With scattered debris and possibly alien bodies – being recovered by the US government, the Roswell Incident marked the beginning of a national and worldwide cover-up.

What really happened at Roswell, and why does this mystery still attract such interest and controversy, decades later?

The Roswell incident begins on 24 June 1947 when 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 9 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 movement of the objects as being, "like a saucer would if you skipped it over water. The media got hold of the story, coined the phrase flying saucer and a modern mystery was born

This 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.

On 7 July a local rancher named ‘Mac’ Brazel contacted the sheriff in Roswell to say he’d discovered strange debris spread over the ranch.

He’d found it days earlier but hadn’t thought much of it until the stories about flying saucers emerged.

Thinking there might be a connection and guessing something might have crashed during a recent storm, he alerted the authorities.

He’d brought some samples of the debris, and when the sheriff contacted the nearby Army airbase, intelligence officer Jesse Marcel went to the crash site with Brazel and recovered more debris.

Nowadays, with the 24/7 news cycle, internet, social media and an activist community of UFO researchers, such a claim – and U-turn – would no doubt cause controversy and conspiracy on a grand scale.