endeavor

to consider all possible explanations.

In the case of Roswell,

there is still the question

of whether the crashed object

could have been something

other than a UFO.

- My inclination is to believe

that it was a Air Force

or a Central Intelligence

Agency balloon project

and that there was an initial attempt

to cover up this intelligence program.

- [Patrick] John Pike is

Director of Space Policy

at the Federation of American Scientists.

- I'm extremely skeptical

that it had anything

to do with extraterrestrial intelligence

because for one of their vehicles to crash

implies a fallibility on

the part of their technology

that's simply inconsistent

with the reliability

that one needs to build star ships.

- [Patrick] Or could it have

been a classified US project?

Aerospace engineer Ron Ray spoke with us

at Edwards Air Force Base.

- Yeah, the possibility

exists back in the '40s

that because all this new

technology out of Germany,

we had scientists from Germany,

that either we were testing

new advanced concepts

to us at the time, these rocket engines

which were brand new to us,

or this was some kind of

smoke screen if you will

to hide or to put the Russians off guard,

make them think we were further

along than we really were.

And there's been a

history of misinformation

on both sides trying to

keep each other off guard

and that very likely is

one of the possibilities.

If it wasn't Roswell,

we're probably doing it some other place.

- [Patrick] But researcher

Don Schmitt doesn't agree

with either explanation.

- The debris field, as you'll

see in some of the shots,

is open pasture.

It's visible for miles from the air.

In fact, Kevin Randle and

I have flown over the site

on two separate occasions.

You can literally see for almost 50 miles.

I can assure you that

if there was anything

that had gone off course,

anything that had been lost,

that was of top secret nature,

they would have found it before anybody.

- Let's just suppose Los Alamos

or White Sands launched

some ultra-experimental

plane, rocket, whatever--

- They'd be out looking for it.

- Maybe they are.

Maybe they can't find it.

That happens.

- Sherman, look around you.

What do you see?

I mean, what do you see geographically?

This place may be remote

by car but not by plane.

You'd have to be blind not

to spot this from the air.

Nobody's found anything

because nobody's out looking,

and that means this ain't ours.

- All the explanations

that have been offered

for the Roswell crash, whether

it's a balloon of any kind,

a V-2 rocket, airplane

accident, experimental aircraft.

All of those explanations

failed when you started talking

to the witnesses and getting

the eyewitness testimony,

the descriptions of what they had seen.

- With all that we know

about the circumstances

of the Roswell case, it is

puzzling as to why more people

who were here 50 years

ago don't come forward now

and tell their stories.

Could it be that those who

have been keeping their secrets

for all these years are

still afraid to talk?

- There was an element of

fear in this whole thing

from the beginning.

- [Patrick] Many that

were involved at Roswell,

including Frank Joyce,

knew the possible dangers

right from the start.

- And he said our lives

will never be the same.

That's his exact words.

- [Patrick] In a small, desolate town

during a much simpler time

when business deals were sealed

with a handshake, a rancher's

word meant everything.

The possibility of ridicule

resulting from claims

of little green men in

flying saucers was real,

so it's certainly understandable

that many residents

might not have spoken of the

events of early July 1947.

But why wouldn't those who

carried a burning story with them

not come forward today?

- Everything that has to do

with UFOs or super technology

or extraterrestrials has

been placed into an aspect

of everybody that

believes in that is crazy,

that they're all nuts,

that they belong in mental institutions,

and so the legitimate

military and aerospace

basically say, well, you

belong in a rubber room,

or the men in the white coats

are gonna come and get you.

So there's always been, like

I said, a laughter curtain,

a ridicule that anybody that

purports to believe in this

or to have seen it or to filmed it

or photographed it or researched it

is purposely put up to ridicule.

- [Patrick] One witness that

has asked to remain anonymous

explains why he hasn't

come forward until now.

- [D] I have children that

could possibly be hurt by this.

They're also residents.

I also have several legal

matters that are pending

that some judge might not

look favorably upon me

if I stand up and tell them

that I did definitely know

that something crashed out there,

but that could be twisted and warped

in a court of law, sir.

- [Patrick] D knew those involved

and the ramifications of them

having told their stories.

