A former CIA agent is going on the record to say the alleged UFO incident on July 8, 1947, in Roswell, N.M., really happened, the Daily Mail and other news organizations report.
Chase Brandon, who worked 35 years with the CIA, said documents regarding the alleged landing of beings from outer space are locked up at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va.
"It was in a vaulted area - there was one box that really caught my eye," the Daily Mail quotes Brandon as saying. "It had one word on it: Roswell. I rummaged inside it, put the box on the shelf and said, 'My God, it really happened.' "
Brandon makes the comments during the 65th anniversary of the alleged incident, which military officials initially explained as the capture of "a disc," but later explained away as a weather balloon, according to the Daily Mail.
"It was not a weather balloon - it was what people first reported," the news organization quotes Brandon as saying.
The Huffington Post quotes Brandon as saying, "It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet."
Brandon worked as an undercover, covert operations officer in the CIA's Clandestine Service, where he focused on missions on international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics and weapons smuggling, according to Huffington. He spent his final decade with the agency as liaison to the entertainment and publication industries, and it was during this time - in the mid 1990s - that he walked into the vaulted Historical Intelligence Collection area at CIA headquarters, according to the news organization.
Brandon said the box contained written material and photographs, according to Huffington.
"That's all I will ever say to anybody about the contents of that box," Huffington quoted Brandon as saying. "But it absolutely for me was the single validating moment that everything I had believed and knew that so many others believed had happened truly was what occurred."