Did You Know? Although the crash of *whatever* came down near Roswell, NM occurred “about three weeks” earlier, on July 8, 1947 the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut in Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press release stating that personnel from the field’s 509th Bomb Group had recovered a crashed “flying disk” from a ranch near Roswell, sparking intense media interest. The following day, the press reported that Commanding General of the Eighth Air Force (Roger M. Ramey) stated that, in fact, a radar-tracking balloon had been recovered by the RAAF personnel, not a “flying disc.” This was very shortly after aviator Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sighting of objects that he said skipped in the air like “saucers” skipping on water (leading to the term “flying saucers,” though he did not describe saucer-like objects). Unlike the Arnold incident, the Roswell crash was forgotten for nearly 30 years until ufologists revived it in the 1970s. Since 1947 the U.S. government has acknowledged that *something* crashed at Roswell, but it denies that it was a flying saucer. LEARN MORE.
