Hobbyists, conspiracy theorists, and a handful of earnest scientists have studied the phenomenon of Unidentified Flying Objects since the end of World War II, but it wasn’t until about 1980 that they began to fixate on a mysterious crash outside the small town of Roswell, New Mexico, back in the summer of 1947. Some say a flying saucer or two was taken down by a lightning storm; half a dozen aliens aboard were killed, leaving two little gray men alive to be secreted away for government studies. Others offer a slightly more plausible explanation: a high-tech hovering Soviet spycraft crashed while conducting Cold War military reconnaissance around White Sands Missile Range and Sandia Base.

Those who take the alien-based explanations seriously and commit themselves to studying extraterrestrial sightings call their field ufology (pronounced—yep—/yo͞oˈfäləjē/). But, as this blog proves, adding the suffix “-ology” does not render one’s area of interest a legitimate science. What really happened out near Roswell all those years ago?