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| - FACT CHECK: Image Attempts To Tie McConnell, Pence, Trump And Manafort Birth Dates To Roswell UFO Incident
An image shared on Facebook claims Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort were born in 1948.
Verdict: False
None of the four men mentioned in the Facebook post were born in 1948.
Fact Check:
Debris was recovered from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The U.S. Army initially said it had found a “flying disk” but later said the debris came from a high-altitude weather balloon, according to the Associated Press. A 1995 Government Accountability Office report found the Air Force released information that concluded the likely source of the wreckage was a “balloon-launched classified government project designed to determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research.”
A viral 2020 post attempting to tie McConnell, Trump, Pence and Manafort to the Roswell incident recently resurfaced on Facebook. It alleges they were all born in April 1948, nine months after the crash. That is not the case for any of those four political figures.
The Encyclopedia Britannica website identifies the correct birth dates for Trump, Pence and McConnell. The birth dates listed by Britannica match those respectively listed on the White House website for Trump, the archived Trump White House website for Pence and the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress website for McConnell.
Pence, the youngest of the four men, was born June 7, 1959, while Trump was born June 14, 1946. McConnell, the oldest of the four mentioned in the Facebook post, was born on Feb. 20, 1942. (RELATED: Were These Nine Politicians Born 9 Months After The 1947 Roswell UFO Incident?)
Manafort’s birthday appears on an archived page from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. He was born April 1, 1949, according to that archived page and Biography.com.
The Facebook post contains a line – “This is the obvious consequence of alien breeding with sheep and jackasses” – that suggests it was meant to be satirical. However, many users still appeared to think the four were born nine months after the Roswell incident.
A similar meme inaccurately claiming nine Democratic politicians, including former President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were born nine months after the Roswell incident previously circulated on social media. Check Your Fact debunked that iteration in May 2020.
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