LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Stories about crashed flying saucers and coverups have been around since the end of World War II. But now, these stories are being taken seriously in Washington.

When former intelligence officer David Grusch testified last July about nonhuman craft hidden away for decades inside special access programs, it caught some members of Congress and major media off guard.

However, the lore of crashed saucers and dead aliens is hardly new and the claims have leaked out many times in the past 76 years.

The grandfather of crashed saucer tales is Roswell. A story that didn’t emanate with UFO nuts, but came from the U.S. military.

In 1947, Roswell, New Mexico was home to the world’s only atomic bomber wing. That summer, a long stretch of strange debris was discovered on a ranch outside of the town.

The U.S. Army Air Force issued a news release that made headlines — the army had recovered a crashed disc. The Army retracted its claim 24 hours later and said it was merely a weather balloon.

“The release said we have recovered a crashed disc” Walter Haut, the retired Army officer who wrote both releases, said during 8 News Now’s first visit to Roswell in 1989.

Haut stuck to the official story until the day he died. However, he left a sworn posthumous statement saying he had been ordered to lie and that the recovered craft had been of alien origin and that small bodies of the pilots had also been recovered by the Army.

The story has been backed up by dozens of other witnesses. The U.S. military has changed tunes multiple times in the decades since, later saying the object recovered wasn’t a mere weather balloon but a highly classified spy balloon and the bodies were mannequins dropped years later.

The Air Force declared the case closed in the 1990s but it hasn’t gone away.

Roswell wasn’t the earliest crash tale. Famed astrophysicist Dr. Jacques Vallee, who worked as a consultant to the Air Force Project Blue Book, told 8 News Now in 2021 that the very first atomic blast — the Trinity test — caused the crash of a five-ton avocado-shaped spacecraft.

“It didn’t blow up into pieces the way an airplane would have. It was apparently very strong. The tower was bent but the object kept going. It came to the ground, and it plowed an avenue all the way down the hill. They made a turn apparently under power and stopped against a bump in the terrain. The kids saw that. Now remember, this was 1945, August 1945. Two years before Roswell. There was no concept of flying saucers,” Vallee said.

Grusch told Congress there might have been an even earlier crash in Mussolini-era Italy. The strange materials recovered were reportedly stashed inside the Vatican.

Nevada’s connection to alleged UFO crash retrievals was merely whispered about for decades until the late 1980s when a former government scientist unleashed explosive allegations about a string of secret hangars built into the side of a mountain near the mysterious Area 51 base.

The identity of the witness was later revealed as Bob Lazar. His claims remain controversial to this day but the allegations are now permanently etched into the minds of the public.