"The Roswell Incident" by Charles Berlitz & William Moore (1980)

The Facts:

On June 14, 1947 something exploded in the air above the remote farm in Roswell, New Mexico. The government sent army to collect the debris and whatever was left from explosion, while curious locals and visitors were strongly discouraged from approaching the scene. Some guessing was involved but immediately refuted by US government who claimed this was just a weather balloon that crashed. End of the story.

The Legend:

Not satisfied with official press release, in the subsequent decades lots of people came with their own theories what actually happened and with time these theories just grew bigger and bigger until at certain point it seems everybody simply knew this was an UFO crash, with dead bodies on board and government simply decided to do research in secret, in order to create their own space ships & weapons & whatnot. 

"The Roswell Incident" was the first of many books published on the subject and its interesting not because of the subject - which is fascinating but not very convincing - as because of the description how something that has simple explanation can grow into elaborate myth and given enough time, start having its own life. (Come to think of it, something similar to religious cults) Since government quickly hushed the whole affair, people became suspicious and because they were told to keep silent about the subject (for patriotic purposes), they created their own explanations that just got wilder and wilder with time. Its never a concrete witness but a hearsay, rumours and distorted memories of the relatives who can't remember exactly what was whispered in private. This book starts very good but in just a few chapters I got tired of uncredited witnesses, anonymous testimonies and all these stories coming from the people who passed away long time ago. You can actually follow how the story got wilder and wilder with time. It starts with mysterious pieces of material ("not from our planet") and than it ends with dead Aliens kept in formaldehyde, somewhere in secret army hangars. Decades later the truth finally came out - government had to keep it quiet because it was a nuclear test surveillance balloon and naturally this could not be published in the press - hence sharp reprimands from the officials and that is why everybody was told to keep quiet and just forget about it. It could have been better if this was immediately printed and to hell with it, because in the meantime half of the planet became convinced that we keep dead aliens in formaldehyde and nobody can convince them otherwise now, its absolutely fascinating how some ideas become public knowledge and tons of people will have their opinions about them, although the truth is very simple.