- [D] I know of people who

said they were threatened,

and I know several of the

ranchers in that area were told

to stay away from that area,

and if they had picked up any of the metal

or any of the wreckage as

souvenirs, to return it

or they'd be prosecuted.

- [Patrick] If a flying saucer

was recovered at Roswell

as many believe, then what's

happened to it and its crew?

Metallurgist and author Lee

Shargel spent years working

with advanced flight

systems and technologies,

including NASA's Hubble Telescope

and the Navy's super

R back missile system.

Now Shargel is revealing what he believes

to be a piece of Roswell crash debris.

- It's a piece of a vehicle

that didn't originate on this planet.

- [Patrick] Shargel says that

the material was given to him

by a woman whose father

was a pilot stationed

at Roswell Army Air Field

at the time of the crash.

After authenticating her background,

Shargel subjected the

object to both metallurgic

and chemical analysis.

- We found out that it is made

of homogeneous 100% pure aluminum.

You can't get 100%

homogeneous pure aluminum.

The only way we believe

that that could be made is

in a environment under extreme

pressure and no gravity

in the vacuum of space.

- [Patrick] Shargel is adamant

that the technology did not exist in 1947.

Using computer-aided designs,

he created a three dimensional

model that leads him

to suspect that the object was part

of the spacecraft's engine.

- I think it is a type

of containment valve

or flow valve used in a

superconducting magnetic drive.

It's coated with a thin layer of glass-

and it has what I believe

to be extremely curious

dielectric properties,

and it probably was a valve that operated

with a series of valves to

allow the flow of a material

like liquid nitrogen or

some very cold liquid

that was used to surround

the magnetic core.

- If that explains what

happened to the wreckage,

what about the ship's occupants?

Over the past few years,

various film clips

and photographs have

surfaced that were purported

to be actual images of

recovered alien life forms.

Investigators have scrutinized

all footage and photos

that have come to light, and so far,

no pictures have been

verified as being genuine.

(spooky instrumental music)

The incident at Roswell can be explained

by one of three possibilities.

It was either a downed weather balloon,

a crashed alien spaceship,

or some top secret military

project gone wrong.

And every investigator who

has researched the case

says it was definitely not a

top secret military project,

so we're left with two choices:

balloon or alien craft.

What do you think?

If it was a balloon,

why do eyewitnesses describe the wreckage

as something not manufactured on earth?

And why did the military

treat the material

as something far more

important than balloon debris?

The idea that an extraterrestrial craft

may have crashed here in

Roswell challenges some

of our most fundamental beliefs.

Are we alone in the universe?

Or have we indeed been visited

by beings from other worlds?

- [Man] Can you make any sense

of what it could possibly be?

- [Man] No, we're in as much

dark about it as you are.

- [Patrick] In 1965, radar

detected something in the skies

over Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Recently, some of the

recordings of the conversations

during the incident

have been declassified.

- [Patrick] These excerpts

from the audio documentary

Edwards Air Force Base Encounter,

compiled by producer Sam Sherman,

are proof to many that UFOs do exist.

- [Patrick] Some believe

that the earliest reports

of UFO sightings date back hundreds

if not thousands of years.

(tense instrumental music)

Certainly in this century,

the notion of distant space travel

and contact with exotic

beings from other worlds

has been a captivating

and entertaining subject

in popular culture.

The pervasive paranoia

of the '50s was reflected

in frightening depictions of

invasions from outer space.

- [Narrator] Flying saucers

have invaded our planet.

Washington, London, Paris,

Moscow are key targets.

The whole world is under attack.

- [Patrick] Motion pictures and TV shows

portrayed flying saucers and their pilots

as sinister enemies to mankind.

While images such as these

appear laughable now,

at the time, they represented

disturbing possibilities

of disaster resulting from alien contact.

With some notable exceptions,

contemporary attitudes thankfully

tend to be more hopeful.

Recently, part of Nevada Highway 375

was renamed the Extraterrestrial Highway,

welcoming any and all alien visitors.

- Most people when they look

to the skies see friend or foe.

Not me.

I see intergalactic tourists.

- [Patrick] Many point to a

variety of mysterious phenomena

as evidence of the presence

of extraterrestrials.

Crop circles in the UK are often claimed

to have been caused by alien beings.

Likewise, they have been blamed

for many unexplained

instances of animal mutilation

across the United States.

