Urban Legends
Vasiliymeshko · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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Roswell

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On 8 July 1947 the army airfield at Roswell issued a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc". Hours later the statement was withdrawn and the debris called a weather balloon. It would have been forgotten if participants had not started telling it differently in the late 1970s; by the 1990s Roswell was shorthand for cover-up. In 1994 the Air Force admitted the balloon was not meteorological but part of Project Mogul, listening for Soviet nuclear tests — a truth forty-seven years late, which by then convinced nobody.

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Fort Knox and the Death of Captain Mantell

On 7 January 1948 a large bright object was reported over Kentucky and a flight of fighters was scrambled. Captain Thomas Mantell climbed after it, radioed that he could see something "metallic and of tremendous size", and kept climbing without an oxygen mask. His aircraft came down south of Franklin; Mantell was killed. The military first said Venus. It was later established that the object was a classified high-altitude Skyhook balloon the pilots had no way of knowing about: from the ground such a balloon looks exactly as Mantell described it. It is the first death connected with the pursuit of an unidentified object, and it set the tone of the subject for years.

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