Have UFOs Crashed On Earth?

Ever since the term 'flying saucer' floated into the public consciousness in 1947, rumours started to fly faster than the saucers themselves. People claimed these unidentified flying objects were not just visiting our planet but had also had the occasional mishap, resulting in a crash.

It all began in July 1947 in a small but now infamous place called Roswell, New Mexico. A rancher discovered some peculiar debris on his property, and the US military swooped in like they'd found a winning lottery ticket. They claimed it was a weather balloon, but the public wasn't buying it. With so many sightings at that time, it almost seemed logical that one UFO would eventually meet an untimely end, either due to an accident, a breakdown, or a welcoming shot from Earth's military forces.

In 1950, Frank Scully published a book titled 'Behind The Flying Saucers' that sold over 60,000 copies. Scully claimed he'd chatted with a Texas oilman named Silas Newton, who led him to his colleague 'Dr Gee.' According to Newton, 'Dr Gee' was privy to insider information about the US military having three UFOs and 16 extraterrestrial beings—each about a metre tall—in custody.

However, two years later, journalist J.P. Kahn exposed Scully's story, saying it lacked credible evidence. While Kahn's own article was a bit of a dodgy mess itself, it did its job: Scully's sources, Newton and 'Dr Gee,' were branded as frauds.

April 1976 saw another player enter the field. A journal called 'Official UFO' published an article titled 'What about crashed UFOs?' by Raymond Fowler. This article included a sworn statement from a technician who claimed to have personally inspected a crashed UFO at Kingman, Arizona, on 21 May 1953. This technician, known as Fritz Werner, described being taken to the crash site in a blacked-out bus and instructed to investigate based on his expertise. The object he described was about 10 metres in diameter and seemed to have suffered no external damage. And there was a twist: a humanoid body on a table nearby, about 1.3 metres in height.

Perhaps supporting Werner's claims was a metallurgist named Daly, who worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, spoke of being blindfolded and led to a crash site where he examined a metallic craft. He couldn't find any marks to indicate an Earthly origin. Interestingly, a woman tasked with cataloguing UFO material at the same Air Force base reported seeing bodies of two humanoids, about 1.5 metres tall, with notably large heads.

While Daly's and Werner's accounts have some inconsistencies, it’s intriguing to consider that these could be two sides of the same coin—or saucer, if you will.

In March 1964, reports poured in of a UFO crash on Mount Chitpec in Mexico. This wasn't just any crash—the UFO was said to emanate bright blue and orange lights. While authorities planned to transport the object to the nearest town, San Cristobal de las Casas, the local tribe stood firm. They considered the UFO a divine gift and refused its removal.

Fast forward to May 1978 in Tarija, Bolivia. Witnesses saw not one, but two glowing objects cross the afternoon sky. The first object was a metallic cylinder around 7-8 metres long. Seconds later, an explosion and subsequent 'earthquake' were registered on seismic equipment. Witnesses claimed the smaller object flew away after the larger one crashed. The object's slow speed made meteor theories a hard sell, and investigations ruled out a re-entering satellite. Despite this, a security blackout was imposed, leaving more questions than answers.

More recently in 2017, details surfaced in The New York Times about a $22 million US military project designed to study UFOs. Not only did the project exist, but it also included secret Las Vegas facilities that stored 'metal alloys recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.' The project was part of the US Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and had links to Robert Bigelow, a NASA contractor and friend of Reid.

The idea of 'alien alloys' stored in a secret Las Vegas facility seems too good to pass up. However, from a skeptical standpoint, this idea loses some of its lustre. The alloys might not be otherworldly at all; they could be highly advanced Earth-made materials, part of an experimental aerospace tech project. We simply don't have peer-reviewed studies to back any of these claims, leaving us again in a limbo between earthly logic and out-of-this-world possibilities.

So, have UFOs crashed on Earth? While some believe wholeheartedly, others still wait for that irrefutable piece of evidence. Until then, like a UFO in the night sky, the truth remains elusive but endlessly fascinating.