The skeptoid podcast by Brian Dunning is well researched, you can listen to or read the transcript for episode 79 on Roswell here.

Summary of the initial "incident" from the episode's transcript:

"In July 1947, a balloon train came down on the Foster Ranch, 75 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. Rancher "Mac" Brazel, who had been reading about flying saucers, reported it to the local Sheriff, who in turn reported a crashed flying saucer to a Major Jesse Marcel at Roswell Army Air Field, but not before the local press heard about it. The debris, totaling some five pounds of foil and aluminum and described in detail by Mac Brazel, was recovered by officials from Roswell Army Air Field. These balloon trains were long ultra low frequency antennas designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests, held aloft by a large number of balloons, and were known as Project Mogul. With Marcel's press release in hand, the Roswell Daily Record reported that a Flying Saucer was captured, and the following day, printed a correction that it was merely a weather balloon, along with an interview with Mac Brazel, who deeply regretted all the unwanted publicity generated by his misidentification".

Edit: I realize after reading the answer guidelines more closely, this answer may fail to meet them. Feel free to delete as necessary.

In the 1960's a top secret all titanium military aircraft crashed in the desert near "Area-51" leaving a huge debris field of hundreds of thousands of bits of titanium. The military picked up every little piece of bright shiny metal, much of it by hand in a huge effort to keep the whole thing concealed. Sound familiar?

That aircraft as the A-12, a precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane built by Lockheed Skunkworks, which is based our of Groom lake a.k.a. Area-51.

These things happen. There are still a huge amount of secrets hidden away from the post war world in the late 40's even. There are more secret military projects than the public can fathom. The black budget is trillions of dollars a year.

Secret events happen all the time. It's rare that the public hears about it. Roswell could have been a secret project still covered up with that fake balloon story.

The balloon story doesn't match. There are records proving there were no balloons during the time period of the debris finding. The story has changed several times over the years. We've been fed different "explanations" over the years, none of which have proper documents to prove the crash was something terrestrial. By all means it could very well be so made by man but there's no proof it was. It could have been a secret project of the Russians for all we know, or even a real extraterrestrial object.

It's interesting to note that some stories of the debris say it was a strange metal that would return to it's original shape when you bent it. Now these days we have a metal that does the same thing. We call it shape memory alloy.