The "Roswell incident", or simply "Roswell", was the July 1947 recovery of metallic and rubber debris from a crashed military balloon by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, who issued a press release announcing possession of a "flying disc". Decades later, conspiracy theories claimed that debris from an alien spaceship had been covered up by the government. In response, in 1994 the United States Air Force published a report concluding the crashed object was a top secret nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

The Roswell incident took place during the flying disc craze of 1947, sparked by widespread media coverage of pilot Kenneth Arnold's alleged sighting. Amid hundreds of reports nationwide, on July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field's press release was broadcast via wire transmission. The Army quickly retracted the release, falsely stating the crashed object was merely a conventional weather balloon.

The incident was forgotten until 1978, when retired lieutenant colonel Jesse Marcel was interviewed by ufologist Stanton Friedman. In that interview,  Marcel revealed the "weather balloon" had been a cover story to divert public attention. Based on this, Marcel speculated that the debris might have been extraterrestrial in origin.

Jesse Marcel's interview led to complex conspiracy theories about alien spacecraft recovery and military cover-ups by ufologists. In 1979, over three decades after Roswell, conspiracy theorists began to claim that extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military at Roswell. In response to claims of alien occupants, a second USAF report in 1997 reviewed testimonies about aliens and found them to be baseless, made up, or inspired by parachute dummies.

Conspiracy theories about the event persist despite explanations linking the incident to Project Mogul, a military balloon or having been described as "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim". Its myth has become a cultural phenomenon and the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media. Portrayals of the incident are a prominent and enduring trope in popular culture and mass media commonly associated with "grey aliens" and "flying saucers".  The city of Roswell, New Mexico has embraced this cultural iconography; featuring a little green man on its seal and hosting numerous ufology attractions and events.

Events of 1947

Project Mogul

The initial events occurred at the beginning of the Atomic Age during what historian Kathryn S. Olmsted describes as "the first summer of the Cold War". By 1947, the United States's top-secret Project Mogul had launched thousands of balloons carrying devices to listen for Soviet atomic tests.  On June 4, 1947, researchers launched a long train of these balloons, designated Flight 4, from Alamogordo Army Air Field. They tracked Flight 4 flying northeast toward Corona and lost contact within  of Mac Brazel's ranch.

'Flying disc' craze

In June 1947, media nationwide reported civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold's account of objects flying at "incredible speed". Arnold's description of what would become known as flying saucers incited a wave of over 800 sightings. Many of these accounts echoed Arnold's description with speed beyond known planes and elements from aircraft like glass domes, cockpits, fins, legs, jet pipes, vapor trails, and even propellers. On July 4, 1947, United Airlines Flight 105 reported seeing multiple 'flying discs'. During that summer, Americans associated saucers with secret military projects, hoaxes, or natural phenomena. They had not yet become synonymous with the idea of extraterrestrial visitation.

Debris recovered
When W.W. "Mac" Brazel discovered debris scattered across several acres of his ranch in mid-June, he did not view the tinfoil, rubber, tape, and thin wooden beams as unusual.  Brazel gathered it and pushed it under some brush to dispose of it. The ranch had no phone or radio, leaving Brazel unaware of the ongoing flying saucer craze. On a Saturday evening, July 5, he drove into Corona, New Mexico, where patrons at a local bar informed him of the flying disc stories. Later, Brazel transported some of the silvery debris to the sheriff's office in Roswell. Sheriff George Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), who assigned the matter to Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt. Brazel took Marcel and Cavitt to the debris site to gather more of the material.

On Tuesday morning, July 8, Marcel took the debris to the 509th Commander, Colonel William Blanchard. Blanchard reported the finding to General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth Army Air Field (FWAAF), which resulted in orders to fly the material out to FWAAF that evening. By the end of the day, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that the military had recovered a "flying disc" near Roswell. Robert Porter, an RAAF flight engineer, was part of the crew who loaded what he was "told was a flying saucer" onto the flight bound for Fort Worth. He described the material - packaged in wrapping paper when he received it - as lightweight and not too large to fit inside the trunk of a car.

After station director George Walsh broke the news over Roswell radio station KSWS and relayed it to the Associated Press, his phone lines were overwhelmed. He later recalled, "All afternoon, I tried to call Sheriff Wilcox for more information, but could never get through to him [...] Media people called me from all over the world." When interviewed decades later, Lydia Sleppy, a teletype operator at the KOAT station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, claimed that she was typing a story about the wreckage as dictated by reporter Johnny McBoyle until interrupted by an incoming message ordering her to end communications.

'Flying disc' debunked

Media interest in the case dissipated soon after the July 8 press conference where General Ramey, his chief of staff Colonel Thomas Dubose, and weather officer Irving Newton identified material as pieces of a weather balloon. Irving explained to reporters that similar radar targets were used at about 80 weather stations. According to Irving, balloons would be attached to a star-shaped reflective target. After launch, the balloon would expand with increasing altitude before bursting around 60,000 feet.

On July 9, 1947, the US Army identified the debris as an ordinary weather balloon. As described in the July 9, 1947, edition of the Roswell Daily Record:
The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been 12 feet [3.5 m] long, [Brazel] felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards [180 m] in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet [1 m] long and 7 or 8 inches [18 or 20 cm] thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches [45 or 50 cm] long and about 8 inches [20 cm] thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds [2 kg]. There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine, and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No strings or wires were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.

The handful of news stories that followed the official explanation, offered mundane and prosaic accounts of the crash. Brazel told the Roswell Daily Record that the debris consisted of a "large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks." He paid little attention to it but returned later with his wife and daughter to gather up some of the debris. When interviewed, Marcel described the wreckage as "parts of the weather device" and "patches of tinfoil and rubber." While not an outright fabrication, the 1947 official account omitted any connection to Cold War military programs. Major Wilbur D. Pritchard, then-stationed at Alamogordo Army Air Field, would later describe the weather balloon story as "an attempt to deflect attention from the top secret Mogul project."

Roswell forgotten (1947–1978)
The Roswell incident, first brought to public attention in July 1947, remained relatively obscure for three decades until the emergence of UFO conspiracy theories rekindled interest in subsequent years. These theories were fueled by hoaxes, legends, and stories of crashed spaceships and alien bodies in New Mexico.

Folklore scholars have traced the development of the Roswell narrative throughout its history. According to their research, the genesis can be traced back to the waning days of World War II (1944-45), a time when Japan unleashed thousands of Fu-Go balloon bombs, designed to inflict damage and instill fear in the United States.

Crashed disc hoaxes (1947–1950)

Twin Falls crashed disc hoax (1947)
Days after Roswell, on July 11, the press reported the recovery of a  disc from the yard of a home in Twin Falls, Idaho. On July 12, it was reported nationally that the Twin Falls disc was a hoax. Press reported that four teenagers had confessed to creating the disc. Photos of the object were then publicly released. The object was described as containing radio tubes, electric coils, and wires underneath a plexiglass dome.

The Twin Falls hoax, with its nationally published image showing a bemused army officer holding a disc-like object of mundane construction, has been called the "coup de grâce of press coverage" on the 1947 flying disc craze. In the days following the story, flying disc "press accounts rapidly fell off".

Weeks later, on July 28,  flying disc news briefly resumed when two army officers died in a plane crash after investigating a hoaxed report of recovered disc debris at Maury Island, Washington.

Aztec crashed saucer hoax (1949)
In 1949, con-artists tricked journalist Frank Scully and the magazine Variety into publishing the story of a crashed saucer with dead alien bodies near Aztec, New Mexico.  The story told of humanoid bodies about three feet tall, metal that was much stronger than those found on Earth, and alien writing found in the wreckagethese elements would later reappear in some versions of the Roswell myth.

After the Scully debacle, tales of crashed saucers faded from UFO circles for decades.

Aztec tale revived (1966–1977)
In the 1960s and 1970s, amid increasing societal distrust of government, the UFO community revisited earlier claims of a UFO conspiracy.

In 1966, UFO conspiracy book Incident at Exeter featured a one-sentence mention of a crashed saucer tale about alien bodies in an Air Force morgue at Wright-Patterson Field.  The passage served as the inspiration for the 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy about a UFO cover up by the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, the unit charged with studying and reverse-engineering other nations' technical advancements.

"Hangar 18" and Robert Spencer Carr (1974)

On October 11, 1974,  science-fiction author turned UFO conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr was being interviewed by radio station WKRC in Cincinnati when he, on air,  publicly claimed that alien bodies were being kept at "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson.  The claim garnered substantial press attention, and led to official denials.  The Air Force explained that there is no "Hangar 18" at the base and noted Carr's claims bore a close similarity to the 1966 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy.

During the interview, Carr also relayed a tale of Senator Barry Goldwater requesting and being denied access to a restricted area.  Reached for comment, Goldwater admitted to having requested a tour and been denied, but Goldwater said he'd never heard any rumors of alien bodies.

By September 1979, Carr's claims included a surgical nurse who witnessed an alien's autopsy. In November 1979, local papers reported that Roswell was being location-scouted for an upcoming film titled Hangar 18. That film, which dramatized Carr's claims, was released in 1980.

Decades later, Carr's son recalled that his father had been a habitual liar who often "mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of strangers... [tales of] befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico.  It wasn't the tall tales themselves that hurt so much but his ferocious insistence that they were true....  They were dead serious, and you had by God better pretend you believed them or face wrath or rejection."

Claims that alien bodies were being hidden by the military were also popularized by longtime UFO researcher Leonard H. Stringfield. Stringfield claimed analysis of bodies and UFO crash debris was being conducted at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, however no connection to Roswell was specified. In July 1978, Stringfield spoke about alleged crash retrievals at the international MUFON symposium held in Dayton, Ohio.Also in attendance were Donald Keyhoe, J. Allen Hynek, and Ted Bloecher Stringfield wrote a seven part series of his 'research' titled Status Report I-VI as a follow-up to this talk.

