Roswell craft

The Roswell craft — also referred to as the Roswell vehicle or Roswell disc — is the designation for one or more non-human vehicles, unidentified exotic craft, that allegedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in early July 1947 and were subsequently allegedly recovered by the United States Army Air Forces. Witness accounts describe at least two distinct forms: a compact egg-shaped object approximately twelve to fifteen feet long, observed in Hangar P-3 and transported through town on a military flatbed, and a larger delta- or crescent-shaped structure recovered from the crash site itself, bearing a resemblance to the German Horten flying wing. The relationship between these two forms — whether they constitute separate vehicles or components of a single craft — remains contested across sources. The craft is the physical subject of the Roswell incident and was recovered in the Roswell craft retrieval operation.

Compact vehicle

The smaller of the two recovered forms was a silver, oval or egg-shaped object, seamless in construction, with no visible windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear. Walter Haut, the 509th Bomb Group public information officer who issued the original "flying disc" press release on July 8, 1947, described in his sealed posthumous affidavit seeing this object inside Hangar P-3 at Roswell Army Air Field, measuring approximately twelve to fifteen feet in length, not quite as wide, and about six feet high.

Civilian witnesses in Roswell observed the object in transit. E. L. "Mac" McFerrin reported a military flatbed transporting an egg-shaped object through town. Homer Rowlette Sr., a 509th soldier detailed to the hangar, told his family the object was round or egg-shaped and seamless, with no rivets, seams, or other conventional joinery. Robert Dwyer, an Army Air Forces mechanic stationed at Roswell, described it as a smallish, egg-shaped object.

Oliver "Pappy" Henderson, a pilot who flew wreckage to Wright Field, described to his wife what witness Robert Talbert subsequently corroborated: a silver, oval-shaped object approximately four to five feet wide by twelve feet long and five to seven feet high, with a dome on it, damaged because it was cut off at one end. Archaeologist W. Curry Holden, who reportedly reached the crash site independently, described an egg-shaped object that had impacted into the rough terrain.

Researchers Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt interpreted the compact vehicle as an escape capsule or crew compartment that had separated from a larger structure during breakup, explaining the debris field's distance from the body site.

Crash-site vehicle

The larger structure, recovered from an arroyo where it had embedded its nose into an embankment with its tail high in the air, presented a fundamentally different profile from the compact egg. Philip Corso, who managed the Pentagon's Roswell file at Army R&D from 1961, described it as a soft-cornered delta-shaped craft with a dark skin that appeared mostly intact despite the impact. It resembled "the flying wing shape of an old Curtis" rather than an ellipse or a conventional saucer, with two tail fins on the top sides of the delta's feet pointing upward and outward. Corso also characterized it as crescent-shaped, noting its resemblance to the German Horten wings that American flyers had encountered at the end of World War II.

Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett, who accompanied Sheridan Cavitt to the debris site, described the structure as having a curved front and a wide wing with a batlike trailing edge, with a rip or hole visible in the left side. A second source interviewed by Kevin Randle — whose identity was not published — described it as narrow with a batlike wing, only fifteen to twenty feet wide and about twenty-five to thirty feet long.

Richard Dolan, citing ten vinyl-bound volumes of records from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, referred to "two crashes of manta ray shaped craft." Linda Moulton Howe's South Carolina source described a wedge-shaped disc at a separate recovery site.

The vehicle was surprisingly light for its size; the retrieval crane that hoisted it from the arroyo swung it onto a standard long flatbed Ford without heavy-equipment difficulty. Its interior exhibited an anomalous optical phenomenon: light was visible through the top of the vehicle even before sunrise, as though the hull was conducting or refracting external light through its structure like a lens. A split seam ran along one side of the fuselage, through which the occupants had apparently exited or been thrown.

Propulsion

No conventional engines, fuel tanks, or recognizable propulsion components were identified in the recovered vehicle. General Nathan Twining, who personally examined the material, reported to President Truman that the craft "seemed to have no engines, no fuel, nor any apparent methods of propulsion, yet out flew our fastest fighters." A civilian witness present in the hangar at Roswell Army Air Field when wreckage was assembled reported that "there wasn't a moving part on it."

