The UFO
Phenomena
Almost every civilization
that has kept a written history has recorded the
sighting of strange objects and lights in the skies.
Today, unexplained aerial phenomena are generally
referred to as unidentified flying objects or flying
saucers. Though there has been much skepticism about
whether such objects are merely the product of our
imagination or in actuality a physical existing
entity, the question still holds; are we alone in the
universe? The great UFO wave that has swept the
American nation during the 1940’s has left many to
question the existence of alien life forms in our vast
universe; from mere sightings or indistinct evidence
exemplified in this paper the reader may perhaps
decide for them selves the answer to this age-old
question.
What is a UFO one may
ask? Well it is an abbreviation for unidentified
flying object. Many people associate the term with
mysterious objects seen in the sky that have no
similarity to what is regularly seen. The twentieth
century did not invent them; rather it inherited an
age-old preoccupation of mankind with strange sights
in the sky, and a rich legacy of observations
preserved in writing as long as historical writings
have existed. Human ideas about the nature of these
sights have changed over the centuries and a history
of these ideas divides into three distinct eras. The
modern view associates aerial mysteries with machinery
of advanced design, a notion that set in during the
late nineteenth century with the appearance of
unidentified airship sightings and continued into this
century with mysterious aircraft, foo fighters, ghost
rockets, flying saucers, and UFOs. Mechanical wonders
have increased and in large part replaced the idea of
anomalous natural phenomena that took hold in the
eighteenth century and dominated the nineteenth. In
naturalistic terms anything mysterious in the sky had
to be peculiar meteors, auroras, or electrical
discharges, freak manifestations of astronomy or the
atmosphere.
The UFO phenomena burst
into the world scene in 1940, the United States was in
the midst of a World War not to mention tensions with
the Soviet Union and there was much government
paranoia. The United States government has records of
thousands of UFO sightings, including photos of
alleged UFOs and interviews with people who claim to
have seen them. Since UFOs were considered a potential
security risk, the report on these sightings was
originally classified as secret. Most of the sightings
turned out to be celestial objects, such as stars or
bright planets like Venus, or atmospheric events such
as auroras or meteors falling through the atmosphere.
Many other sightings turned out to be such objects as
weather balloons, satellites, aircraft lights, or
formations of birds. Often these sightings were
accompanied by unusual weather conditions. However on
July 4th 1947 something unusual crashed in New Mexico
that would later be known as the greatest find in
history. Not only were there witnesses that seemed to
tell a consistent story. There was evidence of unusual
debris and witness of non-humanoid
beings.
Though most government
officials deny that the crash was extraterrestrial by
producing claims that what crashed in New Mexico was a
weather balloon, many still believe that something
unearthly crashed in the fields of that night of July.
4th 1947. The Roswell Incident continues to be of
interest to many researchers and UFO fanatics eager to
discover the truth. Government concealment seems to
provoke an increase in public interest in the UFO
phenomena, which questions the relationship between
the government and the people. If indeed the
government is keeping information from the public then
the concern is should the government be trusted. On
the other hand it may be for security reasons with
intentions to protect the public for what the future
may hold, and we must not rule out the fact that the
government may not even have the slightest clue in
what they are dealing with.
Before there were UFO’s,
there were remarkable meteors and mystery airships,
foo fighters, and ghost rockets. Strange unidentified
objects in the sky can be traced as far back in
history as one is willing to explore. According to
Stanton Friedman drawing’s interpreted, as someone’s
idea of spaceships and spacemen have been found on the
walls of European caves dating back tens and thousands
of years. (Friedman, Crash At Corona, p.1)
Unfortunately the credibility of clues older than a
few centuries ago is hard to believe. “The original
references are too vague and the witnesses are long
since dead, so all the remains are amusing tales and
the intriguing link between ancient unknowns and their
modern counterparts.” (Friedman, Crash At Corona,
p.1). Even scriptures as old as the Bible contain many
references to mysteries from the sky, such as the
"pillar of fire" that led the Israelites through the
wilderness, the Star of Bethlehem, and the following
from the book of Ezekiel:
Ezekiel
4:1-4:
“As I looked, behold, a
stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud,
with brightness round about it, and fire flashing
forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as if
it were gleaming bronze.”
Few pre-1800 aerial
phenomena reports resemble modern UFOs, and few offer
any genuine strangeness. Our ancestors recorded odd
sights, but their descriptions confirm only the
constancy of human interest in aerial mysteries, not
evidence that aliens have flown over the earthly skies
for hundreds or thousands of years. We cannot at this
late date declare with certainty that people in our
distant past witnessed the same UFO phenomenon we know
today.
While there were
occasional UFO reports in the earlier decade of the
1800’s, the modern UFO phenomenon emerges clearly in
the late 1890’s. In the United States between late
1896 and the spring of 1897 objects, dubbed “
airships”, generally ruled the skies. These brilliant
nocturnal lights often compared to as an arc light
moving through the sky at a notable speed, had swept
across America in the latter part of the 1800’s.
Rumors of airships go back to the California Gold Rush
in 1848. As news of the gold discovered at Sutter's
Mill spread across the country, people rushed to get
to California to stake a claim. Transportation from
"Back East" to the west coast was slow, mostly horses
and wagons. The transcontinental railroad wouldn't be
completed for twenty more years. There was no Panama
Canal yet, so sailing involved going around South
America. Anyone who could have come up with a quick
method of transport would have made a fortune. One
company, "R. Porter & Co," of New York City,
advertised something that they could not deliver, an
airship. In the latter part of 1840s the company
distributed an advertising flyer in the eastern United
States that read "THE BEST ROUTE TO THE CALIFORNIA
GOLD!". The company said it hoped to begin making
flights from New York to California around April 1,
1849, and that the round trip would take only seven
days. However it would be over thirty years before the
first practical, steer-able airship was invented in
Europe, and commercial airship travel would not begin
until the turn of the century, and it wasn’t until
1904 that Roy Knabenshue would test the first American
airship.
“The Great wave started
in California but by March 1897 it had moved eastward
into Nebraska and by the next month had swept over
much of the Midwest and south. Early on the evening of
November 17, according to the next days Sacramento
Evening Bee, a light resembling an ‘electric arc lamp
propelled by some mysterious force’ passed over the
city and was seen by hundreds of persons as it
traveled at low altitude and, as if intelligently
controlled, took evasive action as it approached
buildings and hills.” (Clark, The UFO Book, p.28).
Some observers claimed to have gotten a good look at
the object and to have heard voices. If the records
are to be believed, there were nearly a hundred
sightings of airships in the United States in
1896-1897, most of them in the mid west. In at least
three of these sightings, the occupants are described
as a young woman, a young man, and an older man with a
long beard. They supposedly survived on pigeons, which
they netted from the deck of the airship, and
occasionally landed for water and a change in diet.
This was later proved to be a huge publicity stunt.
The climax of these sightings seems to have occurred
in, “Apr. 17, 1897.Aurora, TX: An airship supposedly
crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill and disgorged
the mangled body of a little man believed, for
unspecified reasons, to hail from the planet Mars.
This turned out to be a publicity stunt for the town,
whose population and economy were on the decline.”
(www.foia.af.mil).
Even though the media
coverage was typically more of ridicule, or outright
exaggeration, hardly a newspaper in the country failed
to take note of airship sightings. These mysterious
aircrafts continued to be spotted all over the world,
and were frequently reported on for decades afterwards
and even up till present day. However except for those
who directly experienced them, memories faded quickly
and each sighting was treated as a distinct event
unrelated to any larger phenomenon. Were the Great
Airship sightings real? Well if one plots all of the
reported sightings on a map by date and location, one
will find that either most of them must have been
hoaxes, or else there must have been not one, but a
dozen or so airships flying around the U.S. in 1897.
The sightings are widely regarded as having been
invented and propagated by imaginative newspaper
writers throughout the mid west region of the
U.S.
