Nitinol
Nitinol is a nickel-titanium shape-memory alloy — a metal that returns to a pre-set shape after deformation — whose alleged connection to the Roswell crash and subsequent U.S. government reverse engineering programmes has made it a recurring subject in UAP disclosure research. Researcher Anthony Bragalia obtained approximately 150 pages of documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that were described as appearing to confirm Nitinol as an anomalous substance potentially reverse-engineered from recovered exotic materials.
Alleged Roswell connection
The Roswell crash accounts, as relayed by Colonel Philip Corso and others, describe recovered debris with a memory-metal property — material that returned to its original configuration after being crumpled — and which witnesses reported could not be cut, burned, or permanently deformed. Corso claimed in his memoir The Day After Roswell that he was assigned to a foreign technology division tasked with seeding recovered artefacts into civilian and defence industry research and development pipelines, with Nitinol cited as one of the resulting technologies.
Physicist Hal Puthoff, in his paper Ultraterrestrials Models (2022), lists Nitinol as a candidate example within the forensic signature set for the extraterrestrial hypothesis: specifically, the "accelerated development of new high-tech, high-temperature, low-density intermetallic alloys funded by nearby government facilities" beginning in the late 1940s, citing government installations in the vicinity of known UAP-related research institutes as the funding source. The reference to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) is significant because the base has long been identified in crash-retrieval accounts as a receiving and storage site for Roswell material. Roswell researcher Donald Schmitt, drawing on testimony from General Arthur Exon — stationed at Wright Field when the Roswell materials arrived — describes labs prepped in advance, followed by exhaustive material testing where every attempt to cut, burn, or drill through the debris failed completely: Exon recorded a unanimous consensus at the Foreign Technology Division that "the materials from Roswell were from space — they were not manufactured here, they were manufactured off the planet."
DIA documents
Bragalia's FOIA request to the DIA yielded approximately 150 pages of documents that Bragalia and commentators interpreted as consistent with the claim that Nitinol was studied as an anomalous or non-human-origin material rather than a straightforwardly domestic invention. The documents were described as appearing to reference Nitinol in contexts that diverge from the official history of its development at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in the 1960s. Bragalia subsequently published his analysis, arguing that the DIA material supports a reverse-engineering provenance for the alloy's core shape-memory properties.
Properties and UAP relevance
Nitinol's shape-memory effect — whereby the alloy deforms under stress but reverts to a programmed configuration on heating — is structurally similar to the memory-metal behaviour described by Roswell witnesses. The material also exhibits superelasticity at body temperature, enabling large elastic deformations without permanent change. Within the broader AAWSAP research programme, Hal Puthoff catalogued anomalous materials of potentially non-human origin and evaluated whether recovered samples matched known or unknown engineering lineages; Nitinol was among the classes of material whose historical provenance was regarded as requiring further scrutiny.
Tom Carey and Battelle
Roswell researcher Tom Carey, co-author of Witness to Roswell, independently documented the Nitinol connection through interviews with engineers and scientists at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. Carey argued that Battelle was contracted to reverse-engineer the Roswell memory metal beginning in the late 1940s, and that the results were deliberately laundered through the Naval Ordnance Laboratory to conceal the origin: "The Battelle Memorial Institute didn't want their name associated with anything that had to do with the UFO. So the results were laundered through the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and they announced it in 1962. You can go online, just put Nitinol in your browser and see what comes up." Carey described the original Roswell material from which Nitinol is claimed to derive as "very thin, light, indestructible, but that you could wad into a ball, open your hand, and it would just float out and go back to its original shape" — a description of far more extreme shape-recovery than any current commercial Nitinol product can achieve, consistent with the view that the reverse engineering was only partially successful. A 2025 discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience with researcher Jesse Michels independently corroborated the Battelle connection, noting that Elroy John Center — FOIA-confirmed co-author of a 1949 Wright Airfield–Battelle contract listing Nitinol among metals under study — had told UFO researchers before his 1991 death that he worked on alien material with "weird hieroglyphics" on it.
Nanotechnology explanation for properties
Len Kasten, analyzing the gap between Nitinol's behavior and the behavior witnesses described from Roswell debris, proposes that the original extraterrestrial material's self-recovery properties derived from active nanotechnology embedded in the metal rather than from any passive shape-memory metallurgy. Per Kasten, the Roswell material "could be wrinkled beyond recognition with hammers and even shot with a gun and that always returned to its smooth original condition" — properties he attributes to nanoscale machines rather than to a thermally-activated crystallographic phase transition as in conventional Nitinol. This interpretation reconciles the testimony that witnesses could not permanently deform the material — including via gunshot — with the commercially available Nitinol's far more modest shape-recovery characteristics, which require heating above a transition temperature and cannot survive ballistic damage.