In the summer of 1947, a rancher discovered unidentifiable debris in his pasture outside Roswell, New Mexico. William “Mac” Brazel reported to the local sheriff, George Wilcox, that he might have recovered the remains of “one of them flying saucers.” Military authorities were subsequently alerted, and on July 8, 1947, the public information office at Roswell Army Air Field made the startling announcement that they had recovered the remains of a “flying disc.”
However, on July 9, a press conference was held announcing that the ‘flying saucer’ was in fact a hot-air balloon. According to widely held public opinion, the United States government successfully recovered the remains of a crashed UFO along with its extraterrestrial occupants near Roswell, in July 1947. In what is now known as the “the Roswell incident,” the U.S. military is said to have quickly covered up the affair and allegedly continues to shroud it in extreme secrecy even today.
Extra-terrestrial intelligence and UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) have always been a subject of boundless interest for mankind. While there is no conclusive proof of life beyond what we know on Earth, this hasn’t stopped scientists, historians, moviemakers, writers, and scholars from putting in time and money in creating the ‘perfect image of an alien’.
Hollywood movies like Aliens, Independence Day, District 9, Men in Black (the list is endless) have all depicted aliens as large, scaly creatures (think Predator from the 2010 film Predator), usually with a plot to usurp life on Earth and take over the planet. These movies manage to rake in quite the moolah, despite the recurring plot in all the movies. Somehow, people just can’t get enough of aliens!
And of course, there is always the ‘aura’ surrounding secret locations that hold remains of crashed flying saucers and alien bodies (Area 51 in USA). For decades, the U.S. military installation located roughly 100 miles (161 kilometers) north of Las Vegas had been one of the worst-kept secrets on the planet.
Area 51, as it’s commonly known to UFO conspiracy theorists and aviation buffs who piece together the details of classified military spy plane prototypes, is a place whose existence the U.S. government long refused even to acknowledge. In the murky world of Internet discussions, late-night TV programs and movie science-fiction fantasies, it’s long been assumed to be the place where government researchers reverse-engineered captured alien spacecraft, tried to clone extraterrestrials, and filmed the fake moon landing in 1969 (Day, 2006). The government, as you might expect, did not confirm any of that.
July 2 commemorates the supposed UFO crash in the 1947 Roswell UFO Incident, giving birth to the World UFO Day, an awareness day for people to gather together and watch the skies for unidentified flying objects. The stated goal of the July 2 celebration is to raise awareness of “the undoubted existence of UFOs” and to encourage governments to declassify their files on UFO sightings. After all, what harm can come from revealing proof that ‘yes, aliens do exist’?