A press release issued by the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico claimed on this day in 1947 that soldiers had collected the remains of a flying saucer from a crash site on a local farm. This information was quickly passed along to local news outlets, which reported it the same day. The next day, the Army backpedaled, saying the components found belonged to a weather balloon. That, it would turn out, was a lie; the unidentified flying object had a more secretive mission.
To this day, the incident in Roswell, New Mexico, has been cited as evidence of a grand conspiracy concealing extraterrestrial visits to Earth. Speculation was reignited around the crash in 1978 when a retired military officer revealed the weather balloon story was a cover-up, theorizing that it might have been an alien craft.
But it turns out the Roswell incident was the result of international tensions, not interplanetary ones. After years of (sometimes ridiculous) speculation, the U.S. Air Force admitted in 1994 that the debris was from a spy balloon intended to collect data on atomic bomb tests by the Soviet Union. Still, plenty of people today believe there were aliens involved. Roswell has cashed in on that theory, with UFO-themed shops and attractions, including a museum dedicated to speculation about aliens.