And while there has been

little physical evidence

to prove the claims,

thousands of individuals

have reported being abducted

by extraterrestrial craft.

UFO debunker Phillip Klass

feels that none of these claims

offer substantial proof of

extraterrestrial visitation.

- In 30 years, more than nearly 31 years

of investigating mysterious UFO cases,

I have yet to find one, not a single one,

that cannot be explained in

down to earth or prosaic terms.

- [Patrick] Scientist

John Pike tends to agree.

- I think it's clear

that tens of thousands

of people every year see

objects flying in the sky

that they can't explain.

I think that it's equally

clear that, upon investigation,

most of those sightings

have relatively prosaic

explanations, but a small percentage

of them remain very difficult to explain.

When you do the math, it's

fairly clear that life,

civilized life, should be

very abundant in the galaxy.

Space flight isn't that

difficult, so the question is

why aren't those advance

civilizations already here

because we certainly don't

seem to see them here.

- Could it be that in

this amazing universe,

100 billion galaxies,

each with hundreds of billions of stars,

this is the only star that

has an inhabited planet?

It seems like the height

of human arrogance,

but that's not proof.

The only way you really

find out is by looking.

- [Patrick] For over 30 years,

scientists involved with SETI

have been scanning the heavens

for signals from other worlds.

- Everything we've learned

in our modern studies

of astronomy, of biology,

of evolution of life

have showed that the steps

which led to our being here,

including our high

technology-using civilization,

are completely normal steps

in evolution of a star

and its planets, and therefore,

the steps which led to our

existence should have occurred

in many, many places, and

therefore, there should be many

technology-using civilizations in space.

- [Patrick] Regrettably, the

US Congress canceled funding

for SETI, but the search still goes on.

Lee Shargel believes a

different NASA project

may be the means of contact.

- We sent Voyager out in space

and Carl Sagan and other

scientists, Nobel laureates,

fought vehemently to put that

gold plate, that record album

on the side of that probe

with the images and

sounds of what the essence

of human culture is.

Why did they do that?

Because they hope that someday,

some extraterrestrial race

would find that probe,

retrieve that record from the side of it,

see the diagram, learn how to play it,

and understand who and what we are

and see the map of its trajectory

and follow it back to this world.

And they thought, well maybe

it'll be 10,000, 30,000,

maybe a million years from now,

but someday, they would discover that.

Why did they do that?

Because they believed in the possibility

that extraterrestrial

life might be out there.

Now think about that in reverse.

What if they did it to us?

Would we say, oh it's ludicrous,

it could never happen?

How could be make a statement like that

when we ourselves did the very same thing?

Suppose they're sending

probes out into space

and one of them may have

inadvertently come here,

and maybe one of those probes

had within it the life forms

of that other world.

- [Patrick] Those who study

the phenomenon of UFOs

are convinced that the

government knows a lot more

about alien life than they

even come close to admitting.

For years, both civilian

and military pilots

have reported observing mysterious

objects while in flight.

Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Frank Borman

have publicly announced their encounters.

And yet no official announcement.

- And it's interesting because

the denial has actually gone

from the original Condon

Report in the 1950s

that said UFOs aren't dangerous,

but people who see them are.

So it's gone from everybody

that sees them is crazy

to okay, we'll investigate the phenomenon

to now there's nothing to it,

to now it being well, we

can't confirm or deny.

So in other words, the

military is now saying

we can't say that there isn't something

but we can't say there

is something either.

So you'll notice that even

the level of deniability

has actually swung in an arc

that's more towards favoring the truth.

- I am here to discuss the

so-called flying saucer.

The Air Force interest in

this problem has been due

to our feeling of an

obligation to identify

and analyze to the best of our ability

anything in the air that may

have the possibility of threat

or menace to the United States.

In pursuit of this obligation, since 1947,

we have received and analyzed

between 1,000 and 2,000

reports that have come to us

from all kinds of sources.

Of this great mass of reports,

we have been able adequately

to explain the great bulk of them.

However, there have been a

certain percentage of this volume

of reports that have been

made by credible observers

of relatively incredible things.

It is this group of observations

that we now are attempting to resolve.

- [Patrick] Responding to

ever-increasing awareness

of the situation,

the Air Force launched what

they called Project Blue Book,

implemented, they said, to

investigate the UFO phenomenon.

