The Roswell Incident

In July 1947 something crashed on a ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, and the Army Air Field first announced it had recovered a “flying disc” before retracting it to a weather balloon the next day. Decades later the military said it had been a balloon from the classified Project Mogul, listening for Soviet bomb tests. Believers say that is a cover story. Whatever fell, Roswell became the founding legend of the UFO age, and the town has made a warm, tongue-in-cheek industry of it. Told as the pop-culture folklore it is, the crash and the retracted press release are documented fact.