ROSWELL HAS LANDED

The Probable Scenario Behind the "Roswell Incident" Does it start with Kenneth Arnold, and Ray Palmer? I suspect it starts with H.G. Wells, and Orson Welles. The latter's radio production of the former's War of the Worlds genuinely shook up the public -- War of the Worlds was the original Independence Day, the prototypical alien invasion story -- and Jesse Marcel was of the generation that was shaken by Wells and Welles... And Marcel grew up to become a Major at an Air Force base in Roswell, New Mexico... But before there was Marcel in that debris field, in Roswell, there was Kenneth Arnold flying over the Cascades. Not so very long before the Roswell incident, Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen a fleet of strange, otherworldly craft, sort of saucer like (actually more like giant flying horseshoe crabs, really, from his more detailed descriptions), as he flew his small plane through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. The newspapers picked up the Arnold story, and called the objects he'd seen "flying saucers." Some skeptics think he saw an optical illusion; some think he saw boloid meteors, which can fragment and, for a time, fly along more or less horizontally. And his imagination, they suggest, supplied the rest. But Arnold, it should be noted, was an acquaintance of one Ray Palmer, the guy who created the Shaver Mysteries, one of the world's most elaborate journalistic hoaxes; and Palmer was the recipient of mysterious messages about strange beings from another world hidden within our Hollow Earth. Now it's true that Kenneth Arnold claimed to have met Palmer only after his famous UFO sighting. And it's true that Arnold had a rep as a Really Straight and Reputable Guy; a former Eagle Scout. But both this claim and this view of Arnold came... from Arnold. (UFO researchers rarely dig very deeply -- as for example with the, shall we say "questionable," backgrounds of Travis Walton or Ed Walters and Derrel Sims.) And just coincidentally, not long after Palmer had communicated with someone about strange beings from beneath the Earth, Kenneth Arnold -- later to be Palmer's collaborator -- saw strange beings flying through the sky. Are hoaxes infectious? Whatever Arnold saw, the media picked up the story and splashed it across the papers, seeding the soil of a public imagination already fertilized by the War of the Worlds broadcast and fallacious reports of "canals" sighted on Mars. Meanwhile, military intelligence was involved in a top secret project code-named "Mogul". New, high-tech (for the time) spying devices were being hoisted into the upper atmosphere on balsa wood structures attached to balloons; balloons very much like weather balloons, but somewhat distinct. The balloons were made -- some say -- of a shiny metallic material, like mylar. The balsa wood was covered, perhaps to protect it from moisture, by a household shelf-covering material or decorative tape, decorated with odd little abstract flower-petal designs. Highly stylized, the flowers were almost like some kind of hieroglyph, if you sort of squinted. The stuff had been handy when they were putting the framework for the listening devices together. And this is exactly the description of the debris given by one of the Brazels -- a lady, in fact -- from the ranch where the debris field was. The Cold War had already gotten underway; we were paranoid of the Soviets and they were paranoid of us. We chewed our nails and wondered: How much atomic weaponry did they have? How much of a threat were they? How could we find out? Maybe -- via Project Mogul. But because the Russians were so paranoid, and because we were so paranoid, Project Mogul was Top Secret. Theoretically, if the Soviets knew we were spying on them -- or trying to spy on them, even from a distance -- the cold war could turn hot. It was imperative that Mogul be kept secret. When a Mogul balloon-train crashed on the ranch of a fellow named Brazel, scattering shiny, odd-looking debris all over the place -- and perhaps metallic bits of a new kind of spy technology -- the lid had to be clamped down fast. A cover story was needed. Before the cover could be properly organized, a frustrated, somewhat over-imaginative would-be hero named Jessie Marcel (that is how some of the evaluations of Marcel describe him), apparently not briefed on the highly secret Mogul project (almost no one was briefed on it), went out to the Brazel ranch to see what had crashed there. He vividly remembered the stories from the newspaper, of not long before. What was that guy's name? Kenneth Arnold! The "Flying Saucers"! The whole subject, probably, had fascinated Marcel. And at the time pulp science fiction magazines, with aliens bug-eyeing at everyone from their lurid covers, could be found in every drugstore -- including those in Roswell, New Mexico. Perhaps Marcel was a fan of Amazing Stories. He was, anyway, primed to identify the strange, shiny fragments on the debris field as something from one of Arnold's Flying Saucers... the