Roswell UFO incident (nonfiction)
The Roswell UFO incident of July 1947 involved a military balloon, or (supposedly) an alien spacecraft, crashing at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.
The sequence of events was triggered by the crash of a Project Mogul balloon near Roswell. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut, issued a press release stating that personnel from the field's 509th Operations Group had recovered a "flying disc", which had crashed on a ranch near Roswell.
Following wide initial interest in the crashed "flying disc", the US military stated that it was merely a conventional weather balloon.
Interest subsequently waned until the late 1970s, when 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, who then engaged in a cover-up.
In the 1990s, the US military published two reports disclosing the true nature of the crashed object: a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. Nevertheless, the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media, and conspiracy theories surrounding the event persist.
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External links:
- Roswell UFO incident @ Wikipedia