Estimate of The Situation - The Roswell UFO Crash

The Roswell UFO Crash

In the early 1980s, researcher Kevin D. Randle (Randle, 1989) said he spoke with an unnamed colonel who claimed to have helped write the Estimate when he was a lieutenant. According to the colonel, when Vandenberg was sent a working draft of the report, he allegedly ordered the paragraphs giving physical evidence (metal recovered in New Mexico) removed from the report. After doing so, Vandenberg then rejected the final version as lacking physical evidence. Randle claimed that he realized the significance of this anecdote only a few years later, while investigating the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico crash. According to Randle, the colonel had died by that point, and a follow-up interview was not possible.

The McCoy letter of November 8, 1948, which mentioned that there was no physical evidence of extraterrestrial origins for flying saucers, has sometimes been cited as evidence against the Roswell UFO incident of July, 1947, where a UFO allegedly crashed in the New Mexico desert. Swords argues, that the McCoy letter should not be interpreted this way, because the U.S. Military usually operates in a highly compartmentalized, need to know basis. If something as extraordinary as an alien spacecraft had crashed in the summer of 1947, Swords contends that fact would have almost certainly been quickly suppressed, and that Sign would not necessarily have been informed of it.