The Roswell Incident:

The Most Famous UFO Puzzle of All

From the wreckage of a weird crash in 1947 has grown a tale of intrigue and conspiracy that refuses to die

During a thunder-storm in July 1947, something crashed near the US air force base at Roswell, in New Mexico. Over the next few days, USAF personnel collected various odd bits of wreckage; a spokesman said that they had been "fortunate enough to gain possession" of a "flying disk". The wreckage was whisked off to air force HQ in Texas, where a senior general explained to the press that it consisted of bits of a weather balloon. Since UFO sightings were being reported almost every day that summer, the story died.

In the 1970s though some of those who had participated in the events a quarter-century before began telling tales of a downed saucer, alien corpses, of conspiracy and cover-up. After the Watergate scandal - and the release of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Americans lapped the story up.

There were certainly inconsistencies in the official account: a lot of mysterious things were going on at Roswell that summer. It was then the USAF’s only nuclear armed base; and the air force was also experimenting with long-range balloons to sample the stratosphere above the Soviet Union for signs of an atomic test. There was plenty to hide without bring space aliens into the picture, and the air force’s "flying saucer" announcement could easily have been no more than a quick piece of disinformation to smoke-screen real secrets. Besides, there were inconsistencies in the conspiracy theorists’ accounts too: witnesses disagreed on key timings.

Roswell came surging back into controversy in 1995, with the showing of a film purportedly taken in 1947 at the autopsy of a humanoid creature. Most experts were unimpressed, dismissing it as an fake of average quality; but the conspiracy theorists were thrilled by every frame. Probably, we’ll never know exactly what happened that evening in July.