It wasn’t until the age
of mechanical flight, with the voyages of the Wright
brothers in 1903 could reports of aerial oddities be
judged in the light of a rapid advancing technology.
It wasn’t until around this time and age that any
aerial phenomena would attract serious attention. The
first writer to collect UFO reports from a wide range
of sources and locations and to see them in broad
context was the American Charles Fort. He was the
author of what is arguably the
First UFO book, The Book
of the Damned (1919). Two other Fort books include New
Lands (1923) and Lo! (1931), which also chronicled
early UFO reports. Charles Fort died in 1932 leaving
the UFO scene with catalogs of mysterious phenomena
reports for the latter generations to
unravel.
Airship sightings were
just the beginning of what was to come in the
following years. In
1939 World War II began;
bombs, missiles, and warplanes were now appearing in
the skies. There were many advances in technology by
the 1940’s. Radio waves were heard from Mars, the
radio telescope was invented, the sound barrier was
broken, and the parabolic dish antenna was invented.
In the 1930’s similar waves of mystery airplanes
failed to conform to known activity reported from both
the United States and Europe, and it wasn’t until the
latter part of World War II that the press and the
government would began to gear their attention towards
another similar phenomena known as foo fighters. These
sightings gained much popularity in early 1944 and the
late 1950’s, but were mainly disregarded once World
War II was over.
The name “ Foo Fighters,”
originated from a cartoon character named Smokey
Stover who used to say, " Where there's foo, there's
fire, " somebody called them Foo Fighters, and the
name stuck. These odd balls of light or shiny metal
that would fly circles around U.S. pilot planes used
to follow ships at sea during World War II sometimes
even playing ‘tag’ with the vehicles. As Sergeant
Stephen J. Brickner, U.S. Marine Corps could remember,
the objects seemed to "wobble" slightly as they flew
over at a speed that was "a little faster than Jap
planes." He also stated that their appearance was of
highly polished silver that shimmered brightly in the
sun. (Clarke, The UFO Book, p.230).
In the midst of World War
II the Allies suspected that the foo fighters were
devices built by the Axis powers, and the Axis powers
held the opposite view. In reality, though, no one
knew what the mysterious odd balls of light were.
Hitler thought they were a U.S. secret weapon, and set
up an organization to study them. The British thought
they were German and allegedly set up a group called
the "Massey Project" to study them. The United States
8th Army even scrutinized them, but once it was
determined that the foo fighters were not of German or
Japanese origin the studies were dropped. Various
explanations were given for Foo Fighters. The official
explanation was that they were the effect of magnetic
fields created across the wings of aircraft. But why
none of these effects are present on modern aircraft
and why the objects were not always observed in
contact with the wings and were often seen far away
from aircraft has never been explained. Later in 1953
The Robertson Panel, a CIA- sponsored meeting,
reviewed air force UFO data. The panel concluded that
foo fighters were believed to be electrostatic or
electromagnetic phenomena or possibly light
reflections from ice crystals in the air, but their
exact cause or nature was never
defined.
Even stranger phenomena
were ghost rockets. If foo fighters were unexplainable
try the ghost rockets that appeared in the skies after
WWII. In 1946 Scandinavian countries reported over
2,000 unidentified flying objects over their airspace.
These objects usually looked like rockets with fiery
exhausts, and they sometimes performed unusual
maneuvers as they passed overhead. At first they were
thought to be captured German V-2 missiles that were
being tested by the Russians, but British radar
experts said they did not come from the U.S.S.R.
Oddly, the objects appeared over some of the southern
European countries also, such as Greece, where an
official investigation was conducted in 1947. The
leader of that investigation, Professor Paul
Santorini, revealed in 1967 that their investigation
showed that the objects were not missiles. He also
said that before they could precede any further, the
army ordered the investigation stopped. Even today,
fifty years later, official files on the ghost rockets
are still classified documents.
“The UFO phenomena burst
onto the world scene in the wake of a sighting made
over the Cascade Mountains on June 24, 1947, when
private pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine shiny discs
moving in formation at a speed of more than 1200 mph.”
(Craft, The UFO Book, p.xi). Kenneth Arnold was a US
Marshall and a member of the Sheriff's "aerial posse”
of Ada County, Idaho who would sometimes fly prisoners
to the Federal Penitentiary. On June 24, 1947, he was
returning home from a business trip when he made a
detour into the Yakima, Washington area to help in an
aerial search for a missing C-46 Marine transport
plane that was believed to have gone down in the area.
At around 3:00 in the afternoon, he was flying at
about 9,000 feet, near Mount Rainier, when a flash of
light caught his eye. He turned and saw a procession
of nine very strange objects flying from north to
south in front of his plane. “ They were flat discs,
like pie tins, very shiny, and they moved erratically,
like a ‘saucer would if you skipped it across water.’
Arnold estimated their size at about two-thirds that
of a DC-4, and he calculated their speed at over 1500
mph by timing their travel between two mountain peaks
of known distance.” (Clark. The UFO Book, p.61). This
inspired an anonymous headline writer to coin the
phrase “flying saucer.” The term “ unidentified flying
objects” did not come into popular usage until the mid
1950’s.When Arnold arrived at Yakima, Washington, he
told several other pilots about his sighting who
believed it was some type of military "secret weapon".
Arnold would later be stunned to find that the U.S.
military was as mystified by the objects as he himself
was. In Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold went to make a
report to the FBI, but the local office was closed, so
he talked to the editor of the East Oregonian
newspaper and it was the editor who put the story in
the media. Because of Arnold's background and
reliability as a witness, the story got wide
circulation. More sightings immediately followed it,
in the Pacific North west and
elsewhere.
Regardless of strange
aerial phenomena in 1939, just before the start of
World War II, German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz
Strassman discovered nuclear fission in 1938. It was a
process in which atoms of a heavy element, such as
uranium, are bombarded with neutrons until they split
into fragments of approximately equal mass, producing
more neutrons in the process.
Immigrant scientists
living in the United States feared that Germany might
be able to use nuclear fission to build a weapon of
incredible power. The result is a chain reaction that
releases tremendous amounts of energy. Albert Einstein
wrote to United States President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, urging him to set up an American program on
nuclear fission. The goal was to design a weapon of
mass destruction, the atomic bomb, before German
physicists were able to do so. With a meager 6,000
dollars, the project was started in 1940. In December
1941 the project was put under the direction of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed
by Vannevar Bush. The War Department was given partial
responsibility for the work in 1942, and called it the
Manhattan Project. More than 100,000 people were
working on it at the height of its activity in early
1945. Research progressed during the war, and a
successful test of an atomic bomb using plutonium was
held on July 16, 1945, in the desert 120 miles (193
kilometers) south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Nuclear
fission testing was just a start in the many nuclear
trials to occur in New Mexico, and in 1947 government
tested missiles or airships were not the only objects
seen to crash, but perhaps the most famous
controversial UFO crash in history to take place was
The Roswell Incident in Corona, New
Mexico.
“Ordinarily we do not
draw a distinction between experiences and events. We
human beings tend to think that either thing happens
or they don’t, and if they happen, they happen in the
world. If someone sees something that is not an image
from a dream or a hallucination or a misperception,
that thing so we assume implicitly-exists in the
world. Certainly, where UFOs are concerned, an object
that shows up on radar or leaves anomalous traces on
the ground where it was seen to land may be assumed to
exist in the world. Cases like these comprise the core
of the evidence for the proposition that UFOs are both
physical and extraordinary.” (Clark, The UFO Book.
p.xiv).
From time to time in
1947, some people in various parts of the United
States and some other countries reported seeing
strange objects in the sky and claimed that they were
spacecraft piloted by space aliens. In the midst of
this "flying saucer" craze, some unusual material fell
to the ground on or about July 4 near Roswell, N.M.
