Roswell is a name that everyone knows whether or not they are interested in the UFO Phenomenon. An incident that occurred near Roswell, New Mexico on July 4, 1947 set off the speculation about visiting our world. Years later the existence of the blues and greys would be debated, and it is still not clear whether an alien spaceship crash landed at Roswell, if the UFO that was recovered was an experimental government airplane or as the Unite States Air Force has maintained since the Roswell incident, a weather balloon.
Whatever the object was that landed on the Foster Ranch in 1947, the debris left by the wreckage would be found by a ranch foreman and a seven year old girl. William Brazel and Dee Proctor walked out that morning to find objects that were strange to them. Skeptics of the Roswell incident point out that most of the objects are in fact ordinary objects with a mundane origin.
Roswell, like many other paranormal occurrences, has had its events exaggerated over the years. The crash outside of Roswell, New Mexico would have long been forgotten had the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind not sparked interest in contact with extraterrestrial life. The movie which debuted in 1977, was followed up in 1980 by a story on the incident appearing in The National Enquirer and a book written by Charles Berlitz and William Moore was published during the same year.
Today conspiracy theorists point to the inconsistencies in the original Roswell report published by the Air Force as evidence of a massive government cover-up to hide the existence of extraterrestrials, but the credibility of the leading researchers on the subject itself has been brought into question. According to the Skeptic's Dictionary, the son of one Roswell Expert who calls himself Professor Carr had his son issue an apology for his actions.
What has never been disputed about the Roswell incident is that something landed at the crash site which would later be found by the ranch foreman and the seven year old girl. Whether it was a weather balloon, espionage equipment, or then top secret balloons used to detect Russian nuclear tests is open to debate. The legend of what happened at Roswell has grown and the truth will likely forever be obscured. If nothing else, the crash at Roswell has given humanity something to stir its fertile imagination and some moderately entertaining television shows.
