Explaining the mystery behind Roswell, and the line of thinking that keeps this mystery, and other UFO sightings, alive.
The “Gap Theory”
For the serious UFO believer, humanism mixed with a dabble of occult belief lies behind most theories. One woman argued, “We don’t know, which is why I believe.” Without realizing it, she was describing what we will call here the “gap theory” (not to be confused with the “gap theory” some teach about Genesis 1). It says that whatever we cannot explain today will one day be explained, in part or as a whole, by advancing science. For example, there is no cure yet for some deadly brain cancers, but someday, it is said, science will find the cause and the cure. In other words, science has the answers to everything; we simply have not learned them all yet. This is what humanism falls back on when it comes to theories that are hard, if not impossible, to prove.
As we saw in Part 1, travel at or near the speed of light is impossible because of the vast amount of energy it would take, let alone travel across thousands or millions of light-years. The gap theory answers that some tiny source might one day hold as much energy as our sun, or more. The film Spider-Man 2 (2004) is a good example: a scientist creates a miniature “sun” that holds enormous power in a tiny space. So humanists, in their vain imaginations, dream up ways a UFO might carry enough energy to cross the universe.
When it is not super-compact energy sources, it is theories of ships vanishing and reappearing at vast distances, which belong more to the occult than to science. Or it is theories about what the U.S. government is hiding from the public about UFOs. Serious UFO believers treat that as another “gap” in our understanding of alien life.
The Roswell Incident
On June 14, 1947, rancher W. W. “Mac” Brazel and his eight-year-old son came across scattered debris on the J. B. Foster ranch near Corona, New Mexico, roughly 75 miles northwest of Roswell. In early July, after hearing reports of “flying discs,” Brazel went into Roswell and showed some of the pieces to Sheriff George Wilcox, who thought they might be of military interest and called the Roswell Army Air Field.
Major Jesse Marcel, the base intelligence officer, and counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt were sent to look over the site. On July 8 the base announced that it had recovered a “flying disc,” but the next day General Roger Ramey said the material was nothing more than a weather balloon, and the story faded away for many years.
In 1978 Jesse Marcel was interviewed by UFO researcher Stanton Friedman, and Marcel now said he believed the debris had come from an alien craft and that the weather balloon was a cover story. Friedman was convinced he had found proof of a government cover-up. In 1980 Charles Berlitz and William Moore published The Roswell Incident, which became the most famous book about the events of 1947.
More claims begin to surface
- The debris was an unknown material that could not be broken or burned.
- The material had strange “alien” markings on its surface.
- Everything recovered was hidden away in “Hangar 18.”
Later a former mortician’s assistant named Glenn Dennis came forward, saying that a nurse at the base had told him of alien bodies and autopsies. This surprised many who knew him, and there were serious problems with his story. The nurse could never be found, and Dennis eventually admitted that the name he had given for her was made up. Even researchers who believed in a crash concluded he had knowingly given false information. Yet the missing nurse only fed more theories of a cover-up.
What the rancher actually described
Brazel’s own account, printed in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9, 1947, was very ordinary. The debris was scattered over an area about 200 yards across. It included smoke-gray rubber, tinfoil, tough paper, sticks and tape, some of the tape with flowers printed on it. Gathered together, the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 5 inches thick. In the 1990s, at the request of a congressman, the General Accounting Office investigated the records, and the Air Force undertook its own review.
The real secret: Project Mogul
The Roswell incident did involve a real government secret, but it had nothing to do with aliens. In 1994 the Air Force reported that the debris most likely came from Project Mogul, a top-secret program that flew long trains of high-altitude balloons carrying instruments to listen for Soviet atomic bomb tests. One of those balloon trains was launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field on June 4, 1947, and was last tracked drifting toward the Corona area. So it was not exactly a weather balloon, as the military first said. Mogul’s purpose was secret, and the odd materials found at the site — the foil radar reflectors and the tape — came from its equipment rather than from an ordinary weather balloon. The United States did not want the Soviet Union to know how it planned to detect its nuclear tests. In 1997 the Air Force followed with a second report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, which explained later stories of “alien bodies” as memories of test dummies dropped by parachute and recovered in the 1950s.
Hoaxes hurt their own cause
Like the radio drama of 1938, some UFO believers have turned to hoaxes, not for entertainment but to pressure the government into “confessing” the truth about alien life. These hoaxers get their fifteen minutes of fame and are then discredited, which only makes it harder for anyone to take the UFO movement seriously. A classic example is the 1995 television special Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, which claimed to show film of an alien from Roswell being dissected. In 2006 the man who released the film, Ray Santilli, admitted it was a staged re-creation, made in a London apartment.
The problem with the witnesses
Many books have been written about the alleged cover-up. Berlitz and Moore said they had interviewed more than 90 witnesses, yet only 25 appeared in their book, and of those only seven claimed to have seen the debris and five to have handled it. Another problem is time. The first interview about the Roswell incident took place 31 years after the fact, and some accounts came as much as 50 years later. Over those years stories conflicted with one another and changed. The authors maintained that the witnesses’ memories were still sharp, but memories do not improve with age; after so many years, they are far more likely to have faded or become mixed with what people later heard and read.
So What Are People Really Seeing?
Is there really life on other planets millions of light-years from earth, and are such creatures really visiting us from so far away? As man searches the vastness of the universe for life, the Bible tells us that God formed the earth to be inhabited and gave it to the children of men; it says nothing of life on other worlds.
There are many explanations for what people report as UFOs. Some sightings come from delusions or drug use. Some photographs and videos are faked, especially in the digital age, to give the illusion of alien life for one reason or another. Many sightings have natural explanations, and others are aircraft, balloons or secret military projects. The U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book studied 12,618 sightings before it closed in 1969. Only 701 remained unexplained, and the Air Force concluded that UFOs posed no threat to national security and showed no sign of being alien vehicles. In 2024 the Pentagon’s UFO office reached the same conclusion, finding no evidence that any sighting was alien technology and no evidence of recovered alien craft, at Roswell or anywhere else.
After all these years of searching, neither the UFO movement nor NASA can show solid evidence of life anywhere else. No alien bodies have been recovered, no spacecraft parts, and no radio transmissions or other messages from aliens have been received. There is nothing but explaining the unknown with “gap” theories and alleged cover-ups — or with aliens who travel between “different realities” to get around the laws of physics, which is nothing more than a pagan idea. The mysteries remain unsolved for them only because they wish to be right and the Bible to be wrong.