June 24: This Day in History - UFOs, Mail Bombs and Flight 66 Crash

On this day in history, many interesting things happened in the U.S. Here are the events San Angelo LIVE! chose to highlight.

U.S. Air Force Reports on Roswell

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

Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, have fascinated the public since the 1940s. This was when the development of space travel and the dawn of the atomic age caused many to start looking and thinking deeply about the stars and beyond.

The town of Roswell, which is located close to the Pecos River in southeast New Mexico, became the haven for all UFO enthusiasts 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. It was turned over to the nearby U.S. Air Force Base, and on July 8, Air Force officials reported having recovered the wreckage of a “flying disk.”

The Air Force officials soon took back their story, and instead said that the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. The Roswell incident faded out until the 1970s, when claims surfaced that the military had used the weather balloon story as a cover-up.

People who believed in the conspiracies argued that officials had retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area 51.

“Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1000-page report stating that it was in fact a high-altitude weather balloon launched by a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests,” said History.com.

So on July 24,1997, barely a week before the extravagant 50^th anniversary celebration of the incident, the Air Force released a second report on the controversial subject. They titled the report “The Roswell Report, Case Closed.” The document stated there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form was found at the Roswell crash site.

But the UFO enthusiasts quickly went through the report and found many different inconsistencies. Thus, conspiracy theories are still alive and Roswell continues to be a tourist destination for UFO believers far and wide.

Mail Bomb Injures Yale Professor

On this day in 1993, Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter was seriously injured while opening his mail, and the padded envelope exploded in his hands. The attack came just two days after a University of California geneticist was injured by a similar bomb. This attack was the latest in a string of bombings since 1978.

Authorities believed that the string of bombings were related, and, after the attack of Gelernter, various federal departments established the UNABOM Task Force, which launched an intensive search on the “Unabomber.”

“The bombings, along with 14 others since 1978 that killed 3 people and injured 23 others, were eventually linked to Theodore John Kaczynski, a former mathematician from Chicago,” said History.com. “Kaczynski won a scholarship to study mathematics at Harvard University at age 16.”

Though he became an esteemed brilliant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he suffered from social and emotional problems, and ended his career abruptly in 1969.

Kaczynski tried to publish academic essays on radical environmentalism and militant opposition to modern technology. It was the rejection of one of his papers that might have sent him into the spiral to deliver his first bomb.

With the help of Kaczynski’s older brother David, FBI agents gathered enough evidence and arrested him in his remote cabin on April 3, 1996. Kaczynski was sentenced to four life terms in prison and he pleaded guilty in order to escape the death penalty.

Eastern Flight 66 Crashes at J.F.K

On this day in 1975, an Eastern Airline jet crashed near J.F.K International Airport in New York City, killing 115 people. The Boeing 727 was brought down by wind shear, a sudden change in wind speed or direction.

“On the afternoon of July 24, the New York area experienced severe thunderstorms with heavy winds and rain,” said History.com on the tragedy. “Thunderstorms often cause microbursts, damaging downbursts of wind that can be immensely destructive and are particularly dangerous to air travel.”

Eastern Airline Flight 66 from New Orleans was about a mile from the runway when it was lifted suddenly and violently by the wind; it was then pushed downward. The plane struck a row of lights that tore off the outer portion of the left wing, and it proceeded to crash into light poles before it broke into pieces just above the ground.

Over seven passengers and two flight attendants survived the crash, all with serious injuries. The remaining 109 passengers and six crew members lost their lives.

Wind shear still remains a threat to air travel, but advances that have been made to identify areas and times of concern have virtually eliminated deadly crashes caused by sudden winds.