Forbidden History - UFO Conspiracy: Roswell Revealed

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

In 1947, a strange crash in the New Mexico desert sparked rumours of alien contact and a military cover-up. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we explore the conflicting reports, declassified documents, and enduring questions surrounding the Roswell incident. Cast List: Guy Walters: Author & Historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. It's July 1947. In the barren heat of the New Mexico desert, something crashes to the ground near the small town of Roswell. The debris? Unlike anything locals have ever seen.

It's metallic and lightweight. It's also scattered across the scrubland like wreckage from another world. The Roswell incident is just an epic piece of forbidden history, frankly. A rancher makes the discovery. The military arrives. Then an astonishing headline. Roswell Army Air Force captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region. This is something that has been running... for decades and decades, and it's never going to end,

because there is no more fun to be had than speculating whether alien life forms have visited our dear old Earth. And then the US Army quickly do a backpedal and say, no, it wasn't a flying disc, no aliens, or whatever. For a moment, the unimaginable becomes real. But just as quickly, the story changes. The U.S. Army says they made a mistake. It wasn't a flying disc.

It was just a weather balloon. But the question remains, what really fell from the sky? In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we take a look at the enduring mystery of the infamous Roswell incident. Roswell has become a mecca, not just for UFO believers, but for an enduring American myth. What started as a single crash in the desert, has evolved into books, documentaries, secret files, and enough theories to fill Area 51. But to understand why the story never dies, we have to go

back to the moment in 1947 when something really did crash. Today we're joined by historian and author Guy Walters. So what exactly did happen in Roswell in 1947? Well, it's early July in that year and something crashes on a ranch near Roswell. And Roswell's in New Mexico. The American Army initially reported that they'd recovered a, quote, flying disc. And there is this great bit of radio footage

from ABC News in which it reports that very, very thing. saying, you know, flying disc has been found and what the hell is it? In the days following the crash, the U.S. Army made an announcement that shocked the world. They'd recovered a flying disc. A press release from Roswell Army Airfield was issued on July 8, 1947, and was soon picked up by the Associated Press. The headlines lit up radios and newspapers across the country. has announced that a flying disk 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 Right Field, Ohio for further inspections. But then, silence and a sudden retraction. Just 24 hours later, the Army released new photos, showing officers holding what appeared to be the remains of a weather balloon. The flying disc was downgraded. The mystery was officially over. Or so they claimed. And there are always going to be people who think, you know what, if they have visited, they're

bound to have visited the United States. And if they visited the United States, that good old naughty US government is bound to have covered it up. That sudden reversal, from flying saucer to weather balloon, is the origin point for what would become one of the most famous conspiracy theories of all time. Why did the Army change its story? Was it a simple case of miscommunication or something more deliberate? Because if the military really didn't know what it was they'd found, then why speak at

all? And if they did know, why lie? The damage was done. The moment the U.S. Army walked back its claim, They didn't close the case, they opened it. And so that reversal, that is the kernel, that is where the whole conspiracy, the whole history of the Roswell incident starts spawning up. And people are going, hang on a minute, why did they report a flying disc,

and then why say it's a weather balloon? That sounds like a cover-up. That sounds like a conspiracy. Within hours, a new question took root. Why the sudden change of story? What was so sensitive that it couldn't be explained? And then, since then, over the decade, there have been people coming forward, new testimonies, new documents, new theories, you know, leading to more and more fascination, and people going, hang on a minute, at Roswell, that was a flying saucer,

that was full of alien life forms. For some, the answer was clear and terrifying. The government had discovered something they weren't ready to admit to the public. Something not from this earth. Those alien life forms were, you know, people met them, people operated on them, people performed autopsies on them. This is the kind of ground zero of the UFOists. Over the years, the trickle became a flood of whistleblowers,

deathbed confessions, even supposed to be. posed autopsy footage. Newspaper clippings, leaked government memos, eyewitnesses who claim to see strange bodies, and with each new claim, the legend of Roswell grew stronger. This wasn't just about a crash anymore. It was about contact. Soon, Roswell wasn't just a location. It was a symbol of government secrecy and a growing fear that we were not a alone. As new claims surfaced of alien autopsies, crash retrievals, and shadowy cover-ups, the public imagination exploded. What had started in the New Mexico desert now spread like wildfire through American culture.

