74 Years Ago: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region"

Above, my reprint of the famous front page of the Roswell Daily Record. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

A newspaper came out whose headline shook up a lot of people. The headline still resonates today.

It was 74 years ago today (July 8, 1947) that the Roswell Daily Record reported that a flying saucer was recovered by the RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) in Roswell, New Mexico.

The headline: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region"

Above, yours truly in Roswell, New Mexico at the UFO Festival.

Other newspapers around the country picked up the story, including the Los Angeles Herald-Express.

From Wikipedia:

The Roswell incident is the 1947 crash of a United States Army Air Forces balloon at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, and the subsequent conspiracy theories claiming that the crash involved a flying saucer, and that the truth had been covered up by the United States government. On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had recovered a "flying disc" from a ranch near Roswell. The Army quickly retracted the statement and said instead that the crashed object was a conventional weather balloon.

The Roswell incident did not surface again until the late 1970s, when a retired lieutenant colonel, in an interview with a researcher of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), alleged that the weather balloon account had been a cover-story. Ufologists began promoting a variety of increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, claiming that one or more alien spacecraft had crash-landed and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military, which then engaged in a cover-up.

I obtained a reprint of the famous front page at the 2018 Roswell UFO Festival and it is framed and display in my living room.