2nd July: World UFO Day

It's World UFO Day - because today was the day in 1947 that a UFO allegedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. 10 things you may not know about the Roswell Incident:

1. In the days immediately following the incident, the US military said the debris that had been found belonged to a weather balloon. There was a press conference showing the debris which appeared to be foil, rubber and wood. It's possible it was no ordinary weather balloon, though, as a top secret project named Project Mogul was being conducted at the time, which involved sending microphones up to extremely high altitudes to try and detect sound waves from Soviet nuclear tests.
2. Another experimental programme of the time, which may have had some bearing on the UFO claims was Operation High Dive, in which dummies were dropped from very high altitudes to see what the effects would be on the human body (fyi, not good). Some witnesses who said they saw alien bodies may actually have seen crash test dummies which had fallen from the sky.
3. People seemed to have accepted these explanations at the time and nothing more was heard about UFOs in Roswell until 1978, when, during an interview with physicist and ufologist Stanton T. Friedman, Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved with the original recovery of the debris in 1947, expressed his belief that the military had covered up the recovery of an alien spacecraft.
4. It wasn't until 1980 that people started writing books about it. The first was The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. Many more books followed with differing scenarios, new witness accounts and new theories.
5. One of these books was called Crash at Corona, as the authors pointed out that the ranch where the debris was found was actually geographically closer to Corona, another New Mexico town.
6. Joe Nickell and James McGaha used the Roswell incident to illustrate a phenomena they called the "Roswellian Syndrome", the means by which modern myths come about. The stages are as follows: Incident: The initial incident and reporting of it, before anybody has any theories about it; Debunking: Immediately after, a rational explanation is put forward: the object was a weather balloon, later confirmed by the military to be a balloon from Project Mogul. Submergence: The news story ended with the identification of the weather balloon. Most people forget all about it, apart from a few UFO enthusiasts or people with active imaginations - who eventually start asking questions, and making public their beliefs. Mythologizing: The story snowballs into an elaborate myth as reports are exaggerated, events are misremembered and turned into folklore. There may even be deliberate hoaxes which add to the effect as people believe them. Reemergence and Media Bandwagon Effect: Publication of books, TV shows and other media coverage follow and the snowball gets even bigger.
7. Even some prominent UFO believers think the Roswell incident had nothing to do with aliens, and if the military admitted they didn't know what the some of the objects were, it probably meant they were Soviet spy satellites.
8. The Roswell incident, it is alleged, led to the setting up of a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, formed in 1947 by an executive order by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, The purpose of this committee, called Majestic 12 (or MJ-12, or Majic 12) was to investigate reports of UFO sightings.
9. The 1995 footage of an alien autopsy, at first said to have been taken by a US military official shortly after the Roswell incident, was actually made by a video entrepreneur in London, Ray Santilli, who admitted it was a reconstruction, presumably to show off his video-making ability. He went on to say, though, that it was based on a real film, mostly lost, and included some of the few original frames which has survived.
10. Finally, a few things Roswell is famous for besides UFOs. It is the administrative capital of Chaves County; one of the world's largest mozzarella factories, Leprino Foods, is based there (aliens made from cheese, anyone?) and the singer John Denver and the actress Demi Moore were both born there.