What really happened? Who knows? Why the government
would want to cover it up? No one seems to know for
sure. There are many sides to the Roswell story. There
are so many unanswered questions. But what seems to be
certain is that something crashed that night. What it
may be is still questioned. Something strange occurred
that night and there are witnesses that claimed to
have seen it. One would have to decide between the
truth and what is just a mere fabrication simply based
on the stories that were told about the night
“something” crashed on the barren fields of New
Mexico.
The story begins when two
innocent people stumble upon what is known as the
greatest find of the millennium. The account was taken
out of Stanton Friedman’s Crash at Corona pages 72-79:
William W. "Mac" Brazel was a stereotypical cowboy,
although he actually tended sheep, he was foreman of
the Foster Ranch in rural Lincoln County near Corona,
New Mexico. On the evening of either July 2 or July 4
(the various sources disagree) there was a severe
thunderstorm in the area with lots of lightning. But
this time there was a “different sort of sound among
the booming thunderclaps.” The next morning, July 3 or
5, Mac rode out as usual to check on his sheep and to
"ride the fences". A seven-year-old neighbor boy,
William D. "Dee" Proctor, accompanied him. Riding
south of the ranch headquarters, they suddenly came
upon an area about a quarter of a mile long and
several hundred feet wide that was strewn with debris,
shiny bits and pieces unlike anything Mac had ever
seen. Mac picked up some of the material and carried
it with him back to the ranch headquarters, where he
put it in a shed.
Bessie Brazel Schreiber
(Mac's daughter):
"There were what appeared
to be pieces of heavily waxed paper and a sort of
aluminum-like foil. Some of these pieces had something
like numbers and lettering on them, but there were no
words you were able to make out. Some of the
metal-foil pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them,
and when these were held to the light they showed what
looked like pastel flowers or designs. Even though the
stuff looked like tape it could not be peeled off or
removed at all…. [The writing] looked like numbers
mostly ... They were written out like you would write
numbers in columns to do an addition problem. But they
didn't look like the numbers we use at all. What gave
me the idea they were numbers, I guess, was the way
they were all ranged out in columns… No, it was
definitely not a balloon. We had seen weather balloons
quite a lot - both on the ground and in the air. We
had even found a couple of Japanese-style balloons
that had come down in the area once. We had also
picked up a couple of those thin rubber weather
balloons with instrument packages. This was nothing
like that. I have never seen anything resembling this
sort of thing before - or since..." (Friedman, Crash
At Corona, p.72).
Later that day, Mac put a
small piece of the debris in his pocket when he drove
Dee Proctor to his home about ten miles away from the
ranch headquarters. He showed the debris to Dee's
parents, William and Loretta Proctor, and tried to get
them to go back and look at the debris field with
him.
Loretta
Proctor:
"The piece he brought
looked like a kind of tan, light-brown plastic...it
was very lightweight, like balsa wood. It wasn't a
large piece, maybe about four inches long, maybe just
larger than a pencil… We cut on it with a knife and
would hold a match on it, and it wouldn't burn. We
knew it wasn't wood. It was smooth like plastic; it
didn't have real sharp corners, kind of like a dowel
stick. Kind of dark tan. It didn't have any
grain...just smooth…we should have gone [to look at
the debris field], but gas and tires were expensive
then. We had our own chores, and it would have been
twenty miles."
The next night, Mac went
into Corona, where he told his uncle, Hollis Wilson,
about the debris. Wilson and another man who was
present told Mac about the "flying saucers" that were
being reported around the area and advised him to
report his find to the authorities. So, on July 6,
when Mac was going into Roswell to see about trading
for a new pick-up truck, he took some of the debris
with him and stopped off at the office of Chaves
County Sheriff George Wilcox. At first, Wilcox paid
little attention, but when Mac showed him a piece of
the debris, he realized that this might be important,
so he called Roswell Army Air Field and spoke to Major
Jesse A. Marcel, the base intelligence officer.
Meanwhile, Frank Joyce of radio station KGFL either
called Wilcox looking for news, or Mac called him.
Sources differ on this point, but since Mac was hardly
the type to seek publicity, it's less likely that he
called KGFL. Either way, Joyce interviewed Mac over
the phone. Marcel arrived at the Sheriff's office,
questioned Mac, and was shown the debris. Then Marcel
went back to the base to make his report. He reported
to Colonel William H. Blanchard, the base commander,
and they decided that Marcel should go out to the site
and investigate further. Marcel took his Buick, and an
Army Counter Intelligence Corps officer named Sheridan
Cavitt drove a Jeep carry-all, and they followed
Brazel back to the ranch. Frank Joyce of KGFL had told
his boss, Walt Whitmore Sr. about Brazel's find, and
Whitmore drove out to the ranch and picked up Mac.
Whitmore took him to his own home in Roswell, where
Mac spent the night. There, on a wire recorder,
Whitmore recorded an interview with Mac that would
never be aired.
The next morning,
Whitmore took Mac down to KGFL and called the base.
The military came out and picked Brazel up and carried
him back to the base, where Mac was kept under guard
in the "guest house" for several days. On July 8, Mac
was escorted by the military to the offices of the
Roswell Daily Record, where he gave a press interview.
The story he told them was a bit different from what
he had told before, however. Now he said that he and
his son had originally discovered the debris on June
14, but that he was in such a hurry that he ignored
it. Then, on July 4, he and his wife and two of his
children rode out to the site and picked up some of
the debris, which consisted of smoky gray rubber
strips, tinfoil, heavy paper, and some small sticks.
He said that he had twice before found weather
balloons on the ranch but that this material in no way
resembled what he had found before. He went in and
began telling Frank Joyce the same story he had told
at the Record. Joyce interrupted him and asked why he
was telling a different story than he had told
earlier. He later said that Mac became agitated and
said, "It'll go hard on me." At the end of the
interview, Brazel went back out to where his military
escort was waiting, and they took him back to the
base. When he was finally released by the military,
Brazel refused to say anything other than that he had
found a weather balloon. He privately complained of
his treatment by the military, whom he said wouldn't
even let him call his wife. He told his children that
he had taken an oath not to talk about the
incident.
On July 8, 1947, 4 days
after the crash evidence was found, the government had
to give an explanation of the military build-up in the
area and report the findings. Base Commander Colonel
William Blanchard was head of one of the investigative
teams in Roswell. He summoned William Haut, a 509th
Public Relations officer, to write up and send out a
press release to the Roswell Daily Record and many
other local and state media teams. Before the
materials could be sent anywhere, Brigadier General
Roger Ramey of the 8th Air Force intercepted the
hauling and ordered the supplies back to Roswell
pending further explanation. After Ramey looked over
the debris again, he claimed that it was nothing more
than a busted weather balloon. With expert advice and
counsel from a prominent weathercaster, Warrant
Officer Irving Newton, Ramey concluded that the
material was remnants of a high-altitude weather
balloon. He claimed that the sticks and tin foil like
debris mirrored that of the reflectors used to track
the balloons.
News traveled fast, and
eventually the press discovered the find and all of a
sudden the quiet western town, whose main claim to
fame is it’s the home of the first A-bomb carrying
509th bomb group, was instantly transformed into the
center of something. Everyone wanted to know about the
momentous event, and was curious to find out about the
crashed wreckage. However the announcement from
general Ramey killed the story. At this time, Major
Jesse A. Marcel, an Intelligence Officer present at
the debris sight, came forward to refute the claims
made by Ramey and his expert
consultant.
