An astounding forty million Americans say they have seen a UFO.12 Assuming respondents defined UFO as spaceship, that's a lot of people who are seeing what they think are alien visitors. But if extraterrestrials really are constantly buzzing around above all these witnesses, then where are all the high-quality photos and HD video of them? Think about the age we now live in. Who doesn't have a cell phone with a camera in it these days? Have you been to Disney World or a kid's birthday party lately? Virtually everyone is armed with a camera of some kind. We can add to these hundreds of millions of potential UFO photographers and videographers the hundreds of satellites and UAVs (unmanned drones) that are constantly monitoring and photographing the Earth. Shouldn't they be able to detect or capture images of all these low-flying spaceships that are supposed to be here? Finally, astronomer Andrew Fraknoi asks why the tens of thousands of amateur astronomers around the world who look up every night are not the ones who are responsible for the majority of UFO claims. He suspects the reason for this is because they almost always know what they are looking at. They, for example, are unlikely to mistake Venus or a meteor shower for spaceships.13
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute points out that not only is the case for even one extraterrestrial visit unproven, but there is also nothing to show for all these decades of research and attention.
“Despite the fact that about one-third of the populace believes that aliens are visiting our planet, we've really learned nothing from that,” he explained. “If the aliens are really here—which I strongly doubt—there's been precious little effect on us. But space exploration has revealed countless new, fabulously interesting facts. As a simple example: Until the 1970s, the moons of Jupiter were just bright points of light in our telescopes. Now we know them in detail and have reason to think that some of them could be habitable. The same could be said of the Saturnian system, and of course Mars. Space exploration does lots more than merely fuel conspiracy theories and provide us with tales of strange lights in the sky.”14
Since UFO sightings seem largely culture driven—why aren't unidentified flying objects assumed to be high-flying harpies or dragons?—I'll make a prediction. For the last five or six decades, virtually all UFO sightings have suggested large vehicles with roughly human-sized aliens aboard. Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being utilized increasingly by the US military and CIA around the world. Other countries such as Great Britain, Israel, and Russia are investing in UAVs too. Now the US military is adding insect-sized UAVs to conduct surveillance, and who knows what else, to their robotic fleet. Some are pure machines while others are living insects turned into obedient cyborgs. As the popular culture eventually becomes aware of these new technologies in the coming years, I predict we will begin to see new waves of UFO reports that describe extremely small extraterrestrial vehicles with tiny aliens aboard. Wait and see.
GO DEEPER…
Bennett, Jeffrey. Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Its Astonishing Implications for Our Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York: Crown, 2010.
Darling, David. Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Macknik, Stephen, and Susana Martinez-Conde. Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.
Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997.
Sheaffer, Robert. UFO Sightings: The Evidence. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.
Shostak, Seth. Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009.
Webb, Stephen. If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens…Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. New York: Springer, 2010.
Other Sources
Bad UFO (blog), http://badufos.blogspot.com/.
Roswell is the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim. It's far past time for UFOlogists to admit it and move on.
—B. D. Gildenberg, Project Mogul participant
It is one of the most important events in all of history. Technologically advanced extraterrestrials traveled some vast unknown distance to reach our planet in the summer of 1947. Tragically, however, the spacecraft crashed, killing the entire crew. The cause of the disaster remains a mystery. Perhaps a collision with a flock of birds doomed them, or maybe the alien crew made the mistake of opening a window and then lost control after being infected by Earth germs, a la H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Whatever the reason, their journey ended tragically in a lonely field near the small town of Roswell, New Mexico.
Some witnesses say there were multiple crash sites, indicating that more than one spaceship went down. A rancher discovered strange metallic debris, providing hard evidence of at least one downed space vehicle. The US military was quick to recover the wreckage and a few alien bodies as well. Initially, the army said it had “captured a flying disc,” and this was reported by the local newspaper.1 Afraid that an unhinged public would panic and riot in the streets if people learned what had happened in New Mexico, the government made the decision to execute a cover-up and initiate a strict policy of denial that continues to this day.
OK, SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
The Roswell crash is a great story. Much as I would love to believe it, however, I can't. The story is just not good enough because there are very sensible, credible, and more believable alternative explanations for what happened. When one learns the real story of the 1947 incident and the way in which the Roswell myth was rehashed years later and then nurtured by the media and a town that likes tourism dollars, it becomes clear that if there's one place we can be sure aliens did not crash in 1947, it would be Roswell, New Mexico. After all, no other location on Earth has been as scrutinized and analyzed—without uncovering any evidence—as Roswell has been by UFO believers, UFO skeptics, military investigators, and journalists.
Something did happen near Roswell in the summer of 1947. A strange object really did fall from the sky, and the US military really did lie about what it was. Unfortunately for space enthusiasts like me, flying saucers and aliens had nothing to do with it. In the late 1940s, the US military was concerned about the Soviet Union becoming the second nation to have nuclear weapons. It was just two years after World War II and the Cold War was already under way. In the days before spy satellites, the Army Air Force (the US Air Force did not yet exist as a separate branch) established Project Mogul, a top-secret program to develop ways of monitoring Soviet nuclear bomb tests. Project Mogul used high-altitude balloons to carry electronic listening devices that were designed to detect the sound of distant explosions. An aboveground nuclear blast is so loud that researchers believed they could pick up the sound waves at high altitudes even halfway around the world.
