In 19, the United States's top-secret Project Mogul launched thousands of balloons designed to listen for Soviet atomic tests. Olmsted notes that 'The Roswell 'incident' occurred at the dawn of the nuclear age and the cold war, just months after President Harry Truman had officially announced his administration's intention to fight communism all over the globe'. Researchers at Alamogordo Air Field, less than 150 miles from Roswell, were launching classified balloons during the prior weeks. 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.Ĭlass=notpageimage| Roswell was one of many Army Airfields in New Mexico when debris was recovered from a ranch near Corona. The incident has been described as 'the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim'. 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.Ĭonspiracy theories about the event persist, and the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media. 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. The Army quickly retracted the statement and said instead that the crashed object was a conventional weather balloon.

On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had recovered a 'flying disc'. The Roswell incident took place amid the flying disc craze of 1947, where widespread media coverage of pilot Kenneth Arnold's alleged sighting triggered hundreds of copycat reports nationwide. In 1994, the United States Air Force published a report identifying the crashed object as a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. Decades later, conspiracy theories claimed that the debris was from a flying saucer which had been covered up by the United States government. The Roswell incident centers on the 1947 recovery of metallic and rubber debris from a military balloon that was recovered by military personnel from Roswell Army Air Field.

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