beginning of a War of the Worlds: and perhaps Marcel's opportunity to be a kind of war hero, at last. He announced the find of a crashed flying disc to the local papers. The local cops called the FBI who didn't know, yet, about the Mogul crash -- and likely the FBI didn't know about Mogul at all. So, the FBI was interested in this "crashed disk." Marcel brought some of the shiny new balloon material home to show his son. He also brought small pieces of balsa wood, from the framework, with the covering material on it -- the odd material with the abstract flower print. Marcel told his young son he believed this was a piece of one of those flying disks that Arnold had seen. A craft from outer space! His son was not about to question his father, who was, in his eyes, always a hero. It was more fun to think the stuff was from outer space than to wonder why the little stick things were so much like balsa wood... and that print did look like some sort of otherworldly writing, if you squinted. Marcel was hauled before the military authorities at the base and Those Who Knew Better informed him he had mis-identified a weather balloon. Weather Balloon? Nonsense! He knew what a weather balloon looked like. Why would a weather balloon have strange fragments of machinery attached, and this odd material... They didn't want to answer that question. They didn't want to talk about Project Mogul with a guy who had run to the newspapers with this flying disk story. Orders were orders and, with an ill grace, Marcel went along with the weather balloon story. Since they never told him about Mogul, he denounced the weather balloon story years later. It was, after all, a lie. And his son, decades later, remembered his Dad bringing home the strange fragments and telling him they'd come from a crashed flying disk... Back in late '47, Roswell was still abuzz with the front page news about the crashed disk. First that Arnold thing -- now this! Right in our own backyard! Just like that War of the Worlds story, only now for real! Makes a forgotten little desert town feel special... Every small town has tall-tale tellers and they'll try to outdo one another. One fella thought he'd seen something strange that same night -- another fella, jealous of the attention the first one was getting, topped the first one's story. He'd seen the creatures themselves! And so it went, the story getting a life of its own, told and retold and revised till some of the tale-tellers believed it themselves. And the tale of crashed spacecraft was only underscored when mysterious G-Men really did started visiting some of the locals, warning them not to talk about anything they might have seen concerning that "crashed saucer" or weather balloon or whatever it was. The "G-Men" were genuinely associated with Military Intelligence, and from their point of view they were trying to cover up a project so sensitive it could possibly, they believed, lead to an atomic war with the Russians. So they had to make sure the story died. Because if people probed around Roswell too much, the real story would come out: Project Mogul. And there were known to be Soviet agents in New Mexico, since the southwest was a key testing area for atomic weapons and other secret projects. So yes, it was necessary to keep people away from the debris field, and to haul everything away to another base. Roswell researchers, years later, pointed out that those who had to clean up the "debris field" were required to take secrecy oaths. Why? Secrecy Oaths for a weather balloon? Unlikely. But for the remnants of the highly classified Project Mogul, during the uncertain days of the early Cold War, the secrecy oath made sense. And the secrecy around Mogul was so intense that our original Men in Black, the unnamed G-Men, threatened and cajoled and intimidated people in Roswell -- just as that nice, truly sincere lady who is the daughter of a judge involved has said, in television interviews -- and they were not specific about what it was they wanted suppressed. Just anything to do with that mess on Brazel's ranch: Don't talk about it! Naturally, this sinister activity on the part of mysterious G-Men had the effect of underscoring the whole alien-invasion tale. Why, people wondered, were the feds being so secretive, after all, if that thing had been just a weather balloon? So the original story about it being an alien spacecraft must have been true! Or so went the local reasoning. Not too unreasonable a supposition for credulous people -- people who'd never heard of project Mogul. And some of those people were probably local military men, even officers, who were kept in the dark about Mogul. It was likely to be a need-to-know situation. So of course scuttlebutt abounded, rumors right there on the base that a saucer had crashed, that aliens had been seen. Military men love rumors as much as the next guy. Wild gossip and rumors make a dull routine less dull. And maybe it had occured to someone in Military Intelligence that the Flying Saucer story, however ludicrous, was better than the