Instead of recognizing the preposterousness of the Air Force's contention outlined in the book that dead aliens witnesses saw in 1947 were actually anthropomorphic dummies used in high-altitude balloon drops in the 1950s, the mainstream media bought the story hook, line and sinker and never bothered to investigate the outrageous contention further.

Twelve years later, the "dummy" explanation is still referenced as a matter of fact by skeptic organizations and cable television documentaries that appear on channels such as the National Geographic Channel, which not surprisingly receives some government funding.

The 1997 book was actually a sequel to the Air Force's 1994 debunking volume, "The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert." The first book contended that wreckage from a flying saucer seen by hundreds of witnesses was actually remnants of a weather balloon. The Air Force, after initially reporting in 1947 that it recovered a crashed flying saucer on a ranch outside of Roswell, quickly changed its story by saying the wreckage was only a downed weather balloon.

When Jesse Marcel Sr., a former Air Force major who was the top intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Forces Base at the time of the UFO crash, told noted UFO researcher Stanton Friedman in the late 1970s that the material he handled in 1947 was not of this world, it inspired numerous other witnesses to step forward and break their long silence. Many of the witnesses said some Army Air Forces personnel in 1947 threatened to kill them if they ever talked about what they saw or heard. As the story became bigger throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the Air Force obviously felt pressured to make a statement. That statement was delivered in the Air Force's 1994 book, which contended the weather balloon was actually a balloon part of a top-secret project called Mogul. The balloon that fell on the ranch near Roswell, according to the Air Force, was used to determine whether Russia was detonating any atomic bombs.

The only problem with the 1994 book, which was written by Air Force Col. Richard L. Weaver and Air Force Captain James McAndrew, was that it did not offer an explanation to witness reports of alien bodies recovered at the site. Numerous first-hand and second-hand accounts of alien bodies had become a fascinating aspect of the Roswell story. The beings in many accounts were described as very thin, about four-feet tall in stature, having only four digits on each hand as opposed to five, being gray in color, having heads that appeared too large for their bodies, and sporting wide concave dark eyes.

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