The phenomena of “flying saucers” started in 1947 when a civilian aircraft pilot saw several objects from his plane that he claimed were traveling at supersonic speeds. Reports of more flying saucers soon proliferated throughout the country (the term “unidentified flying object” was coined by the military in 1952). When a rancher found unidentified debris including rubber, tape, and tinfoil near Roswell, NM, the most enduring UFO legend was born.
The military originally said that the debris could have been from a flying disc, but soon retracted that and claimed it was from a weather balloon, and the incident was largely forgotten for several decades. In the 1970s, interest in UFOs peaked again, and the Roswell story was revived when an army officer who collected the debris from the ranch said that the weather balloon story was a cover-up for an extraterrestrial craft. You can read more about this incident in a 1979 interview that was published in the National Enquirer. It begins on page 165 in the file unit UFO File (2 of 2), from the series Roswell Report Source Files
UFO enthusiasts and science fiction writers have since kept interest in the Roswell Incident alive. The story has expanded to include alien bodies (never mentioned in the original accounts) and the Area 51 testing facility in Nevada.
In 1994 the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry into the events at Roswell and concluded that the debris had indeed come from a balloon, but not a balloon for monitoring the weather. Instead, it came from Project Mogul, a program that used balloons to monitor Soviet atomic tests. As part of the investigation, the Air Force conducted several interviews and produced the film “Roswell Reports” to accompany the publication “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” You can view the film and the related interviews in the Catalog.
As part of the National Archives’ staff ongoing declassification and digitization efforts, several more series relating to UFOs were added to the National Archives Catalog. You can explore these digitized records and more:
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![Project Mogul [screen shot from 05:38]](https://hs-20973928.f.hubspotemail.net/hub/20973928/hubfs/2023-09-12_09-56-27.jpg?upscale=true&width=1118&upscale=true&name=2023-09-12_09-56-27.jpg)