truth: Project Mogul. The Soviets would then shrug that whole Roswell UFO tale off as hysteria, fallout from the Kenneth Arnold sighting. So, yes, let the myth grow, maybe even encourage it a little. Perhaps spreading stories of little gray men seen beside crashed saucers would help: it was a smokescreen in itself. The men who'd launched Mogul now had two layers of disinformation in place -- both the weather balloon story and the flying saucer story protected them. They were well covered. The story eventually died down -- though sometimes, in the local bars, it was whispered about and embellished. Nowadays, some investigators feel that Mogul can't explain the crash because the alleged dates of Mogul launches don't properly coincide with the crash. But records of Mogul launches aren't necessarily airtight-correct, or complete -- especially when we're talking about fifty year old military intelligence records. And the vagaries of weather and the upper airs could explain other discrepancies. What, after all, is more likely -- a flying saucer from another star system, crashed in New Mexico, or a slight confusion about the dates of launch for Mogul's balloon train? Decades after the crash, Mogul was still Top Secret, hence still not talked about, mostly because no one had bothered to declassify it. Barney and Betty Hill published a best selling book about their Interrupted Journey, their supposed abduction by aliens. A Roswell book or two was published. Forgotten old folks in Roswell suddenly felt important. Here was attention; here were interviewers, maybe a chance for a little money down the line. And local visionaries likely foresaw the touristry possibilities which have since come to fruition. The Interrupted Journey was made into a TV movie. Barney and Betty, demonstrably, were making money off this sort of thing. Travis Walton and his cronies saw the TV movie, they wanted to make money too. And Travis wanted to win that National Enquirer reward for best UFO story. (I recently saw Walton on TV, saying "I took two lie detector tests and passed both of them." They should have given him one when he said that: he was lying in that very television interview, because in fact he failed one lie detector test and the other was inconclusive.) Walton sold his story to Hollywood for Fire in the Sky. Then there was Whitley Strieber. Sometimes there's money in this UFO stuff -- though not as much as the UFO Hopeful hope there'll be. Roswell residents had noted the books about Roswell -- starting, as I recall, about 1980 -- and even now they take note of the Walton and Strieber successes. If people like Walton can tell bullshit stories and get paid for it, why not us? And so Glenn Dennis sticks to his story, despite having been shown its numerous contradictions and the demonstrably wrong information in it. And so it goes on, in Roswell. And so it will, as long as there are tourists to be amused, and TV crews to be fed, and producers to bring in more tourists and TV crews... ~John Shirley The Real Roswell Crashed Saucer Coverup Skeptical Inquirer,  May-June, 1998  by David E. Thomas The question isn't "Did an alien spaceship crash at Roswell in 1947?" The question is, why do many prominent UFO authors persist in claiming the Roswell Incident is still UFOdom's best case? In case there were still doubts, Phil Klass's new book should help settle them. His case against the Roswell "alien" myth is devastating. Klass's previous books include UFOs: The Public Deceived and UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, both published by Prometheus books. He has spent over thirty years investigating famous UFO incidents, hoping to find credible, scientific evidence of extraterrestrial visitors. He currently publishes the Skeptics UFO Newsletter (SUN), and is a Fellow of CSICOP and chair of its UFO Subcommittee. Klass, in short, is well qualified to separate the truths from the myths about the alleged Roswell crashed saucer. Through impartial research and meticulous documentation, Phil Klass has written the definitive book on the Roswell myth. Klass starts off with contemporary accounts from 1947 - cold, hard facts that are not subject to the whims of memory. He details the UFO "craze" that swept the country in the summer of 1947, the Army Air Force announcement of the capture of a "flying disk," and the explanation of the find as weather balloons and radar targets. Nowadays, UFO promoters maintain that the announcement of the "flying disk" came from high up the command - Col. Blanchard himself. (And, of course, top brass wouldn't have been fooled by a "balloon.") But original reports indicate that the "disk" claim came from the intelligence office at the Roswell Army Air Force base - namely, one man, Major Jesse A. Marcel. After its correct identification as weather equipment, the Roswell event drew no attention for decades. Klass details how both leading UFO groups (NICAP and APRO) did not even mention Roswell in their lists of "most important UFO cases" submitted for the Condon Report in 1966. Details