Marcel had been a highly
skilled aerial cartographer before the U.S. entered
World War II, and after Pearl Harbor, the Army had
sent him to intelligence training. At the end of the
war, he was chosen to become part of the 509th Bomb
Wing, and as such handled security for the 1946
atom-bomb tests called "Operation Crossroads". He was
awarded a commendation for this work. Marcel’s story
was similar to Brazel’s, however it is just from a
different perspective. Major Jesse
Marcel:
" When we arrived at the
crash site, it was amazing to see the vast amount of
area it covered.... it scattered over an area of about
three quarters of a mile long, I would say, and fairly
wide, several hundred feet wide…It was definitely not
a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of
plane or missile…I don't know what it was, but it
certainly wasn't anything built by us and it most
certainly wasn't any weather balloon.... small beams
about three eighths or a half inch square with some
sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could
decipher. These looked something like balsa wood, and
were about the same weight, except that they were not
wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible,
and would not burn at all. There was a great deal of
an unusual parchment-like substance, which was brown
in color and extremely strong, and great number of
small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it
wasn't tinfoil. I was interested in electronics and
kept looking for something that resembled instruments
or electronic equipment, but I didn't find anything
...Cavitt, I think, found a black, metallic-looking
box several inches square. As there was no apparent
way to open this, and since it didn't appear to be an
instrument package of any sort, we threw it in with
the rest of the stuff … it had little numbers with
symbols that we had to call hieroglyphics because I
could not understand them. They were pink and purple.
They looked like they were painted on. I even took my
cigarette lighter and tried to burn the material we
found that resembled parchment and balsa, but it would
not burn - wouldn't even smoke.... the pieces of metal
that we brought back were so thin, just like the
tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes...you could not tear
or cut it either. We even tried making a dent in it
with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, and there was still
no dent in it.” (Friedman, Crash At Corona,
p.74).
When Marcel got back to
the base, Colonel Blanchard ordered him to load the
debris on a B-29 and fly with it to Wright Field in
Ohio, stopping at Carswell AAFB in Fort Worth, Texas
on the way. Marcel did so, but as soon as he landed at
Carswell, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, Commander of
the 8th Air Force, took over. The debris was taken to
Ramey's office and spread out on brown paper. Marcel
said later that one photo was taken of him with the
real debris, then Ramey took him into another room,
and when he came back, a weather balloon had been
substituted for the debris. A weather officer, Warrant
Officer Irving Newton, was brought in, and he
immediately identified the material he saw as a
weather balloon and a Rawin radar target. A Rawin
radar target was a reflector made of metal foil and
balsa wood sticks that was attached to a weather
balloon so that it could be tracked on radar. Ramey
announced to the press that the "flying saucer" was
only a weather balloon. After more photographs with
the weather balloon, Ramey ordered Marcel back to
Roswell with a strong hint to keep quiet about the
incident. When he was interviewed in 1978, he
maintained that the debris he found on the Foster
ranch was definitely NOT a weather balloon. He
insisted that it was like nothing he had ever seen.
Was the debris found by Mac Brazel just part of a
craft that got struck by lightning or collided with
something? Did the main part of the craft crash
somewhere else, and were there aliens aboard? Was
there a second crash site? The stories that there was
a second crash site are what keeps the Roswell story
going.
At about the same time
one hundred and fifty miles west of Corona, NM
something even stranger happened. In 1978, after a
lecture in Bemidji, Minnesota, Vern and Jean Maltais
first told Stanton Friedman, that in February, 1950,
an engineer friend of theirs named Grady "Barney"
Barnett told them that he had been working out in the
field near Magdalena, New Mexico on July 3, 1947 when
he came upon a crashed disc-shaped object with dead,
non-human bodies both inside and outside the craft,
that was some kind of metallic instrument of some sort
- a kind of disc. It seemed to been made of stainless
steel. The machine had been split open by explosion or
impact. These were not Barnett’s actual words for he
died in 1969 before anyone in the UFO community had
become aware of his involvement in the New Mexico
crashes. But a diary kept by Barnett's wife was later
recovered that stated that Barney Barnett was not on
the Plains of San Agustin on July 3,
1947.
The San Agustin story was
given new life when a man named Gerald Anderson came
forward after television's Unsolved Mysteries telecast
a segment about Roswell in January of 1990. Anderson
claimed he and his family had been hunting rocks on
the Plains of San Agustin in early July 1947, when
they came upon a crashed UFO with four alien bodies
inside. Although Gerald was only six years old at the
time, he told of vivid memories of the scene,
including the presence of an archaeologist named Dr.
Buskirk and five of his students. What these civilians
saw were what appeared to be an unknown craft with
non-human bodies inside and outside the craft. Around
a dozen people were swarming to see the wreckage. When
the U.S Army arrived everything had changed. Charges
have been made that Anderson made up the whole story,
but a polygraph examination was taken of Anderson that
proved there was no evidence of deception from
Anderson and that he had an outstanding
memory.
Meanwhile on July 4th
1947, Jims Ragsdale and Trudy True Love were driving
north from Roswell, NM. “ Lightning crashed and
thunder boomed, and the wind was blowing at thirty or
forty miles per hour, it whipped across the desert
where dust and dirt filled the air. Rain came briefly,
roaring for a moment, hiding everything, and then
evaporating in minutes. About 11:30 PM, brightness
flashed as an object roared overhead… It was a flaring
bright light, blue-gray like that from an arc welder.
At first he thought that it was a lightning strike not
far from him, but then he saw the object as it roared
over the campsite. Seconds later it slammed into the
ground about a mile or so from the camp.” (Randle, The
Truth About the UFO Crash in Roswell,
p.3).
At around the same time
several other witnesses believed they have seen
something in the sky. South of Roswell, William Woody
was watching the night sky with his father when he
spotted a white light with red streaks in it. It
glowed brilliantly and, unlike the many meteors he had
seen in the past, took a long time to fall. In Roswell
proper at Saint Mary’s Hospital, Franciscan Catholic
nuns Mother superior Mary Bernadette and Sister
Capistrano making routine night observations, saw a
brilliant light plunge to earth, due north of their
location, they recorded it’s passage in their logbook.
Fifteen miles southwest of the base, Corporal E. L.
Pyles, on a detached facility, looked up to see what
he thought was a shooting star, but larger. It moved
across the sky and then arced downward. There seemed
to be an orange glow around it, a halo near the
front.
Civilians weren’t the
only ones who knew something strange was happening.
Military officials had been tracking on their radars
an unidentified flying object in flight over southern
New Mexico since July 1st. The object had appeared
over the highly restricted areas near the White Sands
Proving Ground about one hundred miles from Roswell.
On July 2, Steve MacKenzie, stationed at the Roswell
Army Air Field, had received a call from Brigadier
General Martin F. Scanlon of the Air defense Command,
ordering him to report to the radar sites at White
Sands. MacKenzie was to monitor the objects movement
and report them directly to the general. Nothing
changed for the whole time MacKenzie was in
surveillance. However that evening the situation
changed drastically. “ The object as seen on the radar
seemed to pulsate, blip growing larger and brightening
before shrinking to its original size and dimming.
This activity kept up for a short period of time and
then the object blossomed into a sunburst and
disappeared from the screen at about 11:20 PM.”
(Randle, The Truth About the UFO crash at Roswell,
p.5). The next day the Army was going to search the
area to see what exactly crashed.
The number of people
involved in the recovery of the wreckage and the
bodies, and the subsequent elimination of clues to the
crashes, was growing rapidly. Once the materials got
back to the military facilities that had been
hurriedly prepared to deal with this extraordinary
challenge, more people joined the inner circle, and
the job of security became more even more
complex.
So many people have
testified to the presence in New Mexico of very
strange substances from the wreckage of the two
crashes. The fact that the bodies of as many as eight
small humanoid aliens accompanied the wreckage is
another matter. “ Few people have described, in
limited but highly consistent detail, their awareness
or even direct observation of miniature,
out-of-proportion bodies at the crash site and
elsewhere. The evidence for them is increasingly
impressive, but perhaps not yet completely
convincing.” (Friedman, Crash At Corona,
p.114).
