The storm had passed, leaving the high desert air scrubbed clean. When William “Mac” Brazel rode out to check his sheep pasture near Roswell, New Mexico, in early July 1947, he found the ground littered with something that did not belong to any aircraft he knew. The fragments were impossibly light, metallic yet flexible, and scattered in a long, ragged ellipse across the sagebrush. Brazel gathered a bundle and, days later, mentioned it to the local sheriff. That quiet act of curiosity set in motion a story that would outlive him, his town, and the certainties of an age.

Within hours, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating it had recovered a “flying disc”. The next day, the military retracted the claim, explaining the debris was a weather balloon. Decades later, the US Air Force declassified documents identifying the wreckage as part of Project Mogul, a secret Cold War effort to detect Soviet nuclear tests using high-altitude balloons. Yet the reversal had already done its work. Coming just two weeks after pilot Kenneth Arnold’s report of nine crescent-shaped objects skipping over Washington state at 1,900 km/h — a sighting that gave the world the phrase “flying saucer” — the Roswell incident became the origin myth of modern ufology.

Today, Roswell is a pilgrimage site. The town of 48,000 hosts an annual UFO festival, museums dedicated to the unexplained, and a steady stream of visitors who spend millions in the local economy. The date of Brazel’s discovery, 2 July, is marked as World UFO Day, observed with film marathons, public sky-watching gatherings, and conferences from Buenos Aires to Milan. In the United States, a 1997 CNN/Time poll found that 80 per cent of Americans believed the government was hiding knowledge of extraterrestrial life. A 2022 global survey by Glocalities and Fairleigh Dickinson University put the figure at 32 per cent worldwide; in Argentina, a separate study by UBA’s Pulsar found 51 per cent of respondents convinced there is life on other planets. The belief is not fringe. It is a quiet, persistent hum beneath the surface of public opinion.

Official language has shifted, too. The Pentagon now speaks of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), a term meant to shed the cultural baggage of “UFO” while acknowledging that some military pilots have recorded objects performing manoeuvres beyond known technology. In 2020, the Department of Defense confirmed the authenticity of several such videos. Under the Trump administration, a further 72 documents were released, detailing sightings that remain unexplained: a white-cream object resembling a “potato covered in scales” observed by five soldiers over Cheyenne Mountain in 2022; an orange sphere that appeared to generate smaller red orbs above a mountain ridge in 2023. Investigators have ruled out known aircraft and, preliminarily, foreign technology, but the files remain open.

None of the declassified material offers proof of non-human intelligence. Instead, it provides a catalogue of the uncanny: digital reconstructions of scaly ovoids, testimony of silent red lights that hover for hours, and the recurring gap between what witnesses swear they saw and what official explanations can comfortably contain. On this day, as telescopes tilt upward in back gardens and public squares, the legacy of a rancher’s find is not a solved mystery but a ritual of collective looking — a reminder that the sky still holds shapes we cannot name.