The theatrical release of Ant and Dec's Alien Autopsy combined with the latest revelations from Ray Santilli has put the Roswell crash back in the headlines once again. Roswell has spawned a plethora of books, websites and TV documentaries, and anyone who is anyone in Ufology is expected to have an opinion about it.

Yet it wasn't always so. Thirty years ago, you would scarcely have found even a passing mention of Roswell in the contemporary UFO literature. It was not until the publication of Berlitz and Moore's bestseller The Roswell Incident in 1980 that the case became Ufology's most famous cause celebre.

How could this be? How could the publicly announced retrieval of a 'flying disc' by the military be judged unworthy of further comment for three decades? And why did everyone at the time swallow the 'weather balloon' explanation quite so readily?

The answer only becomes apparent when we place the Roswell crash back into context. For throughout July 1947 flying saucers were crashing so frequently that both the press and the authorities found themselves hard pressed to keep up with them. Under these circumstances, the Roswell incident was just one more false alarm to be discounted along with the rest.

It all began with Kenneth Arnold. On the afternoon of June 24, 1947, Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains looking for a downed plane when he spotted a chain of nine "peculiar looking aircraft" near Mt Rainier.

He wasn't too sure how far away they were, how large they were, or how fast they were travelling, but he guessed they must be "some new type of jet" and later told reporters that they flew erratically "like a saucer if you skip it across the water". One of the pressmen got hold of the wrong end of the stick and quoted Arnold as saying "they were shaped like saucers," and thus the term "flying saucer" was born.

When the air-force denied responsibility for the saucers, suspicion arose that they might originate from some unfriendly foreign power - probably Russia but maybe even Japan. The only way to solve the mystery, surmised the press, was to wait until one of the things crashed or was shot down. (Some impatient newspapers even offered handsome rewards to anyone who could bring them a saucer - dead or alive, so to speak.)

They didn't have long to wait. On July 5, the Circleville Herald announced: "One of the flying discs which have been puzzling aviators all over the United States was believed Saturday to have been found on a Pickaway county farm".

The report revealed that the "star-shaped" object was attached to a small balloon and was made from "silver foil stretched over a wooden frame". The next day, the paper added that a second disc had been found and put on public display, although it was now "generally believed to have been sent aloft in connection with weather observations ".

An editorial in the July 9 edition treated the Roswell crash in much the same terms. "Excitement buzzed throughout the United States early Tuesday night when an alleged 'flying disc' was reported found on a ranch in eastern New Mexico," it announced. "Shortly afterward, however, an Army Air Corps announcement said the find was a contraption whose description tallied closely with the gadgets discovered in Pickaway county and placed on exhibition in the office of The Circleville Herald."

That same week, the Reverend Joseph Brasky of Grafton, Wisconsin heard "a swishing and whirring noise" followed by a "mild explosion" as a small metallic disc crashed into his back yard. The priest notified both the press and the FBI of his discovery before he noticed that the disc bore the legend "High carbon, 100 per cent steel" and was actually a circular saw blade.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, an electrician was charging people 50 cents a time to see a plywood flying saucer that he claimed had crashed near Black River Falls. "It was disc-shaped with a motor, propeller and various electronic components; none of which did anything," sneered the press. The police stepped in and confiscated the object, which they declared to be "patently a hoax".

On the same day Roswell made the headlines, another 'flying disc' was recovered by railway workers at Ludlow. The local police chief came down to inspect it and deduced that it was "an airplane wing tip removed from a freight car and left in the yards as a practical joke". (The fact that the words "half a flying saucer" were scribbled on the object in chalk rather gave the game away.)

In North Hollywood, engineer Russell Long called out the fire brigade after a "saucer-shaped mechanical contraption, resembling a chicken-brooder top with a few gadgets added" crash-landed in his garden. The fire brigade in turn summoned Army officers from Fort MacArthur, who took the disc away with them saying that it "looked like a gag" but they were nevertheless "holding the thing pending instructions from 6th army headquarters".

In a bizarre publicity stunt, the Canadian newspaper The Star sent a pair of planes to drop 2000 paper pie plates over Windsor, Ontario, because they "wanted to know Windsor’s reaction to an invasion of flying saucers".

A rather more sophisticated hoax was perpetuated by a quartet of teenage boys in Twin Falls, Idaho, who planted a three-foot-wide saucer with a plexiglass dome in a neighbour's backyard on July 11.

"The disc looked real enough that an FBI agent took one look, notified his district office in Butte, Mont, and three army officers came post haste from Fort Douglas, Utah, in a military plane furnished by the state national guard," reported the Idaho Daily Tribune.

"The army men refused to divulge their names to newsmen and kept distant from any persistent interviewers. While speculation was highest, the army group slipped away from police headquarters with the saucer and whisked back to Salt Lake City."

After the army's departure, the young hoaxers finally came forward and admitted they had fabricated the disc from a pair of cymbals and some silver paint!

A similar prank was played in Woodworth, North Dakota, by a group of jokers who built a flying saucer out of "a wash tub, a lamp shade, some tubes and some wiring" and then "planted it on Bert Miller's lawn". The local paper claimed that "hundreds of visitors" flocked to see the saucer, adding that "the army was reported to have called Woodworth a few moments after the pranksters admitted the hoax".

Elsewhere, weather balloons were still the cause of much unnecessary excitement. In Colorado, the Boulder Daily Camera ruefully reported that "It looked for a while as though the mystery of the flying discs was going to be solved in Boulder County Thursday afternoon, but the soaring objects which came to earth on a farm north-east of here proved to be balloons released by the University of Denver for scientific research".

Similarly, the Yonkers Herald Statesman announced that "Reports of 'flying discs' or 'saucers' over Westchester were explained by the finding of a burst weather balloon with a tinfoil radar target attached in Greenburgh yesterday."

A more dramatic report came from Seattle, where a woman summoned the police to deal with a flying saucer that had smashed into her roof and burst into flames. The craft (which had the letters 'USSR' and a hammer and sickle painted on it) was examined by both the FBI and navy bomb experts and declared to be "undoubtedly the work of practical jokers". Meanwhile, army officers at Port Newark were busy dismantling a saucer that had nearly flattened a local housewife when it crashed into her garden. The "ingenious contrivance" turned out to be made from "two tin pie plates soldered together with a bulb similar to a radio tube attached to the inside".

Indeed, hoaxing had become so endemic that when Mr Thaddeus Elder of Laurel, Maryland, told the FBI that he had found "a buzzing thing 3 feet across made of a circular piece of metal and a garbage can lid," they told him he could keep it. The public-spirited Mr Elder handed the ridiculous contraption over to the police instead - who no doubt filed it in the nearest dustbin.

So, where does all this leave the Roswell crash itself? The fact that citizens across America spent July 1947 panicking over weather balloons and crude hoaxes hardly proves that an alien spacecraft didn't crash at Roswell. But in a week when the army was called out to investigate schoolboy pranks and when priests reported circular saws to the FBI, the events over at Mac Brazel's ranch hardly seem exceptional. Indeed, they seem positively routine.

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All press reports archived at UFO Research Cincinatti