Renewed interest in Roswell (1978)
The Roswell incident was largely forgotten until February 1978, when  ufologist Stanton Friedman visited a Baton Rouge, Louisiana television station to promote an upcoming lecture at Louisiana State University.  While there, a director gave Friedman the name of a local "ham radio buddy" who claimed to have handled exotic debris.

Jesse Marcel, the army officer who had accompanied the Roswell debris from the ranch to the Fort Worth press conference, was interviewed by Friedman. Marcel reported that the Roswell "weather balloon" was a cover story.  In that interview, and others like it,  Marcel said he now believed the Roswell debris was extraterrestrial.

On December 19, 1979, Marcel was interviewed by Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer, and on February 26, 1980, the tabloid brought large-scale attention to the Marcel story. On September 20, 1980, the TV series In Search of... aired an interview where Marcel described his participation in the 1947 press conference:

In 1980, the book Roswell Incident (1980) popularized Marcel's tale, adding a story of alien bodies on the Plains of San Agustin. In all his statements, Marcel consistently denied the presence of bodies. Marcel's son Jesse A. Marcel Jr. M.D. spent 35 years stating that in 1947, when he was 10 years old, his father had shown him alien debris recovered from the Roswell crash site, including, "a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics on it".

Roswell in UFO conspiracy theories (1978–present)

In 1981, tabloid The Globe told stories of bodies being brought to Roswell. In 1989, in response to an Unsolved Mysteries episode discussing the story of Roswell bodies,  mortician Glenn Dennis recounted a tale of a nurse who had assisted in an alien autopsy.

Between 1978 and the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman, William Moore, Karl T. Pflock, and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed several dozen people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947.

In 1991, retired Brigadier General Thomas DuBose corroborated Marcel's claims that the weather balloon was cover story, while both men consistently denied the existence of bodies.  In 1994 and 1997, the US Air Force Roswell Reports identified the material as part of a top secret atomic surveillance balloon from Project Mogul launched on June 4 which had last been tracked near Corona.

The Roswell Incident (1980) by Berlitz and Moore

In October 1980, Marcel's story was featured in the book The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. The authors had previously written popular books on fringe topics such as the Philadelphia Experiment and the Bermuda Triangle.

The book argues that an extraterrestrial craft was flying over the New Mexico desert to observe nuclear weapons activity when a lightning strike killed the alien crew and, that after discovering the crash, the US government engaged in a cover-up.

The Roswell Incident featured accounts of debris described by Marcel as "nothing made on this earth." Additional accounts by Bill Brazel, son of rancher Mac Brazel, neighbor Floyd Proctor and Walt Whitman Jr., son of newsman W. E. Whitman who had interviewed Mac Brazel, suggested the material Marcel recovered had super-strength not associated with a weather balloon.  Anthropologist Charles Zeigler described the 1980 book as "version 1" of the Roswell myth. Berlitz and Moore's narrative was dominant until the late 1980s when other authors, attracted by the commercial potential of writing about Roswell, started producing rival accounts.

The book introduced the contention that debris which was recovered by Marcel at the Foster ranch, visible in photographs showing Marcel posing with the debris, was substituted for debris from a weather device as part of a cover-up. The book also claimed that the debris recovered from the ranch was not permitted a close inspection by the press. The efforts by the military were described as being intended to discredit and "counteract the growing hysteria towards flying saucers".

The authors claimed to have interviewed over 90 witnesses, though the testimony of only 25 appears in the book. Only seven of these people claimed to have seen the debris. Of these, five claimed to have handled it. Two accounts of witness intimidation were included in the book, including the incarceration of Mac Brazel.

This version of the myth began the elevation of Marcel's narrative above that of Cavitt, who gathered material from the site alongside Brazel and Marcel. Cavitt's mundane description of the debris contradicted Marcel and was likely omitted as not supporting UFO-community beliefs. Later authors would selectively quote Cavitt's assertion that the debris was not a German rocket or Japanese balloon bomb. Independent researchers would find patterns of embellishment in Jesse Marcel's accounts, including provably false statements about his military career and educational background.

First claim of alien bodies (1980)

The Roswell Incident (1980) was the first book to introduce the controversial second-hand stories of civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university encountering wreckage and "alien bodies" while on the Plains of San Agustin before being escorted away by the Army. The second-hand Barnett stories, set 150 miles to the west
of Corona,  were described by ufologists as the "one aspect of the account that seemed to conflict with the basic story about the retrieval of highly unusual debris from a sheep ranch outside Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947".

Many alleged first-hand accounts of the Roswell incident actually contain information from the Aztec, New Mexico, UFO incident, a hoaxed flying saucer crash which gained national notoriety after being promoted by journalist Frank Scully in his articles and a 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers.

Majestic Twelve hoax (1987)

On May 29, 1987, a team consisting of Friedman,  Moore, and television producer Jaime Shandera released the "Majestic Twelve documents".   On December 11, 1984, Shandera had received the documents in the mail from an unknown source.  The MJ-12 documents purported to be a 1952 briefing prepared for President Eisenhower.  They have been called "version 2" of the Roswell story. In this variant, the  bodies are ejected from the craft shortly before it exploded over the ranch.  The propulsion unit is destroyed and the government concludes the ship was a "short range reconnaissance craft".  The following week, the bodies are recovered some miles away, decomposing from exposure and predators.

On July 1, 1989, Bill Moore gave a speech at the MUFON annual symposium where he acknowledged spreading "disinformation", claiming he did so on behalf of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. By 1991, the documents were exposed as forgeries, with a signature and stray marks copied from a different letter.

Mortician's tale of a Roswell alien autopsy (1989)

On August 5, 1989, Stanton Friedman interviewed former mortician Glenn Dennis.  Dennis claimed to have received "four or five calls" from the Air Base with questions about body preservation and inquiries about small or hermetically sealed caskets; he further claimed that a local nurse told him she had witnessed an "alien autopsy".   Glenn Dennis has been called the "star witness" of the Roswell incident.

On September 20, 1989, an episode of Unsolved Mysteries had included second-hand stories of "Barney" Barnett seeing alien bodies captured by the Army and pilot "Pappy" Henderson transporting bodies from Roswell to Texas. The episode was watched by 28 million people. Mortician Glenn Dennis called the show's hotline claiming to have knowledge of the events.

In September 1991, Dennis co-founded a UFO museum in Roswell along with former RAAF public affairs officer Walter Haut and Max Littell, a real estate salesman. Dennis appeared in multiple books and documentaries repeating his story. In 1994,  Dennis's tale was dramatized in the made-for-TV movie Roswell and by the television show Unsolved Mysteries.

Pflock observed that Dennis's story "sounds like a B-grade thriller conceived by Oliver Stone."  Scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning said that Dennis cannot be regarded as a reliable witness, considering that he had seemingly waited over 40 years before he started recounting a series of unconnected events. Such events, Dunnings argues, were then arbitrarily joined to form what has become the most popular narrative of the alleged alien crash. Prominent UFO researchers, including Pflock and Kevin Randle, have become convinced that no bodies were recovered from the Roswell crash.

Competing accounts and schism
The early 1990s saw a proliferation of competing accounts.

UFO Crash at Roswell (1991) by Randle and Schmitt

In 1991, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt published UFO Crash at Roswell, which has been called "version 3" of the Roswell story. They added testimony from 100 new witnesses, including those who reported an elaborate military cordon and debris recovery operation at the Foster ranch. The book included the new claims of a "gouge ... that extended four or five hundred feet [120 or 150 m]" at the ranch.

Randle and Schmitt reported Gen. Arthur Exon had been directly aware of debris and bodies, but Exon disputed his depiction, saying his comments had been based exclusively on second-hand rumors. The 1991 book sold 160,000 copies and served as the basis for the 1994 television film Roswell. Also in 1991, retired USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who had posed with debris for press photographs in 1947, publicly acknowledged the weather balloon cover story, corroborating Marcel's previous admissions.

The Barnett "alien body" accounts were mentioned in the 1991 book, though the dates and locations were changed from the accounts found in 1980's The Roswell Incident. In this new account, Brazel was described as leading the Army to a second crash site on the ranch, at which point the Army personnel were supposedly "horrified to find civilians [including Barnett] there already."

Mortician Glenn Dennis's claims of an alien autopsy was detailed in the book.

Though hundreds of people were interviewed by various researchers, only a few of these people claimed to have seen debris or aliens. Most witnesses were just repeating the claims of others. Pflock notes that of these 300-plus individuals reportedly interviewed for UFO Crash at Roswell (1991), only 41 can be "considered genuine first- or second-hand witnesses" and only 23 can be "reasonably thought to have seen physical evidence, debris". Of these, only seven have asserted anything suggestive of otherworldly origins for the debris.

Crash at Corona (1992) by Friedman and Berliner
In 1992, Stanton Friedman released Crash at Corona, co-authored with Don Berliner. The book, later termed "version 4" of the Roswell story,  introduced new "witnesses" and added to the narrative by doubling the number of flying saucers to two, and the number of aliens to eight – two of which were said to have survived and been taken into custody by the government.

The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994)
In 1994, Randle and Schmitt authored another book, The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell which included a claim that alien bodies were taken by cargo plane to be viewed by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Zeigler refers to the 1994 book as 'version 5' of the Roswell story.

The existence of so many differing accounts led to a schism among ufologists about the events at Roswell. The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), two leading UFO societies, disagreed in their views of the various scenarios presented by Randle–Schmitt and Friedman–Berliner; several conferences were held to try to resolve the differences. One issue under discussion was where Barnett was when he saw the alien craft he was said to have encountered. A 1992 UFO conference attempted to achieve a consensus among the various scenarios portrayed in Crash at Corona and UFO Crash at Roswell; however, the publication of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell "resolved" the Barnett problem by simply ignoring Barnett and citing a new location for the alien craft recovery, including a new group of archaeologists not connected to the ones the Barnett story cited.

