• New York HeraldTribune July 3 1947 

Original Newspaper (Front Page Only)

July 8, 1947: Roswell Incident Launches UFO Controversy

1947: Days after something shiny crashed in the New Mexico desert, the Roswell Army Air Field issues a press release that says the military has recovered the remains of a “flying disc.” Although quickly discounted as erroneous, the announcement lays the groundwork for one of the most enduring UFO stories of all time.

 

The first reports of 'flying saucers' being sighted were on 24 June 1947 from the Cascade Mountains of Washington state, USA. A private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing nine strange objects that moved at tremendous speed across the sky „like a saucer skipping on water‟. His sighting triggered a wave of similar reports from observers in North America and across the world. On 8 July 1947 a report came from Roswell, New Mexico, that a disc-shaped object had landed on a remote ranch and had been removed for examination by officers from the US Eighth Army Headquarters. The age of the flying saucer had arrived. The acronym UFO is an abbreviation for the US Air Force term „Unidentified Flying Object.‟ It was coined in 1950 by Captain Edward Ruppelt of „Project Blue Book’, the USAF‟s official 'UFO project', to replace flying saucers, a term that was widely used by the media and public. A flying saucer is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as „a disc or saucer-shaped object reported as appearing in the sky and alleged to come from outer space‟. Although for the public and the media UFO has since become a synonym for „alien spaceship,‟ for the military forces of the world it is simply refers to something in the sky the observer can see but does not recognise. In the vast majority of cases, investigations have discovered ordinary explanations for UFO reports such as bright stars and planets, meteors, artificial satellites, balloons, aircraft seen from unusual angles and space junk burning up in the atmosphere. However, there are some cases on record where no common explanation can be found. For the Ministry of Defence, these types of report remain „unidentified‟ rather than „extraterrestrial‟. Some branches of the MoD, such as the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), prefer the term UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) to describe those UFOs that remain unidentified. UAP does not imply the existence of an „object‟ of extraterrestrial origin.