Roswell incident | 1947 flying disc craze
Roswell incident
The Roswell incident is the 1947 recovery of mundane metallic and rubber debris from a military balloon that crashed near Corona, New Mexico by United States Army Air Forces officers from Roswell Army Air Field, and the conspiracy theories, decades later, claiming that the debris involved a flying saucer and that the truth had been covered up by the United States government. On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had recovered a "flying disc". The Army quickly retracted the statement and said instead that the crashed object was a conventional weather balloon. In 1994, the United States Air Force published a report identifying the crashed object as a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. The Roswell incident was not widely discussed until the late 1970s, when retired lieutenant colonel Jesse Marcel, in an interview with ufologist Stanton Friedman, said he believed the debris he retrieved was extraterrestrial. Ufologists began promoting a variety of increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, claiming that one or more alien spacecraft had crash-landed and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military, which then engaged in a cover-up. Conspiracy theories about the event persist, and the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media. The incident has been described as "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim". The city of Roswell, New Mexico has capitalized on the event; the city's official seal now features a little green man while the city contains countless ufology attractions, events, statues and iconography. (Wikipedia).