of Marcel's earliest Roswell interviews, in February 1978, are provided by Klass. Marcel did not save any news clippings from this "historic" encounter; he couldn't even remember what year the incident took place. Klass describes, and demolishes, the accounts of the long string of witnesses who waited decades before coming forward to claim their 15 minutes of fame: Grady Barnett, Glenn Dennis, Walter Haut, Gerald Anderson, Jim Ragsdale, Frank Kaufmann, Frankie Rowe, Col. Thomas Dubose, and more. He lists the wildly different estimates of the numbers of alien bodies (three living; three dead; four dead/one living; three dead; one living; and, one dead). The search for mortician Glenn Dennis's "missing nurse" (Naomi Marie Selff) is detailed, along with strong evidence that she never existed. Witness Anderson's diary copying and phone-record tampering severely damage his credibility. Klass takes on all of the major pro-Roswell authors as well: Stanton Friedman, William Moore, Kevin Randie, Donald Schmitt, and others. He clearly documents how Friedman, Randie, and Schmitt all have changed the day rancher Brazel brought the debris into Roswell from Monday, July 7 (the actual day), to Sunday, July 6. They did so because that's the only way they could reconcile events with witness Dubose's testimony that the famous photographs of the debris in General Ramey's office were taken at least two days after the debris was supposedly flown from Roswell to Fort Worth. (In actuality, the pictures were taken the same afternoon as the flight). Original reports, and Brazel's comments that he came to Roswell to sell wool, clearly show that he did not go into town on the last day of a (then) rare three-day weekend. Klass also describes how author Donald Schmitt was caught faking his credentials. The book also turns to UFO researcher Robert Todd's discovery of the connection of the debris to New York University experiments performed in support of secret project Mogul, and the further evidence for this explanation developed by physicist/balloonist Charles B. Moore, UFO author Karl Pflock, and by the United States Air Force. The General Accounting Office report was portrayed by New Mexico Congressman Steve Schiff as leaving unanswered questions regarding some missing message traffic. But, Klass points out that the bottom-line conclusion of the GAO report was completely missed by most of the media: there is not one shred of evidence in the archives of the federal government that lends any credence to the supposed alien crash at Roswell (or any other locale). He also relates how once pro-Roswell pilot Kent Jeffrey came to agree that the Roswell Incident was due entirely to misidentification of weather equipment. A major theme of the book is the continuing coverup of the truth about Roswell - not by the government, but by producers and authors of television shows, movies, and books. Klass tells how he has repeatedly tried to get TV producers to show formerly secret documents that prove the US did not have any physical evidence of alien visitors, even after Roswell. And Klass tells how, time and again, the truth has ended up on the cutting-room floor. Klass concludes the book by discussing his work at Aviation Week and Space Technology. Aviation Week has revealed so many sensitive aerospace secrets that many government employees disparagingly refer to it as "Aviation Leak." Yet, this fiercely independent magazine has never uncovered even a trace of a sinister coverup of alien visitation. This book is a very valuable addition to the shelf of anyone with an interest in Roswell, or in the UFO movement in general. It does seem to hop around from topic to topic at times, but the biggest flaw of the book is the material that's missing, such as Klass' resounding debunking of the supposed "Majestic 12" forgeries. (Klass's MJ-12 exposes are nevertheless available in book form, reprinted in the 1997 SI anthology The UFO Invasion.) When I give talks about Roswell, I always show how Klass found that President Truman's alleged signature on an MJ-12 letter was really just photocopied from a different, legitimate letter. As transparencies of both signatures are overlaid, the audience always gasps in surprise as the different signatures blend into a single trace. Incredibly, Stanton Friedman still maintains the validity of MJ-12. When I confronted him on a radio show last year, he said Klass's methods were shown false in his new book Top Secret/Majic. And what is Friedman's new attack on the signature analysis? "The signatures are clearly not identical." Simply outrageous! Similarly, there was no mention of the supposed alien autopsy, or the Penthouse "photograph" of the alien's body. I'm hoping that someday, some of these gaps will be filled, and that we'll be treated to a second edition of this excellent book. But even with its minor omissions, this book destroys the "Roswell" mythos once and for all.

Roswell

AIR FORCE TO ISSUE YET ANOTHER ROSWELL EXPLANATION

Is This One Impressive Enough to Rain on the Anniversary?

