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In 1997, fifty years after the Roswell Daily Record ran the headline "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region," the U.S. Air Force made a 24-minute video to close the case for good. It was written and produced by Captain James McAndrew to accompany the Air Force publication The Roswell Report: Case Closed, and it is now in the National Archives and, through it, on archive.org.

The film knows exactly what people think of it. Its narrator says the Air Force "is routinely accused of concealing a deep, dark secret from the American people," and calls the story "what some have described as the extraterrestrial event of the millennium" (07:50). Then it gives its answer, deadpan: "reports of aliens in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by Air Force high altitude research balloons" (08:01).

This clip is that answer, cut to fifteen seconds: the headline, a dummy strapped into an ejection seat under a crane hook, and a black-and-white photo of two airmen posing with their arms around a dummy in a parachute harness, like a friend at a party.

What makes it strange now is the arithmetic the film itself supplies. "From 1953 to 1959, anthropomorphic dummies were used by the U.S. Air Force" (09:04), carried "up to 98,000 feet on high-altitude balloons" (09:28). The Roswell crash was in 1947. The Air Force's report was titled Case Closed. The case did not close.