Today in 1977, Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope picked up an anomalous signal originating from the constellation of Sagittarius. 72 seconds of the signal was received, but no other attempts to find it again have been successful. Despite numerous hypotheses about its origin, none have been able to fully explain the signal. It is by and far the most compelling radio evidence of possible extraterrestrial life ever discovered.
Today in 1947, the U.S. Air Force released a press conference confirming the crashing of a "flying disc" near Roswell Army Air Field in Roswell, NM. The object in question was actually a balloon from a top-secret Air Force operation called Project Mogul, in which microphones were flown in high-altitude balloons in an attempt to detect Soviet Union nuclear weapon testing. The initial story given by the air force was that it was simply a crashed weather balloon. Conspiracy theories at the time died down almost instantly, and it wasn't until the late '70s that interest piqued again. By the 90's, the names Roswell and…