According to the believers, it happened somewhere around the start of July. They can't remember the precise date, but they do remember that the winds howled and the thunder crashed. In an isolated farmhouse, 129km from the town of Roswell, rancher Mac Brazel sat up in alarm when, through the strikes of thunder, he heard a louder noise - that of a huge explosion. The next day, he saddled up his horse and rode out to inspect his land. Scattered around the ranch, he saw an array of tinfoil parts, wooden sticks, and strips of tape inscribed with what appeared to be some bizarre form of floral hieroglyphics. Brazel informed the local sheriff of his discovery, who in turn contacted the commanding officer at the Roswell Army Airfield (Jesse Marcel). They collected and examined the wreckage, and Marcel soon issued a press release reporting their mysterious findings - they had discovered the wreckage of a flying disk. 

Not surprisingly, within minutes mass hysteria broke out. The Pentagon began to receive calls from all around the world. The wreckage was moved to a different military base for further analysis. And a few hours later, the military announced that what they had really recovered was a weather balloon. It was a cover-up. 

Over three decades passed before it resurfaced. Stanton Friedman (a prominent UFO researcher) was told that a retired Air Force officer (Jesse Marcel), who had once handled the wreckage of a UFO, was living nearby him. After interviewing Marcel and other witnesses, he came to the dramatic conclusion of a massive UFO cover-up, which he published in his 1980 book, The Roswell Incident. This time the story was embraced by a less trusting public made cynical by the Watergate conspiracy and Vietnam War. Many books followed, and the speculation abounded. Some suggested a second crash site, with several alien bodies on which autopsies were performed. Others were more inventive, proposing secret government aircraft carrying inexperienced chimpanzee test pilots. In a crash, the chimps would have appeared alien after having most of their hair singed off. But it is only in the last decade that the Roswell story has infiltrated our movies, television screens, magazine articles and popular culture. 

The more the military denied it, the more the people believed it. Initially, it may have been a convenient cover story to divert attention from the latest developments in military technology; but eventually the complaints of a cover-up grew too loud to be ignored. In 1994, in response to the growing controversy, the U.S. Airforce announced that it would finally resolve the incident. It launched a comprehensive investigation eventually leading to a scientist by the name of Charles Moore, who in 1947 had been working on a previously top secret project named Project Mogul. 

As Moore explained, Mogul’s purpose was to develop balloons carrying acoustic equipment designed to monitor possible Soviet nuclear bomb explosions. The U.S. military did not want the Soviets knowing about what they were able to detect, and so the project was classified in the name of "national security". The balloons were equipped with tin foil corner reflectors so that they could be tracked by radar. The reflectors were put together with beams of balsa wood and the seams reinforced with leftover tape that Moore recalled had abstract flower-like designs because it had been manufactured by a toy company. 

Records showed that one such balloon was launched on June 4 of 1947 and had been tracked to within 32-km of the Foster ranch before it lost contact with radar. Subsequent simulations based on wind data and altitude information then confirmed a crash site in the Foster ranch in mid-June. Was this the wreckage that Mac Brazel had seen? Although UFO researchers argue over a crash date between July 2 or July 4, Brazel reported unequivocally that he discovered the debris on June 14. This also implies that he didn’t pay as much attention to the wreckage as the UFO researchers suggest. In fact more than three weeks would have passed by the time he informed the local sheriff of his discovery. 

When we ignore the mass hysteria and media hype surrounding the Roswell incident, the evidence in favour of a UFO crash does not actually amount to very much. There are reports of exotic materials and reports of threats from military personnel; but at the end of the day it all comes down to human testimony, much of which is based on 30-year-old memories. It is even possible that the current Roswell myth is a reconstruction involving many events over many years. For example, the aliens weren't added to the story until 1978, and their appearance has been traced back to military experiments in which 1-metre tall, bluish dummies without ears, hair or eyebrows were dropped from high-altitude balloons to study the effects of impact. These dummies could have appeared as aliens to witnesses and been linked to the original Roswell incident by UFO researchers. To the skeptics, this is evidence of a process called retrospective falsification, in which an extraordinary story is told, and then retold with favourable points being emphasized and unfavourable ones neglected. The Roswell myth may be no more real than the TV show that it has spawned. 

Ultimately, the truth about Roswell is that, like the TV show, it will continue to survive as long as there is still money to be made out of it. The town of Roswell generates money through UFO-related tourism much like the town of Inverness does with the Loch Ness monster. It now houses two UFO museums and an annual alien festival, motivated not by the pursuit of truth but by the pursuit of money.