Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Shares What 'Most People Don't Know' About Roswell UFO Crash

Even if you don't know the conspiratorial details surrounding the mysterious crash that occurred in the summer of 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, you probably at least know there are some who believe it was a UFO now being covered up by the government.

(Related: Proof of an Alien Cover-Up? YouTube User's Wild Theory That NASA Is 'Trying to Stop Us From Looking at the Sun')

One of them, a former Air Force Lt. Col., is speaking out saying not only was he ordered to debunk some of the findings surrounding the investigation he was involved in, but that there was more than one crash. Here's what Richard French had to say about the case to the Huffington Post:

"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.

[...]

French says he was told about the UFO "shootdown" by another military officer -- a confidential source -- from White Sands Proving Grounds, an area of the New Mexico desert where the U.S. military tested many weapons systems.

His source told French there was a second UFO crash near Roswell a few days after the first one.

"It was within a few miles of where the original crash was," French said. "We think that the reason they were in there at that time was to try and recover parts and any survivors of the first crash. I'm [referring to] the people from outer space -- the guys whose UFO it was."

Watch this report from OpenMindsTV, a site that covers UFO news, (via Huffington Post) in which French speaks out:

In the above video, French again says that he was told to "debunk what we could in any way we could."

Still, as one might expect, there are skeptics to French's claims. The HuffPost reports retired Army Col. John Alexander, who viewed the Roswell documents, saying the technology in the 1940s would not have been sophisticated enough to do what French described:

"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.

Either way -- government UFO cover-up or not -- the object was deemed by military authorities as a high-altitude weather balloon, not a flying saucer.