Area 51 and Aliens

Some believe that an alien spacecraft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the government shipped the wreckage and a body to Area 51 for examination and study. A few go even further, claiming the facility has underground levels and tunnels connecting it to other secret sites, and that it contains warehouses full of alien technology and even living alien specimens. Some theorize that the aliens are actually the ones running the show and that their goal is to create a human-alien hybrid (the aliens seem to have lost the ability to reproduce on their own). Stories cast the aliens in roles from benevolent visitors to evil overlords who subsist on a paste made from ground-up human bits. Air Force representatives have publicly denied that aliens have anything at all to do with Area 51, but that seems to have only strengthened conspiracy theorists' wilder suggestions.

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June 24, 1947, was the day the term flying saucer entered the American vocabulary. That was the day Kenneth Arnold reported sighting a UFO while piloting his private plane over Washington state. He said the object flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water, and the flying saucer was born. On July 8, 1947, Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release written by General William "Butch" Blanchard, stating they had recovered the remains of an unidentified flying object. The Army quickly retracted the statement, but not before it ran in several papers. According to the Army, it was not a flying disc at all, but a weather balloon. Years later, declassified documents said that the object recovered at Roswell was actually a balloon created for a surveillance program called Project Mogul. The weather balloon story was a cover for this secret project. Of course, UFO believers say that the spy balloon story is also a cover, and that the Army really did recover an alien craft.