Conrad Bauer - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: The Story Behind the Story - The Pentagons UFO Report

In many ways, the Pentagon report has been a refreshing experience. It's refreshing to see the U.S. government apparently in the trenches with both UFO researchers and the general public in an attempt to figure what the heck UFOs may be. But for many long-time followers of the phenomenon, such an earnest approach on the part of our government can't help but seem disingenuous at bestand outright deceptive at worst.

Long before this groundbreaking Pentagon report ever surfaced, many in the UFO world were crying foul about how the government has handled purported encounters with UFOs. The first and most infamous of these claims of governmental malpractice is the alleged mishandling of the Roswell Incident.

Roswell, of course, has become entirely synonymous with the discourse on aliens and UFOs. For better or for worse, the word Roswell brings to mind images of crashed spacecraft, stranded aliens, and a government cover-up. As of this writing, however, the U.S. government's official stance on this infamous incident hasn't changed: it wasn't an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, but rather a high-altitude balloon.

This balloon was supposedly part of a top-secret program called Project Mogul whose main purpose was to detect nuclear test blasts in the Soviet Union. And the alleged aliens? The Pentagon states that they were nothing more than burned-up crash test dummies. According to the official version of events, all of the hubbub that led to the most infamous UFO event of all time was due to nothing more than ranchers and other local yokels stumbling a secret military operation.

For UFO researchers, however, this explanation is just not up to snuff. For one thing, crash test dummies were not used in high altitude testing until the 1950sand the last time anyone checked, the Roswell incident occurred in 1947! Also, of course, the Pentagon's official account completely contradicts countless eyewitness accounts of what happened on that infamous day in Roswell. But perhaps nothing screams Pentagon cover-up more than the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Roswell incident, Walter Haut, the public information officer of the nearby 509th Bomb Group, issued an official press release stating that the Army had "come into the possession of a flying disc."

Local newspapers quickly ran the release under their own sensational headlines, such as the Roswell Daily Record 's RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region . But then Haut suddenly changed the official narrative, and all of the exciting talks of a downed alien spacecraft morphed into drab descriptions of a downed weather balloon. Many years later, Haut would suggest that the top brass had pressured him to change the original storybut what was most astonishing was his deathbed confession that "I am convinced that what I personally observed was some kind of craft and its crew from outer space."

Haut's dying words, therefore, seem to confirm what true believers of the Roswell incident have been claiming all along: not only did the U.S military recover the wreckage of a crashed alien spacecraft, they also recovered the dead bodies of the alien crewand then they engineered a major cover-up. Long before the Pentagon report, all the way back to 1947, there has been a push for answers about UFOs.