According to Project Mogul participant B. D. Gildenberg, the work was extremely sensitive. It was so secretive, in fact, that many of the people involved didn't even know the name of project until many years later.2 It was not declassified until 1972. The concern was that if the Soviets learned about what was going on, they would move their testing underground and make detection even more difficult.
The official explanation Project Mogul researchers gave to anyone who asked what they were up to was simply, “weather balloon research.” But these were much more than basic weather balloons. For some flights, several very large high-altitude balloons were joined together with cords to form a “flight train” that could be as long as six hundred feet. And then there was the equipment hanging beneath the balloons, including spiked silver-foil-covered reflectors that enabled the balloons to be tracked
by radar. Gildenberg says these elaborate balloon trains were the cause of many UFO sightings in the region during the project's run.3
Project Mogul was active in multiple locations. One place where balloon trains were launched was Alamogordo Army Air Base in New Mexico—just one hundred miles west-southwest of Roswell. Gildenberg is certain that the famed Roswell wreckage was nothing more than the remains of a Project Mogul radar reflector. When rancher Mack Brazel found the debris scattered across the ground on June 14, 1947, he initially ignored it. Several days later, however, the modern UFO craze took flight when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot flying over Oregon and Washington State, reported seeing unusual objects that came to be known as “flying saucers.” Soon after Arnold's story was published in newspapers nationwide, UFO sightings began pouring in across America. Gildenberg believes Brazel heard about these sightings after driving into town on July 5, nearly three weeks after he had found the wreckage. He then reevaluated the debris he had initially thought was unimportant and told the Roswell sheriff about it. The sheriff reported it to Roswell Army Air Field, a base that had nothing to do with Project Mogul and knew nothing about it.4 Then somebody at Roswell Air Base gave the gift that keeps on giving to UFO believers everywhere. An overly enthusiastic press officer at the base issued a press release stating that recent rumors of “flying discs” had become reality and the Roswell Army Airfield had recovered one. The next edition of the Roswell Daily Record carried a front-page story with the headline: RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER IN ROSWELL REGION. At this point, it's worth pointing out that “flying saucer” did not automatically mean “extraterrestrial spaceship” to everyone in 1947. Furthermore, Kenneth Arnold, the private pilot who made the famous “flying saucer” sighting several days before the Roswell “incident” never said he saw a flying saucer or disc. He said he saw flying objects that were shaped like large boomerangs. The press incorrectly reported his description, however, so what should have been the beginning of the “flying boomerang” craze became instead the “flying saucer” craze.
In the meantime, Major Jesse Marcel flew the material recovered from Brazel's ranch to Fort Worth Army Air Base. Once there, it was immediately identified by people who knew what it was. Photographs were taken of the material, and the press was told it was from a weather balloon. The media reported this to everyone's satisfaction. End of story—or it should have been.
It has to be emphasized that there was nothing exotic or mysterious about the debris. It consisted of balsa wood, thin aluminum foillike material, and rubber—hardly the stuff of interstellar flight. If it really was wreckage from a spaceship, it means that the aliens are smarter than we could ever imagine because they would have traveled across the galaxy in something similar to a child's kite.
“The Roswell debris was simply and obviously a radar reflector from a balloon,” states Gildenberg. “Once available, this official explanation was accepted as self-evident. All one had to do was look at the photo to be convinced.”5 And that was it; the Roswell crash story was dead. By the way, notice that there was no mention by anyone at the time of alien bodies being carried away from the crash site, no alien autopsies, no multiple crashes, nothing said about strange metal, and so on. All those claims came later, much later.
In fairness, conspiracy theorists are technically correct about the military covering up the truth and lying when they said the wreckage was from a “weather balloon.” Clearly it was not. It was wreckage from a “spy balloon.” Most people probably will agree, however, that this was not an evil or significant lie, certainly understandable during the early days of the Cold War.
A MYTH IS BORN
The big “flying saucer crash” of 1947 was exciting for about twenty-four hours. Then Americans moved on and forgot about it. But sometimes you just can't keep a good story down. The Roswell legend roared back with a vengeance thirty years later and doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. Energized by decades of UFO sightings, science fiction books, TV shows and films, and some very questionable journalism, the story has become deeply entrenched in pop culture. Today Roswell, New Mexico, has a museum, bus tours to the “crash site,” and even an annual festival dedicated to the 1947 non-event. The “crash” is often mentioned on TV and in films.
