You may not have noticed (but only if you’ve been living in a hermetically sealed shipping container). This month is the sixtieth anniversary of what’s politely termed the Roswell incident.
That incident unfolded like this. In July, 1947, New Mexico sheep rancher William Brazel showed up at the Roswell Army Air Field with some unusual debris in the bed of his pickup – weird leavings that he’d found in a pasture near the tiny town of Corona. This initiated a series of events that eventually became a drawn-out pot boiler about a crashed, alien spaceship. The plot line is simple: extraterrestrials came to visit, and accidentally destroyed their craft. The remains were efficiently collected and perfectly hidden by a government paranoid about security. According to the die-hard believers, the feds, even now, aren’t willing to fess up to the fact that aliens were on our front porch.
Now Roswell isn’t the only story about aliens come to Earth, although it’s certainly garnered more press than most. Admittedly, there’s some indication that its popularity, even among the UFO in-crowd, may be oxidizing somewhat. In a recent query to ten experts made by the Fortean Times web site, Roswell was mentioned only once as a “most interesting UFO case.” And that single mention was offered by Stanton Friedman, who, as the greatest proponent of the Roswell story, certainly has a dog in the fight.