Air Force response (1994–1997) and aftermath
After an October 1993 inquiry from US congressman from New Mexico Steven Schiff, the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. The result was summarized in two reports. The first, released in 1994, concluded that the material recovered in 1947 was likely debris from Project Mogul, a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons (a classified portion of an unclassified New York University project by atmospheric researchers). The Air Force reports were dismissed by UFO proponents as being either disinformation or simply implausible, though skeptical researchers such as Philip J. Klass and Robert Todd, who had been expressing doubts regarding accounts of aliens for several years, used the reports as the basis for skeptical responses to claims by UFO proponents. After the release of the Air Force reports, several books, such as Kal Korff's The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You To Know (1997), built on the evidence presented in the reports to conclude "no credible evidence from any witness has turned out to present a compelling case that the object was extraterrestrial in origin."

Alien autopsy film hoax (1995)

In 1995, film footage purporting to show an alien autopsy and claimed to have been taken by a US military official shortly after the Roswell incident was released by Ray Santilli, a London-based video entrepreneur. The footage caused an international sensation when it aired on television networks around the world. Fox television broadcast the footage, hosted by Jonathan Frakes, in the United States on August 28, 1995, under the title Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction.  Fox re-broadcast the program twice, each time to higher ratings, with the November 1995 broadcast winning its time slot again with 11.7 million viewers and a 14% share.  At same day, the footage was broadcast on UK's Channel 4. The program was also repackaged for the home video market.

The program was an overnight sensation, with Time magazine declaring that the film had sparked a debate "with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since the Zapruder film".  The program was quickly debunked, with multiple participants complaining that misleading editing had removed their opinions that the footage was hoax.  That year, hit TV show The X-Files featured alien autopsy footage that the skeptical Agent Scully decries as "even hokier than the one they aired on the Fox network". The following year, the film was satirized by the X-Files episode Jose Chung's From Outer Space.

In 1998, Fox aired a new special, The World's Greatest Hoaxes and Secrets Revealed!, which debunked the 1995 Alien Autopsy footage.  Santilli admitted in 2006 that the film was a fake, though he continued to claim it was inspired by genuine footage now lost. A fictionalized version of the creation of the footage and its release was retold in the comedy film Alien Autopsy (2006).

The Day After Roswell (1997)
In his 1997 autobiography, former Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso wrote that M. Sgt. Bill Brown showed him a purportedly-nonhuman body. Corso wrote that it was being transported through Fort Riley (Kansas) in 1947 suspended in liquid inside a glass coffin within a wooden crate. According to Corso, he found paperwork tucked down in the crates identifying their contents as corpses from "a craft that had crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, earlier that week", and a shipping manifest that listed Wright Field and Walter Reed Army Hospital. Corso further claimed that years later, he helped oversee a project to reverse engineer recovered crash debris. Philip Klass analyzed his claims line by line and exposed many inconsistencies and factual errors. Corso's story was noted for its similarities to the film "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" which had been released six years prior. In both that film and Corso's narrative, civilians secretly attempt to reverse-engineer extraordinary technology of unknown origin.

Body Snatchers in the Desert (2005)
In 2005, Nicholas Redfern authored Body Snatchers in the Desert : The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, a book that suggests the Roswell crash may have been the result of a top secret high-altitude balloon test.  According to Redfern's narrative, the test used deformed Japanese POWs acquired after a battle in 1945 on a small island in the Pacific. Redfern suggests the test was part of a program resulting from an import of Japanese scientists after the war in similar vein to Operation Paperclip. The Japanese scientists are alleged to have brought POWs with them to continue experimenting radiation, cosmic ray & high altitude effects on people, including people with progeria.

Witness to Roswell (2007)
In 2007, Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey published the book Witness to Roswell, which prominently featured a document said to be a sworn affidavit by Walter Haut, who had written the first Army press release about the Roswell crash in 1947. The document, alleged to have been left by Haut and opened only after his death in 2005, includes a description of the 1947 crash debris having been discussed by high-ranking staff and how Haut had seen alien bodies. The claims, however, drew an unimpressed response even from ufologists: Dennis Balthaser said that the document was not written by Haut, and that by 2000 Haut's mental state was such he could not recall basic details about his past, making the detail contained in the affidavit seem dubious. Physicist and skeptic Dave Thomas commented: "Is Roswell still the 'best' UFO incident? If it is, UFO proponents should be very, very worried."

Other debunked theories
In 2011, American journalist Annie Jacobsen's Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base featured a claim that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was recruited by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to cause hysteria.  The book was criticized for extensive errors by scientists from the Federation of American Scientists. Historian Richard Rhodes, writing in The Washington Post, also criticized the book's sensationalistic reporting of "old news" and its "error-ridden" reporting. He wrote: "All of [her main source's] claims appear in one or another of the various publicly available Roswell/UFO/Area 51 books and documents churned out by believers, charlatans and scholars over the past 60 years. In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man's sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent."

In September 2017, UK newspaper The Guardian reported on Kodachrome slides which some had claimed showed a dead space alien. First presented at a BeWitness event in Mexico, organised by Jaime Maussan and attended by almost 7,000 people, days afterwards it was revealed that the slides were in fact of a mummified Native American child discovered in 1896 and which had been on display at the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado, for many decades.

In February 2020, an Air Force historian revealed a recently declassified report of a circa-1951 incident in which two Roswell personnel donned poorly fitting radioactive suits, complete with oxygen masks, while retrieving a weather balloon after an atomic test. On one occasion, they encountered a lone woman in the desert, who fainted when she saw them. The personnel could have appeared, to someone unaccustomed to then-modern gear, to be alien.

Cultural impact

Tourism & commercialization

Roswell's tourism industry is based on ufology museums and businesses, as well as alien-themed iconography and alien kitsch. A yearly UFO festival has been held since 1995.
There are several alleged crash sites that can be visited for a fee, as well as alien museums, festivals and conventions, including the International UFO Museum and Research Center, founded in 1991.

Popular fiction

In the 1980 independently distributed film Hangar 18, an alien ship crashes in the desert of the US Southwest. Debris and bodies are recovered, but their existence is covered up by the government. Director James L. Conway summarized the film as "a modern-day dramatization of the Roswell incident".   Conway later revisited the concept in 1995 when he filmed the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Little Green Men"; In that episode, characters travel to 1947, triggering the Roswell incident, with their ship being stored in Hangar 18.

Beginning in 1993, the hit television series The X-Files featured the Roswell incident as a recurring element.  The show's second episode "Deep Throat", introduced a Roswell alien crash into the show's mythology.  The Roswell incident was  most prominently featured in "My Struggle", while the comical 1996 episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" satirized the recently-broadcast Santelli Alien Autopsy hoax film. After the success of The X-Files, Roswell alien conspiracies were featured in other sci-fi drama series, including Dark Skies (1996–97) and Taken (2002).

In the 1996 film Independence Day, an alien invasion prompts the revelation of a Roswell crash and cover-up extending even to concealing the information from the President of the United States, to facilitate plausible deniability, according to the Defense Secretary.  The 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sees the protagonist on a quest for an alien body from the Roswell Incident.

In a 2001 episode of the animated comedy Futurama, titled, "Roswell That Ends Well", protagonists from the 31st century travel back in time and cause the Roswell incident.  The 2006 comedy Alien Autopsy revolves around the 1990s-creation of the Santilli hoax film.  The 2011 Simon Pegg comedy Paul tells the story of Roswell tourists who rescue a grey alien.  Starting in 1998, Pocket Books published a series of young adult novels titled Roswell High;  From 1999 to 2002, the books were adapted into the WB/UPN  TV series Roswell, with a second adaption release in 2019 under the title Roswell, New Mexico.

Roswell in spirituality

Scholar of religion Christopher Hugh Partridge  has characterized the Roswell incident as a key element within UFO spirituality. He states that "Roswell is now firmly established as what might be described as a key ufological 'spiritual site' " within ufology. Similarly in his book The Gods Have Landed, James R. Lewis highlights the event's role in the emergence of UFOs into the public consciousness.

Partridge places UFO religion within the context of theosophical esotericism, noting that the term 'UFO religion' gained prominence after the 1947 Roswell incident. He draws parallels between UFO spirituality and New Age thought, highlighting shared beliefs, including a belief in a Spiritual Hierarchy.

Furthermore, Partridge observes that, post-1947, many of these groups maintained the belief that extraterrestrial beings served as 'heralds of a new era.' Examples of this include:

 Raëlism, founded in the 1970's incorporates the Roswell incident into its belief system, interpreting it as evidence of extraterrestrial contact and the Elohim's involvement in human creation.

 The Heaven's Gate cult, believed that the Earth was about to be recycled and that a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet would transport their souls to a higher existence. While the group's beliefs were not exclusively centered on Roswell, they saw the Roswell incident as one of several historical events signifying extraterrestrial presence and their impending departure. Its members committed mass suicide in 1997 in the belief they needed to shed their earthly bodies to join the spaceship.

 The Unarius Academy of Science, a new age religious group that believes in the existence of advanced extraterrestrial beings. They have incorporated the Roswell incident into their teachings, viewing it as evidence of contact with higher intelligences.

 Aetherius Society, it combines elements of Theosophy, Eastern spirituality, and UFO beliefs. While not solely focused on Roswell, they consider it a significant event in the history of UFO contact with humanity.

 The Ashtar movement / Ashtar command movement, This is a belief system associated with New Age spirituality and UFO contactees. While not centered exclusively on Roswell, it is part of the broader narrative of extraterrestrial intervention and communication with beings like Ashtar Sheran.

