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A GenePoool.com Essay
Roswell
Sure you've heard of it. Everybody has by now. Roswell. It's one of those words for which no further information is needed, the "New Mexico" portion dropped off due to overall lack of necessity. Like Elvis. Or, more appropriately, RuPaul.
As the legend goes, an alien space craft crash-landed in Roswell in 1947 with four passengers who either did or did not survive the crash. The humanoid aliens-- dead or alive, take your pick-- were taken, along with all the pieces from the crash, to a nearby air force base, where the whole thing was subsequently covered up. To this day the government denies the existence of the crashed saucer and the alien bodies.
So of course it must be true.
Most people I've spoken to accept this tale, or a variation of it. Some will meet it halfway, with "SOMEthing happened, we don't know what it is, but the government is covering it up." Call it secular agnosticism. I have met very few who've admitted that they think it's a lot of bunk. This is a shame, because it just so happens it is a lot of bunk.
There are more variations on the Roswell myth than I can possibly tackle in one column, and I'm not going to even try, but I think there are some details that warrant a little more attention than they usually get.
Let's start with the overall reliability of memory. From 1947 until 1980, the town of Roswell lived a benign and fairly harmless existence. There were no UFO investigators there, running around W. W. Brazel's farm with metal detectors and looking for extraterrestrial body parts. There was no Roswell museum, or organized tours, or anything else that one might expect from a town that had been the center of an extraterrestrial visitation for thirty-three years. Nobody had heard of it. That's because the book The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, hadn't come out yet. Berlitz and Moore interviewed all of the people who were "witnesses" to the crash site THIRTY YEARS after the incident.
Memory has a way of filling in gaps, and embellishing where needed, which is why the most reliable eyewitness account is always the first one given. But when the first account offered is thirty years after the fact, there's a good reason to suspect it, especially when being asked by someone who WANTS you to tell them you saw a flying saucer. This may also be why most of the "eyewitness accounts" have changed four and five times over the last eighteen years.
Then there's the evidence. Or rather, the lack of evidence, because there is not a single scintilla of anything vaguely resembling evidence, although those who are looking to make a few more bucks on the perpetuation of the Roswell myth have certainly done their best to make up some.
One purported piece of evidence is the MJ-12 documents. Copies of these documents were reportedly mailed anonymously to a friend of a prominent UFO investigator. Right away, there's a problem with provenance. Provenance is what art dealers rely on to prove a specific piece of art is not a forgery, and it essentially involves the verifiable the history of ownership. In other words, if I want to know I'm buying a genuine Monet, I find out who owns it now, who they bought it from, who THEY bought it from, and so on, hopefully right up to the point when Monet actually painted it. If at any time the painting just "appeared" I know something's rotten. (This is also one of the largest problems with the Shroud of Turin, but I'll get to that another time.)
The MJ-12 documents are three memos concerning the top secret "Operation Majestic-12" which was supposedly the code name for the government operation that dealt with the recovered saucer. It has been proven rather authoritatively by investigator Philip Klass to be a forgery. He's amassed a huge amount of evidence to support this, which I won't go too extensively into, but I'll give you a taste of. According to the documents, Eisenhower was briefed by Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter in the fall of 1950. The only problem is, Admiral Hillenkoetter was on sea duty in the Formosan Waters in the Fall of 1950, and did not return to the US until 1951. Also, Harry Truman's signature on one of the documents was clearly photocopied from an archived memo, which Klass located. In fact, it was photocopied three times before it landed on the "original" MJ-12 document, and the proof is that the copied signature is just about exactly 3.6% larger than the original. (Xerox copies are enlarged by an average of 1.2% in order to prevent the border of the document from turning up on the copy.) The MJ-12 documents are a hoax.
Another Roswellian wonder is the Alien Autopsy footage. Have you ever looked closely at it? Of course you haven't; it's all blurry. Any special effects expert with a little time on their hands could do a better job. If you ever get a chance to look at it again, look for two things in particular. One, look at the way the "doctor" holds the scalpel. A surgeon will hold the scalpel so that the fingers are splayed, with the pinkie resting on the body itself. This is to done to steady the blade. The "doctor" in the autopsy video holds his scalpel like a weapon, in a closed fist. Second, look for the Radiation symbol on the back wall. This is the sort of thing one might expect to see in a laboratory where an alien corpse is being cut open. There's only one problem: the symbol didn't exist until the early 1960's, more than ten years after the video was supposedly made.
