During the Roswell incident, believers say an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in the New Mexico desert, with debris – and possibly alien bodies – recovered by the US government, marking the beginning of a decades-long cover-up.
What really happened at Roswell, and why does this mystery still attract such interest and controversy, decades later?
The Roswell UFO story begins
The Roswell UFO incident begins on 24 June 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in the US, helping to search for a crashed military aircraft.
He saw 9 crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at a height of around 3km (10,000ft) and an estimated speed of approximately 1,900km/h: seemingly impossible at the time.
Arnold described the jerky movement of the objects as being, “like a saucer would if you skipped it over water.”
The media got hold of the story, coined the phrase ‘flying saucer’ and a modern mystery was born.
Hellbound and Down 