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In 1997 the United States Air Force put out a report called The Roswell Report: Case Closed, and made a film to go with it. The film, Roswell Reports, Volume 1, was written and produced by Captain James MacAndrew and is now in the National Archives collection on archive.org. It opens by admitting what the Air Force is "routinely accused of": "concealing a deep, dark secret from the American people." The July 1947 story began when the Army said it had recovered a "flying disc" near Roswell, New Mexico, and retracted that within a day. The Air Force's own 1994 report later said the weather-balloon explanation was a cover story for Project Mogul, which the film calls "a top secret attempt to acoustically detect suspected Soviet nuclear explosions" (02:17).

Then the film goes after the legend. It reads out one claim from the stories: military personnel "led by an angry red-headed captain, threatening those who witnessed the operation with imprisonment or death" (04:47). Its answer arrives after a pause: "However, things are not always as they appear" (05:41). The "aliens," it says, "were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by Air Force high altitude research balloons" (08:01). From 1953 to 1959 the Air Force dropped such dummies in its High Dive and Excelsior projects (09:04), carried up to 98,000 feet (09:28). "Many of the dummies landed outside the confines of military reservations and were regularly observed by local civilians" (09:58).

The red-headed captain gets the same treatment. "The redheaded captain was probably Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr." (17:33), one of the balloon jumpers; the film shows his Excelsior III jump of August 16, 1960 from 102,800 feet. Its last word on him is that "there is no evidence of any kind that Kittinger confronted or threatened civilians" (18:06).

What makes it strange to watch now is the gap the film never closes. The dummy drops it describes ran from 1953 to 1959, and the Roswell debris was found in 1947. The Air Force was explaining its own cover-up, in its own voice, with its own footage. Wikipedia notes that contemporary polls found the majority of Americans doubted the Air Force explanation.