Read through the history of the Roswell incident, and it's a perfect case study of how people involved in routine shyt can blow it way out of proportion to the point that even their own memories are compromised.
en.wikipedia.org
Step 1: Air Force's top secret Project Mogul launches high-altitude balloons in an attempt to detect Soviet nuclear tests. On June 4, 1947, the Project Mogul balloon
NYU Flight 4 crashes in the desert near Roswell. It's crash location is unknown to the authorities and it is not recovered.
Step 2: Starting on June 24, a giant flying saucer craze sweeps across America after pilot Kenneth Arnold claims to see 9 flying saucers flying in tandem [Arnold would later go on to become a successful Republican politician and reported seven additional UFO sightings in his life.] For two weeks, hundreds of people all across America reported copycat UFO sightings.
Step 3: Sometime in June, the rancher Mac Brazel discovered the NYU Flight 4 crash debris on his ranch, which consisted primarily of tinfoil, rubber, and thin wooden beams. He thought little of it and just kicked it under some bushes. Being on an isolated ranch without a radio, he was unaware of the ongoing UFO craze.
Step 4: On July 5th, Brazel goes into town and learns of the flying saucer craze. He thinks back to the strange foil he found on his ranch weeks earlier and goes to get some to bring back to tell the sheriff and the local air force base (not the base that was running the top secret Project Mogul). The base's public relations officer announces that someone has found debris from a UFO.
Step 5: A major from the air force collects some of the debris with the rancher, and together they go to Fort Worth Army Air Field. General Roger Ramsey there immediately identifies it as belonging to some sort of weather balloon. All news stories and pictures of the debris from the time fit this description, and the story is dropped.
Step 5: Over thirty years after the event, in 1978, the air force officer who originally accompanied the rancher started saying that the weather balloon explanation was "just a cover story", and he believed the debris was actually extraterrestrial in origin. This eventually leads to an Air Force investigation which determines that the debris was most likely from a Project Mogul balloon, and had been labeled as a weather balloon in order to hide the existence of a program monitoring Soviet nuclear tests.
"Actually, this material may have looked like tinfoil and balsa wood, but the resemblance ended there ... They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less-interesting metallic debris ... The stuff in that one photo was pieces of the actual stuff we found. It was not a staged photo."
Note - at no time did this officer ever state that he saw alien bodies and he consistently denied there were alien bodies present, even as he pushed the claims that the debris was extraterrestrial. He also stated consistently that the pictures of him with the debris were accurate photos of the debris he found, including in the book he wrote on the incident, until the pictures were demonstrated to perfectly match Project Mogul balloon debris, at which point he began claiming the photos were staged. This fits a pattern of fabrication in the officer's life, such as claiming to be a pilot (he was not) and claiming to have received five air force medals for shooting down enemy planes (he did not).
Step 6: Suddenly, the officer's claims release a torrent of Roswell witness claims in the 1980s-2000s, forty to fifty years after the actual events. Most of the witnesses contradict both the "official" version as well as the original discovering officer's new version of events. At least 11 different crash sites are claimed for the original crash, some hundreds of miles apart. Alien bodies are introduced for the first time, anywhere from two to eight depending on the story, sometimes dead and sometimes alive. Different retellings appear to mimic various true and fictional events that occurred in the intervening time period, including:
1948-1950: Four air force crashes occurred in the desert during this time, each requiring the recovery of dead or injured airmen
1949: a hoax in Aztec, New Mexico, where conmen tricked a newspaper into reporting a story about the recovery of alien bodies from a flying saucer crash
1950s: the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies from the desert during tests of Operation High Dive
1963: the first report of "grays" from the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story, copying a recent Outer Limits episode
With the massive publicity among Roswell, and most of the new "witnesses" being in their 70s to 90s and speaking of events 40-50 years in the past, events were confused and false memories were created. There can't be 11 completely different crash sites. There can't be 6 completely different stories of how the crash site was discovered. There can't be zero, two, or eight bodies found dead or alive depending. It makes no sense that for over 30 years, there was just one rancher and one air force officer who found the debris, which is clearly mundane in the photographs, and never reported any bodies, and then 40 years later all of the sudden there are dozens of people claiming to have been involved somehow with wildly different stories than what started the hysteria.
Read the article. Look into the evidence. Look at how easy stories take on a life of their own, hysteria spreads, people get confused and create false memories, and ridiculous narratives emerge. Considering all the contradictions, you
know that most of the stories have to be fake. So can you see how it happens?
en.wikipedia.org
For more great examples of how mass hysteria leads to easily debunked alien sightings from well-meaning people:
This popular tale claims 62 African schoolchildren were contacted by an extraterrestrial.
skeptoid.com
Twenty years ago this month—this week, in fact—the capital of India was gripped in a panic. Early reports claimed that some mysterious monkey-like creature ...
skepticalinquirer.org
en.wikipedia.org