In 1994 the Air Force
admitted that the recovered material was in reality
from a United States spy balloon. Part of Project
Mogul, it was an attempt to monitor anticipated
nuclear tests by the Soviet Union. In 1997 an Air
Force report ventured the opinion that stories of
alien bodies may have come from civilian witnesses who
saw parachute crash test dummies, a severely injured
airman parachutist, and charred bodies from an
airplane crash during the 1950s. However, according to
Stanton in an interview, “One of the silliest official
USAF stories is the crash test dummy nonsense…
Remember that the dummies had to be the same height
and weight as air force pilots. None were dropped
anywhere near the two crash sites and none were
dropped earlier than 6 years after the 1947
events,”
Still other Roswell
hoaxes included the notorious "MJ-12 documents" of
1984, which purported to show a secret operation was
launched by President Truman to handle the Roswell
incident; a bogus alien autopsy film of 1995
purporting to show the dissection of an alien corpse,
which in an interview Stanton Friedman stated was just
for higher ratings and in the words of Peter Robbins “
It is an expensive fabrication...”(Robbins Interview);
a fake Roswell UFO fragment delivered to a UFO museum
in 1996; and so on. Such sensational hoaxes helped to
make the term "Roswell incident" almost universally
familiar to the point that it has achieved the status
of myth.
The Roswell case has been
extensively researched by Stanton Friedman and
independently by the team of Kevin Randle and Don
Schmitt. Between them they have discovered around 200
witnesses who claim to have been involved in the
recovery of the Roswell material. Researcher John Keel
has suggested that the Roswell material might be the
remains of a Japanese Feugo balloon, a balloon with a
bomb attached launched towards the USA during World
War II. These were still being discovered in remote
parts of the USA in the late 1940s. Keel’s theory
gained little credibility with the masses in part
because he had no documentation, eyewitnesses, or
proof of his accusations and the American fear of
vulnerability. In 1994 at the request of US Senator
Steven Schiff the General Audit Office started an
inquiry into the incident and subsequent cover-up. The
GAO required the US Air Force to reopen the enquiry.
After a nine-month study the Air Force announced that
the Roswell object had not been a weather balloon but
a balloon involved in a top-secret project to study
Soviet missile launches. Many UFO investigators remain
unconvinced by this explanation.
The question still holds,
why the government cover-up? “ Flying saucers finish
the job Copernicus started in taking man out of the
middle of the universe. Priests fought Copernicus's
ideas. Today guys in lab coats, rather than priestly
robes, fight alien visitations…”
(Stanton Friedman
Interview). For days, weeks and years after the
supposed sighting and crash of an unidentified flying
object in the barren fields of the New Mexico desert,
the United States government and the UFO intrigued
community have been on opposite ends of a bitter
battle to once and for all expose the truth of the
Roswell Incident.
The decade of the 1940s
was in the middle of an era of heightened Communists
threats as well as increased military build up and
technological advancements. The need to ensure
national security and protect the American citizens
was of top priority. After the finding of the
unidentifiable debris in the New Mexico desert, the
government took control in order to determine the
origins of the matter, its supposed purpose or
usefulness, and most importantly, its possible
potential to harm the United States as a military or
biological threat. Engaged in World War II and
immediately followed up by the Cold War conflict, the
United States was in no position to take the abandoned
debris lightly or overlook any possible explanations
of its identity. The United States government, trying
to conceal allegations of extraterrestrial involvement
and ensure national security, created a series of
false explanations for the supposed Roswell incident
over the course of fifty years. The crash, which
occurred in 1947, followed a famous 1938 radio
broadcast entitled the “War of the Worlds.” This
infamous program is notorious for the mayhem and panic
its fictionalized report of alien life forms instilled
in the American public. The fictional story carried
reports of inhumane violence and brutality against the
American people. Reports from local police agencies in
areas that heard the broadcast informed officials of
the overwhelming amount of frantic calls from fearful
listeners. Some reports even maintained that people
committed suicide in order to escape the possible
annihilation from the extraterrestrial visitors
(Balthaser Interview). Not wanting to repeat the same
hysteria with real possible evidence of a UFO, the
government maintained the need for
secrecy.
Similarly, the United
States had just ended World War II and was on the
brink of joining the arms race with the Soviet Union,
better known as the Cold War. Before analysis of the
debris had taken place, the government was very
speculative as to the inherent nature of the finding.
Always fearful of foreign attack, the government
speculated that the debris was remnants of an
experimental Soviet weapon that reached the United
States mainland. Lastly, in the absence of any other
concrete information implying enemy weaponry, the
government had to speculate the possibility of an
extraterrestrial craft. In order to prevent the
hysteria that followed the radiobroadcast and ensure
American invulnerability, the government created a
series of supposed excuses to try to explain to the
American public mundane reason for the mysterious
Roswell UFO crash.
Now since the government
was faced with objects that seemed to be unexplainable
to the human intelligence, the government became more
involved in the “flying saucer” craze. The Army Air
Force was, in one form or another, involved in
investigating UFOs beginning with the 8th Army's
investigation of foo fighter reports during World War
II. The AAF also sent intelligence officers to
investigate many of the early sightings, but did not
take them very seriously. In the late summer of 1947,
when the Air Force had become an independent branch of
the military, Air Intelligence at the Pentagon
requested a report from Air Materiel Command regarding
what was known about "flying disks". The Commander of
the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson, Lt.
General Nathan F. Twining, held a conference with
persons from the Air Institute of Technology,
Intelligence T-2, the Office of Chief Engineering
Division, and the Aircraft, Power Plant, and Propeller
Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3. As a result
of this conference, on September 23, 1947, Twining
sent a secret memorandum to Brig. General George
Schulgen, Chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements
Division that concluded: “the phenomenon reported is
something real and not fictitious…it is recommended
that …Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning
priority, security classification and Code Name for
detailed study of this matter.” (Clark, The UFO Book,
p.489). By this time, U.S. intelligence had completed
its analysis of German projects that were in existence
during the War, and had found nothing that could
account for UFO sightings, even with post-war
continued development in the Soviet Union. On December
30, 1947, Major General L. C. Craigie, Director of
Research and Development, issued an order establishing
Project Sign. Project Sign, decided to make a formal
Estimate of the Situation. The Estimate was a
top-secret document that contained unexplained
sightings by pilots, scientists, and other reliable
witnesses. The report concluded that UFOs were of
extraterrestrial origin. Air Force Chief of Staff
General Hoyt S. Vandenburg promptly rejected the
Estimate of the Situation. It is said that he deleted
the strongest parts of the original report, sent it
back, and then, when he received the revised report,
he rejected it on the grounds that there was not
enough evidence to support the conclusions. Then,
after rejecting it, he ordered all copies destroyed.
Those inside Project Sign said that their morale and
enthusiasm for the project declined sharply after
this. Decidedly skeptical towards the extraterrestrial
origin hypothesis for the origin of UFOs, reflecting a
shift towards explaining all sightings as
misidentifications of natural phenomena, Project Sign
would soon have its name fittingly changed to Project
Grudge. The new name reflected the change in policy
towards UFOs.
This change in policy by
the Air Force brought with it a campaign of
characterizing those who believed UFOs were
extraterrestrial as insane. Now the project was
becoming less active and it was “recommended that the
investigation and study be reduced down to
scope.”
