Roswell

In early July 1947, rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel discovered debris — described as sticks, tinfoil-like material, and tape with unusual markings — scattered across his property near Roswell, New Mexico. The local Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release on 8 July 1947 stating that personnel had recovered a "flying disc," a story picked up by newspapers nationwide. Within 24 hours, the Army retracted the statement, holding a press conference at which the debris was identified as the remains of a conventional weather balloon — an explanation that, at the time, attracted little further attention.

The incident lay largely dormant until the late 1970s, when ufologists Stanton Friedman and others interviewed surviving witnesses and published accounts alleging that the military had recovered not a balloon but an alien spacecraft, along with non-human bodies, and had orchestrated a cover-up. In 1994 and 1997, the U.S. Air Force released reports identifying the original debris as wreckage from Project Mogul, a classified programme using high-altitude balloon trains to detect Soviet nuclear tests via acoustic sensors — a programme whose secrecy at the time, the reports argue, explains both the initial "flying disc" announcement (by personnel unfamiliar with the classified project) and the rapid retraction. The reports attributed later accounts of recovered bodies to conflated memories of unrelated military accidents and anthropomorphic test dummies dropped in the area in the 1950s. Roswell has since built its civic identity around the incident, hosting an International UFO Museum and an annual UFO festival.