JULY 1947

On July 8 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issues a press release stating that a ‘flying disc’ had crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, sparking the rumour that a UFO had crashed, and highlighting the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. The debris was later identified as a weather balloon, which had been involved in highaltitude monitoring of Soviet atom bomb tests, but the crash has been the subject of countless UFO conspiracy theories ever since.