Retired Air Force major general missing for weeks once led Wright-Patterson, an Ohio base steeped in decades of UFO theories | CNN

Streetlights shaped like alien heads line the roads of Roswell, New Mexico, where murals of flying saucers streak across storefronts and tourists pose beside statues of little green men. Nearly eight decades after a mysterious crash in the desert sparked global fascination with extraterrestrials, the small city remains synonymous with one of the world’s most enduring mysteries: the Roswell Incident. In July 1947, the US military announced it had recovered the wreckage of a UFO from a nearby ranch before quickly retracting the claim, saying the debris was from a weather balloon. The episode helped ignite decades of speculation that something far stranger had fallen from the sky — and that whatever was recovered, including rumors of bodies that didn’t belong to human beings, was quietly transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a sprawling military installation in Ohio long speculated to house secret government research into unidentified flying objects. Renewed attention is falling on the base after the disappearance of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, a former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson whose career placed him at