Army researchers at Wright Field and later at the Pentagon's Foreign Technology Division reportedly concluded the vehicle was likely propelled by an antigravity system converting an electromagnetic field into lift. Corso, who managed the technical file from 1961, described it in his notes as a craft that "navigated by brain waves and floated on a wave of electromagnetic energy" — a brain-wave navigation system in which the occupants' neural signals controlled the vehicle directly. According to Corso, the craft's propulsion appeared to be embedded in its material structure rather than realized through any mechanical mechanism — a characteristic that allegedly defeated reverse-engineering efforts at Wright Field for fourteen years before the file passed to him. The memory metal fabric recovered from the debris field is believed by some researchers to have served dual roles as hull material and propulsive medium; the Battelle Memorial Institute analysis produced only Nitinol as a commercially viable derivative.

Corso's colleague Paola Harris reported that he also described the craft as having a biological cell structure — the ship itself was partly organic.

Multi-craft hypothesis

Main article:

multi-craft Roswell theories

The question of how many vehicles were involved in the 1947 Roswell event has been answered differently by different researchers. Three main positions exist.

One craft

Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, in UFO Crash at Roswell (1991) and The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994), argued that a single vehicle broke apart in flight, producing the Foster Ranch debris field and a separate body/impact site two to three miles away. Tom Carey and Schmitt later refined this model: the compact egg was the crew compartment or escape capsule that separated from the larger delta structure during breakup, continuing thirty to thirty-five miles further before coming to rest.

Two craft

Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner, in Crash at Corona (1992), argued that two separate vehicles crashed: one near Corona and another on the Plains of San Agustin approximately 150 miles to the west, with up to eight bodies recovered across both sites. Richard Dolan, citing Wright-Patterson records accessed through Jacques Vallée, referred to two crashes of manta ray shaped craft. Len Kasten, in Secret History of Extraterrestrials (2010), proposed a midair collision between two craft of Zeta Reticuli origin — one coming down near Corona, the second found near Datil in August 1949.

Three craft

Steven Greer, in interviews on the Shawn Ryan Show, described three vehicles: the first obliterated at the Foster Ranch debris field, the second coming down near Socorro with recoverable bodies, and a third found in the mountains in 1951. Greer attributed the crash to a scalar electromagnetic weapon concealed within a radar dome at the 509th Bomb Group's facility, which caused two of the vehicles to collide.

Paola Harris, drawing on her extensive unpublished interviews with Corso, reported that Corso privately described three craft that entered through an "electromagnetic gate" during a storm — a more exotic scenario than what appeared in his published memoir.

Horten resemblance and the Schulgen memorandum

The visual similarity between the crash-site vehicle and German Horten flying wing designs was noted immediately by the military officers who examined it. General Nathan Twining told President Truman that "the crescent shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn't know about." This suspicion was formalized in the Schulgen Collection Memorandum of October 28, 1947 — an intelligence directive instructing agents to search for aircraft exhibiting sandwich construction, boundary-layer suction, unusual power plants integral to the airframe, and other features consistent with the recovered debris. Joseph P. Farrell argued in Roswell and the Reich (2010) that the Schulgen memorandum's specifications align item-for-item with documented Third Reich aeronautical research programs rather than any extraterrestrial engineering paradigm.

In his September 23, 1947 memorandum to Brigadier General George Schulgen, Twining — who had personally visited the recovery sites — characterized the objects as "something real and not visionary or fictitious," with a "light reflective or metallic surface," "circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top," and flying in formations of three to nine at speeds above 300 knots.

See also

• Roswell bodies
• Roswell cover-up
• Majestic 12

Open questions

References

Source ratings:

(Color-coding) (

[1 Wikipedia-grade]

·

[2 Questionable]

·

[3 Reporting/Analysis]

·

[4 Speculative/Hearsay]

·

[5 Ungrounded]

). (To change source ratings,

edit this page

.)