See, got there in the end. Despite having inspired any number of conspiracy theories, themed Arizona diners and a forgettable teenage soap opera that also had aliens, the Roswell UFO incident where a flying saucer supposedly was captured by the American Air Force in the middle of the small desert town is nothing of the sort. It's still a pretty cool story without the aliens! Weirdly this is one of those that got debunked almost immediately, but has grown in popularity amongst UFOlogists in the years since. Initial reports claimed that the strange, foil-covered ship that crash-landed in Roswell might have been an alien craft, but they were probably just getting carried away with themselves. It was 1947, there probably wasn't a lot on telly back then. As it happens the crashed Project Mogul balloon was a top secret Air Force project that involved microphones flown at high altitudes to detect sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. Which is why the government were so coy about revealing the true nature of the Roswell crash.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
