In Search of Aliens

Lore & Background

The series consists of ten episodes, each exploring a different mystery or historical topic from the perspective of ancient astronaut theory. Episodes include 'The Hunt for Atlantis', 'Nazi Time Travelers', 'The Mystery of Loch Ness', 'The Roswell Rock', 'Searching for Bigfoot', 'The Mystery of the Cyclops', 'The Mystery of Puma Punku', 'The Founding of America', 'The Mystery of Nazca', and 'The Alien Code'.

Reader's Guide

In Search of Aliens is significant as a television program that continued the promotion of ancient astronaut theories, a form of pseudoscience, on a mainstream cable channel. According to reviewer Jason Colavito, the information presented in the show 'added up to nothing', there was 'no overriding thesis or purpose', and Tsoukalos admits 'he doesn’t buy into what his interviewees said'. Colavito wrote that 'In Search of Aliens is an ersatz America Unearthed that lacks even the dubious expertise of Scott F. Wolter'. The show has been criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for promoting 'racist pseudo-scholarship'. According to Alexander Zaitchik writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, shows that promote fringe history like In Search of Aliens are embraced by the far right because they help in 'raising the profile of racist pseudo-scholarship', such as German writer Jan Udo Holey, whose antisemitic books have been banned across Europe.

Did You Know?

• The show premiered on July 25, 2014, on the H2 channel.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center described the show as promoting 'racist pseudo-scholarship'.

The Rancher's Discovery and the Chain of Events

In the early summer of 1947, a long train of top-secret military balloons was launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico. Within seventeen miles of the ranch managed by W. W. "Mac" Brazel near Corona, the balloon array lost contact and crashed across the property. Brazel, who had no telephone or radio on his land, came across tinfoil, rubber strips, tape, and slender wooden beams strewn over several acres. At the time, he had no awareness of the national flying-saucer frenzy that Kenneth Arnold's June sighting had ignited. It was only when Brazel drove into Corona on July 5 that his uncle Hollis Wilson suggested the wreckage might be a "flying disk." The next day, Brazel brought the matter to Sheriff George Wilcox in Roswell, who contacted Roswell Army Air Field. The base, home to the 509th Bomb Group—the only unit then capable of delivering nuclear weapons—dispatched Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt to accompany Brazel back to the ranch and collect the material.

The Press Release and Its Rapid Retraction

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field public information officer Walter Haut released a statement declaring that the 509th Bomb Group's intelligence office had gained possession of a "flying disc" through the cooperation of a local rancher. Flight engineer Robert Porter, who helped load the material for transport to Fort Worth, Texas, recalled it was wrapped in paper, lightweight, and small enough to fit in a car trunk. When station director George Walsh broadcast the news on local radio KSWS and passed it to the Associated Press, his phone lines were flooded with calls from around the world. Yet the excitement lasted barely a day. At a press conference, General Roger Ramey, Colonel Thomas DuBose, and weather officer Irving Newton identified the debris as fragments of a conventional weather balloon, noting similar radar targets operated at roughly eighty weather stations nationwide. Brazel himself described the wreckage to the Roswell Daily Record as rubber strips, tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks, while Marcel called it "parts of the weather device."

The Conspiracy's Birth and Proliferation

For over three decades, the Roswell incident remained a footnote. Then in 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel stepped forward to argue that the Army's weather-balloon story was a deliberate fabrication, and he suggested the wreckage might have been of extraterrestrial origin. His claim gained enormous traction through the 1980 publication of The Roswell Incident, a book that wove Marcel's testimony into a compelling narrative of military deception. What began as a single speculation about one piece of wreckage ballooned into an ever-expanding web of increasingly elaborate and mutually contradictory theories. Over the following years, the conspiracy narrative grew to encompass government concealment of alien beings, grey-skinned extraterrestrials, multiple crashed flying saucers, the recovery of alien corpses, secret autopsies, and the reverse engineering of non-human technology. None of these additional claims possess any factual basis, yet the story's complexity and internal contradictions only deepened its grip on popular imagination.

Official Explanations and Cultural Aftermath

The true origin of the 1947 debris was eventually confirmed: it belonged to Project Mogul, a top-secret program operating complex, uncrewed balloon trains from Alamogordo to detect Soviet nuclear tests. To obscure the program's purpose and the source of the wreckage, the Army had reported the material as a routine weather balloon. In the 1990s, the Air Force published multiple reports that definitively tied the incident to Project Mogul and ruled out any extraterrestrial explanation. Nevertheless, a persistent community of UFO enthusiasts continues to insist the debris came from an alien craft and to accuse the U.S. government of a decades-long cover-up, despite the general absence of supporting evidence. Culturally, the Roswell story has transcended its origins to become a foundational trope across science fiction literature, film, and television. The town of Roswell itself has embraced the narrative, actively marketing itself as a destination for UFO-themed tourism and keeping the legend alive for new generations of visitors.

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