(Clark. The UFO
Book.p.487). The Air Force was now closing down the
Project putting the files into storage. Project
Grudge, however, while "officially" closed, was still
functioning at a reduced level. This reduced level
consisted of a private investigator, Lt. Jerry
Cummings. He left the Air Force in 1951, then him and
an Air Force intelligence officer Captain Edward
Ruppelt, was appointed to take over the project, which
was renamed Project Bluebook. Captain Edward Ruppelt
took the task seriously and completely reorganized the
project. He established means for speeding the receipt
of reports, established liaisons with other agencies,
systematized reporting procedures, and obtained the
services of a scientific consultant in the person of
astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
The "Flap of 1952" was a
huge increase in sightings peaking in July with
massive sightings both visual and on radar over
Washington, D.C. These sightings were so numerous that
they became known as the Washington Nationals. Even
the CIA became concerned, so much so that they ordered
the Office of Scientific Intelligence to review the
data collected by Bluebook and the Air Technical
Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson AFB and to
make recommendations based on their findings. The OSI
review of the existing data resulted in a
recommendation, predictably, that the phenomena
required more study. The main concern of the CIA was
not that UFOs were a direct threat to the U.S., but
that they were an indirect one. During this period,
the peak of the Cold war, the fear was that the many
UFO sighting reports might conceal a very real threat
from the Soviet Union. So, the CIA asked a Cal-Tech
physicist, Dr. H.P. Robertson, to assemble a panel of
respected scientists to study the UFO phenomenon.
These included Dr. Samuel A Goudsmit, a nuclear
physicist with the Brookhaven National Laboratories,
geophysicist Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, radar &
electronics expert Dr. Luis Alvarez of the University
of California, and Johns Hopkins University astronomer
Dr. Thornton L. Page. Astronomer and Project Bluebook
consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Frederick C. Durant,
president of the International Astronautical
Foundation, were associate members of the panel. This
distinguished panel, which would become known as the
Robertson Panel, spent four days, reviewing the
existing evidence. At the end of this time, they
issued a report, known as the Durant Report which
merely restated that UFOs were not a direct threat to
U.S. security, but which reiterated the fears of the
CIA that the Soviets might somehow use the phenomenon
to mask an invasions of the United States: Further,
the Panel recommended a policy of debunking UFO
sightings in order to suppress the growing public
preoccupation with the phenomenon. By the mid-1950’s
the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, following
recommendations laid down by the CIA-sponsored
scientific committee (known as the Robertson panel,
after its head, physicist H. P. Robertson), had become
no more than a debunking exercise. It conducted little
real investigation even as it rendered regular
negative judgments on the UFO reports that came to its
attention. Many who took a skeptical view of the
official pronouncements suspected that the Air force
was covering up big UFO secrets, and from 1957 onward
the Washington-based National Investigations Committee
on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) led by the author. Retired
Marine Corps major, and proponent Donald E. Keyhoe,
pushed vigorously for congressional hearings and
challenged the Air Force at every point. The end of
Project Bluebook was heard in April 1966, when the
House Armed Services Committee recommended that the
Air Force contract with a University for a scientific
study of UFOs.
On October 7, 1966, the
Air Force announced that a program to study UFOs would
be conducted by the University of Colorado and headed
by Dr. Edward Condon. “In reality, the Condon
Committee, as it was called, had one task, and that
was to provide a reason for the Air Force to end its
official investigation of UFOs.” The report
essentially is a collection of case histories and
special reports by members of Dr. Condon's staff and
investigators working under contract with the
University of Colorado.
Meanwhile, speculation of
UFO’s became a national craze, with popular opinion
divided between those who dismissed the phenomenon as
a hoax or hallucinations and those who saw it as
enormous potential significance. Most were saucer fan
clubs, but some were actually disciplined and
intellectually serious, and capable of the
sophisticated investigation and analysis. Some even
claimed they communicated with aliens in different
realms, etc. Cults and such were devoted to UFO’s
especially. In January 1969 The Condon Committee
formal report “ opened it’s introduction which
declared that no further investigations of UFO’s were
justified; those who read past the introduction found
that a third of the cases reviewed in the text
remained unexplained…” (Clark, The UFO Book. p.xiii)
As Project Blue book was closing down, public interest
also plummeted.
But it wasn’t long until
another UFO wave emerged in America. Periods of
intense sightings of activity were reported between
1964-1973. Daylight discs and radar/visual cases would
fade into the background as ufologists turned their
attention to experiential claims of strangeness. For a
growing number of UFO students, extraterrestrial
theories no longer enough, and parapsychological, and
often occult, approaches shoved aside speculations
about spaceships. Many “new ufologists” sought to link
themselves with ghosts, poltergeist, etc. The
abduction phenomenon rose to prominence, largely
thought the writings and investigations of Bud
Hopkins, and played an ever-larger role in discussions
about the nature and the meaning of the UFO
phenomenon.
Approaching a new decade
the public became less interested in the debris of
crashed space ships or relying on sightings to tell
them that there are UFO’s amongst us. The focus
shifted on the aliens themselves. People started to
report alien abductions. UFO’s were not sighted just
in the skies. Now they were visiting earth to take
humans back to their spaceship to perform some
experiments of their own. Stories of close encounters,
where victims were said to be taken abroad an alien
spacecraft are called abductions. These abduction
victims often experience memory loss and "missing
time.” Some of them have been able to recall their
abductions from memory and others have recalled their
abductions by the aid of hypnosis. Often these
encounters involve being taken aboard an alien craft
and examined by the aliens and put through a variety
of physical and mental procedures. Then the
individuals are returned. Many of the abduction
victims have shown signs of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder.
The controversy was
transformed in many ways from a debate about aerial
phenomena into one about experiences at ground level.
Close encounters dominated the UFO-reporting of the
period as much as daylight discs and nocturnal lights
had defined the previous 15 to 20 years. The
strangeness of these claims seemed to escalate. The
distinction between a hoaxers tall tale and a
frightened witness’ sincere testimony blurs when the
content of one is barely outlandish than the other.
Both shameless liars and earnest souls told of
meetings, sometimes with extended communication, with
alien humanoids. Some even claimed to have sexual
experiences with extraterrestrials.
Yet as the investigations
grew more sophisticated, both ufologist and the
scientists working on their own or with professional
organizations uncovered new evidence for a physical
dimension to the UFO phenomenon. In the late 1970’s
several American ufologists reopened the long-closed
question of the “crash/retrievals,” once disparaged as
tall tales of “ little men in pickle jars.” Veteran
ufologist Leonard H. Stringfield led the way,
collecting and compiling anecdotes from sources of
varying or indeterminate credibility. But in the new
climate two ufologists, Stanton T. Friedman and
William Moore, were encouraged to start the long,
complicated probe of the now famous Roswell incident.
The effort would stretch all the way long into the
1990’s and involve other investigators. They would
find that nearly most official records of the event
are missing, are presumed missing. Despite the
setbacks many investigators and researchers are still
persistent in seeking out the truth about
extraterrestrial beings in our
presence.
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This section is known as
the Interview Section. Interviews were conducted with
three different people who are known specialist and
very knowledgeable to the topic pertaining to this
report. They were given different sets of questions in
which referred to their background of research. These
were not only lecturers, but also authors and
researchers some even worked for the government.
Nevertheless, all three were presumed experts in the
UFO phenomena.
The First Interview was
conducted with Mr. Peter Robbins. He is a researcher,
investigator, writer, lecturer, and best selling
author and currently is an Executive Assistant to Budd
Hopkins’ Intruders Foundation. He also serves as head
of the UFO media Group of Central Park Media
Corporation and is Editor-In-Chief of the website
UFOcity.com. Mr. Robbins has lectured on the subject
of UFO’s in the United States, the United Kingdom and
in Europe. He has also been a guest and consultant on
many TV and radio shows. These include: “ Unsolved
Mysteries”, “ Current Affair,” “Good Day New York,”
and many more.