In 1947, you know, after the war, there was a real kind of flying saucer scare, if you like. And there was a big fear that maybe the Soviet Union, the beginning of the Cold War, that maybe the Soviets had got some secret weapons, that they'd harnessed from scientists, Nazi scientists. America was already on edge. The war had ended, but a new enemy, the Soviet Union was rising. Tensions were escalating. Trust in institutions were shaky. And from that uncertainty, paranoia flourished. Popular media played its part. Science fiction comics filled newsstands with images of little green men, alien invasions,

and mysterious lights in the sky. Flying saucers weren't just tabloid material. They became a cultural obsession. We continue the story after the break. I want to talk to you about a new book by author Carl Barney, about something we all strive for. Happiness. You weren't born to coast through life.

You were born to feel alive, to wake up with energy, to live a life that excites you. The new book, The Happiness Experiment, is the tool to help you do just that. It's not fluff, it's a practical system to help you find your unique version

of joy, meaning, and drive. It's time to stop surviving and start thriving. If you want to learn more, take a few minutes at the end of this podcast and listen to an interview about the happiness experiment and how you can bring it to life. Plus, to discover your unique happiness type by taking the free assessment at my happiness type.com. That's m-y-h-h-a-p-p-I-N-E-S-T-Y-P-Y-S-T-Y-P dot C-O-M. Then grab your copy of the happiness experiment at Booksamillion.com. That's B-O-O-O-K-S-A-M-I-L-L-I-O-N dot C-O-M-M-A-M-Million.

Nineteen 47 wasn't just the year something crashed near Roswell. It was also the year the CIA was founded. The year the U.S. Air Force became its own branch. The year the Cold War got going. It was a time of secrets and government suspicion. And for many Americans, a growing fear that hostile powers might already be among us or above us. Guy Walters tells us more. There was a rise in kind of fascination with extraterrestrials.

A lot of comics had alien life forms as their central characters, if you like. And so it was a really kind of fertile time for speculation about, you know, E.T.'s extraterrestrial life. And what happens at Roswell absolutely feeds into that whole kind of flying saucer scare in the late 1940s. Just two weeks before the Roswell incident, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine mysterious objects flying over Washington State at incredible speed. speed. Newspapers called them flying saucers, the first time the term entered popular language. From that moment on, Americans were primed. The airwaves, the headlines, even the comic books, all pointed to one possibility. We are not alone. And if something crashed in the desert, then maybe, just maybe, it had come from somewhere far beyond. And then for a while it kind of

quiet and then in the 1970s you've got researchers and former military personnel begin making these claims that the crash wasn't a balloon but was actually an alien spacecraft and there are books coming out in the 1970s that absolutely fundamentally and historically state that that thing that crashed in July 47 was not a weather balloon it was a flying saucer and here is the proof that renewed interest in the 70s seems to have opened the because by the 1980s, the conspiracy deepens. And now we're talking about actual documents, secret task forces, and presidential involvement. In the 1980s, you have all these secret documents emerging.

And obviously, this is before the internet. So they're being disseminated in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. And what these documents prove in inverted commas is that there was this high, secret group formed by President Truman and this group was called Majestic 12. And that was there to investigate extraterrestrial encounters, including Roswell, and not only there to investigate, but also to conceal these encounters. Because there was a fear that, you know, if supposedly, you know, if ETs had landed, if aliens had landed, there's going to be some sort of mass panic of alien invasion.

And those documents, the majestic 12 documents, are really widely circulated, and a lot of people said, okay, this is really proving it. You know, if you've got the president forming this group, that's good enough for me. This stuff actually happened. And all of this taps into something bigger, a sort of national anxiety. Don't forget that there are a lot of people, especially in the United States, who are kind of very wary of outside influence. influences, very wary of this idea of being invaded and this idea that you've got to protect yourself against everything and if they're aliens you've got to protect yourself against

them. In the late 1980s, the Roswell story took another twist, this time involving a mysterious military base out in the desert. Suddenly, it wasn't just about a crash in New Mexico anymore. It was about where the wreckage supposedly went. It should come as no surprise to anybody that there's this very top secret military base in Nevada that is always linked with the Roswell incident and that is our old friend Area 51. And that is long being considered at the place that is housing all this alien technology

that was recovered from the Roswell crash. And there are a lot of people out there who say, look, all that stuff from Roswell, all that flying saucer bits, all those alien bodies, that is all taken. to Area 51 and it's there and it's examined and then it's reverse engineered. And then the US government has this really secret area that they say, it's just for testing military aircraft, not studying extraterrestrial beings. There are people who say, yeah, but all these new types of military aircraft, all that stealth technology, all those special substances, that is all come from alien technology.