These beliefs have contributed to the spiritual significance attributed to the Roswell incident. There are other beliefs that do not specifically refer to the Roswell incident but include extraterrestrial beings, such as Xenu in Scientology.

Modern views

Despite the lack of conclusive evidence supporting the existence of an alien spaceship, there are individuals who firmly maintain the belief that a spacecraft crashed near Roswell. B. D. Gildenberg has called the Roswell incident "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim".

Pflock said, "[T]he case for Roswell is a classic example of the triumph of quantity over quality. The advocates of the crashed-saucer tale ... simply shovel everything that seems to support their view into the box marked 'Evidence' and say, 'See? Look at all this stuff. We must be right.' Never mind the contradictions. Never mind the lack of independent supporting fact. Never mind the blatant absurdities." Korff suggests there are clear incentives for some people to promote the idea of aliens at Roswell, and that many researchers were not doing competent work: "[The] UFO field is  people who are willing to take advantage of the gullibility of others, especially the paying public. Let's not pull any punches here: The Roswell UFO myth has been very good business for UFO groups, publishers, for Hollywood, the town of Roswell, the media, and UFOlogy ... [The] number of researchers who employ science and its disciplined methodology is appallingly small."

B. D. Gildenberg notes the existence of multiple reported alien recovery sites, which bear little resemblance to the original event reported in 1947 or the subsequent accounts provided by initial witnesses. Some of these new accounts could potentially be confused recollections of known recoveries of injured and deceased servicemen from military plane crashes in the area between 1948 and 1950. Other accounts might be based on memories of recoveries involving test dummies as suggested by the Air Force in their reports.

Multiple persons who were mentioned to have visited the site later provided sworn witness testimony in response to inquiries by Ufologists who had tracked them down over the ensuing years.

'Weather balloon' as cover story for Project Mogul

Beginning in 1978, Jesse Marcel publicly reported that the claims of a weather balloon had been a cover story. In 1991, retired USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose corroborated Marcel's admission.   In 1993, in response to an inquiry from US congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico, the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. A 1994 Air Force report concluded that the material recovered in 1947 was likely debris from the then top secret Project Mogul, a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons (a classified portion of an unclassified New York University project by atmospheric researchers).
Ufologists had previously considered the possibility that the Roswell debris had come from a top-secret balloon. During the final year of World War 2, Japan had launched thousands of paper and silk balloons carrying bombs designed to cause damage and spread panic in the United States.
In March 1990, Ufologist John Keel proposed that the Roswell debris had been from a Japanese balloon bomb.  An Air Force meteorologist roundly rejected the theory, explaining a Japanese balloon "could not possibly have stayed aloft for two years".

In 1990,  Ufologist Robert G. Todd had first connected Roswell to Project Mogul.

Sheridan W. Cavitt was a Counterintelligence Corps Special Agent for the US Air Force, he is a witness who was corroborated by Marcel to have visited the site. He provided a sworn witness statement that he encountered balloon debris at the site which was included in the first official Roswell Report.

A scholarly consensus emerged concluding that the military decided to conceal the true purpose of the crashed devicenuclear test monitoringand instead inform the public that the crash was of a weather balloon. The balloon had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field a month earlier. It carried a radar reflector and classified Project Mogul sensors for experimental monitoring of Soviet nuclear testing.

Air Force declassification officer Lieutenant James McAndrew concluded:

'Alien bodies' as later hoaxes or test dummies

The Air Force concluded that reports of recovered alien bodies were likely a combination of innocently transformed memories of accidents involving military casualties with memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies in military programs such as the 1950s Operation High Dive. Recollection of these test dummies could be mixed with a myriad of hoaxes or misconceptions. Project MOGUL did not involve test dummies but U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons did drop test dummies from high altitudes and they both operated in the New Mexico Desert.

Critics suggest claims of alien bodies face credibility problems with witnesses making contradictory accounts. Death-bed confessions or accounts from elderly and easily confused witnesses to one party are also considered problematic. Pflock noted that only four people with supposed firsthand knowledge of alien bodies were interviewed by Roswell authors. Additionally all reports of bodies came about a minimum of 31 years after the fact.

Roswell as modern myth and folklore
According to anthropologists Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, the Roswell Story was a prime example of how a discourse moved from the fringes to the mainstream according to the prevailing zeitgeist: public preoccupation in the 1980s with "conspiracy, cover-up and repression" aligned well with the Roswell narratives as told in the "sensational books" which were being published. Additionally, skeptics and some social anthropologists saw the increasingly elaborate accounts of alien crash landings and government cover-ups as evidence of a myth being constructed.

Prominent skeptics Joe Nickell and co-author James McGaha identified a myth-making process, which they called the "Roswellian syndrome". In this syndrome, a myth is proposed to have five distinct stages of development: incident, debunking, submergence, mythologizing, and reemergence and media bandwagon effect. The authors predicted that the Roswellian syndrome would "play out again and again", in other UFO and conspiracy-theory stories.

Charles Ziegler argues that the Roswell story exhibits characteristics typical of traditional folk narratives. He identifies six distinct narratives and a process of transmission through storytellers, wherein a core story was formed from various witness accounts and then shaped and altered by those involved in the UFO community. Additional "witnesses" were sought to expand upon the core narrative, while accounts that did not align with the prevailing beliefs were discredited or excluded by the "gatekeepers".

Statements by US Presidents
In a 2012 visit to Roswell, President Barack Obama joked "I come in peace."

When asked during a 2015 interview with GQ magazine about whether he had looked at top-secret classified information, Obama replied, "I gotta tell you, it's a little disappointing. People always ask me about Roswell and the aliens and UFOs, and it turns out the stuff going on that's top secret isn't nearly as exciting as you expect. In this day and age, it's not as top secret as you'd think."

In a 2014 interview, former President Bill Clinton reported that his administration had investigated the incident, saying "When the Roswell thing came up, I knew we'd get gazillions of letters. So I had all the Roswell papers reviewed, everything".

In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump, when asked if he would consider releasing more information about the Roswell incident, said "I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting."

In December 2020, Obama joked with Stephen Colbert: "It used to be that UFOs and Roswell was the biggest conspiracy. And now that seems so tame, the idea that the government might have an alien spaceship."

See also

References

Sources

1947 flying disc craze
1947 in military history
1947 in New Mexico
July 1947 events in the United States
Aviation accidents and incidents in the United States in 1947
Conspiracy theories by subject
Conspiracy theories in the United States
Hoaxes in the United States
UFO conspiracy theories

Roswell incident


A nanowire is a nanostructure in the form of a wire with the diameter of the order of a nanometre (10−9 metres). More generally, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a thickness or diameter constrained to tens of nanometers or less and an unconstrained length. At these scales, quantum mechanical effects are important—which coined the term "quantum wires".

Many different types of nanowires exist, including superconducting (e.g. YBCO), metallic (e.g. Ni, Pt, Au, Ag), semiconducting (e.g. silicon nanowires (SiNWs), InP, GaN) and insulating (e.g. SiO2, TiO2).

Molecular nanowires are composed of repeating molecular units either organic (e.g. DNA) or inorganic (e.g. Mo6S9−xIx).

Characteristics

Typical nanowires exhibit aspect ratios (length-to-width ratio) of 1000 or more. As such they are often referred to as one-dimensional (1-D) materials. Nanowires have many interesting properties that are not seen in bulk or 3-D (three-dimensional) materials. This is because electrons in nanowires are quantum confined laterally and thus occupy energy levels that are different from the traditional continuum of energy levels or bands found in bulk materials.

Peculiar features of this quantum confinement exhibited by certain nanowires manifest themselves in discrete values of the electrical conductance. Such discrete values arise from a quantum mechanical restraint on the number of electrons that can travel through the wire at the nanometer scale. These discrete values are often referred to as the quantum of conductance and are integer multiples of

They are inverse of the well-known resistance unit h/e2, which is roughly equal to 25812.8 ohms, and referred to as the von Klitzing constant RK (after Klaus von Klitzing, the discoverer of exact quantization). Since 1990, a fixed conventional value RK-90 is accepted.

Examples of nanowires include inorganic molecular nanowires (Mo6S9−xIx, Li2Mo6Se6), which can have a diameter of 0.9 nm and be hundreds of micrometers long. Other important examples are based on semiconductors such as InP, Si, GaN, etc., dielectrics (e.g. SiO2,TiO2), or metals (e.g. Ni, Pt).

There are many applications where nanowires may become important in electronic, opto-electronic and nanoelectromechanical devices, as additives in advanced composites, for metallic interconnects in nanoscale quantum devices, as field-emitters and as leads for biomolecular nanosensors.

Synthesis

There are two basic approaches to synthesizing nanowires: top-down and bottom-up. A top-down approach reduces a large piece of material to small pieces, by various means such as lithography, milling or thermal oxidation. A bottom-up approach synthesizes the nanowire by combining constituent adatoms. Most synthesis techniques use a bottom-up approach. Initial synthesis via either method may often be followed by a nanowire thermal treatment step, often involving a form of self-limiting oxidation, to fine tune the size and aspect ratio of the structures. After the bottom-up synthesis, nanowires can be integrated using pick-and-place techniques.

Nanowire production uses several common laboratory techniques, including suspension, electrochemical deposition, vapor deposition, and VLS growth. Ion track technology enables growing homogeneous and segmented nanowires down to 8 nm diameter. As nanowire oxidation rate is controlled by diameter, thermal oxidation steps are often applied to tune their morphology.

