Roswell

The Air Force conducted two investigations in the 1990s at the request of Congress and the General Accounting Office, and declassified the underlying programme to do it.

Project Mogul was a classified effort run from New York University to detect Soviet nuclear detonations using long trains of balloons carrying low-frequency acoustic microphones at constant altitude. Flight 4, launched from Alamogordo on 4 June 1947, was never recovered and its track is consistent with the ranch where the debris was found. The arrays used neoprene balloons, balsa struts and metallised paper tape from a toy manufacturer — which accounts precisely for the descriptions of unusually light, strong foil with purple-pink figures along the beams that witnesses later interpreted as hieroglyphs. The programme was classified, which is why the Army lied.

The 1997 follow-up report addressed the bodies. It found that the descriptions matched anthropomorphic test dummies dropped in high-altitude parachute experiments in the New Mexico desert in the 1950s, and injured airmen from a 1956 aircraft accident, recalled decades later and compressed into 1947 — a well-documented memory phenomenon. The dummy explanation is often mocked, but the dummies are photographed, catalogued and were unambiguously in that desert.

Key witness testimony also collapsed under examination. The 1995 'alien autopsy' film was admitted by its producer to be a reconstruction. Glenn Dennis, the mortician whose account supplied the alien bodies, was found by investigators to have given demonstrably shifting versions.