The Roswell Crash Site
New Mexico
Out here in the high ranch country of Lincoln County, closer to the little town of Corona than to Roswell itself, sits the most famous patch of ground in the history of flying saucers. In the summer of nineteen forty-seven, a rancher named Mac Brazel found a wide scatter of strange wreckage on the ranch he managed, tinfoil, rubber, tape, and thin wooden beams flung across several acres. He reported it, and on July eighth the Roswell Army Air Field announced to the press that it had recovered a flying disc.
The very next day the Army took it back, saying the debris was only a weather balloon. Decades later the government explained it as a secret high-altitude project called Mogul, built to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. But the retraction came too late.
The legend of Roswell was already loose in the world.