- Project Blue Book was the third name

for the Air Force's publicly

known UFO investigation.

By previous names, it

goes back to January 1948

and continued until December

1969, almost 22 years.

It was headquartered at

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

in Dayton, Ohio.

It accepted UFO reports

from government people,

from the general public.

It collected over 12,000 reports

and it was charged obviously

with explaining every

single report it got.

The techniques it used were

sometimes so unscientific

as to make you wonder what was going on,

but when it closed down and

the files were first sent

to the Air Force archives

and later to the National

Archives here in Washington,

there was still almost 600

reports admittedly unexplained.

There were two or three times

that many reports claimed

to have been explained but weren't,

but these were the ones the Air Force said

they felt they had enough information

but couldn't come up with an answer.

It was as if unexplained

was an explanation.

You explained some as

balloons, some as airplanes,

and some as unexplained,

and that was the end of it.

This was definitely

not a scientific study.

It was a public relations effort.

- Only a fool would say

that there is no possibility

of life elsewhere but on Earth.

Yes, there must be life out there,

but I must say that we on

Earth have not seen it yet.

- None of the arguments

made by a very small group

of debunkers, noisy

negativists, as I call them,

people like my college

classmate Carl Sagan,

against the first two conclusions

stand up under careful scrutiny.

The arguments sound great

until you look at the evidence

and they collapse with their own weight.

The evidence is overwhelming

that planet Earth is being visited

by intelligently controlled

extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In other words, some UFOs,

underlining the some 20 times,

are alien spacecraft.

Most are not, I don't care about those.

- Hello, I'm Patrick Macnee.

We're talking about Roswell

and the incident of 1947.

The crash outside this

town ignited the passions

of those who insist that what

landed here was a spacecraft

from another planet.

If the remnants recovered

were from an alien craft,

they say, then the reason

we haven't been told

about it is simple.

The government is keeping the details

of the incident a secret.

- I really think the story here

is not something crashing here so much.

The story is that our government,

which is supposed to have an open society,

clamps the lid on something using tactics

that are very questionable,

that are constitutionally

questionable in my opinion,

and getting away with it.

- [Patrick] Within hours of

the original press release,

samples of the debris

were sent to Fort Worth.

There, General Ramey posed

for pictures with Jesse Marcel

and pieces of a weather balloon

that Ramey claimed came from Roswell.

- What was brought through the hangar,

through the building and

loaded on the airplane

was not the same material.

It was not a weather balloon.

- They tried to kill

every last word of it.

They didn't want anyone to

know anything about this,

not even a thought.

- [Patrick] While at

Roswell Army Air Field,

Glenn Dennis witnessed what

he believed to be the wreckage

of an airplane crash.

He was immediately

detained for questioning,

then threatened by military officers.

- When I turned around,

there was another captain standing there

and he came up and he

tapped me on the shoulder

and he said don't go and

start a bunch of rumors.

Nothing's happened out here,

this crash or anything else.

And he said you'll get in some

trouble or something similar.

I don't remember the exact words,

but anyway, I didn't like his attitude,

and I said, I'm a civilian.

You can't do anything to

me, you can go to hell.

That's when he really

punched me a little bit

and he said somebody'll

be picking your bones out

of the sand if you.

That was the only time

when I was ever threatened.

- There is a cover up.

After many years of

investigation, I am certain

that there is a cover

up as far as Roswell,

not by the US Air Force,

not by the US government,

but by those people who falsely claim

that the government is covering up.

They are the ones that are

withholding key information

from the public.

- [Patrick] Aviation historian

Phillip Klass believes

that a declassified letter to the Pentagon

by Wright-Patterson Lieutenant

General Nathan Twining

might be evidence disproving

the Roswell cover up theory.

- Here is a letter written

by Lieutenant General Nathan Twining

on September 24th, 1947,

in which he says the phenomenon

reported is something real

and not visionary or fictitious.

But what you never see

or never hear quoted

was a later paragraph in that same letter

in which General Twining says

"Due consideration must

be given to the following.

"The lack of physical

evidence in the shape

"of crash recovered exhibits

"which would undeniably

prove the existence

"of these objects."

This letter alone, that comment

alone, disproves Roswell.

