The Roswell UFO story still resonates around the world 77 years later

ROSWELL, N.M. (CBS4) — In a previous story, I showed you how people’s fascination with UFOs and aliens has transformed my hometown of Roswell.

It was a book, “The Roswell Incident” that first rekindled interest in an alleged UFO discovery near Roswell that had occurred more than 30 years earlier when it was published in 1980.

That was the same year I first learned about the so-called Roswell Incident while working in my first TV job in Roswell.

In my final story for CBS4, I explore why the Roswell Legend still resonates with people around the world 44 years after the book came out.

Donald R. Schmitt is a best-selling author and UFO investigator who’s been studying the Roswell Incident for decades.

“I can’t emphasize enough, [that] we were skeptics,” Schmitt told me. “We came down here that very first time thinking we would wrap this up in a single weekend, that we would either prove it was a balloon or something just as prosaic, just as conventional.”

Despite his initial skepticism, Schmitt is now a true believer that an alien spacecraft crashed on a ranch north of Roswell back in July of 1947, especially the witness accounts of a material that appeared to be a kind of indestructible metal.

“We’re talking to witness after witness who are describing– you know– the highly extraordinary characteristics of that metal-like material,” Schmitt said, “Especially that memory material, that would, right before your eyes, that it would assume its original shape and size no matter what you did to it.”

Schmitt became so convinced the Roswell incident was real, that he now serves as the lead investigator at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell.

In 1980, a book titled “The Roswell Incident” was published that rekindled interest in the UFO story 33 years after it occurred.

Until then, I’d grown up in Roswell knowing nothing about it.

The book detailed some sensational assertions by Jesse Marcel who had been the Chief Intelligence Officer at the Roswell Army Airfield, later known as Walker Air Force Base.

He was the first military officer to see the site where an unknown object had crashed, charged with investigating what it was, take it back to the base and share what he’d learned with the commander.

At the time, the Roswell Army Airfield was probably the nation’s most exclusive military base because it was home to the atomic bomb.

“Marcel was the number one intelligence officer in the country at that time and the fact they were in charge of the atomic bomb,” Schmitt said. “The 509th Bomb Wing, in which Marcel was the lead intelligence officer, was the elite within the military at that time. They were hand-selected, where they picked the best officers, best pilots, best crew, doctors, nurses, and so, these people were beyond– you know– reproach.”

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The day after Maj. Marcel went to the crash site, Lt. Walter Haut, the Public Information Officer for the 509th Atomic Bomb Group, wrote a press release that stated the “509th’s intelligence office had found a flying disc” and that “the flying object had landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime the previous week.

For a day, the news shook the world. It was a time when a lot of people had reported seeing so-called “flying saucers” and this appeared to confirm there were unidentified flying objects of unknown, but likely alien origin.

Then, the next day, it all appeared to be a galactic mistake with the U.S. Army saying the wreckage found was nothing more than a weather balloon.

That was the end of the story for decades until Marcel said he wanted to set the record straight. “He was terminally ill and he was a good soldier,” Schmitt said. “For 30 years, he kept his oath of secrecy. And what’s interesting about that he was pictured with the substituted weather balloon. Those famous pictures of [Marcel] holding up sections of that radar kite. Why are you then sworn to secrecy after it’s been explained away? Because there was another truth. There was then something that he was told to keep his mouth shut about.”

I first saw Marcel share the changed story when I was a senior at Roswell High, working as a studio cameraman at the local TV station, KBIM.

Sometime after that, I learned that my family had a direct connection to one of the principal participants in the Roswell Incident, the PIO who wrote the flying disk press release. Walter Haut and his wife were close friends of my Mother and Father, and soon after the book, ‘The Roswell Incident’ was published, he gave an autographed copy to my parents with a simple message next to his picture in the book,

Believe it.

I later interviewed Haut on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell Incident when I worked for another El Paso TV station and learned that his neighbor on Elm Street in Roswell when he was the base PIO, was his best friend, Jess Marcel.

Haut told me in 1997 that he was convinced there was something to the Roswell incident because he’d never seen Marcel, a World War II veteran like him, so flabbergasted by what he said he encountered.

At the time, Haut said he never saw any materials related to the Roswell Incident, maintaining his soldier’s oath to secrecy for the rest of his life.

But before he died in 2005, Schmitt said, Haut agreed to provide a sealed statement, detailing what he really knew about the Roswell Incident, that would only be released after his death.

“Walter, in that sealed statement,” Schmitt said, “Would acknowledge that he was taken to the hangar and he was shown the craft and the bodies. So, in other words…”

“So, he saw alien bodies?” I asked.

“Yes, and he swore to that,” Schmitt said, “That it was a sealed affidavit witnessed by his daughter and by a notary, and as a result, Walter, even from the grave, he told us the truth. That what had crashed north of town here, in July of 1947, was a craft of unknown origin with non-human bodies.”

“Why do you think Roswell still resonates all these years later?” I asked, “Why has it become even bigger, I think, in this century, than it was in the last century?”

“Because people are realizing more and more that the government slash Washington, is hardly the arbiters of truth. And as a result, the fact that the government is up to four official explanations regarding Roswell,” Schmitt said. “I always joke, ‘Hey husbands, try that with your wives.'”

Schmitt thinks the government has never revealed what he believes is the truth about the Roswell incident because it still hasn’t deciphered the out-of-this-world technology discovered there 77 years ago and does not want to admit how alien beings and technology were able to visit us and move through our airspace with impunity.

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