June 24th...This Day in History (Now with links to other events)

U.S. Air Force reports on Roswell 1997

 

On this day in 1997, U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash 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 Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered the 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-hard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, when 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 the 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 that 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 destination 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.

 (More Events on This Day in History)

• American Revolution

• 1803 New Hampshire Patriot Matthew Thornton dies

• Automotive

• 1966 Senate passes landmark auto safety bill

• Civil War

• 1862 Lincoln consults Winfield Scott

• Cold War

• 1948 Soviets blockade West Berlin

• Crime

• 1993 Mail bomb injures Yale professor

• Disaster

• 1975 Eastern Flight 66 crashes at J.F.K.

• General Interest

• 1675 King Philip’s War begins
• 1812 Napoleon’s Grande Armee invades Russia
• 1901 Picasso exhibited in Paris
• 1973 Eamon de Valera resigns

• Hollywood

• 2005 Tom Cruise raises eyebrows

• Literary

• 1935 Pete Hamill is born

• Music

• 1997 Disney pulls album on release day

• Old West

• 1864 Colorado Governor orders Indians to Sand Creek

• Presidential

• 1885 Woodrow Wilson marries Ellen Axson in Savannah, Georgia
• 1953 Jacqueline Bouvier and Senator John F. Kennedy announce engagement

• Sports

• 1995 Mandela cheers on South African rugby team

• Vietnam War

• 1970 Senate repeals Tonkin Gulf Resolution
• 1973 Martin becomes the U.S. ambassador in Saigon

• World War I

• 1915 First operational flight of new German fighter plane

• World War II

• 1945 Russians enjoy a victory parade