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N0KFQ > TODAY 24.06.07 09:25l 56 Lines 2854 Bytes #-6355 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jun 24
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From: N0KFQ@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
To : TODAY@ALLUS
1997 : U.S. Air Force reports on Roswell
On this day in 1997, U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page
report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft
crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.
Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to
flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the
dawn of the atomic age caused many Americans to turn their
attention to the skies. The town of Roswell, located near the
Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO
believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when
ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material
scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to
the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air
Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had
recovered the wreckage of a "flying disk." A local newspaper put
the story on its front page, launching Roswell into the spotlight
of the public's UFO fascination.
The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the
debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from
die-hard UFO believers, or "ufologists," public interest in the
so-called "Roswell Incident" faded until the late 1970s, when
claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather
balloon story as a cover-up. Believers in this theory argued that
officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the
crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area
51 installation in Nevada. Seeking to dispel these suspicions,
the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that the
crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon
launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified
experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect
Soviet nuclear tests.
On July 24, 1997, barely a week before the extravagant 50th
anniversary celebration of the incident, the Air Force released
yet another report on the controversial subject. Titled "The
Roswell Report, Case Closed," the document stated definitively
that there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form
was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO
sightings, and that the "bodies" recovered were not aliens but
dummies used in parachute tests conducted in the region. Any
hopes that this would put an end to the cover-up debate were in
vain, as furious ufologists rushed to point out the report's
inconsistencies. With conspiracy theories still alive and well on
the Internet, Roswell continues to thrive as a tourist
destination for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual
UFO Encounter Festival each July and welcoming visitors
year-round to its International UFO Museum and Research Center.
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