According to ABC News, once the debris arrived at the Roswell air base on July 8, base commander Colonel William Blanchard authorized a press release declaring that a flying disc was captured by the Air Force. Smithsonian Magazine reports the Roswell Daily Record ran a story that said, “The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into the possession of a Flying Saucer.” Why would the consistently conservative military state something so incendiary if it were not true?

The next day, Brigadier General Roger Ramey held a press conference in which he aggressively walked this back, saying that it was only “a harmless, high-altitude weather balloon.”

The Albuquerque Journal reports that the debris was likely from a train of research balloons that was launched out of Alamogordo Army Airfield on June 4, 1947. The airfield officers lost contact with it 17 miles from the Brazel ranch. Years later, atmospheric scientist Charles B. Moore, who helped launch it, showed the Albuquerque Journal a device much like the photographed wreckage.

The Skeptical Inquirer notes that there was no mention of alien bodies in the 1947 report of the incident, but mentions of alien corpses appear in ufology books and articles from 1978 on. In a 1997 report, the Air Force stated that lifelike dummies that were dropped out of research balloons through the 1950s, after the Roswell incident but somehow potentially including it. According to Washington Decoded, the Air Force report stated, “The object of these studies was to devise a method to return a pilot or astronaut to earth by parachute, if forced to escape at extreme altitudes.”

The report noted that one of the dummies “very likely could be mistaken for an alien,” a response that was laughable to UFO researchers. This could account for the dummy/alien’s blank eyes, bluish-white skin, and bizarre outfits that the military claimed were pressure suits. Also, the dummies weighed 250 pounds each, so they were hard to move. That’s why the military employed stretchers to retrieve them, of course. Then, to transport them back to base, they put them in an ambulance. Obviously. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Joe Kittinger said, “Now if somebody is back in the weeds watching this they are going to say, ‘Wow, look at that alien they have there.’ We think that a lot of the alien sightings were actually us doing our work with the test dummies.”

No matter the story, the fact is that something caused a crash in New Mexico. If it were a balloon — either weather or spy — it might simply have popped, and the material it was carrying plummeted to the ground, dummies possibly included. However, the amount of debris reported by William “Mac” Brazel doesn’t seem to justify this explanation. If the balloon didn’t pop, why wouldn’t the material have glided gently down in a recognizable form? Wouldn’t there be a failsafe or parachute?

Did the military sweep in to seize not alien technology but Soviet? In the book “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base,” Annie Jacobsen suggests that the Soviets created the Roswell incident as a warning that they could spark a UFO panic if they wanted to (via NBC). As History explains, by the early 1950s, the U.S. government was worried about the prospect of a growing national hysteria around UFOs.

News.com.au reports that, on his deathbed, Lieutenant Walter Haut, the public relations officer on base that day in 1947, admitted in an affidavit to be opened after his death that the weather balloon story was always a cover-up. He had seen the actual object, which was kept in a hangar. He had been in the presence of alien bodies. And, in something that later fell into the canon of the event but was not reported on until later, he knew about a second crash site. Unlike many who spoke of their experiences that day, it is known that he was on-site. At the end of his affidavit, he wrote, “I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space.”

Oddly, even in interviews that he gave close to his death, he did not make any of these claims and downplayed that anything much had happened that day.

The best argument against the affidavit being true is that Haut may not have been of sound mind when he wrote it. But what would he gain from making up a false account other than the strange immortality of being forever wrapped up in this story? Perhaps it’s relevant that he co-founded the International UFO Museum with Glenn Dennis.

The Guardian reports that Joseph Beason found Kodachrome slides among the effects of a woman called Hilda Blair Ray after her death. Two of the slides show a shriveled, small creature in a glass case with an unreadable placard attached, its skull long and its eye sockets large.

Beason contacted his former business partner and videographer, Adam Dew. They contacted Tom Carey, a retired businessman with a background in anthropology who has written books about Roswell. Carey reportedly found the evidence dubious and Beason too secretive, but, once he had a scan, he was nearly convinced.

Beason, Dew, and Carey had a digital illustrator make a 3D image of what the body might look like alive. They sent the slides to Kodak (who confirmed that they were not tampered with and were from 1945–1950), and they tried to find details about Ray’s life that would justify her having rubbed shoulders with an alien. Dew brought the photos to Eleazar Benavides, a veteran who claimed to have seen the Roswell aliens. Benavides said, “That’s what I saw in 1947.”

Emboldened, Carey proclaimed at a UFO conference in 2014, “We have the smoking gun!” They sought money for a documentary, and they held a livestream event titled “BeWitness,” charging 7,000 people between $20 and $86 per ticket.

Days after the event, someone involved leaked a high-resolution scan. Using a photo-enhancing program, the placard in the image could finally be read: “Mummified body of two year old boy.” Skeptics found who had donated the mummy to the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum and also discovered photos of its initial discovery in 1896.

The Washington Post reviewed “Area 51,” a book written by Los Angeles-based independent journalist Annie Jacobsen, which claimed that there were no aliens at Roswell. According to Jacobsen’s unnamed source (supposedly a veteran both of the Manhattan Project and Area 51), there were bodies at the scene. They belonged to children who had been stuffed into a fake UFO (a single wing Horton Ho 229, according to the Telegraph) as a false flag event. Who would do such a thing? Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele. The source told Jacobsen that Mengele didn’t develop this plan but was directed by Joseph Stalin, inspired by the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.

While the finer points are improbable, History pointed out that a connection between UFOs and political movements isn’t. The Robertson panel convened in 1953 to decide “what should be told the public regarding the [UFO] phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic.” The CIA was concerned not about aliens but that a nervous public would have their fear taken advantage of. “The Soviets would find a way to use the huge level of public interest in UFOs to somehow manipulate, to cause panic; which then could be used to undermine national cohesiveness.”