![]() The rancher informed the authorities, and the military duly collected the debris. These were part of a secret project to monitor Russian nuclear tests from high altitude. In 1947, a rancher in Roswell, New Mexico, found some strange debris, the remains of a cluster of metallic balloons. saucer,' a covet story for a classified balloon project. The Roswell Daily Record headlined the local base commander's claim that debris was a 'flying. Sometimes though, military deception went the other way, deliberately promoting belief in aliens. Natural phenomena, misidentification and miscommunication may have been the real cause, but in the absence of proper investigation and explanation, many started to suspect the military were covering up what they knew about UFOs. This failed to convince many and looked like a whitewash. The Air Force held a press conference, glibly asserting that temperature inversions had confused radar and there was nothing to see here. ![]() In 1952 a series of sightings and radar tracks of unidentified objects over Washington, D.C., caused near-panic in the media with headlines blaring “Saucers Swarm Over DC”. The Air Force also went overboard trying to explain away anomalous events. “Remember reports of unusual activity in the skies in the '50s? That was us,” the CIA tweeted in 2014. Some 50% of U.S.UFO reports at the time might have been caused by sightings of these two aircraft. A similar situation arose with the SR-71 Blackbird, which, at Mach 3, was far too fast and too high to be any known aircraft and was assumed to be Something Else. These aircraft had a silver finish, and at 60,000 feet – far above other aircraft of the time – the U-2 looked like a bright metallic blob and was repeatedly reported as a flying saucer. For example, the forerunners of the U-2 high-altitude spy plane, developed for the CIA by the Air Force, caused similar confusion when they flew from Groom Lake (the celebrated Area 51) in the mid-1950s.
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