Suspension
A suspended nanowire is a wire produced in a high-vacuum chamber held at the longitudinal extremities. Suspended nanowires can be produced by:

 The chemical etching of a larger wire
 The bombardment of a larger wire, typically with highly energetic ions
 Indenting the tip of a STM in the surface of a metal near its melting point, and then retracting it

VLS growth
A common technique for creating a nanowire is vapor–liquid–solid method (VLS), which was first reported by Wagner and Ellis in 1964 for silicon whiskers with diameters ranging from hundreds of nm to hundreds of µm. This process can produce high-quality crystalline nanowires of many semiconductor materials, for example,  VLS–grown single crystalline silicon nanowires (SiNWs) with smooth surfaces could have excellent properties, such as ultra-large elasticity. This method uses a source material from either laser ablated particles or a feed gas such as silane.

VLS synthesis requires a catalyst. For nanowires, the best catalysts are liquid metal (such as gold) nanoclusters, which can either be self-assembled from a thin film by dewetting, or purchased in colloidal form and deposited on a substrate.

The source enters these nanoclusters and begins to saturate them. On reaching supersaturation, the source solidifies and grows outward from the nanocluster. Simply turning off the source can adjust the final length of the nanowire. Switching sources while still in the growth phase can create compound nanowires with super-lattices of alternating materials. For example, a method termed ENGRAVE (Encoded Nanowire GRowth and Appearance through VLS and Etching) developed by the Cahoon Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill allows for nanometer-scale morphological control via rapid in situ dopant modulation.

A single-step vapour phase reaction at elevated temperature synthesises inorganic nanowires such as Mo6S9−xIx.  From another point of view, such nanowires are cluster polymers.

Similar to VLS synthesis, VSS (vapor-solid-solid) synthesis of nanowires (NWs) proceeds through thermolytic decomposition of a silicon precursor (typically phenylsilane). Unlike VLS, the catalytic seed remains in solid state when subjected to high temperature annealing of the substrate. This such type of synthesis is widely used to synthesise metal silicide/germanide nanowires through VSS alloying between a copper substrate and a silicon/germanium precursor.

Solution-phase synthesis
Solution-phase synthesis refers to techniques that grow nanowires in solution. They can produce nanowires of many types of materials. Solution-phase synthesis has the advantage that it can produce very large quantities, compared to other methods. In one technique, the polyol synthesis, ethylene glycol is both solvent and reducing agent. This technique is particularly versatile at producing nanowires of gold, lead, platinum, and silver.

The supercritical fluid-liquid-solid growth method can be used to synthesize semiconductor nanowires, e.g., Si and Ge. By using metal nanocrystals as seeds, Si and Ge organometallic precursors are fed into a reactor filled with a supercritical organic solvent, such as toluene. Thermolysis results in degradation of the precursor, allowing release of Si or Ge, and dissolution into the metal nanocrystals.  As more of the semiconductor solute is added from the supercritical phase (due to a concentration gradient), a solid crystallite precipitates, and a nanowire grows uniaxially from the nanocrystal seed.

Liquid Bridge Induced Self-assembly
Protein nanowires in spider silk have been formed by rolling a droplet of spider silk solution over a superhydrophobic pillar structure.

Non-catalytic growth

The vast majority of nanowire-formation mechanisms are explained through the use of catalytic nanoparticles, which drive the nanowire growth and are either added intentionally or generated during the growth. However, nanowires can be also grown without the help of catalysts, which gives an advantage of pure nanowires and minimizes the number of technological steps. The mechanisms for catalyst-free growth of nanowires (or whiskers) were known from 1950s.

The simplest methods to obtain metal oxide nanowires use ordinary heating of the metals, e.g. metal wire heated with battery, by Joule heating in air can be easily done at home. Spontaneous nanowire formation by non-catalytic methods were explained by the dislocation present in specific directions or the growth anisotropy of various crystal faces. More recently, after microscopy advancement, the nanowire growth driven by screw dislocations or twin boundaries were demonstrated. The picture on the right shows a single atomic layer growth on the tip of CuO nanowire, observed by in situ TEM microscopy during the non-catalytic synthesis of nanowire.

Atomic-scale nanowires can also form completely self-organised without need for defects. For example, rare-earth silicide (RESi2) nanowires of few nm width and height and several 100 nm length form on silicon(001) substrates which are covered with a sub-monolayer of a rare earth metal and subsequently annealed. The lateral dimensions of the nanowires confine the electrons in such a way that the system resembles a (quasi-)one-dimensional metal.  Metallic RESi2 nanowires form on silicon(hhk) as well. This system permits tuning the dimensionality between two-dimensional and one-dimensional by the coverage and the tilt angle of the substrate.

DNA-templated metallic nanowire synthesis

An emerging field is to use DNA strands as scaffolds for metallic nanowire synthesis. This method is investigated both for the synthesis of metallic nanowires in electronic components and for biosensing applications, in which they allow the transduction of a DNA strand into a metallic nanowire that can be electrically detected. Typically, ssDNA strands are stretched, whereafter they are decorated with metallic nanoparticles that have been functionalised with short complementary ssDNA strands.

Crack-Defined Shadow Mask Lithography

A simple method to produce nanowires with defined geometries has been recently reported using conventional optical lithography. In this approach, optical lithography is used to generate nanogaps using controlled crack formation. These nanogaps are then used as shadow mask for generating individual nanowires with precise lengths and widths. This technique allows to produce individual nanowires below 20 nm in width in a scalable way out of several metallic and metal oxide materials.

Physics

Conductivity

Several physical reasons predict that the conductivity of a nanowire will be much less than that of the corresponding bulk material. First, there is scattering from the wire boundaries, whose effect will be very significant whenever the wire width is below the free electron mean free path of the bulk material. In copper, for example, the mean free path is 40 nm. Copper nanowires less than 40 nm wide will shorten the mean free path to the wire width. Silver nanowires have very different electrical and thermal conductivity from bulk silver.

Nanowires also show other peculiar electrical properties due to their size. Unlike single wall carbon nanotubes, whose motion of electrons can fall under the regime of ballistic transport (meaning the electrons can travel freely from one electrode to the other), nanowire conductivity is strongly influenced by edge effects. The edge effects come from atoms that lay at the nanowire surface and are not fully bonded to neighboring atoms like the atoms within the bulk of the nanowire. The unbonded atoms are often a source of defects within the nanowire, and may cause the nanowire to conduct electricity more poorly than the bulk material. As a nanowire shrinks in size, the surface atoms become more numerous compared to the atoms within the nanowire, and edge effects become more important.

Furthermore, the conductivity can undergo a quantization in energy: i.e. the energy of the electrons going through a nanowire can assume only discrete values, which are multiples of the conductance quantum G = 2e2/h (where e is the charge of the electron and h is the Planck constant. See also the Quantum Hall effect).

The conductivity is hence described as the sum of the transport by separate channels of different quantized energy levels. The thinner the wire is, the smaller the number of channels available to the transport of electrons.

This quantization has been demonstrated by measuring the conductivity of a nanowire suspended between two electrodes while pulling it: as its diameter reduces, its conductivity decreases in a stepwise fashion and the plateaus correspond to multiples of G.

The quantization of conductivity is more pronounced in semiconductors like Si or GaAs than in metals, due to their lower electron density and lower effective mass. It can be observed in 25 nm wide silicon fins, and results in increased threshold voltage.  In practical terms, this means that a MOSFET with such nanoscale silicon fins, when used in digital applications, will need a higher gate (control) voltage to switch the transistor on.

Welding

To incorporate nanowire technology into industrial applications, researchers in 2008 developed a method of welding nanowires together: a sacrificial metal nanowire is placed adjacent to the ends of the pieces to be joined (using the manipulators of a scanning electron microscope); then an electric current is applied, which fuses the wire ends. The technique fuses wires as small as 10 nm.

For nanowires with diameters less than 10 nm, existing welding techniques, which require precise control of the heating mechanism and which may introduce the possibility of damage, will not be practical. Recently scientists discovered that single-crystalline ultrathin gold nanowires with diameters ~3–10 nm can be "cold-welded" together within seconds by mechanical contact alone, and under remarkably low applied pressures (unlike macro- and micro-scale cold welding process). High-resolution transmission electron microscopy and in situ measurements reveal that the welds are nearly perfect, with the same crystal orientation, strength and electrical conductivity as the rest of the nanowire. The high quality of the welds is attributed to the nanoscale sample dimensions, oriented-attachment mechanisms and mechanically assisted fast surface diffusion. Nanowire welds were also demonstrated between gold and silver, and silver nanowires (with diameters ~5–15 nm) at near room temperature, indicating that this technique may be generally applicable for ultrathin metallic nanowires. Combined with other nano- and microfabrication technologies, cold welding is anticipated to have potential applications in the future bottom-up assembly of metallic one-dimensional nanostructures.

Mechanical properties

The study of nanowire mechanics has boomed since the advent of the atomic force microscope (AFM), and associated technologies which have enabled direct study of the response of the nanowire to an applied load. Specifically, a nanowire can be clamped from one end, and the free end displaced by an AFM tip. In this cantilever geometry, the height of the AFM is precisely known, and the force applied is precisely known. This allows for construction of a force vs. displacement curve, which can be converted to a stress vs. strain curve if the nanowire dimensions are known. From the stress-strain curve, the elastic constant known as the Young's Modulus can be derived, as well as the toughness, and degree of strain-hardening.

Young's modulus

The elastic component of the stress-strain curve described by the Young's Modulus, has been reported for nanowires, however the modulus depends very strongly on the microstructure. Thus a complete description of the modulus dependence on diameter is lacking. Analytically, continuum mechanics has been applied to estimate the dependence of modulus on diameter:  in tension, where  is the bulk modulus,  is the thickness of a shell layer in which the modulus is surface dependent and varies from the bulk,  is the surface modulus, and  is the diameter. This equation implies that the modulus increases as the diameter decreases. However, various computational methods such as molecular dynamics have predicted that modulus should decrease as diameter decreases.