And because of that,

writers of books on Roswell,

producers of TV shows

intentionally omit any reference to that.

- [Patrick] Not all

researchers believe this letter

disproves the cover up.

- There's no doubt there was a cover up.

General DuBose, who was the

Chief of Staff of 8th Air Force

in July of 1947, told us flat out

that the balloon explanation

was a cover story.

- [Patrick] In 1990,

DuBose was interviewed

at the age of 89.

Under hypnosis he recalled

the events of July 1947.

- General DuBose also said

that he was not supposed

to discuss this event with General Ramey,

the commander of 8th Air Force.

- Why not, if it's just a weather balloon?

Even if it's a balloon assigned

to the top secret Project Mogul,

there is certainly nothing

in the balloon arrays,

nothing in the equipment that requires

that high level of security.

Why create this massive

cover up to do that?

- To fully understand how

a story as extraordinary

as that of a crashed flying

saucer could be kept secret,

we need to return once

again to early summer 1947.

Four long years of fighting

had ended victoriously

for the Allies.

With the surrender of Germany and Japan,

the nightmare of World

War II was finally over.

- To every subordinate that

has been in this command

of almost five million Allies,

I owe a debt of gratitude

that can never be repaid.

- [Patrick] The troops returned home

and America was getting back on its feet

and coming to terms with its new position

as a global superpower.

In the late '40s, New

Mexico was a proving ground

for the most awesome weapons

the world had ever seen.

With the onset of the Cold War,

fear of communist aggression

became a national obsession.

It affected every facet

of life in America.

- Answer that question if

we have to stay every week.

Are you a member of the communist party

or have you ever been a

member of the communist party?

- I have told you that I will--

- [Patrick] Far from New

Mexico, 1947 saw the beginnings

of McCarthyism and the witch hunts

of the House Un-American

Activities Committees.

- Stand away from the stand.

- Fight for

the Bill of Rights--

- I said take this man

away from the stand.

- [Patrick] During World War II,

Americans had become well accustomed

to the concepts of national security.

Every citizen was drilled on

the importance of vigilance

and silence, and this situation continued

as the Cold War heated up.

Nowhere was this more

true than in New Mexico.

Across the state, top

secret military projects

and operations demanded cooperation

from private citizens as

well as military personnel.

If people were told not

to talk about something,

they knew to keep their mouths shut.

Classified defense projects in Alamogordo

at the White Sands Missile

Range and at Los Alamos

made New Mexico a hotbed of secrecy.

The entire region was in

a constant state of alert.

In Roswell, the 509th Bomb Group was

at the time the only

military unit in the world

with nuclear capabilities,

having been responsible

for dropping the first and

only A-bomb used in war.

As an officer stationed in Roswell,

Walter Haut knew how

important secrecy was.

- You've got a different

frame of mind back in 1947.

If we were told to do

something, we did it.

We didn't ask why.

Basically, you didn't have a need to know.

Somebody knew why you were doing it

and it passed down the chain of command,

and when it hit you, you were

the grunt that did the work

and that was it.

- [Patrick] In postwar America,

the attitude toward the government

and figures of authority

was still one of trust.

This was still an era of

innocence and acceptance

compared to the decades that would follow.

Former Roswell radio

personality Frank Joyce

articulates the difference.

- Something else you gotta remember.

That was a different era than now.

You didn't have the complex

society that we have now.

You did not have TVs, cameramen

as we have scheduled here,

a news reporter like

yourself with a backing

of all sorts of people

and all the best equipment

in the world to report

everything that happened.

So when a statement came

out on the news wire

that simply said it's a weather balloon,

people were inclined to believe it.

- In 1947, the Vietnam

War hadn't yet happened,

nor had the '60s and the era of rebellion.

Watergate wasn't even a hotel yet

and the Iran-Contra

affair was 40 years away.

People still tended to

believe in their leaders

and what they said.

If an official statement came

out saying a flying saucer

was really a weather balloon,

it was much more likely that

people would accept the change

in story without further thought.

Those who are convinced

there's more to Roswell

than just a weather balloon

are determined to get answers,

but getting through to the

fortress of information

is not an easy task.

While UFO researchers claim

the federal government

keeps the truth about

Roswell locked tightly away,

it is the goal of these researchers

to extract official information.

