The 1947 UFO controversy of Roswell, N.M. is like a bad penny: It keeps turning up.
The legend, rehashed by conspiracy theorists in countless documentaries, revolves around allegations that an unusual object fell from the sky -- an object so bizarre that the U.S. Air Force issued a press release that a flying saucer had crashed.
That story was quickly recanted, creating what would become one of the greatest urban legends in American history.
Until now, most debunkers doubted that there was even one crash. Now, in an exclusive interview, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French told The Huffington Post that there were actually two crashes.
This revelation is especially remarkable considering that French was known in the past to debunk UFO stories.
"There were actually two crashes at Roswell, which most people don't know," French told HuffPost. "The first one was shot down by an experimental U.S. airplane that was flying out of White Sands, N.M., and it shot what was effectively an electronic pulse-type weapon that disabled and took away all the controls of the UFO, and that's why it crashed."
French -- an Air Force pilot who was in Alamagordo, N.M., in 1947, being tested in an altitude chamber, an annual requirement for rated officers -- was very specific in how the military allegedly brought down what he believes was a spacecraft from another world.
"When they hit it with that electromagnetic pulse -- bingo! -- there goes all their electronics and, consequently, the UFO was uncontrollable," said French, who flew hundreds of combat missions in Korea and Southeast Asia, and who held several positions working for Military Intelligence.
Another retired officer doubts French's story.
"No chance! Zero chance!" said Army Col. John Alexander, whose own top-secret clearance gave him access in the 1980s to official documents and UFO accounts. He created a top-level group of government officials and scientists who determined that, while UFOs are real, they couldn't find evidence of an official cover-up.
"In the 1980s, I was the guy developing all of the pulse-power weapons systems. We couldn't have done it then. In the 60s, they had a laser system, but your range was extremely limited, and we didn't have operational laser weapons in that time frame," said Alexander, who is working to get amnesty for military personnel who wish to talk about their UFO experiences.
Except for the initial newspaper headline declaring the military had captured a flying saucer outside of Roswell, the Air Force closed the books on Roswell, claiming that the true identity of the object was a high-altitude surveillance balloon, code-named "Mogul."
But after eyewitnesses -- including numerous military personnel -- began to tell stories of their participation in an alleged cover-up of the Roswell incident, some researchers insisted that it was, in fact, an alien ship that crashed at Roswell.