That has come from Roswell. For decades, the U.S. military maintained that what crashed in Roswell was simply a weather balloon. But that didn't sit right with many people, not least because the government seemed so eager to avoid any further questions. Then, nearly 50 years later, a new explanation emerged, one that seemed to offer clarity and only raised more questions. By 1994, the US Air Force is getting more and more kind of like, oh, God, guys, no, there weren't really aliens at Roswell and we didn't operate on them and, you know, have cups of tea with them or whatever it is. We had, the reason why we had to keep these weather balloons, in inverted commas, quiet, is because actually they were attached to a then top secret military project in 1947 called Project Mogul. But what exactly were the military hiding all those years ago? And what Project Mogul was doing was sending up these really high altitude weather balloons,

or not weather balloons, to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. But these weren't ordinary weather instruments. They were designed to detect the low-frequency sound waves generated by Soviet nuclear detonations. These massive balloon arrays contained long strings of microphones and radar reflectors and could reach altitudes of over 60,000 feet. We can't tell people that this is going on, because if the Soviets know we're monitoring this stuff, then obviously that's going to ruin all the fun for us.

So that's why we've got to keep it quiet. We're not keeping it quiet because we met a load of aliens. No one's going to be able to keep that quiet, are they? The real reason the military was so tough tight-lipped? It wasn't aliens. It was espionage. At the dawn of the Cold War, secrecy wasn't a luxury. It was a matter of national survival. But here's the irony. By refusing to tell the truth, even for reasons of national security, the government let a myth take root. And by the time Project Mogul was declassified in the 1990s, it was already too late. The questions

and the theories just kept coming. And the military simply had to keep debunking them. And then the Air Force also addresses all these eyewitness accounts of small kind of humanoid bodies being found. And people call those grays, grey aliens. I'm not an expert on all the different degrees of aliens, but I think at Roswell, supposedly they were called grays. And so what the US Air Force said is that, you know,

we had later experiments, and we use test dummies. So, you know, do you think that these things are aliens or test dummies? By 1994, the U.S. Air Force had released a nearly 1,000-page report officially attributing the Roswell debris to Project Mogul. Diagrams, timelines, testimonies, it was all laid out. But by then, the story had already been hijacked. The truth had become legend, and legend, unlike weather balloons.

doesn't fall gently back to earth. A lot of UFO researchers and theorists say, now, this is easily rejected. It's yet another government cover-up. We've seen so many cover-ups. Why now in 1994 should we believe you? This is rubbish. This is a cover-up, and this is what it is.

It is an alien landing. It's an alien crash. But what sort of evidence did these theorists have? So you've had a lot of witnesses. is coming forward saying that at Roswell, this is an alien crash, and this is why. This wreckage is manifestly not from some weather balloon. Some of the debris has really strange symbols on it, you know, symbols that are not associated with any form of human writing or graphology or numbers.

And also, some of these bodies are not dummies. They're not dummies. They are definitely aliens. There is no dummy on earth that looks like this. And then also there are some people who say that the wreckage is not made of an earthly technology or it's made of a kind of earthly substance that's so advanced. One of them that they claim was an element 115 called Moscovium, which has never existed on earth in a stable state.

But according to some of the theorists that the aliens had made it work. And so they're saying, listen, you know, you got wreckage. which is full of weird symbols, it's made out of Element 115, it's, you know, this is defying earthly technology, those bodies are not dummies, this wreckage is seriously unusual, and why are you sort of transporting these dummies under top secrecy? Also, the idea that you can have Moscovium, Element 115,

existing in a kind of solid matter, when it's only existed momentarily in kind of weird laboratory operators, it's basically almost impossible to make it, a spaceship out of it. But you know what? It sounds really cool when you say it's Element 115. How are you testing it? What piece of this have you got? Which piece of the supplying saucer have you tested? So you know what? It doesn't stack up. Roswell wasn't just a historical mystery anymore. It was folklore, a parable about distrust, secrecy, and the power of belief. And when the government finally spoke up, it wasn't seen as an answer,