[CNI News thanks Rebecca Keith, Joe Stefula and Steve Kaeser for assistance with this story, dated June 16, 1997]

The Roswell Legacy June 1997 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fifty years ago this summer, the modern UFO craze began. Fed by fantasy, faddishness, and even outright fakery, the mythology has become so well nourished that it has begun to spawn bizarre religious cults like Heaven's Gate. Earlier this month, as reported by the New York Times, the Roswell controversy reached out to involve U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond and a former aide, Philip J. Corso, in a dispute over an upcoming memoir by Corso for which Thurmond wrote the foreword. The book claims that the U.S. government used alien technology to win the Cold War. ("Thurmond Disputes Book on Purported Alien Spaceship," New York Times, June 5, 1997) This latest publicized controversy is sure to have a catalyzing effect on the planned fiftieth-anniversary hoopla, July 1-6, at Roswell, New Mexico, the site of ufology's Holy Grail. From near Roswell, according to a burgeoning legend, in late June or early July of 1947, a crashed alien spacecraft and its humanoid occupants were retrieved and hidden away at a secret government installation. The "Roswell incident" as it is popularly known, was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base. He reported that a "flying disc" had been retrieved from an area ranch where it had crashed. This came in the immediate wake of the first modern UFO sighting, the famous string of "flying saucers" witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. Just such sightings had long been anticipated by pulp science-fiction magazines, like Amazing Stories, and by the earlier writings of a crank named Charles Fort. Called "the world's first ufologist," Fort reported on unidentified objects in the sky that he believed indicated visits from space aliens; his reports were based on old newspaper and magazine accounts. Soon after the press release made headlines around the world, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was released: The unidentified flying object had really been a weather balloon, said officials, and photographs of the "wreckage" -- some flexible, silvery-looking material -- were distributed to the press. In 1949 came the first of the crashed-saucer hoaxes. It involved a science-fiction movie, The Flying Saucer, produced by Mikel Conrad, which allegedly contained actual footage of a captured spacecraft; an actor hired by Conrad posed as an FBI agent and swore the retrieval claim was true. The following year writer Frank Scully reported in his book Behind the Flying Saucers that the U.S. government had in its possession no fewer than three alien spaceships, together with the bodies of their humanoid occupants. Scully was fed the story by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum-locating device allegedly based on alien technology. Other crash-retrieval stories followed, as did photographs of space aliens, living and dead: One gruesome photo merely portrayed the charred body of the pilot of a small plane, his aviator's glasses still visible in the picture. In 1974 Robert Spencer Carr began to promote one of the crashes from the Scully book and to claim firsthand knowledge of where the pickled aliens were stored. According to the late claimant's son, Carr was a spinner of yarns who made up the entire story. In 1977 a pseudonymous "Fritz Werner" claimed to have "assisted in the investigation of a crashed unknown object" in Arizona. This included, he said, his actually seeing the body of one four-foot-tall humanoid occupant that had been placed in a tent. Unfortunately there were suspicious parallels between the Werner and Scully stories and other evidence of hoaxing, including various inconsistencies in Werner's tale. In 1987, the author of a book on Roswell released the notorious "MJ-12 documents" which seemed to prove that a saucer had indeed crashed near Roswell and that its humanoid occupants really were recovered. The documents purported to show that there was a secret "Operation Majestic Twelve" authorized by President Truman to handle clandestinely the crash/retrieval at Roswell. A "briefing document" for President-elect Eisenhower was also included. However, MJ-12 was another Roswellian hoax, the documents merely crude paste-up forgeries that utilized signatures cut from photocopies of actual letters and documents. The forger even slipped one document into the National Archives so it could be "discovered" there. (The Archives quickly cast doubt on its authenticity.) The NBC series Dark Skies is based on the MJ-12 pseudohistory. In 1990 Gerald Anderson responded to an Unsolved Mysteries telecast about the alleged 1947 UFO crash (placing it in western New Mexico). He claimed that he and other family members, including his uncle Ted, were rock hunting in the desert when they came upon a crashed saucer with injured aliens among the still-burning wreckage. Anderson released a diary that his uncle had kept which recorded the event. Alas, examination by a forensic chemist showed that the ink used to write the entries did not exist in 1947 but had first been manufactured in 1974. (Anderson claimed that the tested pages were copies, but he never made the alleged originals available.) The boldest of the Roswell hoaxes came in 1995 when an "alien autopsy" film surfaced, showing the purported dissection of a retrieved humanoid corpse. Attributed to an anonymous former government cameraman, the film was distributed by a British marketing agency that formerly handled Walt Disney products, and it was promoted during prime time on the Fox network. Although the film was supposedly authenticated by Kodak, only the leader tape and a single frame of film had been submitted, and Kodak refused to be taken in by the obvious ploy. In time, the film's bogus, non-military codemark and various anachronisms led it to be declared a hoax -- even by most ufologists, who let it be known there were limits to their credulity.   