Message:24645 In: TODAY.WW
From: KF5JRVDate: Wed, 24 Jun 26 09:20:00 Z
Newsgroups: TODAY.WW
Subject: Today in History - Jun 24
Message-ID: <27275_KF5JRV>
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R:260624/0920Z 27275@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ6.0.24
On June 24, 1997, U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft cra
sh in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.
Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and
the dawn of the atomic age caused many Americans to turn their attention to the skies. The town of Roswell, located near the Pe
cos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when ranc
h foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to the sheri
ff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered t
he wreckage of a “flying disk.” A local newspaper put the story on its front page, launching Roswell into the spotlight of
the public’s UFO fascination.
The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from die-h
ard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, whe
n claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather balloon story as a cover-up. Believers in this theory argued that
officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area
51 installation in Nevada. Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that th
e crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified
experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
On July 24, 1997, barely a week before the extravagant 50th anniversary celebration of the incident, the Air Force released yet
another report on the controversial subject. Titled “The Roswell Report, Case Closed,” the document stated definitively th
at there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO
sightings, and that the “bodies” recovered were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests conducted in the region. Any
hopes that this would put an end to the cover-up debate were in vain, as furious ufologists rushed to point out the report’s
inconsistencies. With conspiracy theories still alive and well on the Internet, Roswell continues to thrive as a tourist desti
nation for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual UFO Encounter Festival each July and welcoming visitors year-round
to its International UFO Museum and Research Center.
73 de Scott KF5JRV
Pmail: KF5JRV@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA
Email KF5JRV@gmail.com
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