Hangar 18: UFO Files

Hangar 18 is located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Greene and Montgomery counties in Ohio, near Dayton and Cincinnati. It's claim to fame stems from allegations, mostly by UFO enthusiasts, that wreckage from an alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico in July of the year 1947, was sent there to be examined.

It is also rumored that refrigerated corpses of alien beings are being kept there too.


As UFO research enters the twenty-first century, controversy continues to rage over the truth of whether or not Major Jesse Marcel and his men collected pieces of debris from a flying saucer along with the bodies of 2 to 5 extraterrestrial crew members. Many accounts from both civilians and military personnel who claim to have been eyewitnesses to the events at Roswell speak of 5 alien bodies found at the impact site just north of Roswell, New Mexico, and state that four corpses were transported to Hangar 18 at Wright Field, with the fifth going to the USAF mortuary service at Lowry Field. Two years before his death in the late 1990s, pilot Oliver "Pappy" Henderson swore at a reunion of his World War II bomber crew that he had flown the remains of four alien bodies out of Roswell Army Field in a C-54 cargo plane in July of 1947.

There are, however, numerous secondary accounts that maintain that one of the aliens survived the crash and was still alive when Major Marcel and his retrieval unit arrived on the scene. Some UFO researchers believe that as late as 1986 the alien entity was still alive and well treated as a guest of the air force at Wright-Patterson.

Originally called Wilbur Wright Field, the government installation was first opened in 1917 to train military personnel during the first World War. Soon, Fairfield Air Depot was created, adjacent to Wright Field. In 1924, McCook Field test facility was closed, and the Dayton community purchased 4,500 acres which housed the various facilities. This took in the previously leased land of Wright Field, and the Wright and Fairfield facilities were combined into one. The newly created facility was named after the innovators of flight, the Wright Brothers.

The base was well known for reverse engineering of foreign government aircraft during the Cold War. The base expertise in the disassembly and recreation of MIG fighters has only enriched the theories that alien craft have been studied there. The workforce is estimated at 22,000, giving us an idea of the massive amount of work being done at the base.

 Wright-Patterson is most well known for its connection to the Roswell crash, although links can be made to other crash retrievals. Several eyewitness accounts of military personnel and even civilian workers who handled debris from the Roswell crash, and saw bodies of creatures not of our world, give us a very plausible Wright-Patterson connection to the study of alien technology and physiology.

The same day that the famous Roswell headlines ran in newspapers around the world, there was an enormous amount of activity at the Roswell base. Some debris from the crash, and possibly alien bodies were sent to Ft. Worth, Texas. It is now commonly accepted by researchers that before the Ft. Worth flight, another flight to Wright-Patterson had already taken place, carrying debris and alien bodies. This shipment was secretly stored and studied in the infamous Hangar-18.

UFO researchers believe some of the stuff was loaned around, but the main repository was the foreign technology division at Wright-Patterson. Many have heard stories over the years of people who say that they're still trying to figure out what that stuff is, speaking of the debris that was collected from the July 1967 crash of Roswell.

Could this alien material and technology recovered be so advanced, that even after many years of study by our best scientists, they still fall short in understanding the secrets behind it? If scientists could have unlocked even some of the technological advancements of the ship's inner workings and navigational systems, could it not have been the creative impetus behind the Stealth series of aircraft, and the seemingly rapid advancement of our weaponry and technology in the last fifty plus years? I think yes. I'm not the only one either.

Even to this very day, UFO enthusiasts believe that evidence of what happened in Roswell, New Mexico can still be found in Hangar 18. Then there are those who now believe that all evidence from that crash, and many others, are no longer located at Wright-Patterson. That in fact, all the evidence may have been sent to the secret installation known as Area 51, in Nevada. However, that installation is no longer a secret.

Then there are those who say that a secret underground facility was built beneath Hangar 18 over the years and all the evidence, including the alleged bodies, were relocated into that storage area. No evidence has surfaced to support the claim. Still, many say that the underground facility is there.

Regardless of what the truth may be, one thing is certain, according to military logs, a cargo plane did indeed arrive in the early morning hours to Wright - Patterson from New Mexico transporting something just a couple days after the reported Roswell crash. What that cargo plane was transporting is still unknown, and will probably always be subject to debate.