More recently, there was the Roswell "UFO fragment" of 1996, a piece of swirly-patterned metal that turned out to be nothing more than scraps discarded by a Utah jewellery artist. And so the hoaxes continue. Many ufologists have heralded the Roswell incident as providing the primary evidence for the UFO invasion of planet Earth. Supporting evidence, of course, purportedly comes from myriad UFO reports (most of which eventually become IFOs: identified flying objects) and "alien abductions" (experiences that skeptics have shown are fantasy-based). Ironically, the government's claim that a weather balloon instead of a "flying disc" landed at Roswell was honest but mistaken. It was not, of course, the grandiose cover-up of extraterrestrial visitation that conspiracy theorists now imagine. The best current evidence indicates that the crashed device was in reality a U.S. government spy balloon -- part of a 1940s secret operation called Project Mogul, an attempt to monitor sonic emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests. As a consequence of these sordid events, the Roswell incident has left a half-century legacy of bizarre cult mythology, anti-government conspiracy theories, and unrelenting skywatching by self-styled ufologists who seem to fancy themselves on the brink of a momentous discovery. The latest book or television program to the contrary, what crashed at Roswell was the truth, plain and simple. About the Author Joe Nickell is CSICOP's senior research fellow. He writes the Investigative Files column for Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptical Briefs and is author or editor of more than fifteen books on the occult and paranormal. Most recently, he coedited the book The UFO Invasion (Prometheus Books, 1997). Are those little green men still in the Roswell desert? Insight on the News,  May 26, 1997  by Mark Gauvreau Judge   Fifty years ago, something big shattered in the New Mexico sand. Ufologists continue to sift the mysterious details they believe prove the debris was a flying saucer. The feds? They have other ideas. On July 4, 1947, something crashed in the desert near Roswell, N.M. An unanswered question is if that something was a top-secret military device or, well, a flying saucer. On the surface, the tale is absurd, the stuff of conspiracy nuts, tabloid headlines and science fiction. On an appropriately dark and stormy night 50 years ago this summer, it goes, a UFO crashed in the desert. The debris, including any alien survivors, was recovered and hidden by the government, which continues to deny its role. Ridiculous, right? Well, maybe. The Roswell UFO crash started as an obsession of the UFO faithful but has become part of American popular culture thanks to TV shows and films such as the X-Files and Independence Day. The tale has sparked an unusually high level of debate and the curiosity of a respected congressman. And no one's laughing at the estimated 150,000 tourists and $5 million in revenue that interest in the mystery will bring this year to the city of 48,000. "We've had to declare a 'No UFO' media diet," laughs Barry Bitzer, press secretary for Republican Rep. Steven Schiff of New Mexico, who launched a 1993 investigation into the incident at Roswell. Schiff, who has become such a lightning rod for ufologists that he no longer answers questions about the subject, is not a UFO buff, but endured such pressure from constituents that he finally asked the Pentagon for a report just to settle the matter. What he got was stonewalled. "We were shocked," recalls Bitzer. "The Pentagon said they had nothing and shunted us off to the National Archives. Then the National Archives sent us back to the Pentagon. I mean, no one should get that kind of treatment from the government, and this is a US. congressman." Schiff finally demanded a report from the General Accounting Office. The report, issued in July 1995, claims that what crashed near Roswell was Project Mogul, a top-secret 1947-era device launched with balloons and allegedly used by the Air Force to monitor Russian nuclear tests. While Bitzer says that Schiff was satisfied with the report, the congressman believes unanswered questions remain. "The phone records from Roswell between 1946 and 1949 are just gone," says Bitzer, "and there are witnesses whose testimony contradicts the official reports. Unfortunately, this office doesn't have the resources to chase all those things down." Indeed, it would take the combined efforts of the X-Files' protagonist, Fox Mulder, and Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to untangle the actual events of July 1947. The Roswell story is set in a twilight world of blind alleys with dubious witnesses making outrageous claims. One