Today in HistoryâJuly 8: A Local Newspaper Kicks Off Roswellâs UFO Mania
On July 7, 1947, soldiers at the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) in New Mexico recovered the remains of a flying saucer that had crashed on a local ranch.
Or so the headline of the RAAFâs press release in the Roswell Daily Record the next day read.
It wasnât the first report of such an object. Two weeks earlier pilot Kenneth Arnold had reported seeing nine mysterious objects flying through the sky in Washington state. He said the objects he saw were crescent-shaped, but the media latched onto his description of them skipping through the air like saucers over water, and flying saucer mania soon gripped the country.
The news inspired New Mexico rancher W.W. âMacâ Brazel to call the sheriff on July 8. In June he had found debris spread over parts of his ranch, and he began wondering if it was part of a flying saucer. The military investigatedâand issued todayâs famous press release.
Just a day after the announcement, however, the army air force backtracked. They claimed that the remains were not from a flying saucer but from a crashed weather balloon. Brazel remained skeptical, but the incident faded from the public imagination.
The Archives for the Unexplained, the largest library for the paranormal, is located in Norrköping, Sweden.
Until 1980, that is.
That was when Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore published The Roswell Incident, which claimed that the weather balloon was a cover story and what the government found was an alien spacecraft. The book was disputed, but conspiracy theories flourished. Supporters produced evidence to bolster the bookâs thesis, and although much of the evidence proved to be fake, Roswell remains a hub of UFOlogy to this day.
Berlitz and Moore were right about one thing, though: The air force didnât find a weather balloon on that July day. The debris was actually from an anti-Soviet spy balloon.
- 12,618: Reported sightings of UFOs between 1947 and 1969
- 50+ percent: Sightings the CIA revealed were actually of classified spy planes
- 220,000: Annual visitors to Roswellâs UFO Museum
- 1833: Treaty of HĂŒnkĂąr Ä°skelesi is signed between Russia and the Ottoman Empire
- 1896: William Jennings Bryan delivers his âCross of Goldâ speech
- 1996: The Spice Girlsâ debut single âWannabeâ is released in the U.K.
