Where are all the aliens? ROSWELL AT 75

Nick Pope looks at back at the most famous UFO story of all, and why more people are reporting strange sights in the sky

- Nick Pope

This summer sees the 75th anniversary of the Roswell incident, where believers say an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in the New Mexico desert, with debris - and possibly alien bodies - being recovered by the US government, marking the beginning of a decades-long cover-up. What really happened, and why does this mystery still attract such interest and controversy, decades later?

On 24 June 1947, a pilot, Kenneth Arnold, was flying over the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in the US, helping to search for a crashed military aircraft. He saw nine crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at a height of around 3km (10,000ft) and an estimated speed of approximately 1,900km/h: seemingly impossible at the time. Arnold described the jerky movement of the objects as being, "...like a saucer would if you skipped it over water".

The mystery begins

The media got hold of the story, coined the phrase 'flying saucer' and a modern mystery was born. It wasn't the first sighting of what we now call a UFO (unidentified flying object), but it was the first to capture the public imagination, making news headlines around the world. More reports were received, suggesting these sightings were commonplace but had previously gone unreported. As this 'summer of the saucers' progressed, media coverage intensified to a point of near-hysteria, until matters came to a head and it seemed the mystery might be resolved.