

The September 19, 1976, incident in Tehran, Iran, started much like many others, with phone calls from concerned citizens reporting a bright light in the sky.Īn F-4 fighter jet was sent out to investigate, but as it neared the object, its instruments blacked out, forcing the pilot to return to base. Iran F-4 fighter jets, similar to the ones that allegedly encountered a UFO. The town is home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, a spaceship-shaped McDonald’s and an annual UFO festival, held each summer.

The Air Force provided plenty of proof in a 231-page report released in 1997 called “ Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash.” Though the mystery has been thoroughly debunked, interest in the case has only grown, and Roswell’s tourism is heavily based around its famous so-called UFO sighting. The crashed weather balloon was, in fact, part of a top-secret military endeavor called Project Mogul, which launched high-altitude balloons carrying equipment used to detect Soviet nuclear tests. (Santilli would admit in 2006 that it was a staged film, but he maintained that it was based on actual footage.)Īs it turns out, the government was indeed covering something up-but it wasn’t aliens. News headlines claimed that a “flying saucer” crashed in Roswell, but military officials said it was only a downed weather balloon.Įver since, conspiracy theorists have been hard at work trying to prove the wreckage was extraterrestrial, with one man, Ray Santilli, going so far as to release a video in 1995 of an alien "dissection" purported to have taken place after the incident. After Brazel reported the wreckage, soldiers from nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base came to retrieve the materials. In the summer of 1947, rancher William “Mac” Brazel discovered mysterious debris in one of his New Mexico pastures, including metallic rods, chunks of plastic and unusual, papery scraps. It’s the mother of all UFO sightings, but no object was actually observed flying in the Roswell incident. Jesse Marcel, head intelligence officer, who initially investigated and recovered some of the debris from the Roswell UFO site pictured in a 1947 newspaper reporting the incident at Roswell. But UFO mania had set in, and just a few weeks later, the infamous Roswell sighting would perpetuate the obsession. It simply claimed Arnold had seen a mirage or was hallucinating. Soon, other reports of a group of nine UFOs cropped up across the region, including sightings by a prospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial flight in Idaho. The government never offered a credible explanation for the sightings. When Arnold described the crafts' motion as similar to “a saucer if you skip it across water,” the media coined the now-ubiquitous phrase “flying saucer.” He first believed the objects to be some sort of new military aircraft-this was, after all, just two years after WWII and the first year of the Cold War-but the military confirmed there were no tests being conducted near Mount Rainier that day. While flying his small aircraft near Washington’s Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold claimed to have seen nine blue, glowing objects flying fast-at an estimated 1,700 m.p.h.-in a “V” formation. The origin of today’s fascination can be traced back to civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold. Stevens look at a photo of an unidentified flying object which they sighted while en route to Seattle, Washington, 1947. He also underscored the Regulation’s role in halting biodiversity loss in the EU by 2020.Pilots E.J. He explained that the Regulation is carefully targeted to focus on “the most serious threats from invasive species,” a problem that costs the EU €12 billion annually in fish stock losses, damage to protected species, infrastructure and river navigability, and health care and animal care costs.

“This new Regulation fills a long-recognized gap in EU biodiversity protection,” said European Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik. The EU will develop a list of species for listing within the IAS system, including information on species’ socio-economic benefits and commercial sector concern. IAS can cause adverse impacts on the economy, environment and human health, according to the EU. The Regulation enables the EU to develop and implement a system to prevent the introduction and spread of IAS, with a focus on the species that cause the most damage. 29 September 2014: The European Union (EU) adopted legislation to address invasive alien species (IAS), in line with its EU 2020 biodiversity targets and its commitments under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
