MYSTERY WIRE — The most famous UFO incident of all time occurred this week. On July 2nd, 1947, something crashed in the desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico.
It was this incident that inspired books, movies, TV specials, and multiple theories. Everyone wanted to know: was it a flying saucer from another world, a weather balloon, a foreign craft? Even today, believers in the UFO theory still argue about the basics such as where and when the Roswell crash occurred.
Former Army Colonel Phillip Corso says there is no question the craft came from somewhere other than earth. Col. Corso confirmed to Mystery Wire it was his job at the pentagon to seed the Roswell wreckage into private industry.
George Knapp sat down with Col. Corso for a one-on-one interview in 1997. This complete interview has never aired or been published before now.
George Knapp: You’re saying these items came from somewhere else. They came from a flying saucer?
George Knapp 1997 interview with Col. Phillip Corso.
Col. Phillip Corso: I didn’t know that. Because they were marked on the files as coming from New Mexico.
George Knapp: Roswell?
Col. Phillip Corso: Yes, Roswell. Well, I think some came in maybe another crash but these came from Mexico and Roswell specifically. And general Trudeau gave me the job of working on a program, put these things out.
Corso wrote a best selling book that was published on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash.
In the years since, investigators, including Mystery Wire, have confirmed Corso did have a high level job at the Pentagon involving advanced technology.
Map to Roswell crash site
It’s now been 73 years since the Roswell incident and 50 years since the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book, its much-maligned study of UFOs.
In the decades since, the UFO question has refused to go away. And the original documents from Blue Book and other formerly classified programs have since been made public. When the Air Force canceled Blue Book, it did so because it said there was no real evidence of any threat to national security.
“None of the evidence that I have examined would indicate any proof at all that we are being visited by extraterrestrials,” said Dr. Allen Hynek of Project Blue Book.
Harold Brown, Secretary of the Air Force, said, “We have not been hiding anything. The investigations have been made public.”
But a careful reading of the now-public documents shows the military hasn’t always been honest in its statements about UFOs. Government programs called Project Sign (1949) and Project Grudge came before Project Blue Book. See more about these projects in this report from our 1989 series, UFOs: The Best Evidence.
After Project Blue Book was shut down, the military took little interest — at least publicly — in UFOs. The Condon Report justified Blue Book’s end on the assertion that UFOs did not present a threat. At Blue Book’s conclusion, more than 12,000 reports of unidentified flying objects had been collected over 17 years, and most were explained as natural phenomena or aircraft.
But that still left 585 cases that were unexplained, and 13 that were mysteriously missing.
The government’s role in UFO studies didn’t reappear until 2007, when former US Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid and other senators established funding to assess possible threats to national security. Programs known as AAWSAP, AATIP remained secret until news reports from the New York Times exposed the $22 million program and introduced the world to the “Tic Tac” UFO video and the eventual acknowledgement by the U.S. government that not only did they have a program to study UFOs, the Navy videos are real.