woman says her life was threatened by the government when she suggested she knew the truth, and Glen Denis, who was the Roswell mortician at the time, claims to have provided child-sized caskets for the alien bodies. Other curious twists seem to challenge explanation. On July 8, four days after the crash, the Army issued a press release announcing that it had, in fact, retrieved a flying saucer, only to retract the release hours later. And Bitzer notes that wreckage was collected and sent to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- quite a fuss for a downed balloon, even a top-secret one. "The Mogul explanation just doesn't cut it," says Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and the author of Crash at Corona and other books on UFOs. Friedman explains that the wreckage originally was found by rancher W. W. "Mac" Brazel and turned over to Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer at what then was Roswell's Army Air Force Base, home of the "Fightin' 509th." The "Fightin' 509th" was the world's only combat unit trained to handle and drop nuclear bombs. Brazel and Marcel, who are deceased, claimed that the dark, shiny debris had preternatural properties. In interviews Marcel describes it as both pliant and indestructible, recalling that when it was balled up it could unfold itself. "There is nothing in the official report that matches Mac Brazel's or Jesse Marcel's descriptions," says Friedman, borrowing from a line made famous during O.J. Simpson's criminal trial: "If the stuff doesn't fit, you must acquit." Marcel's son, Jesse Jr., remembers the morning his father brought home a box of the wreckage. The younger Marcel, now 60, is an ear, nose and throat specialist in Helena, Mont. "My dad came in and dumped all the contents of the box on the floor, saying that it was pieces of a flying saucer," he remembers. "He had gone to radar school and knew what a radar balloon looked like." Marcel Jr. has seen pictures of Mogul and claims it looks nothing like what he saw on the kitchen floor. To skeptics, of course, such a story probably just is wishful thinking. "All the stuff found by Brazel and Marcel was Mogul," says Karl Pflock, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense during the second Reagan administration and is an UFO investigator. In a twist to a story full of them, Pflock is married to Mary Martinek, Schiff's chief of staff. (Pflock strongly emphasizes that "in no way, shape or form" did he influence Schiff's involvement in the Roswell mystery.) As Pflock sees it, Roswell is a story with a prosaic explanation that has grown into a legend. "I think Jesse Marcel took a lot of flack for claiming this thing was a flying saucer," he says, "and to try and save face he began to build his story over the years and make it more convincing." Yet Ufologists counter that Marcel wasn't the only one involved, citing the initial press release announcing the discovery of the saucer. What about that? "You have to remember something," says Pflock. "Col. Blanchard, the [late] commander of the 509th who issued the statement, was known as an envelope-pusher. He was also only 31 at the time, which is a very important fact. Today we have this impression of colonels as these humorless old guys but Roswell occurred during the World War II era when you had majors and colonels who were in their 20s and 30s. And really, the confusion isn't that hard to understand. The Air Force was right over the hill experimenting with this top-secret thing, and the Army knew nothing about it. One hand had no idea what the other was doing." Interestingly, Pflock gives credence to UFOs. "I absolutely, unequivocally believe that UFOs are real, but with the emphasis on unidentified. There's a percentage of sightings that just can't be explained." Pflock's ability to separate the wheat from the chaff in ufology reveals a nuance most people think is absent in UFO groups. To be sure, certain New Age believers are interested in the phenomenon, but they are outflanked by serious researchers such as Friedman and Pflock. In fact, the federal government once regarded UFOs with deadly seriousness. Although reports of strange lights in the sky may be as old as humanity, the modern UFO era began on June 24, 1947. Pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mt. Rainier, Wash., when he spotted nine strange objects in the airspace in front of his plane. Arnold, a small-town sheriff and respected businessman, described the objects as flying "like discs skipping over water." The press quickly dubbed the objects flying saucers, and soon the country found itself in the grip of a "flap," or wave, of UFO sightings. Coming on the heels of World War II and at the beginning of the Cold War, the sightings caused panic. "There was serious concern at the time," recalls Philip Klass, a former editor Aviation Week magazine and well-known UFO skeptic. "It was during the Cold War, and the Russians were developing atomic bombs. People thought that if they were seeing Soviet reconnaissance vehicles, maybe the Russians were getting ready to launch World War III." As a result of the excitement caused by the Arnold sighting, the government created Project Grudge in 1949, later renamed Project Blue Book, to investigate the phenomenon. Project Blue Book researchers proclaimed most of the sightings to be misidentifications, but some defied conventional