How did a spaceship crash that never happened become part of America's unofficial history? How did this happen? It certainly wasn't due to new and compelling evidence that emerged after 1947, that's for sure. The Roswell story returned from the dead because a few people made the decision to “reopen the case” and start asking people what they remembered. In 1978, UFO believer Stanton Friedman interviewed the major who recovered the material, Jesse Marcel. The National Enquirer also interviewed Marcel, who now added new information to his story, claiming that the debris was unusual and couldn't be burned, for example. Charles Berlitz, the same guy who wrote books about the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, coauthored a popular book about the Roswell crash.6 This time the story was too hot, and too profitable, to flame out. The timing was convenient as well. In the late 1970s, the festering wounds of Watergate and the Vietnam War left many Americans well primed to believe that their government was lying to them about hoarding the wreckage in a secret facility somewhere. All this new attention led to more witnesses coming forward with increasingly astonishing claims.
In the 1980s, the Roswell story grew to include the recovery and autopsy of alien bodies. This is particularly interesting since nothing had been said about this by anyone back in 1947. Why now, after so many years, did people remember alien bodies? It would seem that witnesses were either lying or really did see military personnel recover dead aliens from the crash site. But there is a third possibility, one that makes a lot of sense.
In the 1950s, the US Air Force conducted more unusual balloon projects in the region. Some of these involved dropping equipment, test dummies in silver suits, and even a real live human from high altitudes. The test dummies in particular—falling from the sky and then being picked up and carried away by military personnel—likely played a role in feeding the Roswell myth.
MY INTERVIEW WITH A ROSWELL ALIEN
In 2001, I interviewed Joe Kittinger, one of the great aviation pioneers of the last century. He had a remarkable career as a test pilot, fighter pilot, and balloonist. Kittinger was first to solo across the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon, and he performed a successful parachute jump from the upper edge of the atmosphere in 1960. That spectacular leap from a balloon at 102,800 feet (nineteen miles) still stands as the highest parachute jump ever. Kittinger broke six hundred miles per hour during a free fall that lasted more than four minutes. In total, it took nearly fourteen minutes for him to reach the ground. With so much adventure and history to talk about, I was reluctant to even bring up Roswell during the interview. I eventually did, however, because I had heard that he may have inadvertently contributed to the myth by being mistaken for an alien. I sensed in his voice a bit of frustration over the subject but, to his credit, he seemed eager to clear the air.
“It never happened,” Kittinger said. “There was a very top secret army project that was designed to detect when the Russians detonated a nuclear weapon. They sent a balloon aloft with a very long antenna array, almost five hundred feet long. It had very exoticlooking equipment on it. The balloon landed on a ranch near Roswell. The so-called alien spaceship was that balloon. It's turned into a cottage industry, and it put Roswell on the map. A lot of people want to believe it was aliens, and they want to believe there was a big cover-up. But I'll tell you, it never happened.”7
Kittinger, it turns out, was the closest thing to a real alien back then, having plunged to Earth from the edge of space himself. He is certain that high-altitude balloons and those test dummies inspired the Roswell myth.
“Absolutely they did. These dummies that we dropped from balloons were dressed in pressure suits, so they looked unusual. One time we dropped one and it fell way up in the mountains. These dummies weighed more than two hundred fift
y pounds. So how do you carry one out of the mountains? We put it on a stretcher and carried it to the back of an ambulance to take away. Now if somebody is back in the weeds watching this they are going to say, ‘Wow, look at that alien they have there.’ We think that a lot of the alien sightings were actually us doing our work with the test dummies.”8
Project Mogul veteran Gildenberg also believes the dummies were behind the eyewitness accounts that came out decades after 1947: “Many aliens were described wearing flight suits identical in color and detailing to suits used on our dummies.”9 Additionally, the crash of a large KC-97 Stratotanker airplane in 1956 might have contributed to stories of alien bodies showing up at the Roswell Army Hospital. That accident killed eleven men. Their badly burned and disfigured bodies were recovered and taken to the hospital, where they may have been seen by future “Roswell witnesses.” This possible explanation for some of the alien body sightings is detailed in the US Air Force's official study on it, “The Roswell Report: Case Closed,” published in the 1990s.10 Kittinger strongly endorses the report as the final answer to this myth. “Anyone who has any doubts about what happened at Roswell should read it,” he said of the official Air Force report. “When you get to the end of it, you won't have any doubts. Anyone who is interested in the truth and the real facts should read that report.”11
I know what you are thinking. The dates don't add up. There is an obvious problem with the timeline when the supposed crash happened a number of years before the military was using test dummies in that area and the KC-97 crashed. Assuming the witnesses are being honest, how could they remember seeing things in 1947 that actually took place in the 1950s or 1960s? By being human, that's how. Don't forget how memory works! The human mind doesn't file away archival footage of everything we see and hear, in correct order, and then wait for us to request a perfect playback. Our memories are constructed. This means they are edited, embellished, and shuffled around. And because memories are associative as well, details that were not part of the original event as it really happened often get tossed in. Connections our brains “think” make sense are made in an effort to give us coherent and useful memories. It may seem like we are being constantly lied to by our own brains, but they don't do all this to fool or harm us. They do it because we don't need to remember every detail about everything. It would be inefficient to spend time and energy trying to recall everything, so the brain does its best to give us what it thinks we need. This is why it would not be so unusual or unexpected for someone to blend a 1947 memory with the memory of something they saw, read, or imagined they saw, years later.
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