So that takes care of most of the "reputable" evidence. What's left is the Roswell Museum, which is only a collection of newspaper clippings and a rubber dummy of one of the supposed aliens that was donated by an FX studio. You can visit Roswell and take a tour of the crash site, if you like, but don't bother to look for evidence, because you're not looking in the right place. W. W. Brazel, the farmer who owns the land where the crash took place, refused to sell the land to the town. So, being the industrious tourist trap types they are, the Roswell Crash Site tours are conducted on public land in a different location altogether.
I have, on many occasions, pointed out some of the above information to people who sincerely believe a flying saucer crashed in Roswell. Much to my chagrin, I did little to change any opinions. Which is where the real problem lies.
The reasoning goes something like this:
SOMEthing crashed in Roswell in 1947.
The government covered it up.
Therefore, it was a UFO.
This reasoning reminds me of an episode of the old Batman TV show, wherein Batman and Robin happened upon an empty room. They found a riddle on the floor, which read, simply, "Not an animal." Immediately, Robin figured it out. "Not an animal," he reasoned. "Then it MUST be... A fish!" For campy, silly entertainment, this was quite funny, but for some reason, nobody seems to blink when the same faulty logic is applied to Roswell.
DID something crash at Roswell? Yes, absolutely. In the late forties, the Air Force was experimenting with ways to spy on Russia. One of the experiments was a platform held aloft by large balloons. The ostensible purpose of the platform was to hold cameras, but when doing weight tests, rather than use cameras, they sent up platforms with plastic toys on them. This was called Project Mogul. When one of these floating platforms crashed in Roswell, this top secret project was in danger, so they did what they had to do. They recovered the pieces, and when the press asked what had crashed, they LIED. They switched the crash pieces from Project Mogul with a weather balloon. Unlike ANY of the UFO theories, there is ample evidence in support of this, in the form of dozens of genuine declassified documents.
The Roswell myth supporters don't like the Project Mogul story at all. Why?
It fits all the available evidence.
It explains WHAT was being covered up and WHY it was covered up.
But it's from the government.
Therefore it must be a lie.
This attitude is very revealing. It reveals the inherent logical Catch-22 that the Roswellians have caught themselves up in. On the one hand, there is the persistent demand that the government tell the TRUTH about the Roswell incident. On the other hand there is the pathological distrust of everything the government has to say.
This sort of reasoning has its advantages. One such advantage is that the Roswell myth will never die, because none of the myth-perpetuators are ever going to get the government to tell them what they want to hear. And that's what they're really asking for, because they certainly don't want to hear the truth.
I'm reminded of an argument I had long ago with my sister, concerning the Phil Collins song "In the Air Tonight." Legend had it that Collins wrote the song about a friend who witnessed someone drowning and did nothing to help. The problem was, Collins denied this flatly, and said the song was in no way biographical. My sister pointed out that "of course he WOULD say that." Well, no, it doesn't work like that. Collins wrote the song, which means he is the ONLY authority on the matter. If he says he didn't write a biographical song, and we choose not to believe him, we have gone beyond reason and into the realm of blind belief. This is exactly where the Roswellians are right now.
Another reason I think the Roswell myth is so readily accepted is that so many people seem to subscribe to it already. Again, this is a fallacy, but a somewhat more understandable one. It's easy to accept something because it's been proven to someone else to their satisfaction. Roswell means what it means to most people in this country because it has been repeated so frequently and questioned so rarely. This is how mythology works.
So let's apply Occam's Razor to the Roswell myth and see where we end up. Which is more likely:
Alien beings who can somehow manage to travel here from millions of light years away and yet for some reason can't land a space craft safely, crashed on a farm in Roswell in 1947. The government took the craft and its occupants and managed to cover up the whole thing so completely that there is now no evidence whatsoever to prove the crash ever too place.
Or, an experimental top secret spy platform that was being tested at a nearby air base crash landed on a farm in Roswell one a stormy evening. The government picked up the pieces and then, needing a story that did not reveal anything about their top secret spy platform, lied and instead produced a torn weather balloon, a story they maintained until about ten years ago, when Project Mogul was declassified.
For my money, option number two seems like
a pretty good bet.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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