Today is the World UFO day

While it's widely believed that World UFO Day is celebrated on June 24 and July 2 to mark two pivotal moments in UFO lore, Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting and the Roswell incident, this narrative oversimplifies and romanticizes both events. Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine unidentified flying objects near Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24, 1947, is often described as the beginning of the modern UFO era. However, Arnold never claimed to have seen alien spacecraft. He described the objects as moving like “a saucer if you skip it across water,” a simile that media misinterpreted as a description of the shape, thus coining the term "flying saucer." Arnold himself later speculated that what he saw could have been experimental military aircraft, not extraterrestrial in origin. The mythologizing of this event overlooks the ambiguity and caution with which Arnold initially approached his report.

Similarly, the July 2 date linked to the Roswell incident feeds into a popular but highly contested narrative. The Roswell Army Air Field did indeed issue a press release in July 1947 about recovering a “flying disc,” but this statement was quickly retracted, and the debris was identified as part of a classified military balloon project, Project Mogul, designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The alien crash interpretation only gained widespread attention decades later, fueled more by pop culture and conspiracy theorists than credible evidence. The 1990s U.S. Air Force reports further debunked the alien theory, attributing witness accounts of “alien bodies” to misidentified crash test dummies. While these dates serve as cultural touchstones for UFO enthusiasts, their connection to extraterrestrial evidence is tenuous at best, making their celebration more a reflection of societal fictitious fascination than historical fact.