Report says ET did not go home...he was never really here in first place
JUNE 24, 1997
It is the world’s most famous UFO sighting, which launched a whirlwind of fascination and paranoia over proof of extra-terrestrial life.
Dubbed “The Roswell Incident”, the event in the 1940s spawned decades of conspiracy theories and cover-up accusations that plagued the US military and FBI for half a century.
Then on June 24, 1997 US Air Force officials released a historic report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in the town of Roswell, New Mexico.
The report, titled Case Closed: Final Report On The Roswell Crash, was issued one month before the 50th anniversary of the crash to finally lay the case to rest and to silence sceptic “ufologists”.
It claimed “alien bodies” recovered from the crash site were actually crash test dummies, and that the supposed UFO was an American spy balloon headed for Russia.
In the summer of 1947, rancher William “Mac” Brazel discovered a mysterious metal “disc-like object” that had crashed on his land.
The debris was removed by soldiers from the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).
Following recent public reports of “flying saucers” in the area, the RAAF then released a bizarre statement, saying: “The many rumours regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday” when the RAAF “was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers”.
Local news stories ran headlines that a “flying saucer” had crashed in
Roswell, forcing top military officials to quickly backtrack that the object was in fact a weather balloon.
But this swift change to the story only fuelled public scepticism and sparked a tirade of UFO conspiracy theories. Some of the more outlandish claimed eye-witness accounts of “extra-terrestrial bodies” being removed from the Roswell crash site, including some questionable “original footage”.
In a 1994 report, the US Air Force eventually conceded the weather balloon was a tall tale and that the wreckage was a spy device created for the classified Project Mogul.
A high-altitude balloon had been equipped with microphones and was designed to float over the USSR to monitor possible Soviet attempts to test an atomic bomb. As Project Mogul was a covert operation, the Air Force claimed a false explanation of the crash was necessary.
The more-extensive 1997 report expanded on this bizarre reason for the cover story and also explained the stories of “alien bodies” removed from the crash site as being life-sized parachute test dummies.
A New York Times article summarised the report as: “No bodies. No bulbous heads. No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extra-terrestrials or alien artefacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no government cover-up.”
The Roswell case has since been described as “the world’s most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim”.
But that didn’t stop throngs of tourists flooding the town of Roswell on the 50th anniversary of the crash.
The town remains ground zero for UFO conspiracy theorists. It even has its own UFO museum and research centre, alien-themed street lights and a McDonald’s with a spaceship on its roof.