United States · 1947-07; body narratives mostly later
Roswell/Corona, 1947
Official chainThe best-known claim in the subject has the thinnest first-hand record in this archive. What happened in July 1947 near Corona is documented: something came down, the base issued a press release, and the release was withdrawn within a day. The bodies arrive in the story decades later, in recollections gathered from the late 1970s onward.
- Where
- Roswell/Corona, New Mexico
- When
- 1947-07; body narratives mostly later
- Who reported it
- Multiple later claimants
- How direct
- Later civilian/military-associated recollections
- Entities described
- Alleged small bodies; count varies
- Handled as
- INVESTIGATED / EXPLAINED
- Evidence class
- GOV-3
What the record resolves
The official file contains no description. What circulates comes from somewhere else.
The 1947 documents describe no body. Every body account was gathered thirty years or more afterwards.
The record
An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.
- U.S. Air Force; U.S. Air Force / NARA The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert / Case Closed (opens in a new tab)
The document is attached to this entry.
What is not settled
The Air Force's own two reports address the body accounts directly and attribute them to anthropomorphic test dummies dropped in later high-altitude programmes, with the dates displaced in memory. That explanation has its own problems. But the gap between 1947 and the first body testimony is thirty years, and thirty years is long enough for a memory to acquire almost anything.