Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 26, 2025
The Roswell incident is a conspiracy theory which alleges that the 1947 United States Army Air Forces balloon debris recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, was part of a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. The debris was from the top secret Project Mogul, which used high-altitude balloons to detect nuclear tests. Roswell Army Air Field personnel, unaware of Mogul, gathered the material and announced the recovery of a "flying disc"; the statement was retracted within a day. To obscure the source of the debris, the army reported that it was a conventional weather balloon. In 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel revealed that the weather balloon had been a cover story and speculated that the debris was extraterrestrial. This became the basis for long-lasting and increasingly complex and contradictory UFO conspiracy theories, none of which have any factual basis. The conspiracy narrative has become a common trope in fiction. The town of Roswell promotes itself as a UFO tourism destination. (Full article...)