Experimentally, gold nanowires have been shown to have a Young's modulus which is effectively diameter independent. Similarly, nano-indentation was applied to study the modulus of silver nanowires, and again the modulus was found to be 88 GPa, very similar to the modulus of bulk Silver (85 GPa) These works demonstrated that the analytically determined modulus dependence seems to be suppressed in nanowire samples where the crystalline structure highly resembles that of the bulk system.

In contrast, Si solid nanowires have been studied, and shown to have a decreasing modulus with diameter The authors of that work report a Si modulus which is half that of the bulk value, and they suggest that the density of point defects, and or loss of chemical stoichiometry may account for this difference.

Yield strength

The plastic component of the stress strain curve (or more accurately the onset of plasticity) is described by the yield strength. The strength of a material is increased by decreasing the number of defects in the solid, which occurs naturally in nanomaterials where the volume of the solid is reduced. As a nanowire is shrunk to a single line of atoms, the strength should theoretically increase all the way to the molecular tensile strength. Gold nanowires have been described as 'ultrahigh strength' due to the extreme increase in yield strength, approaching the theoretical value of E/10. This huge increase in yield is determined to be due to the lack of dislocations in the solid. Without dislocation motion, a 'dislocation-starvation' mechanism is in operation. The material can accordingly experience huge stresses before dislocation motion is possible, and then begins to strain-harden. For these reasons, nanowires (historically described as 'whiskers') have been used extensively in composites for increasing the overall strength of a material. Moreover, nanowires continue to be actively studied, with research aiming to translate enhanced mechanical properties to novel devices in the fields of MEMS or NEMS.

Applications

Electronic devices

Nanowires can be used for MOSFETs (MOS field-effect transistors). MOS transistors are used widely as fundamental building elements in today's electronic circuits. As predicted by Moore's law, the dimension of MOS transistors is shrinking smaller and smaller into nanoscale. One of the key challenges of building future nanoscale MOS transistors is ensuring good gate control over the channel. Due to the high aspect ratio, if the gate dielectric is wrapped around the nanowire channel, we can get good control of channel electrostatic potential, thereby turning the transistor on and off efficiently.

Due to the unique one-dimensional structure with remarkable optical properties, the nanowire also opens new opportunities for realizing high efficiency photovoltaic devices. Compared with its bulk counterparts, the nanowire solar cells are less sensitive to impurities due to bulk recombination, and thus silicon wafers with lower purity can be used to achieve acceptable efficiency, leading to the reduction on material consumption.

To create active electronic elements, the first key step was to chemically dope a semiconductor nanowire. This has already been done to individual nanowires to create p-type and n-type semiconductors.

The next step was to find a way to create a p–n junction, one of the simplest electronic devices. This was achieved in two ways. The first way was to physically cross a p-type wire over an n-type wire. The second method involved chemically doping a single wire with different dopants along the length. This method created a p-n junction with only one wire.

After p-n junctions were built with nanowires, the next logical step was to build logic gates. By connecting several p-n junctions together, researchers have been able to create the basis of all logic circuits: the AND, OR, and NOT gates have all been built from semiconductor nanowire crossings.

In August 2012, researchers reported constructing the first NAND gate from undoped silicon nanowires. This avoids the problem of how to achieve precision doping of complementary nanocircuits, which is unsolved. They were able to control the Schottky barrier to achieve low-resistance contacts by placing a silicide layer in the metal-silicon interface.

It is possible that semiconductor nanowire crossings will be important to the future of digital computing. Though there are other uses for nanowires beyond these, the only ones that actually take advantage of physics in the nanometer regime are electronic.

In addition, nanowires are also being studied for use as photon ballistic waveguides as interconnects in quantum dot/quantum effect well photon logic arrays. Photons travel inside the tube, electrons travel on the outside shell.

When two nanowires acting as photon waveguides cross each other the juncture acts as a quantum dot.

Conducting nanowires offer the possibility of connecting molecular-scale entities in a molecular computer. Dispersions of conducting nanowires in different polymers are being investigated for use as transparent electrodes for flexible flat-screen displays.

Because of their high Young's moduli, their use in mechanically enhancing composites is being investigated. Because nanowires appear in bundles, they may be used as tribological additives to improve friction characteristics and reliability of electronic transducers and actuators.

Because of their high aspect ratio, nanowires are also uniquely suited to dielectrophoretic manipulation, which offers a low-cost, bottom-up approach to integrating suspended dielectric metal oxide nanowires in electronic devices such as UV, water vapor, and ethanol sensors.

Due to their large surface-to-volume ratio, physico-chemical reactions are reported to be favourable on the surface of nanowires. This may facilitate degradation mechanisms to operate in the some nanowires under certain processing conditions such as in a plasma environment.

Single nanowire devices for gas and chemical sensing

As previously mentioned, the high aspect ratio of nanowires makes this nanostructures suitable for electrochemical sensing with the potential for ultimate sensitivity. One of the challenge for the use of nanowires in commercial products is related to the isolation, handling, and integration of nanowires in an electrical circuit when using the conventional and manual pick-and-place approach, leading to a very limited throughput. Recent developments in the nanowire synthesis methods now allow for parallel production of single nanowire devices with useful applications in electrochemistry, photonics, and gas- and biosensing.

Nanowire lasers

Nanowire lasers are nano-scaled lasers with potential as optical interconnects and optical data communication on chip. Nanowire lasers are built from III–V semiconductor heterostructures, the high refractive index allows for low optical loss in the nanowire core. Nanowire lasers are subwavelength lasers of only a few hundred nanometers. Nanowire lasers are Fabry–Perot resonator cavities defined by the end facets of the wire with high-reflectivity, recent developments have demonstrated repetition rates greater than 200 GHz offering possibilities for optical chip level communications.

Sensing of proteins and chemicals using semiconductor nanowires

In an analogous way to FET devices in which the modulation of conductance (flow of electrons/holes) in the semiconductor, between the input (source) and the output (drain) terminals, is controlled by electrostatic potential variation (gate-electrode) of the charge carriers in the device conduction channel, the methodology of a Bio/Chem-FET is based on the detection of the local change in charge density, or so-called "field effect", that characterizes the recognition event between a target molecule and the surface receptor.

This change in the surface potential influences the Chem-FET device exactly as a 'gate' voltage does, leading to a detectable and measurable change in the device conduction. When these devices are fabricated using semiconductor nanowires as the transistor element the binding of a chemical or biological species to the surface of the sensor can lead to the depletion or accumulation of charge carriers in the "bulk" of the nanometer diameter nanowire i.e. (small cross section available for conduction channels). Moreover, the wire, which serves as a tunable conducting channel, is in close contact with the sensing environment of the target, leading to a short response time, along with orders of magnitude increase in the sensitivity of the device as a result of the huge S/V ratio of the nanowires.

While several inorganic semiconducting materials such as Si, Ge, and metal oxides (e.g. In2O3, SnO2, ZnO, etc.) have been used for the preparation of nanowires, Si is usually the material of choice when fabricating nanowire FET-based chemo/biosensors.

Several examples of the use of silicon nanowire(SiNW) sensing devices include the ultra sensitive, real-time sensing of biomarker proteins for cancer, detection of single virus particles, and the detection of nitro-aromatic explosive materials such as 2,4,6 Tri-nitrotoluene (TNT) in sensitives superior to these of canines.
Silicon nanowires could also be used in their twisted form, as electromechanical devices, to measure intermolecular forces with great precision.

Limitations of sensing with silicon nanowire FET devices

Generally, the charges on dissolved molecules and macromolecules are screened by dissolved counterions, since in most cases molecules bound to the devices are separated from the sensor surface by approximately 2–12 nm (the size of the receptor proteins or DNA linkers bound to the sensor surface). As a result of the screening, the electrostatic potential that arises from charges on the analyte molecule decays exponentially toward zero with distance. Thus, for optimal sensing, the Debye length must be carefully selected for nanowire FET measurements.
One approach of overcoming this limitation employs fragmentation of the antibody-capturing units and control over surface receptor density, allowing more intimate binding to the nanowire of the target protein. This approach proved useful for dramatically enhancing the sensitivity of cardiac biomarkers (e.g. Troponin) detection directly from serum for the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction.

Nanowire assisted transfer of sensitive TEM samples

For a minimal introduction of stress and bending to transmission electron microscopy (TEM) samples (lamellae, thin films, and other mechanically and beam sensitive samples), when transferring inside a focused ion beam (FIB), flexible metallic nanowires can be attached to a typically rigid micromanipulator.

The main advantages of this method include a significant reduction of sample preparation time (quick welding and cutting of nanowire at low beam current), and minimization of stress-induced bending, Pt contamination, and ion beam damage.
This technique is particularly suitable for in situ electron microscopy sample preparation.

Corn-like nanowires

Corn-like nanowire is a one-dimensional nanowire with interconnected nanoparticles on the surface, providing a large percentage of reactive facets. TiO2 corn-like nanowires were first prepared by a surface modification concept using surface tension stress mechanism through a two consecutive hydrothermal operation, and showed an increase of 12% in dye-sensitized solar cell efficiency the light scattering layer. CdSe corn-like nanowires grown by chemical bath deposition and corn-like γ-Fe2O3@SiO2@TiO2 photocatalysts induced by magnetic dipole interactions have been also reported previously.

See also

 Bacterial nanowires
 Molecular wire
 Nanoantenna
 Nanorod
 Nanowire battery
 Non-carbon nanotube
 Silicon nanowire
 Solar cell

References

External links

 Nanohedron.com | Nano Image Gallery several images of nanowires are included in the galleries.
 Stanford's nanowire battery holds 10 times the charge of existing ones
 Original article on the Quantum Hall Effect: K. v. Klitzing, G. Dorda, and M. Pepper; Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 494–497 (1980).
 Strongest theoretical nanowire produced at Australia's University of Melbourne.
 Penn Engineers Design Electronic Computer Memory in Nanoscale Form That Retrieves Data 1,000 Times Faster.
 One atom thick, hundreds of nanometers long Pt-nanowires are one of the best examples of self-assembly. (University of Twente)

Nanoelectronics
Electrical connectors
Mesoscopic physics

Nanowire


Bernard Michael Falk  (16 February 1943 – 4 August  1990) was a British television reporter and interviewer perhaps best known for his contributions to the BBC current affairs and magazine programme Nationwide in the 1970s and the BBC Radio 4 travel programme Breakaway in the 1980s.

