Unsolved Mysteries volume 5, episode 4, "The Roswell UFO Incident" revisits the story it first covered in 1989. The original Unsolved Mysteries show opened with the famous and controversial incident in July 1947 when rancher Mac Brazel discovered unexplainable wreckage on the land he tended near Roswell, New Mexico. Brazel reported his find to the Roswell Army Air Field nearby, who despatched Major Jesse Macey to the site to investigate. His initial findings prompted an astonishingly upfront press release declaring "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer," followed two days later by a further statement disavowing the first, claiming the debris was nothing more than "a harmless high-altitude weather balloon."

It would be 30 years before Jesse Macey revealed the truth of what happened at Roswell between those two statements. In 1989, and having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, Marcel did not want to go to his grave without telling the truth. He was backed by his son, Dr Jesse Macey Jnr, who was 10 years old in 1947 but vividly ed the event and actually handled the material his father had collected in the desert. He agreed with Brazel, who also handled the debris, that "it was not a weather balloon, it was something completely different."

Who Unsolved Mysteries' Major Jesse Macey Was & What He Really Found In Roswell In 1947

Jesse Macey Was A High-Ranking Official in the RAAF

Macey Senior was no amateur ufologist or conspiracy theorist - he was a hard-nosed military veteran who'd served in WW2, and played a significant role in the post-war atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. He was a senior figure in the RAAF. He took possession of parts of debris, consisting of metals, fabric, foil and sticks, and took them home. Sky History relates that Macey Junior recalled that his father conducted his own experiments on the material, including hammering, drilling and melting, to try to establish its origin. He concluded that, without question, the materials were extra-terrestrial.

In Netflix's "The Roswell UFO Incident" Jesse Macey Jnr specifically recalls one item his father found - a metallic-seeming bar with some form of purple-colored symbology etched into it. Upon his father's death, as per The Guardian, Macey Jnr discovered diaries left by the former airman with cryptic messages about the event. After retiring from the Air Force, Macey Snr developed an obsession with astronomy, built his own observatory, and, according to LiveScience, finally went public in 1987 with his revelations: “I knew that I had never seen anything like that before, and as of now, I don’t know what it was. It was not anything of this Earth."

Why It Took 30 Years For Major Macey To Tell The Truth & How The Government Responded

Macey Was Sworn To Secrecy By The RAF

In 1947 after Macey had gathered his evidence from the Roswell site he was flown on a B52 to deliver the wreckage to Brigadier General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth, Texas. 30 years later he revealed that Ramey took the materials from him, ushered him into another room for a debrief, and when he returned to the items they'd been swapped out for a clump of rotting neoprene balloons. Dutifully, Major Macey had his picture taken with the new debris, and the RAAF issued their second statement that he'd simply stumbled across standard weather-tracking equipment.

Macey was told to keep quiet about the entire incident. Brazel and others who bore witness to those events at Roswell in 1947 received official visits and unofficial threats should they speak up; People.com reports that a new story was devised by the government involving Project Mogul, a top-secret Soviet nuclear detection program involving weather balloons, as the real origin of the debris. In Unsolved Mysteries volume 5, episode 4, "The Roswell UFO Incident" that excuse failed to persuade ufologists, who noted that the project did not come into effect until 1952. The argument over what truly happened at Roswell in 1947 rumbles on.

Sources: People.com, The Guardian, LiveScience, Sky History