The so-called UFO Capital of the World would be just another forgotten dot on the map nestled in the barren embrace of the Chihuahuan Desert if not for the incident.
You know the one I mean. Everyone does. It's a story that's seeped into the very cobblestones of American Mythology.
On the face of it, there's really not much to tell. In terms of hard facts all we can really say is that one sweltering July afternoon in 1947, a certain something plummeted out of the sky like God himself had reached out and slapped it down to earth. The object made landfall on the property of local rancher Mac Brazel's land, scattering a tangle of rubber strips, tinfoil, and bits of techno-bobs all across his sheep pasture. Mr. Brazel thought that was pretty weird so he reported it to the authorities and the next thing anyone knew the Army had shown up, scooped up all the wreckage, and carted it off just as fast as their government issue legs could carry them.
Historically speaking, that's where the story ends. But Americans are an imaginative lot and never content to accept a mystery at face value. So that may be the end of the historical event of Roswell, but it was just the beginning of the mythos of The Incident.
The reality is that if the Army really wanted to keep the Roswell crash on a banal down-low note they made a terrible botch of it.
Roswell is a small town today, it was even smaller in 1947. People in small towns tend to talk and few things make for better bar-room conversations that mysterious machines dropping out of the sky. By the time the Army showed up and started posting their "Keep Out!" signs all around the crash site, they already had a whole cluster of nosy, curious, chattering country folk all in a stir over the government drama that had land, quite literally, in their back yard.
Then, in perhaps a profoundly misguided attempt to calm the general titter for answers, Colonel William Blanchard came along to douse the smoldering embers with a few gallons of gasoline. As the commanding officer of Roswell Army Air Field, Col. Blanchard could speak with the authority and prestige of the U.S. Government. So when he issued an official press statement declaring that the Army had dug the remnants of a "Flying Disc" or "Flying Saucer" out of the desert outside Roswell, people listened. The next day, the headlines of the local Roswell Daily Record read: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region."
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The Army tried to switch into damage control mode and officially retracted the good Colonel's claims shortly after, naturally. But the damage was done. Col. Blanchard's press release made Roswell an item of high drama and public interest. The cat wasn't so much out of the bag as it had leapt out of the bag, hot-wired a convertible, robbed a bank, and was last seen tearing down a rural desert highway full-speed towards Vegas wearing the bag as a hat.
Wild speculations took the place of any concrete data, with more and more "eyewitnesses" crawling out of the woodwork over the years to announce more and more outlandish accounts of the things they had seen, experienced, or heard whispered about in the dark corners of the Pentagon.
Stories emerged of alien bodies, recovered and whisked away to secret facilities for autopsy and study. Others spoke of strange hieroglyphics on the wreckage and mysterious men in black suits intimidating those who saw too much.
Most of these testimonies flatly contradict each other, of course, but even a crazy voice can gain traction in a vacuum. As a preamble to the 1950s-60s UFO craze, the Roswell "event" was telling. We weren't sure what was out there exactly, but we craved it and feared it in equal measure. And despite all the wild theories, the one thing we could all agree on was that nobody was buying the "weather balloon" story.
Whether aliens landed in the desert outside Roswell in 1947 or not it was the end of an era—the beginning of the age of doubting the "Official Story."
The more the boys in government uniforms insisted that we "Move along, nothing to see here" the more we started to doubt the "official story."
Roswell was the beginning of a nasty nagging feeling that maybe—just maybe—the government was lying to us.
Thus, the Roswell Incident left the domain of facts and history behind and entered the theater of public imagination, kicking off a game of telephone that would play out across seven decades and transform a sleepy cattle town into the epicenter of one of America's most enduring mysteries.
