Apart from the Roswell crash, June and July in 1947 saw a significant wave of UFOs in the United States [LDLN Nº 325 p. 7]. Now, the reader will remember that the UFO phenomenon was only "officially" born 8 days previously, following Kenneth Arnold’s sighting on the 24^th June 1947. This fact leads us think that this all-too-famous sighting, like the Roswell affair, was an integral part of the manipulation which had begun from this period with a view to consolidating among the population a belief in extraterrestrials, whom science-fiction had already popularised. One might think it strange that a flying saucer, technologically capable of travelling through interstellar space, should have crashed so quickly in the United States, when the American public had only just become aware of the existence of extraterrestrial visitors.

On the morning of this same 8^th July 1947 the American military had indeed publicly announced that it had just captured a flying saucer, before retracting the statement the very same day, when the news had already gone all round the planet. This announcement was neither fortuitous, nor was it a mistake, since the order had come from very high up and its repercussions were worldwide immediately. By quickly retracting the statement in favour of the absurd explanation of the recovery of a weather balloon, the American military inaugurated the principle of debunking through intentional trivialisation: one part of the population turned away in disgust at having been "had" by a mere weather balloon and for having believed for a moment in extraterrestrials, swearing they would never again be taken in; another part of the population began wondering: "suppose it were true and that the military wanted to hide the existence of extraterrestrials from us?". The truth about the manipulation itself remained unsuspected.