re: #77 Hecuba’s daughter

Didn’t the UFO craze here get a real boost when in 1947 the Roswell Army Air Field collected wreckage from a ranch and issued a press release claiming that it had retrieved a “flying disc”? It doesn’t matter that subsequent statements retracted that claim. The original report has remained as a permanent reminder that once out there, information, no matter how erroneous, takes on a life of its own

Interesting that the Roswell incident occurred just 2 weeks after the very first “flying saucer” sighting, by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. Arnold’s story that he had seen “boomerang shaped” craft flying “like saucers skipping across a pond” had become a media sensation.
This could explain why the Roswell PR officer, desperate for a cover story for the crash of a top secret spy balloon, had seized on the “flying saucer” craze as a solution. This seems reckless and stupid today but the UFO culture and its dominating position in conspiracy culture did not exist at the time, while flying saucers were on everybody’s lips. It is also interesting that Arnold never described the craft he saw as saucer shaped, but the term “flying saucer” was construed, or misconstrued that way, and future sightings, lo and behold, were usually described as saucer shaped. Indeed, the term had already evolved to “flying disc” by the time of the Roswell incident.
The flying saucer angle of the Roswell story was forgotten until the 1970s when it re-surfaced and came to the attention of professional UFO conspiracists. The involvement of the spy balloon, Project Mogul, remained classified for many years, helping the alien claim to flourish.