The Second Interview was
conducted with Stanton T. Friedman. He worked for 14
years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as GE,
GM, Westinghouse; TRW, Aero jet General Nucleonics,
and McDonnell Douglas on such advanced, highly
classified, eventually canceled projects as nuclear
aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, nuclear power
plants for space. Since 1967, he has lectured on the
topic ' "Flying Saucers ARE Real" at more than 600
colleges and over 100 professional groups in 50
states, 9 Provinces, England, Italy, Germany, Holland,
France, Finland, Brazil, Australia, Korea, Mexico,
Turkey, Argentina, and Israel. He has published more
than 70 papers on UFOs besides his dozens of,
conventional articles, and appeared on hundreds of
radio and TV shows. These include the TNT Larry King
UFO Special on Oct.1, 1994, Nightline, Sally Jessie
Raphael, Unsolved Mysteries, Entertainment Tonight,
Leeza, and many more. He is the original civilian
investigator of the Roswell Incident, co-authored
Crash at Corona, instigated the Unsolved Mysteries
Roswell program, and is known as “ The Father of
Roswell.” Mr. Stanton Friedman has provided testimony
to Congressional Hearings, appeared twice at the
United Nations, and pioneered many aspects of
Ufology.
The final interview was
conducted with Dennis Balthaser. He served 3 years
('59-62) with the United States Army in the 815th
Engineering Battalion. After some 33 years in Civil
Engineering, Dennis retired from the Texas Department
of Transportation in 1996. Having been keenly
interested in the Roswell Incident of 1947, Mr. Dennis
Balthaser decided to move to Roswell, New Mexico.
Initially he worked as an Engineering Consultant in
Roswell, volunteering his time at the International
UFO Museum and Research Center on weekends. Nine
months later he resigned from the engineering firm,
assuming the duties of IUFOMRC Operations Manager,
served on the Board of Directors and became the UFO
Investigator for the Museum, as a full time volunteer.
He began his own investigations, providing the public
with some of the most informative lectures ever
presented at the museum. Currently, he is no longer
affiliated with the Museum; he is able to devote his
full time as an independent
researcher/investigator
to the Roswell Incident, Area 51 and underground bases
research, and frequently lectures on these and other
topics, related to ufology.
The three interviews were
obtained through request in email and telephone. Since
Mr. Stanton Friedman and Dennis Balthaser did not
reside in New York it was difficult to obtain a
face-to-face interview. However Mr. Peter Robbins did
reside in New York but was much occupied with his work
and that interview was also conducted through the
telephone, which resulted in paraphrasing a lot of
what the three had to say. In obtaining the interviews
the three were glad to assist a student and were very
cooperative in answering the questions. The
information provided from the interviews was very
helpful to the project.
Name: Peter Robbins
Interview # 1
Gender: Male Location:
(Phone interview)
Age: Late thirties
Time/Date: 12/18/00
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Length: 5:30 PM to 6:00 PM
Educational
Background:
BFA in painting and Film
history from Manhattans School of visual Arts where he
taught for 14 years, and has worked as theater manager
and assistant director for New York’s Repertory
Company between 1982 and 1988.
Occupation: Heads the UFO
Media Group of Central Park Media
Q: Why did you become
interested in this field of study?
A: According to Peter
when he was a teenager growing up in Long Island him
and his sister experienced a UFO sighting. It was on a
clear day and they were outside in the yard when they
saw five silvery disc shaped objects. When asked how
he differentiated that it was a UFO, he replied, “ It
was almost like an ellipse…moving at a high rate of
speed.” From then on he pondered if we were alone in
the Universe. The sighting was an experience he could
never forget.
Q: How does the
Government censor the media regarding the UFO
phenomena?
A: According to Peter the
media censors itself and the government downplays the
media. Since 1947 when the start of the UFO era became
publicly known pranks, hallucinations, and newspapers
still were usually covered by the government. “ The
Media does a very good job…the government policies are
hidden and dealt with in a discrete manner, …” replied
Peter.
Q: Why do you think the
government would want to keep an incident such as
Roswell a secret?
A: According to Peter the
crash could be of top-secret advances from unknown.
America is one of the largest super powers in the
world and here the government is faced with unknown
technical advances and beings. “ It would be of
embarrassment to our country who believes that we are
the only intelligent life form… It may cause great
concern if there were others out there…” replied
Peter. In addition it may be better kept to prevent
public panic and in history it has been proven that
national political events can affect the economy
causing a stock market crash.
Q: How do you think the
society would react if UFO’s existed?
A: According to Peter,
most intelligent people will acknowledge that we are
not alone in the vast universe. Scientists, and even
religion say that man is the most advanced being. “ It
would be quite threatening, …” replied Peter. In a
Bible passage of Ezekiel there were suggestions of a
supernatural nature. Religious people may think that
this opens the question of the Bible. Countries that
believe in more then one god and reincarnation; ones
that are more esoteric in belief would possibly adjust
more easily then the western word or religions with
one god. As for scientist, there would be much
research done to better understand the
extraterrestrial life forms.
Q: In what truth do you
find the alien autopsy video?
A: According to Peter he
was invited to a private screening of the film in 1997
in England around the time of the 50th anniversary of
the Roswell incident. “ It is an expensive
fabrication...” replied Peter, and an outright hoax.
When asked if he was a skeptic then if he felt so
strongly about the video being a hoax he replied, “
All great researchers should be skeptical… because not
everything your hear or see is the
truth.”
Q: What do you believe is
the greatest UFO myth?
A: According to Peter,
the greatest UFO myth was that nothing
extraterrestrial crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. “ The
revelation that the bodies found in the crash were
just test dummies is nonsense, …” replied Peter. The
evidence doesn’t match-up. The crash at Roswell
according to Peter was something that was definitely
not from this planet.
Name: Stanton T. Friedman
Interview # 2
Gender: Male Location:
(Phone Interview)
Age: 66 Date/Time:
12/18/00
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Length: 6:15 PM to 7:15 PM
Educational
Background:
Valedictorian of his
1951, Linden, NJ, high school class, and spent 2 years
at Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ, before switching
to the University of Chicago in 1953. He received BS
and MS degrees in Physics from UC in 1955 and
1956.
Occupation: Former
nuclear physicists and now independent
researcher.
Q: Why did you become
interested in this field of study?
A: According to Stanton
he was a man who liked to see the facts on paper. As a
nuclear physicist at the time he would be interested
in reading sci-fi novels, and became especially
interested in UFO’s. The book that affected him the
most was Project Blue Book: Special Report 14. “ I’m a
man of facts … the book had so many documents never
before seen… it was an eye-opener…”
From then on he wanted to
learn the truth about UFO’s.
Q: How does the
government censor the media regarding the UFO
phenomena?
A: According to Stanton
the media does it’s own censoring. It is however
important. He refers to the government cover up as a,
“Cosmic Watergate.” meaning that some few people in
major governments have known since July 1947, when two
crashed saucers and several alien bodies were
recovered in New Mexico. The evidence is overwhelming
speaking from a forty-two year scientific study of the
topic. According to Stanton many major media people
will concede that if indeed aliens are visiting earth,
that would be a major story. But because they take
great pride in their knowledge of major stories, if
this were happening they would know about it. But they
don't. Therefore, anybody who says visits are real
must be a crackpot
Q: Why do you think the
government would want to keep an incident such as
Roswell a secret?
A: “ I prove at every
lecture that the NSA and CIA are withholding UFO data.
Having worked under security for 14 years, visited 17
document archives, … I know how easy it is to keep
secrets…” replied Stanton. The reason for all this is
ego, fear, and economic failures. “ Flying saucers
finish the job Copernicus started in taking man out of
the middle of the universe. Priests fought
Copernicus's ideas. Today guys in lab coats, rather
than priestly robes, fight alien visitations…” Many
fear ridicule and therefore would not take the
government seriously if the truth about aliens were
exposed. Naturally for security reasons as
well.
Q: How much truth is the
Air Forces revelation about the
incident?
A: According to Stanton
it isn’t true. The Air force wanted to cover-up the
incident and chose a time such as the 50th anniversary
to do so because they wanted to take attention of the
phenomenon. “One of the silliest official USAF stories
is the crash test dummy nonsense… Remember that the
dummies had to be the same height and weight as air
force pilots. None were dropped anywhere near the two
crash sites and none were dropped earlier than 6 years
after the 1947 events,” replied
Stanton.
