Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

by Mary Roach

On one occasion, the “alien” that people were sure they’d seen was Dan Fulgham. Fulgham and Kittinger crashed one Saturday morning as their balloon came down in a field on the outskirts of Roswell. The 800-pound gondola was freed from the balloon too early and began to tumble, coming to a stop on Fulgham’s head. When Fulgham took off his helmet, his head swelled so severely that Kittinger was moved to describe his face as “just a big blob.” Fulgham was taken to the hospital at Walker Air Force Base, which was staffed in part by civilians. I asked Fulgham if he recalls people pointing and staring as though they’d seen an alien. “I don’t know,” he said, “because the only way I could see was to put my fingers up and pry my eyelids open.” When Kittinger led Fulgham down the steps of a plane to his waiting wife, the woman asked Kittinger where her husband was. “I replied, ‘This is your husband,’ and she screamed and began to cry,” wrote Kittinger in his witness statement in the Air Force publication The Roswell Report. I saw photographs of Fulgham taken after the crash. It was weeks before he looked human again.