Grainy B&W image of supposed UFO, Passoria, Ne...

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One of the most endur­ing polit­i­cal con­spir­acy the­o­ries is the belief that an alien space­craft crashed at Roswell, NM in 1947, and the episode was kept secret by the US gov­ern­ment which has used tech­nol­ogy from the wreck­age of the craft to reverse-​​engineer advanced stealth air­craft. There are many rea­sons to be skep­ti­cal of this story…but early news­pa­per reports did carry offi­cial mil­i­tary releases about “UFOs” and “fly­ing disks” which were hastily retracted within days and replaced with innocu­ous reports of “weather bal­loons.” (The weather bal­loon sto­ries later turned out to be false.)

I’m not anx­ious to revisit the con­tro­versy over Area 51, though you are free to do so in com­ments if you find the topic inter­est­ing. What really inter­ests me is the idea of how impos­si­ble it would be to report an actual UFO story even if one were a reli­able eye­wit­ness. A law of jour­nal­ism (and human behav­ior) seems to be that when your story is suf­fi­ciently fab­u­lous, the more proof you pro­vide, the less likely you are to be believed.

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