Roswell UFO incident celebrated in Google doodle

A screengrab from an autopsy video examining the supposed body of an alien found at Roswell in 1947. Picture: Contributed

The black and white doodle, which is also an interactive game, is a reference to the theory that a spaceship landed in the New Mexico town.

US authorities have always insisted that the alleged UFO incident in 1947 was a surveillance balloon that had crashed to the ground.

But conspiracy theorists have maintained that the government was concealing the recovery of an alien aircraft, speculation that was fuelled by a local US army base press release revealing that a “flying disk” had been taken from the crash site.

A report designed to put Roswell theories to bed once and for all, entitled Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash, was published in 1997, but it appears to have done little to satisfy many who remain convinced that the incident amounted to a cover-up.

A video of an autopsy of what appeared to be an alien body recovered from Roswell surfaced in the 1990s, but it was later found to be a staged reconstruction of what Ray Santilli, a London-based entrepreneur, claimed was a re-enactment of a older video he had witnessed.

The Google doodle, once completed by assembling the alien protagonist’s broken spaceship, makes way for the site’s top search results for “Roswell UFO incident”.