World UFO Day

July 2, 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the supposed UFO crash incident in Roswell, New Mexico, and is celebrated as World UFO Day. What really happened at Roswell, and why does this mystery still attract such interest and controversy, decades later?

“Like a saucer”

On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed nine crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at a speed of approximately 1.900Km/h, which was thought to be impossible at the time. This was the first UFO sighting ever recorded in the United States. The pilot described the movement of the objects as being “like a saucer would if you skipped it over water”.

The event quickly gained public attention, leading to the creation of the term "flying saucer".

More reports were received after the initial sightings of flying saucers in June 1947, indicating that these sightings were frequent but had previously gone unreported.

The Roswell incident

On July 7 of that year, a local rancher called "Mac" Brazel contacted the Roswell sheriff to report finding weird debris all over his land. He claimed that although he had found it days before, he had not given it any thought until the reports of flying saucers started to circulate. After starting an investigation, the US military quickly ended it, stating that the alleged "flying saucer" was actually a crashed weather balloon.

The explanation did not convince many researchers, who over the years dug deeper into the mystery trying to piece together what happened.

Some of them asserted that the wreckage had been moved to Area 51 in the Nevada desert, while others linked the Roswell Incident to the 1995 film depicting a "alien autopsy." Although the video was ultimately revealed to be a hoax, it nonetheless garnered attention globally and piqued people's interest in the mystery.

Nowadays, the most credited hypothesis is that the culprit was indeed a high-altitude weather balloon, but it had been carrying equipment designed to search the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear test as part of something called Project Mogul and the flying disc story was a local initiative designed to throw the media off the true story.

The majority of sightings today are still unexplained, yet our curiosity with this enigma reflects a broader interest in one of the greatest and most important questions we may consider: are we alone in the universe?