In 1995, Fox Television captivated millions with a medical autopsy of a space alien. The 17-minute black and white clip purported to show military doctors examining a bloated, humanoid-looking extraterrestrial that had died in a flying saucer crash.
The broadcast generated so much hoopla that Fox aired it two more times that year, tacking on “added footage” of the UFO wreckage. Even then, the hoax—recycling the Roswell myth, which holds that the U.S. government in 1947 recovered an alien craft from the New Mexico desert—was old hat.
The latest version of this fable is the widely circulated story of—you guessed it—crashed UFOs that the U.S. government has been hiding for many decades. In June, a recently retired intelligence community “whistleblower” made this claim, like others before him in years past. That the latest “bombshell” landed without any evidence or corroboration has not dampened our feverish enthusiasm. “Are we finally ready to admit UFOs are aliens?” asks the Daily Beast in its headline.
Americans have a bottomless appetite for this stuff. The initial story of crashed aliens was the Roswell incident, which stemmed from an actual cold war event; a balloon from a then-secret U.S. military project had fallen near Roswell, N.M., just as the flying saucer phenomenon was taking root. Ever since, the crashed saucer myth and UFOs in general have steadily profited news and entertainment outlets, and they have sated a deep human need for mystery.
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