It was seen as damage control. Roswell shows us what happens when silence speaks louder than fact. The longer the government withheld the truth, even for reasons of national security, the more they fueled belief in something far more sensational. But who were the whistleblowers who added fuel to this fire? And how are they connected to the incident? One of the most notable figures,

supposed whistleblower that the incident was indeed an alien crash, was this man called Major Jesse Marcell. And he was actually the intelligence officer who first handled the debris. But then decades later, he starts coming out with these public statements that says, it wasn't a weather balloon, it's something far more advanced. And then you've got a mortician. It's a guy called Glenn Dennis. And he claims that he's got this inside knowledge that there were alien bodies being examined.

at this local military base. And then he's also got this guy who's still going around today called Bob Lazar. He's even got an Instagram account called a million followers. And he says he used to work at Area 51 and he was working on reverse engineering alien technology to become human technology. There's no proof that he's ever been employed by the US government.

Got a criminal record or shipping chemicals across state lines without authorization. And he even has a criminal record. attached to pandering, so make it out what you will. These testimonies, while compelling, remain controversial. It's so compelling, isn't it? I mean, I love it myself. It really taps into that fascination about extraterrestrial life visiting Earth,

and it also taps into this whole idea of government secrecy around it. I mean, I love watching close encounters, you know, the Stephen Spielberg film, X-Files. That's great fun, men in black, Independence Day. I love this whole idea that the truth is out there. And I know that the US government has covered things up. You know, all government covers things up. You know, it's very easy to say,

if something like this happened, would the government cover it up? Well, maybe, maybe not. But the thing about it is, is that there is no doubt that the universe has other life forms, apart from us human beings. But those life forms could just be like amoeba, or they could be so advanced that they've looked at Earth and gone, you know what, let's not bother there. That looks rubbish. A flying disc, a cover-up, alien autopsies. For many, those ideas felt more real than radar reflectors and Cold War microphones.

Because in the information vacuum, belief doesn't just survive. It thrives. But you know what? There are still people saying that these UFOs, they're still unidentified flying objects, they still exist, there are still some mysterious things going on. But, you know, there is just, there is no definitive proof that even if there's something is unidentified,

that necessarily means, you know, it's an alien and that there's a potential government deception. A myth doesn't need proof. It just needs repetition. And over time, Roswell became more than a question about what happened in 1947. It became a lens through which millions of people viewed their relationship to power, secrecy, and reality itself. It didn't matter that Project Mogul made sense.

What mattered was that the government stayed silent long enough for aliens to move in. I love the Roswell incident. You know, it's fun. I can see how you could devote your life. studying all the kind of byways and little sort of side roads of research it could lead you to. But, you know, there are a lot of conflicting narratives about it. And there are a lot of people who've written books about it that have either kind of fessed up that they've been having fun or they've been found out for fabricating evidence.

And it's, it is simply a product of the Cold War, the paranoia at the time. People in the 1940s, there's less, you know, obviously sophisticated understanding of what the government was doing or what they were experimenting on. And there are other people who say, the official story, too many inconsistencies, maybe the whole thing is a cover-up. So personally, I don't believe this was a site of an alien encounter. But I do think that it's a real lesson in how governments should manage military secrecy far better. Because if you do it badly, like I think the US government did do at the time, by issuing a statement that was a flying source and then going back on it, I think you're creating.

a kind of information vacuum into which conspiracy theorists can pour all their fun and junk science and junk history. And I think that's what Roswell teaches us. If you're going to cover things up, do it properly. Maybe it was a balloon. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe the real story is in the files. Or maybe it's still buried out there in the desert. But one thing is certain. The Roswell story isn't going away. not because of what we know, but because of what we may never know. Roswell isn't just about aliens. It's about what happens when information is controlled, when silence replaces transparency,

and when mystery becomes more powerful than truth. It's a mirror, not to what crashed in the desert, but to who we are. A species wired for wonder, drawn to stories, suspicious of silence. And maybe, just maybe, hoping we're not alone. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more.

We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And now an interview with Carl Barney about his new book, The Happiness Experiment. Our sister, I'm going to bring forward and yours and give it to you now. And he said, oh, wow, that's great.

