This article is classified "Real"
On the night of July 2, 1947, something crashed in the desert about 75 miles outside Roswell, New Mexico. The exact identity of this object has been a subject of debate ever since. On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field base commander Col. William Blanchard released reports that the object found was a "flying disk." Four hours later, Brig. General Roger Ramey, the commander of the 8th Air Force at Fort Worth, Texas, announced that the whole "flying disk" story had been a mistaken identification of a weather balloon which the base had sent up. This remained the explanation for the next 30 years. In the late 1970s, witnesses began to come forward, claiming the first story was the truth. Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, a retired Air Force officer, claimed he had been on the recovery crew, and that the object was actually a saucer of alien origin. Others have gone on to say that bodies of the pilots were also found, bodies which were definitely not human. My grandmother, who arrived in Roswell in 1948 to join her husband, who had been stationed there before the incident, once told me she saw items the locals had recovered which were definitely not from Earth. She also said her husband had told her that bodies had been recovered. I never knew my grandfather, and thus was never able to learn more about this. My grandmother claimed that everything in the recent movie entitled "Roswell" was accurate, though, but I have as yet been unable to talk to her about what she meant (the movie is a dramatized summary of the accounts, including a story of a live alien being recovered and studied at government facilities). In September, 1994, the Air Force claimed that the crashed vehicle was a then-classified device to detect evidence of possible Soviet nuclear testing. At about the same year, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 aired a story claiming that time-traveling Ferengis were the actual culprits. This all has serious implications for the Earth-confined hitchhiker. If the craft really was alien, this shows that interplanetary travel is actually possible. More importantly, it shows that aliens visiting Earth managed to crash into it, meaning that perhaps those of us wishing to leave should be careful about checking the credentials of any aliens willing to take us, especially those who would choose Roswell, a town with absolutely no known social life, as a good tourist destination.