Q: What do you believe is
the most solid evidence proving the incident in
Roswell was extraterrestrial?
A: According to Stanton
since he has been researching this topic for an ample
amount of time witnesses and the first hand accounts,
and of course the evidence of wreckage. When asked how
he would differentiate between a hoax and truth. He
replied there should be consistency in the evidence.
The consistency in the stories obtained in witness
accounts and the credibility of the witness. “ None of
the anti-UFO arguments stand up to careful scrutiny …”
so what other reason is there.
Q: In what truth do you
find the alien autopsy video?
A: According to Stanton
its phony! None of the evidence proved consistent and
was more for publicity then anything else. “ It was
mainly for the ratings…” he replied.
Q: If aliens do indeed
exist what would they want on Earth?
A: According to Stanton,
just as what we want to know about them; they want to
find out as much about us. When asked if aliens would
be a threat, Stanton replied, “It seems we are more of
a threat to them…” Even possibly we are a colony of
theirs and they have come to check up on us. Who
really knows, but so far it doesn’t seem they have
been a threat to our society.
Q: What do you believe is
the greatest UFO myth?
A: According to Stanton,
the greatest myth is that there is no evidence that
aliens exist or have not even visited earth.“ The
evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being
visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial
spacecraft … The greater the education, the MORE
likely to accept this proposition … In an Oxford
University Debate on the resolution ‘Planet Earth is
being visited by intelligent extraterrestrial life’,
the affirmative side, of which I was a part, garnered
60% of Debate Union Member votes on the question. 92%
of 100,000 people calling during a TV Debate in
London, said Earth has been visited by
aliens…”
Name: Dennis Balthaser
Interview # 3
Gender: Male Location:
(Email Interview)
Age: late 40’s Date/Time:
12/18/00
Ethnicity: Caucasian 9:00
PM
Educational Background:
Extensive civil engineering courses and a diploma in
Highway
Engineering.
Occupation: Civil
engineer and currently an independent UFO researcher
focusing on the Roswell Incident of 1947, Underground
Bases and Area 51
Q: Why did you become
interested in this field of study?
A: “My background is
civil engineering (3 years in the Army and 33 years
with the Texas Highway Department). I’ve been
interested in Ufology for 20-25 years after I bought
my first book " Revelations" by Jacques Valee, and I'd
lay in the back yard looking up into the sky wondering
what was out there. I moved to Roswell in 1996 to
pursue my interest and was the Operations Manager, UFO
Investigator and on the Board of Directors at the UFO
Museum from 96-98 before I went into research as an
independent investigator.”
Q: How does the
government censor the media regarding the UFO
phenomena?
A: “The government
censors the media by lying about what they know about
the subject and possibly controlling the media,
threatening people involved with the subject and
generally denying any knowledge about
UFOs.”
Q: Why do you think the
government would want to keep an incident such as
Roswell a secret?
A: “Several
reasons:
CONTROL---- they will not
admit to anything they can't control and if its been
going on as long
as we think they have no
way at the present time to do anything about it. Also
in case of Roswell, perhaps they are still trying to
figure out the technology involved if in fact they
have a captured craft from the Roswell Incident.
Remember if they can get here they are ions ahead of
us in intelligence and technology, as we can't go
there yet.”
Q: How do you think
society would react if UFO's existed?
A: “50 years ago a lot of
people would have panicked and in fact did. Orson
Wells’s radio show about Martians invading in the late
1930's caused several people to commit suicide. Things
were different then too. If you were told to shut up
for National Security you did it, because they
respected and trusted the government, unfortunately
today because of what are leaders do and say we have
less respect for them. Today people are more educated
and young people like you grew up with Star Wars,
X-Files, Star Trek, NASA, etc., and are more willing
to accept
the fact that we are not
alone in the universe.”
Q: If indeed they do
exist what would they want with Earth?
A: “Beats me as we have
nothing to offer. We can't get along with each other,
with our neighbors, or other countries and are
destroying the planet as fast as we can by destroying
the rain forest, ozone layer etc. I tell people at
lectures when they ask why don't they communicate with
us? why would they want to?”
Q: Do you believe UFO's
are a threat to our national security or our
society?
A: “ I have not seen
evidence that they are threat. They have had ample
time to take us out if that was their intention. I
think we should try to learn from them rather than
probably being hostile toward them.”
Q: In what truth do you
find the alien autopsy video?
A: “None. I think it was
a real woman with a genetic disorder. Santilli who
owns the film will not allow it to be analyzed. It may
have been a government film released and then debunked
as a fraud as part of their mis or disinformation
policy.”
Q: How would you
differentiate between a hoax and a true
sighting?
A: “A true sighting
should have multiple witnesses from different
locations not affiliated with each other with good
documentation. With computers and analyze available
today its easy to distort photographs. Witness
credibility also must be considered such as pilots,
law enforcement
officer and other
professional people.”
Q: What do you believe is
the greatest UFO myth?
A: “The Greatest myth
would be that we are alone in the universe and that
the military and government have no interest in UFOs.
Historical ufologists who have volumes about the
military involvement in UFOs over the years have
disproved the latter.”
So what happens now? The
future is undecided. Did an alien spacecraft really
crash in New Mexico that night of July 4th 1947? Maybe
one would have to decide for oneself. Hundreds of
theories that the United States government and many
crazed citizens have tried to compile just have not
seemed to be enough. Instead of admitting to the
possibility of alter life forms in the universe or on
American soil, the government has spent numerous years
trying to convince the American people that an
extraterrestrial did not land here in July 1947. The
truth to the Roswell Incident is still out there. But
as long as the United States government continues to
run the show, we may never know.
Some people don't agree
with the possibility that there might be extra
terrestrial intelligence or life. A very thorough
investigation carried out by a University of Colorado
group, supported by a panel of scientist from the
National Academy of Sciences, issued a lengthy report
in 1969 to the effect that virtually all UFO sightings
are due to natural phenomena-balloons, meteors,
reflections of light and so on-and that little could
be gained by investigating them further. There are
some who want very much to believe that extra
terrestrial life particularly the intelligent variety
is common throughout the universe; and there are those
who are committed to the view that extra terrestrial
life is impossible, or so rare as to have neither
practical nor philosophical interest.
As for the government
keeping secrets from the public, they have every right
to. However United States law provides public access
to federal government files. The foundation of the act
is the belief that the government is accountable for
its actions and that the public possesses a right to
obtain information about those actions. This act is
called The Freedom of Information Act, which went into
effect on July 4, 1967. FOIA provides that each
government agency publish descriptions of its
operations and procedures. Each agency must also make
available opinions, orders, and statements of policy
that affect the public. Any person or organization can
also obtain data from a government agency through a
FOIA request. Many people who are interested in the
UFO phenomena could obtain information from these
files. (http://www.foia.af.mil)
So are we alone in the
Universe? If we were then many of people who witnessed
sightings must have been lying. “ The evidence is
overwhelming that planet Earth is being visited by
intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft
…” (Friedman interview). However it’s obviously not
enough to prove to everyone that we are not alone. But
take this into consideration the size of the universe;
there are probably even planets or galaxies we have
not discovered yet. Maybe we should stop thinking in a
geocentric manner and open up to new
possibilities.
What if UFO’s do exist?
For most hard-working people, for whom life is already
demanding and challenging enough, the UFO problem may
seem peripheral to their life. After all, millions of
people slave away throughout the world trying to make
it through the day. One can hardly think that such
people would be much worse off worrying about an alien
invasion. However if they do exist humans may be able
to learn a lot from these extraterrestrial beings.
Contact with another civilization may provide us with
technological information, scientific information,
information about social systems, governmental
systems, and possibly even art forms and recreational
forms that would greatly enrich our own civilization.
The results if contact with a greater intelligence
than humans will undoubtedly lead us to new
discoveries, whether or not they are good or
bad.
