Google's latest doodle celebrates the 66th anniversary of the so-called Roswell incident - which generations of UFO enthusiasts and others believe involved an alien landing outside the New Mexico town.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed that US military had captured a crashed alien aircraft outside Roswell in July 1947, but authorities insisted that the incident merely involved the recovery of debris from a top secret surveillance balloon.

Much suspicion about the incident was originally ignited by a press release issued by a local US military base, which mentioned that the crash involved a flying disk.

Seeking to put conspiracies to rest in June 1997, the US Air Force released a 231-page report titled "Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash". It asserted that alien bodies witnesses reported seeing at the crash scene were actually life-sized anthropomorphic test dummies.

However, interest in the incident was stoked once again in 1995, when a London-based entrepreneur called Ray Santilli claimed that he possessed film footage showing an autopsy being peformed on one of the Roswell aliens. Santilli said in 2006 that the film was a reconstruction of what he insisted was real events.

The Google doodle errs on the side of humour, allowing users to control a small animated alien figure as it goes about a series of tasks on a Roswell-like landscape.