Air Force Said Roswell Alien Bodies Were Test Dummy Recoveries
Decades after 1947, witnesses described bald bodies in flight suits, stretchers, and bagged remains that the Air Force said resembled Cold War dummy drops.
en.wikipedia.org · Roswell incidentReports from the time said nothing about dead visitors. None of the main eyewitnesses mentioned bodies.
The bodies showed up decades later, in the memories of elderly witnesses, sometimes offered as deathbed confessions. Those accounts disagreed on the basics, including where the crash happened, how many extraterrestrials there were, and what they looked like.
In 1997, the Air Force offered an explanation for those later stories. It said the alleged "bodies" came from memories of "accidents involving military casualties" and recollections of picking up test dummies.
Beginning in the 1950s, military programs like Operation High Dive sent experimental models aloft on high balloons over the New Mexico desert. The point was to test parachutes and the effects of a long fall, work that required temperature sensitive instruments riding with the dummy.
The Air Force said this also explained why the recovery looked funereal. Crews transported the dummies using stretchers and casket shaped crates, and sometimes used "black insulation bags" that resembled body bags. The bags were meant to protect heat-sensitive gear from desert heat. To a bystander years later, that looked like soldiers loading aliens into body bags.
Even the small details lined up, according to the Air Force. Witnesses spoke of a jeeplike truck loaded with radios, which matched the Dodge M37 truck used for dummy retrievals. Witnesses described the bodies as bald, as "dummies" and as "plastic dolls," and said they wore flight suits. The Air Force said those attributes were consistent with the dummies it used in the 1950s.
The Air Force said the tally of body retrieval accounts pointed to something other than dishonesty. The Air Force said people had seen military recoveries of test equipment, not visitors from another world.
Questions people ask
Why was the Air Force dropping dummies from balloons?
Operation High Dive was a U.S. Air Force project in the 1950s that dropped instrumented dummies from very high balloons to study what happens during a high altitude fall. The dummies carried sensors to record forces, temperature, and parachute behavior. The data helped develop parachutes for pilots.
Why would a dummy need a casket and a body bag?
Because the instruments riding with the dummies were delicate. Crews used stretchers to carry the models, crates shaped like caskets to protect them on trucks, and padded insulation bags to keep sensors from overheating in the desert heat. Seen from a distance, the procedure looked like a military funeral detail.
Does this explain the 1947 debris too?
No. The debris found in 1947 was identified by the Air Force in the 1990s as a Project Mogul balloon train, a top secret system of long balloon strings carrying microphones to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. The dummy explanation covers only the later stories about bodies, which did not appear until years after the dummy flights.