Keay Davidson

About the author: Keay Davidson is a science reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the author of Wrinkles in Time (with George Smoot) and Twister.

The famous extraterrestrial spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and the alien corpses recovered and hidden by the U.S. government are fables with no basis in fact. The theories spawned by the Roswell incident constitute an apt example of the mass hysteria movements that periodically occur in American history. The entertainment industry has capitalized on the Roswell myth, marking it indelibly on the American consciousness. Recent research has shown that the wreckage that was recovered in Roswell in 1947 was from a secret military project (Project Mogul) in which a large military balloon was launched to detect Soviet atomic...