Of all of the conspiracy theories that are floating around out there, perhaps none of them have the staying power or the potential impact to change the way every person on earth perceives reality like UFO's. For those that don't know, UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Objects, and it is a title that has been given to just about anything seen floating, flying, hovering or soaring through the air that we can't readily identify as a bird or a plane (or Superman, for that matter.)



All official government agencies have sworn for decades that UFO's are nothing but a product of an overactive imagination, but for millions of people who have seen unexplained things with their own eyes, UFOs are incredibly real and the fact that no one in government will comment on them officially, is frustrating to say the least.

The most famous, or infamous, UFO sighting of all time within the United States was the incident at Roswell, New Mexico. A group of average citizens claim that they witnessed a downed UFO 'flying saucer' in the middle of a farmer's field, only to have the local military base which cleaned up the crash site tell them that what they saw was simply a downed weather balloon. What made the Roswell incident so remarkable was the sheer number of regular people who saw the crash site before it could be removed.

It is easy to discount a conspiracy theory when you only have one or two witnesses, but when you have 50, the story tends to have much more in the way of staying power. The Roswell Incident has gone on to be one of the most popular conspiracy theories in history and has helped to spawn countless television shows and movies. Today, the city of Roswell makes its money almost solely off of tourism that has been generated by the crash decades ago.

For many skeptics, however, the incredible rise in flying saucer sightings can be tied to Cold War tensions and the launch of the first ever spacecraft, Sputnik. As people grew more and more paranoid about an attack from the sky from our Russian adversaries, it makes perfect sense that people would attach meaning to objects that they couldn't recognize.

Combine the rising paranoia with the onset of the jet engine age and the fact that the military was testing and experimenting with many, many new technologies at the time in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses, and the UFO conspiracy theory stops making a lot of sense.

But for those that still believe, and for those that claim to have been abducted and brought aboard UFO's, nothing will ever break the belief that there are strange craft circling our skies right at this very minute.