Thank you. That's so generous of you, Carl. That's great. But his wife, my sister-in-law, went ballistic. She said, this is too much money. This is wrong. I don't want anything to do with it. And I thought, well, that's not quite a heck.

expected. Oh my God. So I realized from that that this was not an easy thing to do. So I learned a lesson from that and I knew that I had to do this authentically. I had to do it right. Otherwise, it was not going to work. So that that happened. And then the third thing that happened was that I was looking at my financial statements and I had more money there than I was really using. It was sitting there. I mean, it was growing, making profits and so forth, but it wasn't being used. I wasn't using it for me. I wasn't unique for things that I really cared about, not for my people. So I thought, well, if I have all this money now, why should I wait until I die? Why don't I bring it forward? And then, you know, it was a long process for me to come around to that. But that's what finally

started this. And I said, well, I'll do it now. Let's back up just a bit. Tell us a little bit about your new book. What is the happiness experiment? Well, this is a recording of the real events with real people who I decided that I would bring forward the inheritance, the money I had for them in my will, and made it a prequest. So it was a chunk of money that they were going to get while they were still young enough to enjoy it. And I was still alive to see it happening. So I saw what they were doing. So when I sat down with them, I talked about money and happiness and how one can connect.

I said, look, I'm going to bring this forward and give it to you. but what I want from you is a plan so that you use this money so it's really a big benefit for you. I don't want this to overwhelm you. And they said, what kind of plan? I said, I want a happiness plan. And they said, a happiness plan? What's that? So nobody seems to have a happiness plan.

But it's one of the most important plans you can get. And it doesn't have to be very complex. What is it that makes you happy? What values do you want to pursue? You know, what goals and dreams do you have? And you can pursue them. And so I got them to write a happiness plan. And then when I saw the plan, I gave them all the money all at one time.

And so then they took it. And I watched them with their plan. I saw all their plans, what they did and how they became happier. And so, you know, that had to be written about. Because I wanted other people to see what they did so that they too could do the same thing. Which pre-quest is the most unique one you've come across? Well, it was a very, very painful and sad story because two dear friends of mine had a beloved daughter, and she was head on by a drunk driver and killed. She happened to be eight months pregnant at the time, so that killed the granddaughter too and also their daughter.

They were totally, totally wiped out, devastated, and they died emotionally. they had decided that they could never be happy again. They would be wrong to be happy. They didn't deserve to be happy because their darling daughter had been killed. Tremendously painful, awful, awful story. So they were grieving six years later. And I met with them, and I told them how much they had added to my life

and how much I was so grateful to them and that I wanted to express the gratitude. And I put them in my will, and they could accept that. And I said, but I want you to have it. now and they said, oh, no, no, we can't accept it. They turned it down. They turned it down. Well, we worked and I said, look, I'm leaving it open. So several months later, I think his wife persuaded him to do it actually, you know. So they said, okay, we'll do it because if we're going to wait until you die, why not do it now? And it wasn't the money interesting enough. They said it was the coaching

that made the big difference. That changed their mind, their mindset from being so negative. You know, we'll never be happy again. We don't deserve to be happy. And the coach turned their thinking, their mindset around and said, look, you know, it can be, you can be happy again. And they started to get the mindset of happy people. And now you cannot believe what these people, they're traveling all over the world. They're in Tahiti right down. They climbed Kiliman Gera. These people are loving life. And it was a major change. That is one of the most heartfelt, wonderful results of the and in a sense she said the wife said this prequest changed or saved my life because we were no longer living we were dead and this brought us back to life yeah i mean dealing with grief and

and many of us have i have you know when you when you're in those depths it's really it could be really difficult to find your way out of it and you know often it looks like there isn't a way out of it and you know sometimes you want to map right and it looks like this concept could be a good map for you, if you're that. It sounds like it was for these folks. I always like to end interviews by asking, is there anything that I didn't ask that I should have? How can my listeners benefit from this book? What should they do? What would be good for them? And so I'll answer that question. First off, think about happiness. Think about being happiness. You deserve to be happy and you can be happy but you have to make it as a choice. I'm going to increase my happiness.

Just that, if you make that realistically, I want to and I'm going to increase my happiness, that choice, and then talk to people about it, talk to a husband, a wife, or a girlfriend or a friend, a therapist or coach, talk to somebody about it and say, look, I made the decision that I want to be happier and I'm like you to help me create a happiness plan and then work on it. It's not that hard, but it is a, it is challenging, but it's a wonderful exercise. And if they do it, I guarantee they will increase their happiness. I guarantee it. Carl Barney is the author and the book is called The Happiness Experiment, a revolutionary way to increase happiness. Carl, where can people find the book? Wherever books are sold and it's now available for pre-order from

Amazon and they can go to the happiness experiment.com and they can pre-order it there and I hope they will. Carl, thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you, Dan. It's been fun.