In 1947, there's this rancher who discovers this weird wreckage on his property as he's

going for a ride in New Mexico and near a town called Roswell.

This is MJ Benayas, journalist and host of Fringe Network, Alien State Podcasts.

So this crash, it was early July of 1947 and when MJ says weird wreckage think, 10 foil,

rubber, some wooden beams and the rancher, he thinks is odd but he just keeps moving along.

He ignores it at first but a few days later he's like, you know, maybe I should do something

about it so he contacts the local sheriff's department and the sheriff come pick it up,

they take it to the Roswell Army base where sort of the Air Force would have been.

People started to freak out because here's the thing, the summer of 1947, people all over the country

were spotting things in the sky, things that looked just like flying saucers. The Army Air Force,

they do their due diligence, they check out the Roswell crash site and then they release the

statement. There is this big announcement that comes out a day later where the Army Air Force says

we have recovered a flying disc. The papers were all over the story the next day.

The headline of the Roswell Daily Record on July 8, 1947 proclaimed

that's the Roswell Army airfield. There was right in the headline, flying saucer.

Here was finally proof of something that some folks had suspected for quite some time.

That other life existed in the universe and it was a whole lot closer to us than we thought.

There were aliens. The Roswell crash was the spark that got people not just talking or speculating,

but obsessing about aliens. But soon after the papers hit the news stands,

the Army had a new announcement about the mysterious wreckage.

The Army kind of walks it back and says actually no, it was just a weather balloon,

he made a mistake, sorry no flying saucer. Officials were clear, no flying disc.

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