Long-hidden photos from Roswell show aliens (or not)
SUMMARY
Hilda Ray hid some photos in her attic shortly after her husband's death. She was afraid the U.S. government would come looking for them. Her husband Bernard took those photos on his Kodak Kodachrome one day while working as a Geologist in the Roswell, New Mexico area. He and his team stumbled upon a cordoned-off area, but managed to snap off a few shots, despite being told to leave by U.S. Army personnel. Hilda hid these slides in the lining of a trunk in their Arizona home but after she died, they were found by people with a sharp eye for cash grabs historical importance.
As a rule, care must always be exercised when opening a random box. To wit:
But we digress . . .
On July 8, 1947 the U.S. military reported a crashed weather balloon on a local ranch. The object was recovered, but reported to be more of a flying disc. The military sent a plainclothes officer to the ranch to gather the pieces of the wreckage. The Air Force issued a press release, saying it was a downed weather balloon and its radar reflector and not at all a nuclear explosion detector or UFO.
Then the story went away forever and no one ever spoke of it again because we are a nation of rational individuals who seldom jump to conclusions, even for financial gain. We demand authenticity and evidence.
No, of course that's not how it went. This is America. People in the Roswell area began to talk to each other - and to outsiders - about their experiences with the 1947 crash. This, coupled with documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (some say from the so-called Majestic 12), led people to conclude the obvious: an extraterrestrial craft crash landed that night and there may be alien life there, still living there to this day, probably bored as hell.
But evidence does help. The Roswell Incident is now known "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim." It spawned hundreds of books, movies, television tropes, Congressional investigations, and conspiracy theories about what happened that Summer. The official Air Force version stuck with the claim that it was a weather balloon.
After reviewing classified documents nearly 50 years later, historians have determined the craft was likely part of Operation Mogul, an effort to hook high-powered microphones to balloons to hear Soviet nuke tests or Operation High Dive where the Air Force used anatomically correct dummies to test high-altitude parachutes. (Somewhere there are hundreds of photos of the Air Force dumping mannequins into the wild blue yonder.)
The slides were verified real by Kodak representatives, and now they are also public. Roswell researcher Donald Schmitt showcased the photos in Mexico on May 5. Schmitt will also bring them to the Roswell UFO festival in July.
The reception in Mexico was much less enthusiastic than the promoters had hoped. (They had built it up quite a bit over the last few years.)
One of the actual slides is below.
Get a job, Roger . . .
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