A 35-year agency veteran says he knows what went down in the New Mexico desert 65 years ago — and coincidentally has a new book to promote

U.S. Air Force handout The U.S. Air Force released this photo June 24 of an aeroshell of a NASA Voyager Mars space probe prior to launch at Walker AFB, New Mexico (formerly Roswell AAF) as part of its report on the so called "Roswell Incident" of 1947.

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What happened at Roswell 65 years ago? It may be a conspiracy theorist’s greatest mystery. Now, one former CIA agent says he has information that could solve it.

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On July 8, 1947, most reports agree, something landed in Roswell, N.M. At first the government said the object was a “flying disk,” but it quickly changed its story the next day to a “weather balloon.” For a few years, people bought that answer, but eventually some started asking questions. Some people say it was Stalin sending a message to the U.S. as the Cold War kicked off in earnest. Others say Roswell was the first contact between human beings and extraterrestrials. Still others maintain that it really was just a weather balloon. Now ex–CIA agent Chase Brandon says he knows what really happened.

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“It was not a damn weather balloon,” Brandon told the Huffington Post. “It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet.” The 35-year agency veteran was a covert agent involved in international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking and weapons smuggling, and spent 10 years as the agency’s first entertainment and publication industries liaison.

Full disclosure before we storm the barricades: Brandon is promoting The Cryptos Conundrum, a new novel that his website describes as a “sci-fi, political conspiracy thriller about CIA’s cover-up of the Roswell UFO crash.”

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Sometime near the end of his service, while he was the entertainment liaison, Brandon walked into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and found something he did not expect in a restricted section of old documents called the Historical Intelligence Collection.

One of the boxes had a single word written on it: Roswell. “I took the box down, lifted the lid up, rummaged around inside it, put the box back on the shelf, and said, ‘My God, it really happened!'” Brandon recounted.

The former agent reported seeing some “written material and some photographs” but will not reveal what else he saw. “But it absolutely, for me, was the single validating moment that everything I had believed, and knew that so many other people believed had happened, truly was what occurred,” Brandon concluded.

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Although he said he believes he hasn’t violated CIA policy by talking to HuffPo about the discovery, he was clear that he would not say anything more. “I will go to my grave being mindful of the two hats that I wear: my personal one and the one that will forever reside on my head as a former CIA officer,” Brandon said.

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