explanation. Perhaps the most spectacular of these occurred during the flap of 1952. In July of that year, a group of objects appeared in the sky over Washington and was picked up on the radarscopes at Washington National Airport. This caused such a panic that the Air Defense Command scrambled F-94 jets to intercept them. As the F-94s approached, the objects disappeared, but the incident was so hair-raising that it drove the Democratic National Convention off the front page of the Washington Post. The official explanation out of Washington eventually was that the UFOs had been an optical illusion caused by "temperature inversions," a trick of the light. In 1969, the government got out of the flying-saucer business, shutting down Blue Book even though approximately 30 percent of the cases examined had defied explanation. During the intervening years, the flying-saucer phenomenon has shown no sign of abatement. While sightings no longer tend to occur in flaps, there still are hot spots of sighting activity. Moreover, the widespread availability of video cameras has made capturing them on tape fairly common. Then there's the abduction phenomenon. Thousands of people have reported being taken aboard UFOs and subjected to invasive medical procedures. Most of the alleged abductees describe their captors as small, wiry beings with gray skin and huge heads with penetrating, almond-shaped eyes. As the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident approaches, the excitement escalates. The city's officials and merchants are gearing up for a real spectacle, including a rock concert and celebrity banquet. Event organizer Stan Crosby estimates that 150,000 people will pass through during the first week of July alone. And just in case the Roswell crash ever is -- once and for all -- revealed as bogus, Crosby has a slogan at the ready: "Roswell -- You know us as a UFO town, but there's so much more!"

The trouble with little gray men Roswell has generated little in the way of solid evidence but has been indirectly responsible for a long string of hoaxes and forgeries. A supposed fragment of the Roswell spaceship surfaced in 1996. The fragment was tested at New Mexico Tech and at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was found to be copper and silver in normal (terrestrial) isotopic abundances. Then it turned out that the "fragment" was just a piece of scrap from the work of Utah artist Randy Fullbright. Fullbright used a Japanese technique of layering copper and silver, producing a strange-looking layered metal. Someone snatched a piece of the scrap and gave it to an innocent man about to move to Roswell, telling him that it actually came from the Roswell ship and to take it to the UFO museum there. A second "fragment" emerged at the 1997 Roswell festival, but this one failed some basic science requirements. The Internet report on the analysis of this fragment included measurements of materials so radioactive they wouldn't last a week, much less 50 years. This episode ended with the general realization that it is indeed possible to whip up alien-looking alloys in the lab, given access to pure isotopes. In addition, there is the case of the MJ-12 (Majestic 12) papers, purportedly describing the top-secret alien analyses of a dozen top scientists appointed by Truman. But Phillip Klass, the Washington, D.C., publisher of Skeptics UFO Newsletter, has showed that Truman's signature on a key MJ-12 document had been photocopied from a non-UFO-related Truman letter. A host of other problems plague the MJ-12 documents, but that doesn't stop new ones from coming out. Then there's the sad tale of Penthouse magazine, which paid a huge sum for a photograph of the Roswell "alien" for its September 1996 issue. The image turned out to be a fuzzy photograph of the plastic alien prop in the UFO Museum in Roswell. Perhaps the biggest Roswell hoax of all is the Alien Autopsy film, which Fox-TV producers aired twice before debunking the film themselves in a third special. Why does it matter? What could it hurt? Is belief in aliens harmful? I have no problem with speculation about life beyond our tiny planet or with generating needed income with a twist on the traditional small-town festival. As a boy, I idolized Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock, and watched every bug-eyed alien on the Outer Limits. Nowadays, I help with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by letting my computer run the Setihome screen saver. The problem, however, arises when the line between curious speculation and unsupported belief is crossed. The Heaven's Gate cult seized on a typical Internet story, this one about a "mother ship" companion to the Hale-Bopp comet and believed it, even after telescopes the group bought refused to reveal the mother ship. (They returned the telescopes as defective.) Unsupported belief can be deadly if it makes you do dangerous things, such as the Heaven's Gate suicides made in hopes of joining the mother ship, or avoid doing safe things, like shunning mainstream treatment for cancer in favor of shark cartilage. (Shark cartilage has not been shown to reduce cancer, and a recent report confirmed that sharks do get cancer, contrary to the popular belief they don't.) Roswell can be a lot of fun. So have fun. But don't believe everything you hear about it! ~Dave Thomas Albuquerque Tribune, 8 July, 2000