Roswell UFO crash site

The Roswell incident is the best-known UFO story in the world. In the summer of 1947, a rancher found strange debris on his land near Corona, New Mexico, in the United States. The nearby Roswell Army Air Field then announced that it had recovered a 'flying disc'.

The army took back that claim within a day and said it was just a weather balloon. Decades later, the US Air Force explained that the debris came from Project Mogul, a top-secret balloon program built to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. Even so, many people still believe a spacecraft crashed there, and the town of Roswell now welcomes UFO tourists.

What happened in 1947

On 4 June 1947, scientists at Alamogordo launched a long train of linked balloons carrying listening equipment, and lost contact with it. Later that month, a rancher named W. W. Brazel found tinfoil, rubber, tape and thin wooden sticks scattered across several acres. That summer was the start of the 'flying saucer' craze, so the find caught the public's attention. The Roswell airfield announced it had a 'flying disc', which made headlines around the world before the army changed its story.

The legend versus the facts

In 1978 a retired officer, Jesse Marcel, said the weather balloon story had been a cover-up, and later books added bigger claims, like alien bodies. The Air Force published reports in the 1990s: the debris came from Project Mogul, and the stories about 'aliens' probably came from crash-test dummies dropped from high altitude. No evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found. Still, the story became a famous theme in books, movies and television.

On the globe

The model marks the spot of a famous legend: a 1947 crash site in the New Mexico desert. This story is a mystery, and the facts point to a balloon.