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At the time of the alleged UFO crash, in July 1947, nearby Roswell Army Airfield was home to the world’s only atomic bomber squadron, the 509th Bombardment Group. Only two years earlier, in August 1945, the elite unit had destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending World War II. In July 1946, the squadron participated in Operation Crossroads, involving two atomic bombing exercises conducted in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. By the summer of 1947, the 509th was routinely engaged in training designed to prepare it for future atomic conflict with America’s new postwar enemy, the Soviets.
UFOs and Nukes By Robert HastingsConsidering the great many nuclear weapons-related UFO sightings which have come to light—as described in various declassified documents and the military eyewitness testimony found in my book UFOs and Nukes—the atomic bombardment squadron aspect of the Roswell Incident is perhaps not that surprising.
Fortunately, a former, high-level nuclear weapons specialist has now provided dramatic, hitherto unknown information about the controversial case. In 1998, I conducted a taped interview with former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) supervisor Chester “Chet” W. Lytle Sr., whose work in the early 1950s put him in the right place, at the right time, to hear a very interesting story about Roswell. Lytle told me that he was “absolutely” certain that the mysterious object secretly recovered in the New Mexico desert was an alien spacecraft. According to Lytle, the unimpeachable source of this information was none other than William H. Blanchard, the commander of Roswell Army Airfield at the time of the incident.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. During World War II, Chet Lytle had provided engineering support for the seminal Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb. His company, Lytle Engineering, was secretly contracted by the U.S. Army to design and manufacture the explosive “lenses” used on the tower-mounted device detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The disc-shaped lenses uniformly focused a conventional high explosive blast inward, thereby crushing the two halves of the bomb’s plutonium core into a single “critical mass” and triggering a nuclear chain-reaction.
After the war, Lytle’s company continued to manufacture various components for nuclear weapons and was also involved with a number of other highly-classified military R&D projects, ranging from radar development to aircraft autopilot design. His own supervisory position with the AEC involved weapons-stockpiling activities related to the U.S. military’s burgeoning atomic and thermonuclear arsenal.
Because of these diverse, highly-sensitive activities over the years, Lytle held, at one time or another, Top Secret clearances with several government departments and agencies, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
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