DOTD For Wednesday, June 24, 2026
The Truth May Be Out There, But Today's Drink Is In The Bar
Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Steep Flight Cocktail inspired by the release of the declassification report of the 1947 Roswell incident, which first happened on June 24, 1997. Not ancient history at all.
U.S. Air Force Says ‘Nothing To See Here’
On June 24, 1997, almost exactly fifty years after the original Roswell incident, U.S. Air Force officials released a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, which reportedly happened the first week of July 1947.
Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, first began to flourish in the late 1940s, after the end of World War II, 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.
That’s 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.
The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from die-hard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, when claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather balloon story as a cover-up. Believers in this theory argued that officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area 51 installation in Nevada. Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that the crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Unsurprisingly, that report didn’t satisfy those who believed aliens had really crash landed at Roswell
So on July 24, 1997, barely a week before the extravagant festivities planned for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Roswell Incident, the Air Force released yet another report on the controversial subject. Titled “The Roswell Report, Case Closed,” the document stated definitively that there was no official evidence that any kind of life form was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO sightings, and that the “bodies” recovered were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests conducted in the region. Any hopes that this would put an end to the cover-up debate were in vain however, as furious ufologists rushed to point out the report’s inconsistencies.
In the years since, thanks to conspiracy theories, the Internet, and the marketing of the town and local businesses there, Roswell New Mexico continues to thrive as a tourist destination for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual UFO Encounter Festival each July (happening this year July 2-4) and welcoming visitors year-round to its International UFO Museum and Research Center.
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
