In April 1950, the Wiesbadener Tagblatt published a series of photographs purporting to show a crashed flying saucer, its wreckage and a captured extraterrestrial known as “Mister X.” The story was soon revealed to have been an April Fool’s Day hoax, but the photographs continued to circulate afterward, appearing in U.S. government files and, decades later, in the Department of War’s 2026 PURSUE release of UAP records, where their original context had largely been lost.