18. Roswell, New Mexico, was not the site of a crashed spacecraft in the summer of 1947
A top-secret project conducted by the United States Army Air Forces between 1947 and 1949, Operation Mogul involved the flying of microphones on high-altitude balloons with the intent of detecting sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. Launched on or around June 4, 1947, NYU Flight 4 subsequently crashed at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Requiring a military response given the nature of the top-secret device and the surrounding debris – claimed to simply be a weather balloon – the incident immediately spawned widespread interest and generated sustained conspiracy theories concerning a crashed “flying disc” and subsequent government cover-up.
Claiming the fallen object was, in fact, an alien spacecraft, Roswell became a focal point for ufologists – individuals who study alleged extraterrestrial occurrences on our planet – from the 1970s. Becoming popularized in 1980 following the publication of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, in the years since a complicated and convoluted plot has been developed involving the United States Government. Despite the endurance of the theory – with allegedly as many as forty-five percent of Americans believing extraterrestrials have visited Earth as of 2016 – alongside similar contentions regarding Area 51 in Nevada, there remains no genuine evidence a UFO has ever crashed in New Mexico or indeed elsewhere.