Rosewell is a typical small town in the arid state of New Mexico. Rosewell Air Field (formerly Rosewell Army Air Field) lies some one hundred miles east of the White Sands Missile Range. On the night of July 2 1947, only eight days after Kenneth Arnold's experience, a local Rosewell couple, Mr and Mrs Dan Wilmot saw 'a big glowing object' in the night sky over their front porch. It was nearly ten o'clock and the visibility was good. Whatever the object was- and it appeared to be shaped like 'two inverted saucers faced mouth to mouth'- it was moving very fast in the direction of Corona to the north-west.

On that night there was an electrical storm, not unusual in the desert regions of the American south-west. 'Mac' Brazel, a rancher living near Corona and about 75 miles from Rosewell, had heard a loud explosion on that night which was clearly something other thatn thunder. The next morning he found an area strewn with wreckage he couldn't recognise, lying in a narrow belt in the direction of Socorro to the west. The fragments he found were thin, foil-like metal, but impossible to crease or bend with his bare hands. The metal's surface seemed to be covered in hieroglyphics or somehting that resembled writing and had a tape-like material covered in a floral design dangling from it.

The next day, Brazel visited George Wilcox, the town sheriff to tell him. Wilox on his turn contacted the Army Air Force Base. Brazel had also talked to a local radio reporter, Johnny McBoyle, but Johnny's transmission was stopped by the authorities who threatened to remove his licence if he continued. Brazel was interrogated at the Air Base and the army visited his ranch to collect the mysterious debris and cordoned off the area. The debris was inspected at the Rosewell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher head quarters. Most of the reckage which Major Marcel had collected was flown to Fort Worth in Texas, where a press conference was called and newsmen were allowed to photograph the debris from a distance. A second photo-opportunity allowed them even closer, but by this time a swap had taken place, and the real debris had been transferred to Wright Field (now the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). And the authorities now announced that the debris was a weather balloon. This was certainly not the recollection of Major Marcel, nor of Bill Brazel, Brazel's son, who had kept bits of the wreckage out of curiosity. When Bill happened to mention in a local bar that he still had three pieces, he was visited by the military who promptly confiscated his collection. This was two years after the crash. Why should the military be so concerned about what they had already said was a weather balloon?

The evidence of Major Marcel is even more important, in that he was a trained observer and could be expected to know a weather balloon when he saw one. He could not recognise the hieroglyphics on the metal's surface and discovered that, though weighing virtually nothing, the metal couldn't be dented or burned.

More bizarre than the compelling evidence of the crashed UFO and the subsequent official cover-up is the alleged discovery of a dead crew.

Barney Barnett was a civil engineer, working in the desert area known as the Plains of San Augustin, west of Route 25 that meanders with the Rio Grande. On the morning of July 3, he found 'some sort of metallic, disc-shaped object' lying in the sand. It was about 30 feet in diameter and seemed to have cracked open as a result of its impact with the ground. Inside the craft and scattered around it were dead creatures, humanoid, but the size of children. Their eyes were small in their outsized heads and they had no hair. Their clothing was grey one-piece suits without belts, zips or bottons. Had this sight been witnessed by Barnett alone it would have been wide open to the usual accusations, but he was allegedly joined by a group of student archaelogists from the University of Pennsylvania, carrying out a dig in connection with Native American settlements in the area.

The local undertaker in Rosewell, Glenn Dennis, received a number of telephone calls from the Air Base asking about the complexities of preserving bodies in ice. He subsequently received an order for four child-size coffins. A military nurse at the base claims to have seen autopsy reports on alien bodies.

With contradiction, denial and unspecified levels of individual and corporate paranoia, the Rosewell story lay for several years. But the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Watergate scandal and the events in Cambodia led an increasing number of Americans to the realisation that its government could be highly secretive. The Freedom of Information Act, which became law in 1976, forced the release of many (but not all) government papers on UFOs. Papers known as the Majestic-12 documents surfaced in 1984, and they make clear the fact that a group had been set up by the government to study both the Rosewell saucer and its alien crew. The government at once denounced these documents as fakes.

Was the Rosewell 'saucer' an experimental craft, along the lines of dirigible airships and V1/V2 rockets earlier in the century? The unusual metal (still, fifty years later, not in general usage) and the unexplained hieroglyphics would sem to rule this theory out, as would, of course, the alien bodies.