What do Dunkirk, N.Y., and Roswell, N.M., have in common, aside from the fact that neither town is known for its music scene? Both were duped by weather balloons. Allegedly.
Roswell could well be called the birthplace of the UFO. It was near this small farming community 63 years ago that something — a weather balloon, if you believe the government — fell from the sky. Didn’t just fall but crashed, leaving a wide field of debris.
Initially, the object was thought to be a UFO. Those who study UFOs (known as ufologists) say this was likely because A) rumors travel fast in farming communities, B) the public was more impressionable before television and C) the front-page headline of the July 8, 1947, Roswell Daily Record read, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”
The RAAF was the Roswell Army Air Field, the local air base whose officers investigated the incident. And by “investigated” ufologists mean “covered up.” And by “incident,” they mean “crash landing of a UFO with attendant debris and alien remains.”
In the meantime, reports of the “flying disk” were being trumpeted in newspapers around the country. The Los Angeles Times: “Army reveals it has flying disk.” The New York Post: “UFO NO!: With Nazis Vanquished, New Enemy on Scene.” Variety: “Pics Nix Disk’s Risks.” The Weekly World News: “Alien Caught in Love Nest with Andrews Sisters.”
It was all quite exciting. For about a day. Then those wet blankets from the RAAF came along and explained that the remarkably pliant and seemingly indestructible metal with the unintelligible hieroglyphics, which had been found scattered over an area one-quarter of a mile long by 900 feet wide, was actually ... a weather balloon.
On the scale of anticlimactic, this rates somewhere between “We’re out of Bombay Sapphire, can I interest you in Mr. Boston?” and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore.
The weather balloon excuse was so flimsy that, almost 50 years later, the government was still issuing explanations. In separate announcements in the mid-1990s, the Air Force said A) it wasn’t just any weather balloon that was found, but a top-secret balloon that hovered above the atmosphere to listen for Soviet atom bomb tests, and B) memories of alien bodies probably stemmed from human dummies dropped to test parachutes (even though these tests weren’t performed until the 1950s). In other words, they didn’t exactly lay the mystery to rest.
