Chapter 1: The saucer summer

Chapter 1 begins on the night of 24–25 February 1942, when an air-raid alert over Los Angeles ended with more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells fired and no aircraft brought down; the Navy Secretary called it war nerves, later accounts named a weather balloon, and the famous newspaper photo of the searchlights turned out to be retouched. On 24 June 1947 pilot Kenneth Arnold, searching near Mount Rainier for a crashed transport plane, reported nine objects flying in a chain at an estimated 1,200 miles an hour or more; the phrase flying saucer most likely came from the headlines that followed. Two weeks later the air base at Roswell, New Mexico, announced it had recovered a flying disc and corrected itself within a day: a weather balloon. A 1994 Air Force report traced the debris to Project Mogul, secret balloons built to detect Soviet nuclear tests, and called the weather balloon a cover story. A 1997 report said the alien bodies of later accounts were test dummies from balloon drops that only began in the 1950s.