If there is only one thing we can say with any certainty about the infamous events that occurred outside of Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947, it’s that there are multiple theories for what happened. And no-one can offer any real, hard evidence that definitively nails things one way or the other. Of course, Ufology has always been like that. But, Roswell seems to typify that aspect of the UFO phenomenon like no other case.

The many and varied scenarios involve a crashed UFO, a fallen weather balloon, a Mogul balloon used in the detection of Soviet atomic-bomb tests, an experiment based around high-altitude balloons and Japanese people, some sort of atomic mishap, a Soviet ruse involving mutated kids, crash-test dummies, a flying-wing experiment, a craft flown by time-travelers from our future, a vehicle created by an ancient terrestrial race that lives deep underground in vast caverns, and even a demonic, Trojan Horse-style deception.

But, of one thing we can be sure: clearly all of the above scenarios cannot be correct. But, hang on a minute or several. Just maybe they can all be correct, after all. Welcome to the complex world of multiple timelines, alternative realities, and multi-dimensions.

Now before I get taken to task (as someone will surely do), I’m not saying – at all – that what I’m about to discuss definitively explains Roswell, only that it’s something worth musing upon and speculating on – and that’s it. There’s nothing wrong with wildly theorizing. And if you have a problem with wild theories, tell it to someone who actually cares, not to me.

Consider this: what makes Roswell so confusing is that many of the theories actually have degrees of merit attached to them. The original comments of Mack Brazel (who found the huge debris field on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico) do seem to suggest something like a weather-balloon came down. And when one takes a careful read of the Air Force’s 1994 “Mogul Balloon Report” some – but certainly not all – of the data does resonate with the Mogul scenario.

On the other hand, the so-called “memory metal” strewn all across the ranch does not accord with balloon debris in the slightest. It does indeed suggest something unearthly was in our midst.

Then there is the matter of the bodies. Let’s start with the crash-test dummies scenario. Although many Roswell researchers dismiss their testimony, both Gerald Anderson and Jim Ragsdale described seeing dummy-like bodies. As for the Japanese theory, Melvin Brown – a witness to the strange corpses – told his family that the bodies he saw could have “passed for Chinese.” We have others who claim diminutive Gray-like aliens were recovered on the ranch. Others talk of far more human-looking aliens, somewhere around five feet in height.

As for the crash site itself, we hear of a debris field and nothing else. Others, however, claim that a definitive flying saucer was found somewhere in the area. Or was it a semi-intact saucer? Some say neither: instead, it was an escape pod, or a German Horten aircraft, or a mistakenly dropped (but, thankfully, unexploded) atomic bomb.

How is it feasible that so many people could have so many conflicting stories of what they saw, knew or heard? The most obvious answer is that multiple scenarios, and story-lines, have been officially created over the years to deliberately create confusion over what really happened – and that may very well be the crux of it and nothing else.

But, let’s indulge ourselves for a while in the multi-timeline and multiple realities theory. To do so, we have to address the thought-provoking words of a friend of mine, Joshua P. Warren.

A few years ago I interviewed Josh – for my book, The Real Men in Black – on the theory that the MIB might be time-travelers and – more importantly – time-manipulators. Josh had a great deal to say on this matter, much of which revolved around a certain, infamous photograph that no-one can find.

During the course of the interview, Josh discussed the strange story of what has become known as The Thunderbird Photograph. So the admittedly very odd tale goes: back in the 1960s, a photograph, said to date from the late 1800s, appeared in the pages of a newsstand magazine of the day – possibly True, Saga, or Argosy – and displayed the deceased remains of a gigantic, monstrous bird, pinned to a pair of barn-doors somewhere in rural North America. The exact location being a matter of some debate, just like the picture itself.

Numerous researchers, investigators and authors of a whole range of anomalies claim, with absolute unswerving certainty, that they personally saw the priceless picture when it was published. The big problem, today, however, is that despite the fact that the pages of all the above-magazines, and many others too, have been carefully and dutifully scoured – even to the point of near-obsession – the picture cannot be found; anywhere at all.

It’s almost as if it never even existed in the first place. And, in a curious way, maybe it didn’t. Or, if Joshua P. Warren’s theories are correct, maybe it did…but just for a while.

How can we explain such a strange situation? A specific photograph cannot simply disappear from every publication that it ever appeared in – can it? Maybe, if we follow Josh’s lead, it certainly can: “I get the impression,” he said to me, “that there might be a shifting timeline that we are passing through on a day-by-day basis. One day UFOs might be real, and the next they’re not. The next day Bigfoot is running around your backyard, and the next day he doesn’t exist.”

Josh continued: “One day the Thunderbird photo is in a magazine, and then when the timeline is played with again, it’s no longer in the magazine. And it may be that, day by day, hour by hour, or even minute by minute, small changes to the timeline are being made by these entities, or beings, coming back and constantly playing around with the past and the future. So, things we remember in the past, like the Thunderbird photo, suddenly no longer exist in the present”

And maybe that is what has happened with Roswell. But, just perhaps, there are not just multi-timelines, but multiple realities, too, ones ripe for equal manipulation by something akin to the MIB. Perhaps, in one of those realities, aliens met their deaths at Roswell. In another reality, Mac Tonnies’ “Cryptoterrestrials” gave themselves away by coming down on the Foster Ranch. In a third, it was all due to the Japanese. And, in a fourth world, crash-test dummies were the cause all along. And so on. And so on. And so on.

But, maybe the MIB – definitely manipulative characters at the best of times – surfed those same realities and timelines and put everything into a state of “unified flux.” The result: the many alternative realities have became fused into one – thus creating a scenario where, today, Roswell is a mixture of memories borne out of chaotic meddling with the natural order, and a combination of different scenarios originating within varying realities that have bled through into our world.

Perhaps that also explains why there are so many conflicting theories for who Jack the Ripper was: a doctor, a member of the British Royal Family, a Freemason, an actor, and even a midwife! Maybe Jack was all of these. It just depends on which reality you call home. Until, that is, the MIB move in and do their work of the weird and weaving variety. The same could also apply to the JFK assassination of November 1963. Was it the Cubans? The Russians? The CIA? Lee Harvey Oswald? The Mob? The answer may very well be: Yes, it was!

If multiple realties, and multiple Earths exist, perhaps Roswell, Jack the Ripper and the Kennedy assassination are exactly to the people of those worlds as as they are to us: a confusing mass (and mess) of theories that all seem to have a degree of validity to them, something which should be impossible. But which may actually not be quite so impossible after all, if someone has decided to screw around with what passes for reality and time.

But why would the MIB, or something like them, engage in such manipulation? It may be very simple: they do it because they can and it amuses them to screw with the Human Race.