In June 1947 rancher Mac Brazel found a spread of metallic foil, rubber, tape and sticks on the ranch he managed near Roswell, New Mexico. Officers from Roswell Army Air Field collected it, and on July 8, 1947, the base put out a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc". The news went around the world.
Within a day the Army withdrew the story and said the debris was an ordinary weather balloon. The case was mostly forgotten for 30 years.
In 1978 retired officer Jesse Marcel said the weather balloon was a cover story, and books in the 1980s added crashed saucers and alien bodies. In the 1990s the US Air Force reported that the debris came from Project Mogul, a classified string of balloons carrying equipment to listen for Soviet nuclear tests, which is why the Army had hidden its real purpose.
