History: July 7, 1947: Alien Spacecraft Crashes at Roswell, New Mexico

A Brief History

On July 7, 1947, a mysterious object fell from the sky near Roswell, New Mexico, and was reported the next day in the local newspaper as a “Flying Saucer” captured by RAAF (Roswell Army Airfield) personnel. One could hardly blame the newspaper, because the official Air Force press release said authorities had recovered a “flying disc.”

Digging Deeper

Thus, the most celebrated UFO incident of them all began, supposedly because of a typical government lie. The Air Force later claimed the object recovered had been a weather balloon, while in reality it was a balloon carrying instruments to monitor nuclear testing. Or at least that is what the government eventually said!

By the 1970’s the incident had grown in legend and in conspiracy theory circles to epic proportions, often described as either the recovery of alien corpses or the capture of live aliens as well as their space ship. Books, movies, television, every media angle imaginable was inundated with stories about the alleged UFO incident, and despite being debunked over and over again (allegedly) the alien stories would not die.

Authors and skeptics James McGaha and Joe Nickell published an analysis of the incident as a myth making process they called “Roswellian Syndrome.” Undeterred by skeptics, UFO fans watched the 1995 release of film allegedly showing an autopsy of one of the aliens captured in the incident. An international wave of interest developed, but the owner of the film later admitted it was largely a “reconstruction” of the “real” film which had been lost. A comedy film commemorating this event was released in 2006 called Alien Autopsy.

This most celebrated alien encounter event continues to evoke tremendous interest and “new” documents, witnesses, and other “evidence” continues to turn up. Meanwhile, the US government continues to maintain secret classification of many, many items long after any reasonable excuse for doing so exists, keeping the public skeptical about anything and everything the government says, whether it is about UFO’s, assassinations, war, weapons, or whatever.

What do you think? Is there some alien basis for the Roswell incident, or was it a clumsy attempt by the military to hide nuclear monitoring? Let us know!

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