He was born in Southport, Lancashire the son of Samuel, a wine merchant, and Belinda Mary Falk (née Kennedy), and was educated at Liverpool College. He began his career in print journalism with the Birkenhead News and played Liverpool's Cavern Club in the evenings as a member of a beat group called 'Tony Snow and his Blizzards', later renamed 'The Bohemians'. He then worked on Fleet Street for the Daily Mirror, before his first job as a television reporter on Scottish Television's regional news programme Scotland Today, covering local issues across Central Scotland. He quickly graduated to Scotland Today Report, a weekly current affairs programme - filmed mostly within STV's region - on the issues of the day.

He enjoyed a short spell at BBC Scotland, appearing on Reporting Scotland and then, an often controversial series of late-night entertainment shows called Falk On.... with the last word of the title featured the subject to be discussed. He later moved to London to join BBC current affairs, appearing in programmes including 24 Hours.

In 1971 Falk was imprisoned for four days in Belfast's Crumlin Road jail for contempt of court. He had interviewed a member of the IRA but refused to reveal his source to the police.

He also hosted the early reality television survival show Now Get Out of That, the late-night live chat show/discussion programme Sin on Saturday in August 1982 - which was axed after three shows - and for reporting on British general election night programmes. He also worked on Start The Week on BBC Radio 4 and was the regular presenter of BBC Radio 4's Saturday morning travel programme, Breakaway.

Falk had a history of heart problems and died of a heart attack, aged 47. He was married and divorced twice.

External links

Bernard Falk BBC Archive report from the first annual Mersey Beat convention
Pressing charges
Now Get Out of That - UKGameshows

1943 births
1990 deaths
People from Southport
British reporters and correspondents
BBC newsreaders and journalists
Journalists imprisoned for refusing to reveal sources
People educated at Liverpool College
Daily Mirror people

Bernard Falk


Ichthyophis supachaii, or Supachai's caecilian, is a species of caecilian in the family Ichthyophiidae found in Thailand's provinces of Nakhon Si Thammarat and Trang, and possibly Malaysia.

It is known mostly from 11 specimens of various ages collected in 1958 by Edward Harrison Taylor at several localities in a wide area of tropical forest in southern Thailand. Later, it was recorded among the moist banks of a river near an abandoned zinc mine. It is likely to be threatened by habitat loss.

References

supachaii
Amphibians described in 1960
Amphibians of Thailand
Taxonomy articles created by Polbot

Ichthyophis supachaii


The Dark Horse is a 2014 New Zealand drama film written and directed by James Napier Robertson and starring Cliff Curtis and James Rolleston. It won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Score at the 2014 New Zealand Film Awards, Best Film at the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) and 2015 Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), was New York Times Critics' Pick and Time Magazine Critics' Pick, and was labeled by leading New Zealand critics as "One of the greatest New Zealand films ever made".  It premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and was created by production company Four Knights Film. The film was released theatrically in the U.S. by Broad Green Pictures on 1 April 2016.

Plot
The Dark Horse is based on the real-life story of Genesis Potini, a brilliant New Zealand chess player who suffered from severe bipolar disorder. The film begins with him walking down a street in the rain, before walking into an antique store and playing a chess game with himself. He has flashbacks of being taught chess by his older brother, and eventually is taken away by police officers to a hospital because of his mental state. He is released into the care of his brother Ariki, who allows him to sleep in his son's room. Upon hearing about a chess club run by his old chess buddy Noble Keelan, he goes around to his house early in the morning to ask to join.  He is told he can only do so if he promises to not "rock the boat." Genesis meets the Eastern Knights Chess club in a shed where he learns that they only have one chess board, and the kids are not particularly motivated. He introduces himself and discloses that he wants to lead them to the Junior National Championships in Auckland, something Noble is initially frustrated with Genesis about. Mana, Ariki's son, followed him to the club, and it is revealed that he will be patched into his father's Gang, the Vagrants, on his birthday. He is given over to Mutt to harden him up. Ariki, believing that Genesis could interfere with this process asks him to leave. Genesis begins sleeping on the monument on Kaiti Hill, and leading meetings at the Chess club, now held at the marae with new chess sets. Mana, though initially hostile towards Genesis begins to see him more regularly, and joins the chess club. Mana reveals that he has been abused and urinated on by Mutt as part of his gang initiation. He also has a V tattooed on his face.

The mother of one of the members of Eastern Knights finds out that Genesis is homeless, and refuses to let her son participate, sending him into another mental breakdown. Sandy allows him to sleep at a friends house, and they all prepare to go to Auckland for the championship. Mana realizes he cannot come as it is on the day that he will be patched, and leaves angrily. Genesis attempts to reason with Ariki, but he refuses to let Mana leave. On the day they leave for Auckland, Genesis stops at the monument to pick up a distraught Mana, and says that Ariki has allowed him to come. They go to Auckland, and all the members of Eastern Knights lose their games apart from Michael and Mana. That night, Mana reveals that he knows Genesis lied about him having permission to come, but that Mana knows his father is dying. He ends up losing his match the next day, but Michael goes on to compete in the final. Genesis repeatedly calls out during the final, and has to be sent outside, but Michael ends up winning the final. Ariki arrives shortly after, and punches Genesis before he yells at Mana to get in the car. The Eastern Knights travel back to Gisborne, and Genesis is visibly upset. He goes over to his brother's to find his nephew, who is unconscious with a black eye. It is revealed that he has just been patched, and Mutt begins beating Genesis, but is stopped by Ariki. Genesis removes Mana's jacket, and they walk out together, being followed and verbally abused by Mutt. Other members of the Gang begin beating Mutt, and Genesis and Mana leave. The closing montage reveals that the Eastern Knights chess club is still being run, and that Genesis passed away in 2011.

Cast
 Cliff Curtis as Genesis
 James Rolleston as Mana
 Wayne Hapi as Ariki
 Kirk Torrance as Noble
 Miriama McDowell as Sandy
 Baz Te Hira as Mutt
 Xavier Horan as Jedi
 James Napier Robertson as Dave

Real-life basis
The character Curtis plays, Genesis, is inspired by real-life Gisborne speed chess player and coach Genesis Potini, who died in 2011. By teaching local youth to play chess, he hoped to give them a positive focus in life and dissuade them from getting involved in gangs and crime. Potini struggled with bipolar disorder, requiring frequent hospital stays. Potini had been the subject of a well received 2003 documentary film, Dark Horse. At the request of director James Napier Robertson, Curtis gained close to 27 kg  (60 pounds) in weight and stayed in character for the entirety of the shoot to play Genesis. Napier Robertson also had Curtis study chess with some of Potini's erstwhile friends, including FIDE Master Ewen Green.

Release

Box office
The Dark Horse grossed $67,533 in the United States and Canada and $1.8 million in other countries for a worldwide total of $1.9 million, against a production budget of $2.1 million.

Critical reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 97%, based on 62 reviews, with an average rating of 7.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Led by an outstanding performance from Cliff Curtis, The Dark Horse tackles complex themes with a richly layered, unpredictable, and deeply affecting story." On Metacritic, the film holds a rating of 77 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Upon its premiere as the Opening Night film of the New Zealand International Film Festival on 17 July 2014, The Dark Horse was declared by the RNZ National Review "One of the greatest New Zealand films ever made".  The film went on to become a New Zealand box office hit, grossing $2 million and receiving unanimously strong reviews.  The New Zealand Herald rated it 5 stars, calling it "a great, deeply affecting movie", praising the "brave, assured and layered directing" and the "towering performance of Cliff Curtis". It was released theatrically in Australia on 20 November 2014. The Australian called it "outstanding ... a Kiwi – and largely Maori – work of the highest artistic excellence"; the Sydney Morning Herald praised it as "possibly the best movie to come out of New Zealand since Once Were Warriors in 1994". It premiered internationally at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Variety calling it "exceptional...the most deserving cinematic export to emerge from New Zealand in years", The Hollywood Reporter announcing it "certain to attract awards attention", and Indiewire grading it an 'A', praising it as "moving and incredibly humanistic."

Awards and nominations

References

External links

  (rating 4/5)

2010s New Zealand films
2014 films
2014 drama films
New Zealand drama films
Films about bipolar disorder
Films about chess
Drama films based on actual events
Films set in New Zealand
Films shot in New Zealand
Broad Green Pictures films
2010s gang films
Biographical films about sportspeople
Cultural depictions of New Zealand men
Cultural depictions of chess players
2010s English-language films
Films directed by James Napier Robertson

The Dark Horse (2014 film)


John Wickham Legg (28 December 1843 – 28 October 1921) was an English physician and published on medical subjects, and later almost exclusively on liturgy and ecclesiology.

Life and career
He was the third son of the printer and bookseller George Legg, and was born at Alverstoke near Portsmouth in Hampshire, England, on 28 December 1843. He was educated at Winchester College and from there he went to New College, Oxford and subsequently opted to read Medicine at University College, London, where he studied under Sir William Jenner. Having qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he was recommended by Jenner for the post of medical attendant to Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria's fourth son, later styled Duke of Albany, a haemophiliac. Though the appointment lasted only a year, the young Legg became a favourite of the Prince's wife, Princess Helen, and of their daughter, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone.

In 1867, Legg studied in Berlin and upon his return he obtained his M.D. Having been granted membership of the Royal College of Physicians, he was appointed curator of the Pathological Museum at University College. He began to publish and in 1870 became Casualty Physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London. About this time he took up liturgical studies as a hobby.

