Balloons or Saucers?

Objects in the sky fuel new rumors of UFOs, government cover-up

It all started on a July day back in 1947 when a man named William Brazel came upon something strange in the desert.

It was a lot of debris. Wreckage of some sort. Sticks and tinfoil. Paper and rubber.

The stuff didn’t much concern him at first. But then he began hearing stories. Stories about strange lights in the sky.

He told the local sheriff about finding the wreckage. And he told him that the debris might not be of earthly origin.

The news made headlines across the country, though the military was quick to report the debris came from nothing more than a weather balloon.

What happened in Roswell was the birth of a phenomenon. There had been sightings of UFOs before, but the Roswell incident sparked a wave of sightings, news stories, magazine features, books, movies and TV shows. The country went mad for flying saucers. And many Americans still are.

The overall craze has died down and roared back several times over the years. Right now, for example, there is a lot of speculation all over social media that these flying objects our government keeps shooting down might not be quite what they are said to be. Not Chinese spy balloons or some such at all. Maybe not even from this planet.

The Biden administration has been pretty quiet about the nature of these things, which, of course, fuels even more conspiracy theories of a UFO cover-up.

It’s serious business for some, mostly just some harmless fun for others. Most don’t take such chatter seriously.

But, one more thing about Roswell. The government later admitted there was more to the story — but nothing out of this world. The crash was hushed up because the weather balloon was part of Project Mogul, a top-secret operation targeting Soviet nuclear tests.

Makes you wonder if there’s more to what’s up there than they’re telling us. Maybe so. But if there is a truth out there, rest assured it’s much more likely to be of this earth than not.