The crashed weather balloon was, in fact, part of a top-secret military endeavor called Project Mogul, which launched high-altitude balloons carrying equipment used to detect Soviet nuclear tests. (Santilli would admit in 2006 that it was a staged film, but he maintained that it was based on actual footage.)Īs it turns out, the government was indeed covering something up-but it wasn’t aliens. News headlines claimed that a “flying saucer” crashed in Roswell, but military officials said it was only a downed weather balloon.Įver since, conspiracy theorists have been hard at work trying to prove the wreckage was extraterrestrial, with one man, Ray Santilli, going so far as to release a video in 1995 of an alien "dissection" purported to have taken place after the incident. After Brazel reported the wreckage, soldiers from nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base came to retrieve the materials. In the summer of 1947, rancher William “Mac” Brazel discovered mysterious debris in one of his New Mexico pastures, including metallic rods, chunks of plastic and unusual, papery scraps. It’s the mother of all UFO sightings, but no object was actually observed flying in the Roswell incident. Jesse Marcel, head intelligence officer, who initially investigated and recovered some of the debris from the Roswell UFO site pictured in a 1947 newspaper reporting the incident at Roswell. But UFO mania had set in, and just a few weeks later, the infamous Roswell sighting would perpetuate the obsession. It simply claimed Arnold had seen a mirage or was hallucinating. Soon, other reports of a group of nine UFOs cropped up across the region, including sightings by a prospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial flight in Idaho. The government never offered a credible explanation for the sightings. When Arnold described the crafts' motion as similar to “a saucer if you skip it across water,” the media coined the now-ubiquitous phrase “flying saucer.” He first believed the objects to be some sort of new military aircraft-this was, after all, just two years after WWII and the first year of the Cold War-but the military confirmed there were no tests being conducted near Mount Rainier that day. While flying his small aircraft near Washington’s Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold claimed to have seen nine blue, glowing objects flying fast-at an estimated 1,700 m.p.h.-in a “V” formation. The origin of today’s fascination can be traced back to civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold. Stevens look at a photo of an unidentified flying object which they sighted while en route to Seattle, Washington, 1947. It's not clear if the fireball got low enough to drop any fragments.In May, another meteor was spotted lighting up the night sky over several Chicago suburbs. Sightings of the fireball were reported in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin.Based on the sightings, the AMS said a trajectory computed by fireball reports puts it over northern Indiana, but video clips will be more useful in computing the actual trajectory.A fireball is an extremely bright meteor, according to Chicago's Adler Planetarium. A fireball was captured on dashcam video streaking across the sky Tuesday night.The American Meteor Society said it has received around 100 fireball reports from around 6:15 p.m. VIDEO: Fireball streaks across sky over Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, WisconsinĮMBED >More News Videos UFO investigators were contacted in December after a fireball was spotted over the skies of Spring, Texas.ĮMBED >More News Videos Suburban Riverwoods resident captures a meteor over Chicago on his front door camera.
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