- Fifty-five years ago, something fell from the sky and
crashed in the desert outside of Roswell, N.M.
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- What that "something" was, however, remains
a mystery.
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- During the summer of 1947, reports of "flying discs"
ran rampant across the country.
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- On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field in southeastern
New Mexico issued a press release that momentarily shocked the world.
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- "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became
a reality yesterday when the Intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group
of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to
gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers
and the sheriff's office of Chaves County," the release stated.
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- "The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell
sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, (Rancher Mac Brazel) stored
the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office,
who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence
Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the
rancher's home. It was inspected at the (air field) and subsequently loaned
by (Marcel) to higher headquarters."
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- Three hours after the story was released, it was replaced
with a story that indicated the wreckage merely was parts of a weather
balloon with an attached metal radar reflector that mistakenly had been
identified as a flying saucer.
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- The excitement died and so did the story, until the late
1970s, when Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist and ufologist, reopened
the case.
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- Friedman, who now lives in New Brunswick, Canada, discussed
his investigation with The Hawk Eye and some of his conclusions.
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- Marcel, who was living in Houma, La., in the late 1970s,
told Friedman he was familiar with experimental balloons and said the material
he handled was something he never saw before or since.
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- Marcel, who since has died, said he was told by higher
military authorities in 1947 to forget the incident.
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- As the reinvigorated Roswell story gained publicity throughout
the 1980s, hundreds of witnesses to the alleged UFO crash stepped forward,
some of whom claimed to have not only seen parts of the craft, but also
its alien occupants. Many secondhand accounts also surfaced.
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- In most of the accounts, there were four alien bodies
found at another site away from Brazel's ranch and one of the creatures
was still alive.
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- The aliens were described as short, grayskinned creatures
with large concave eyes and oversized heads.
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- Regarding the wreckage, witnesses purported it was made
of a sort of metal that could not be bent or burned and Ibeam fragments
contained strange, indecipherable hieroglyphics. Other material that resembled
thin aluminum foil would straighten iself out when crumbled into a ball,
some witnesses alleged.
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- Many of the witnesses who saw the debris or aliens said
they kept silent for years because military officials told them they would
be killed if they ever talked about it to anybody.
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- The story became so sensational that the U.S. Air Force
released two reports during the 1990s that attempted to debunk the claims.
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- The first report, "Fact Vs. Fiction in the New Mexico
Desert," was released in 1994 and explained that recovered in Roswell
in 1947 was debris from an Army Air Forces balloon that was part of a topsecret
project called Mogul.
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- Project Mogul used highaltitude balloons in an attempt
to spy on the Soviet Union's atomic bomb tests.
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- A 1997 Air Force report, "Case Closed," attempted
to dispel rumors of alien bodies by explaining witnesses to such events
actually had seen anthropomorphic dummies that were used in a special study
and dropped in the desert from highaltitudes.
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- "The object of these studies was to devise a method
to return a pilot or astronaut to earth by parachute, if forced to escape
at extreme altitudes," the report explained.
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- However, the Air Force concluded that all of the witnesses
to alien bodies were wrong about seeing them in 1947 because the dummies
weren't used until 1953.
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- "From 1953 to 1959, anthropomorphic dummies were
used by the U.S. Air Force ... as part of the high altitude aircraft escape
projects High Dive and Excelsior," the report stated.
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- Gerald Anderson, one of the witnesses to alien bodies,
was a young boy at the time of the 1947 incident and was on a family outing
in westcentral New Mexico when the group stumbled upon the wreckage of
a purported space vehicle.
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- "There was a large silver disc shaped object ...
embedded in the side of the ridge line," Anderson told Air Force officials.
"There was debris and wreckage strewn about the area, mainly this
thing was intact. When we got up to it there were four bodies there ...
not human."
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- Anderson said he at first thought the four crew members
were "plastic dolls" until he realized that one of them was moving
and alive.
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- "These creatures, all of them, were, oh, about four
foot tall, four and a half feet tall," Anderson told the Air Force.
"They had very large heads that were shaped larger on the top and
they kind of tapered down where they were thin."
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- Anderson said two of the creatures were dead, another
very badly injured and "one of them apparently suffered no ill effects."
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- "It didn't appear to be injured and was ambulatory."
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- Anderson said military personnel then showed up at the
site and ordered the civilians to leave immediately or face the consequences
" imprisonment or death.
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- The Air Force, however, assessed in its report that the
"crew members" Anderson saw were dummies.
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- "The statement 'I thought they were plastic dolls'
seems an odd choice of words to describe an extraterrestrial being and
is a likely reference to an anthropomorphic dummy whose skin was made of
plastic," the report concluded.
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- Friedman doesn't understand how the Air Force can construe
Anderson's choice of words "odd" in describing the extraterrestrial
beings, unless, of course, the Air Force knows for a fact that an extraterrestrial
being doesn't look like a plastic doll.
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- As for reports witnesses were threatened, the Air Force
asserted these claims as "profoundly inaccurate."
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- "Threats, intimidation, or other types of misconduct
by Balloon Branch personnel would have served no purpose since without
the cooperation of local persons, many (dummy) recoveries would not have
been possible," the report concluded.
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- The Air Force also maintains that the crashed large,
discshaped spacecraft witnesses allege the aliens were apparently ejected
from was actually a suspension rack that carried a payload of anthropomorphic
dummies.
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- Friedman said he and other UFO proponents agree that
the U.S. government must think people are dummies if they expect the public
to believe the Air Force report demystifies the events that occurred in
Roswell in 1947.
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- If anything, the report only serves to further corroborate
the UFO reality because the Air Force explanations for witness accounts
of alien bodies, extraterrestrial spacecraft and alleged military intimidation
are "ridiculous," he said.
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- Friedman offers five reasons why the government continues
to cover up any knowledge of UFOs.
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- >From a government's viewpoint, what is most important
about flying saucers is the technology ... the first country to duplicate
the ability of flying saucers to move at very high speed and very slowly,
to make right angle turns at very high speed, to move up and down vertically,
usually with little noise or exhaust or visible external engines, will
rule the planet ... Fiftyfive years is a very, very short time to try to
learn the technological secrets of a civilization (or civilizations) that
might be thousands or millions of years ahead of us, especially since technological
progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way.
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- Governments must be concerned about the possibility of
"the other guy" ... figuring out how (flying saucers) work before
we do ... we certainly don't want them to know we know they know.
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- The third problem for governments is political ... church
attendance would increase as would mental hospital admissions. The stock
market would go down. The biggest reactions ... would be a push from the
younger generation ... for a new view of ourselves as Earthlings instead
of as Americans, Canadians, Peruvians, Chinese, etc. Friedman "knows
of no government that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance
to the planet instead of that government."
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- Certain Christian fundamentalists have strongly expressed
the view that mankind represents the only intelligent beings in the universe
and that this flying saucer stuff is the work of the devil ... they would
be up the creek without a religious paddle should an announcement be made.
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- Economic chaos likely would result if an announcement
were made that the earth is being visited by intelligent life from other
planets, Friedman explained. "We earthlings don't seem to be very
good at large scale economic transitions," he said.
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- The Hawk Eye 800 S. Main St., Burlington Iowa 52601 319-754-8461
Front Desk 319-754-6824 FAX 800-397-1708
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