In 1872 Legg married Eliza Jane Houghton and they had a son, Leopold George, in 1877.

The medical publications continued, but the liturgical studies also progressed. In 1875 Legg was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In 1878 he became Assistant Physician at Bart's and the following year began to lecture on Pathology. The liturgical hobby surfaced publicly in 1879 when he became a founder member of the re-established St Paul's Ecclesiological Society and with an 1881 essay on liturgical colours. The medical career was still unflagging, for in 1883 he gave the Bradshaw Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on cardiac aneurisms. However, ill health then intervened. Following two attacks of rheumatic fever, Legg resigned his offices in 1887 and gave away his medical books, retiring for the winter to Cannes.

In 1888 Legg faced the public with the first fruits of a series of editions he was to produce in the next three decades: an edition with Cambridge University Press of the reformed breviary devised and published by Cardinal Quiñones in 1535.

Having developed a taste for this line of work, Legg dedicated his energies, social graces and connections to consolidating it. He was the prime mover behind the foundation in 1890 of the Henry Bradshaw Society, which on the model of the Surtees Society aimed at publishing manuscripts and rare printed works in volumes issued to subscribing members. Fittingly enough for a Society inaugurated in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, Legg contributed as its first publication a monumental edition of the manuscript Westminster Missal.

An important figure in the history of coronation in the British monarchy (The Coronation of the Queen (1898), Three Coronation Orders (1900)), Legg passed the passions for this topic to his son, Leopold George Wickham Legg, who published English Coronation Records (1901).

Legg's publications continued until the last major work, the edition of the Sarum Missal which he published with Oxford University Press in 1916. He died at the home of his son, Leopold, by then a Fellow of New College, Oxford, on 28 October 1921, and was buried in Saltwood, Kent.

Sources
 A. Ward & C. Johnson, "John Wickham Legg (1843-1921)", in Ephemerides Liturgicae 97 (1983) 70-84 (with Legg's bibliography).

References

External links
Bibliographic directory from Project Canterbury

19th-century English medical doctors
English theologians
1843 births
1921 deaths
Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians
Alumni of New College, Oxford
Alumni of University College London
Academics of University College London
Ecclesiologists
People educated at Winchester College
Anglican liturgists
19th-century Anglican theologians
20th-century Anglican theologians

John Wickham Legg


Nicholas Nickleby is a 2002 British-American period comedy-drama film written and directed by Douglas McGrath. The screenplay is based on The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, which originally was published in serial form between March 1838 and September 1839.  Charlie Hunnam stars in the title role alongside Nathan Lane, Jim Broadbent, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Bell,  Anne Hathaway, Romola Garai, Alan Cumming, and Timothy Spall.

Plot
A prologue introduces the Nicklebys, country gentry who enjoy a comfortable life in the Devon countryside until the father dies and leaves his family with no source of income. Nineteen-year-old Nicholas, his mother, and his younger sister, Kate, venture to London to seek help from their wealthy, cold-hearted uncle Ralph, an investor who arranges for Nicholas to be hired as a tutor at Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire and finds Kate work as a seamstress.

Nicholas is horrified to discover his employers, the sadistic Mr and Mrs Squeers, run their boarding school like a prison and physically, verbally, and emotionally abuse their young charges on a regular basis. He eventually rebels and escapes, taking with him the crippled young servant boy Smike. As they journey to London, they stumble upon a theatrical troupe owned and operated by Mr and Mrs Crummles. They cast them in a production of Romeo and Juliet, but despite a successful first night and the couple's invitation to stay, Nicholas is determined to continue their journey to London after hearing that Kate is in trouble.

Nicholas discovers his sister has been subjected to humiliating sexual harassment from the lecherous Sir Mulberry Hawk, a client of their uncle, who has encouraged the man to seduce his niece in the hope that she will succumb and thus cement Hawk's business relationship with him. Nicholas confronts Sir Mulberry and his uncle, renouncing the latter.

Nicholas is reunited with his family, who welcome Smike as one of their own, and finds clerical employment with the kindly Cheeryble brothers, who offer him more than double his previous salary. While thus employed, Nicholas makes the acquaintance of Madeline Bray, an artist who financially supports both herself and her tyrannical father, as her father gambled away his fortune and that of his late wife.

Nicholas' determination to defend his sister's honour leads his uncle to vow he will destroy the young man. What ensues is a series of adventures in which the upstanding Nicholas manages to survive the schemes of his evil uncle, including an attempt to return Smike to Squeers by kidnapping him and an effort to abort Nicholas' growing relationship with Madeline by promising her father he will excuse his debts if the girl weds Hawk. Ralph's designs on Madeline are thwarted when her father dies unexpectedly. Unfortunately, Smike falls ill and soon dies. Soon after, a sinister secret Ralph has harbored for years surfaces, and it is revealed Smike was Ralph's son, whom he had thought dead. Realizing that his son had died the best friend of his most hated enemy, Ralph hangs himself. Kate marries the Cheeryble brothers' nephew Frank, while Nicholas marries Madeline and settles with her in Devon at his father's house and grounds, where Smike is buried.

Cast

Production
In Creating a Classic: The Making of Nicholas Nickleby, a bonus feature on the film's DVD release, screenwriter/director Douglas McGrath and his cast and crew discuss the development of the project. The positive audience reaction to a stage reading of the screenplay in a theater in lower Manhattan, which included a number of actors who eventually were cast in the film, convinced McGrath to proceed with the movie. At the request of production designer Eve Stewart, he advanced the time frame from the 1830s to the 1850s so she could incorporate elements of the Industrial Revolution into her design plans.

Jamie Bell's audition for the role of Smike in a London hotel room left McGrath and the producers in tears, and they cast him on the spot. While considering Mrs. Crummles, a smug, opinionated, but lovable dowager, McGrath realized all her traits and characteristics were embodied by Dame Edna Everage, alter ego of actor Barry Humphries, but was hesitant to suggest casting a male in the role. The producers, however, agreed Humphries was an ideal choice. Nicholas was one of the last roles to be cast. Charlie Hunnam had been sent the script, but several months passed before he had an opportunity to read it. He met with McGrath, and based on a couple of hours of conversation with the actor, the director felt he finally had found the right man for the part. Ironically, the British Hunnam had to work with a dialect coach; having lived and worked in the US for the past several years, he had perfected an American accent in order to ensure regular employment.

Costume designer Ruth Myers opted to dress two of the leading characters in clothing pre-dating the period in which the film is set in order to suggest Nicholas, as the newly anointed head of his family, wore clothing inherited from his father, and the impoverished Madeline's dresses were hand-me-downs from her mother.

Locations used in the film included the abandoned 19th century Gibson Mill in Hardcastle Crags; Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire; Churchill College at the University of Cambridge; and Wilton's Music Hall, the Old Vic, and the Reform Club in London. Interiors were filmed in Elstree Studios in Borehamwood and Three Mills Studios in the East End of London.

Release

Critical response
The film received positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 78% out of 126 professional critics gave the film a positive review, with a rating average of 6.8/10 and the critical consensus being: "Thanks to a strong cast of experienced actors and director Douglas McGrath's steady hand, Nicholas Nickleby is a worthy and respectful adaptation of the Dickens novel."

In his review in The New York Times, A. O. Scott called the film "two hours of swift, engaging entertainment" and added, "The book's theme and spirit have been dutifully respected. No, what Mr. McGrath has done with admirable modesty is better than that. Rather than trying to update, transform or otherwise interpret Nickleby, he has decided to share his enthusiasm for it ... [He] has adapted [Dickens' dialogue] with a scholar's ear and a showman's flair ... [and] produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs, a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "The movie is jolly and exciting and brimming with life, and wonderfully well-acted."

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle observed, "It took Dickens 65 chapters, and it took the famous stage production eight hours to tell the story of Nicholas Nickleby. But in the new movie, writer-director Douglas McGrath manages to tell it all in 132 minutes, without the story ever seeming rushed or curtailed. Instead, the impression is one of abundance: It's a generous tale, told through big performances by a talented cast."

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of a possible four stars and commented, "Christopher Plummer steals the show without resorting to camp as Nicholas' wounded and wounding Uncle Ralph. It's a great performance and a reminder of Dickens' grandeur. This CliffsNotes of a film, though lively fun, only hints at that. No matter. I'll take the hint."

In Variety, David Rooney described the film as "a delightful experience. The sacrifices of condensing Dickens' massive novel to standard feature length are discernible, especially in the title character's discovery of love. But while it's told in conventional fashion, the heart of this tale of a young man's quest to rescue his family from villainy and misfortune is lovingly rendered by a mostly superlative cast and with an entertaining balance of humor and pathos . . . McGrath's approach is old-fashioned but appealing, using a novelistic style that relies on voiceover to get through much of the initial exposition. His script captures the scope, humor and compassion of Dickens' novel and drives the picaresque story along at a lively clip."

Box office
The film grossed $1,587,173 in the U.S. and $2,064,289 in foreign markets for a total worldwide box office of $3,651,462, against a budget of $10 Million.

Awards and nominations
The film was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. It received the National Board of Review Award for Best Cast, and Romola Garai was nominated for the Jameson People's Choice Award for Best European Actress at the European Film Awards.

References

External links

2002 films
2000s coming-of-age comedy-drama films
British coming-of-age comedy-drama films
American coming-of-age comedy-drama films
Films set in London
Films shot at Elstree Film Studios
United Artists films
Films based on Nicholas Nickleby
Films directed by Douglas McGrath
Films with screenplays by Douglas McGrath
Films scored by Rachel Portman
2002 comedy films
2002 drama films
Films shot in Cambridgeshire
2000s English-language films
2000s American films
2000s British films

Nicholas Nickleby (2002 film)