On this day in 1997, U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report
dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell,
New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.

Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to flourish
in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the dawn of the
atomic age caused many Americans to turn their attention to the skies.

The town of Roswell, located near the Pecos River in southeastern New
Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of
early July 1947, when ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny
material scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to
the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base.

On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered the wreckage
of a “flying disk.” A local newspaper put the story on its front page,
launching Roswell into the spotlight of the public’s UFO fascination. 

(Fox News) – An extremely rare 1776 printing of the Declaration of
Independence has gone on public display for the first time in over
a century.

The printing is on display at the Museum of the American Revolution
in Philadelphia through the end of 2019. This is also the first time that
the print has been displayed in a museum.

Printed by newspaper publisher and printer John Holt in New York in
1776, the artifact is addressed to Col. David Mulford, a Revolutionary
War colonel who died of smallpox in 1778. The print stayed in the
possession of Mulford’s family until 2017, when it was sold to Holly
Metcalf Kinyon, herself a descendant of Declaration signer John
Witherspoon.

CARLATA BRADLEY

The Soviet Union began the Berlin Blockade on this day in 1948. It
was one of the first major international crises of the Cold  War. The
Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies’ railway, road, and canal
access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. (Wikipedia)