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JFK assassination to moonwalk: 6 American conspiracy theories

American conspiracy theories date back to the days before the Declaration of Independence. Here are six – both old and new, well-known and obscure – that are percolating in the American zeitgeist now.

3. Roswell UFO

Susan Sterner/AP/File
A bicycle-powered flying saucer sputters by the crowd gathered on Main Street in Roswell, N.M., in this July 5, 1997, file photo.

  • By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer

Roswell Army Airfield “captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell Region.”

The famous headline in the Roswell Daily Record made the New Mexico desert town synonymous with alien coverup and conspiracy – namely that the US government captured aliens who crash-landed on July 8, 1947, and then lied about it.

The incident took on new life in 1978 after Army Maj. Jesse Marcel told the world that he helped in the recovery of the spacecraft. That admission led to more testimony about other alien crashes in the American West, and allegations that the military autopsied alien bodies.

Thus “The X-Files.”

The General Accounting Office concluded in the 1990s that the fallen “spacecraft” was a high-flying spy balloon that was part of the ultra-secret Project Mogul aimed at listening to Soviet nuclear tests. The government later dismissed eyewitness accounts as faulty memories and conflated anecdotes about injured or killed service members who participated in the spy craft tests.

UFO-ologists have had one consistent retort to official explanations of what happened at Roswell: Yeah, right.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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