Using procedures mandated by

the Freedom of Information Act,

investigators have been chipping away

at what they see as a

fortress guarding the secrets

of hundreds of UFO encounters.

Stanton Friedman, the

researcher who first spoke

to Jesse Marcel in 1978,

says getting answers

from the government is not so simple.

- Many people think that it's easy

with Freedom of

Information, this magic key

that unlocks all the doors.

All you gotta ask and you

get anything you want.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

You have the right to ask.

They don't have to reveal

because there's a page full of exclusions,

and the major exclusion

is national security.

Anyway, we applied under

Freedom of Information

and we said we want

these 18 UFO documents.

All we have list basically of dates.

No, gentlemen, we can't release anything.

National security here.

We're going around in circles,

so we try a legal ploy.

We ask that they submit

the documents to the judge

so he can determine

whether they are properly

invoking national security.

They provide him none of the documents,

but a 21-page top secret affidavit

justifying the withholding

of the documents

which he gets to see in chambers.

He was so impressed with that

that he ruled in their favor.

He said that the public

interest in disclosure,

which he recognized, was far outweighed

by the potential danger to the

security of the United States

should this information be released.

National security and flying saucers.

We filed one of these wonderful, magical

Freedom of Information Act

requests for the affidavit

and we got it.

We expected a little censorship.

It's not too surprising that

there's some blacked out stuff,

but then it gets so darn heavy

that it's truly laughable.

You're telling me there's no cover up?

75% blacked out.

There is no question

whatsoever that agencies

of the United States government

are withholding UFO information.

Now if you ask do I know what

it is they're withholding?

Well, when I see it, I'll know,

but certainly they're

withholding the story

about the Roswell crash.

- [Patrick] Former Command

Sergeant Major Robert Dean

was assigned to Supreme

Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe

where he was exposed to

highly classified operations

and information on a daily basis.

Since leaving the military,

he has formed Stargate International,

whose goal is to educate

the public on the reality

of extraterrestrial presence.

- It's easy to lie to the American people.

Lying in government has almost

become institutionalized

in American government.

I'll give you a small example.

About a year and a half ago,

NASA at Houston was circulating

and in-house document

to the personnel at Houston

on how to avoid the

Freedom of Information Act.

They were telling their

personnel literally how

to lie to the public and to the media.

So secrets can be kept.

A lid has been kept on this

one for well over 50 years

and it's quite easy to

lie to the American public

because they don't do their homework

and they don't pay attention.

- [Patrick] Other organizations,

such as the Mutual UFO Network

and Citizens Against UFO Secrecy,

were formed with similar goals,

but Washington DC based

Operation Right to Know

is taking a different approach.

Elaine Douglass believes that

highly visible demonstrations

might broaden public awareness.

- Operation Right to Know started in 1992.

Since that time, we've

had 14 demonstrations

and the reason we do these

demonstrations is simply

to get people out there

in public on the street,

saying the truth.

- We're striving to have

what we call open hearings.

We want them on C-SPAN.

We want the doors to be open,

and we have asked Congress

individually, in many cases,

to grant us congressional immunity

for violating our security oaths

so those of us in the old boy

network can tell the Congress,

can tell the congressional

representatives,

can tell the people what we've seen

and what we've learned.

- [Patrick] Even though

public awareness is greater

than it was even a decade ago,

the support of elected

officials is slow in coming.

- But I do believe we're making progress

thanks to the work of people

like Congressman Schiff

from New Mexico.

Questions are being asked.

We've got a number of senators

who have privately stated

that they're with us in this issue.

So we are making some headway.

I'm a little impatient because

I'm getting older by the day

and I'm not gonna be around forever,

and I'd like to see it happen now.

- While assertions of government cover up

are handily dismissed by

skeptics as nothing more

than the rantings of

paranoid sensationalists,

it's important to

consider the track record

of the past few decades.

Since the earliest days of this nation,

the American system of

government has been designed

to serve and be responsible

to the American citizen.

Yet for the last 30 or 40 years,

there has been a steady erosion of trust

in the country's leaders.

The reason: a repeated

surfacing of incidents

of dishonesty by government officials.

Beginning in the late '40s and '50s,

the federal government

Roswell Top Secret (1998) - full transcript