On this day – July 8th

Alien Spaceship lands at Roswell, New Mexico

On July 8th 1947 a report appeared that a local farmer had noticed debris from a crashed something, which appeared to be made up of tough paper, sticks and rubber.

The American Military said that it was a weather balloon that had crashed, and not a lot more was thought about it at the time.

But in the great era of conspiracy theory from 1978 onward, various researchers re-investigated the event, involving hundreds of potential witnesses, bodies of "aliens" being whisked off by the Military and so on. The Roswell incident became the most famous of the "UFO sightings" of the period.

It is now thought likely that the object was in fact an observation balloon linked to the nuclear bomb testing, which the military wished to cover up with the "weather balloon" story, and the rest is down to conspiracy theorists, collective hallucination and media hype.

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