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Roswell solved

M

mothman8

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Feb 11, 2005
Messages
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I finally have solved the Roswell mystery. My theory ties up all the loose ends and once and for all proves what went on. It goes like this - nothing actually happened :lol:
 
mothman8 said:
I finally have solved the Roswell mystery. My theory ties up all the loose ends and once and for all proves what went on. It goes like this - nothing actually happened :lol:
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See but that is the least likely explanation of them all - we know something happened the debate is what ;)
 
mothman8 said:
I finally have solved the Roswell mystery. My theory ties up all the loose ends and once and for all proves what went on. It goes like this - nothing actually happened :lol:
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If nothing happened then why did it make news and why did it get covered up? ;)
 
Well, it's certainly as good as many of the theories about Roswell, but how are you going to sell it? You need to have sensation, conspiracy, drama, revelation...we want aliens, Nazis, weird science and preferably Elvis and JFK.

Stories survive because they're appealing. The story of the Loch Ness Floating Log never really grabbed the public's imagination, and the Quite Large Black Moggie of Bodmin didn't catch on either. So I think this one needs a makeover. How about a massive conspiracy to flog dodgy books about UFOs and aliens by people who ought to know better, aided and abetted by 'witnesses' looking for attention, fame or money?
 
Certainly as far as books on UFOs are concerned, Roswell never actually happened until Charles Berlitz (who had already successfully promoted the Bermuda Triangle and Philadelpia Experiment myths) wrote his 1980 best seller The Roswell Incident (although most of the actual research for the book was done by William Moore).

For example, I have a vintage copy of George Adamski and Desmond Leslie's 1953 opus Flying Saucers Have Landed. It contains not the briefest mention of Roswell, and the rather promising sounding chapter "One that Came Down" is actually devoted to the problematical Oscar Linke sighting.

Elsewhere in my library, Brad Steiger's excitable Flying Saucers are Hostile (1967) makes no mention of Roswell, although it does suggest that the authorites might be involved in a "conspiracy of silence". Ralph Blum's Beyond Earth (1974), despite repeatedly claiming that the military know far more about flying saucers than they admit to, makes only the briefest possible mention of the Roswell incident
In 1947, the ridicule level was high, and when the widely reported "capture" of a flying disk at a New Mexico air base turned out to be to be a "hasty misidentification" of crumpled tinfoil from a high-altitude weather device, the press rapidly lost interest in the phenomenon.
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Hilary Evans just missed the boat with his 1979 book UFOs: The Greatest Mystery. The chapter "Conspiracy?" makes no mention of Roswell, but does include the following intriguing fragment
Did Fritz Werner (link), on 21 May 1953, assist, as he swears on oath that he did, in the investigation of a crashed UFO at Kingman, Arizona, piloted by a small 4-foot creature in a silvery suit whose body Werner saw in a tent, also being examined by airforce officers?
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It's tempting to speculate that if Berlitz hadn't got a bee in his bonnet about Roswell 30 years after the actual event took place, it would have remained one of the smallest of footnotes in Ufology rather than one of the dominant issues.
 
And Berlitz has never been the most reliable of sources ;) One wonders how much of the mythology of Roswell was kick-started by Berlitz - his work on the Bermuda Triangle, for example, added more tall stories or spruious data to the mix than anything else.
 
there is a book which meantions a ufo crash landing around the late 1940's, but i can't for the life of me remember the title or author, it has been mentioned on this board before...
 
You're probably thinking of Frank Scully's 1950 publication Behind the Flying Saucers. There's a slightly convoluted story behind the book:
Scully, Frank
Columnist on the showbusiness magazine Variety who in 1950 published his best-selling Behind the Flying Saucers. A centerpiece of the book was Scully's claim that a spacecraft containing 16 dead aliens had been found on a plateau close to the small town of Aztec, New Mexico. According to his informants, "Texas oilman" Silas M. Newton and his colleague "Dr. Gee" (the latter a pseudonym for a "specialist in magnetism"), the bodies were in the custody of the US military along with two other crashed disks.

Newton and Dr. Gee (real name: Leo GeBauer) turned out to be convicted confidence tricksters who had embellished a story that had originated with a Hollywood actor named Mike Conrad. Around 1948, Conrad had hit upon the idea of making a movie about UFOs with a base in Alaska. To generate interest in the project, Conrad claimed that the film would include footage of genuine UFOs. He also hired a promoter to pose as an FBI agent to spread the story that the FBI had custody of this footage. Newton and GeBauer were unaware that Conrad's story was a hoax, while Scully knew nothing about Conrad's publicity ploy. Newton and GeBauer's motive for elaborating the tale was purely commercial. GeBauer had built a gadget that, he said, was based on technology found in the downed saucer and could detect oil and gold deposits.

Ironically, the FBI took an interest in the affair and, in due course, its chief, J. Edgar Hoover, received a memo on the subject. This document - a commentary on a piece of hearsay - was later often cited as proof that the U.S. government was holding saucer wreckage and alien corpses.
source
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The (fictional) Aztec crash story contains many elements which later pop up in the Roswell myth: a massive military cover-up, a crew of diminutive humanoids, and a craft constructed of an extremely lightweight yet strong material.

But for the mother of all UFO crashes, we have to go back to 1897 and the small town of Aurora, Texas. On April 19th, the local newspaper contained the following rather astonishing tale (which has since been proved beyond all reasonable doubt to be a journalist's whimsical hoax):
About 6 o’clock this morning, the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing around the country. It was traveling, due north, and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour, and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed over the public square and when it reached the north part of town, it collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went into pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden. The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.

Mr. T. J. Weems, the U. S. Army Signal Services officer at this place and an expert on astronomy gives it as his opinion that the pilot was an native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person… evidently the records of his travels… are written in some unknown hieroglyphics and cannot be deciphered. The ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion to its construction or its motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons. The town, today, is full of people who are viewing the wreckage and gathering specimens of strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place tomorrow”.
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Note, in particular, that both the "hieroglyphics" and the "unknown metal" of the Roswell myth are both present and correct.
 
I think this sort of discussion about Roswel is well over due. I think it is important for any UFO case to analyse how it first came to light because I believe most hoaxes and myths can be solved/exposed by this. It is wierd how no one took much interest in Roswell until about 30 years after it happened, I think thats a very important point. Has it really become so blown out of all proportion that it may never be finally settled?
 
I'd recommend that anyone who wants to explore the "UFOs as contemporary mythology" aspect should wander over to Magonia.
 
The story of Roswel can't be explained by saying that nothing happened, as there is the historical record of the News report describing the crash of a 'flying Disk' and the photos of (rather scanty) debris.

But it seems quite possible that all the subsequent accounts by witnesses are unreliable; they could easily be a mixture of poor recollection, suggestibility and outright fabrication.

The balloon theory seems very plausible; attempts to identify the exact balloon involved may never be successful, although many people suggest it was a Mogul balloon, there may have been other candidates in operation at the time. Can you imagine trying to identify a crashed balloon in the UK after nearly sixty years from historical records alone?

Unless there is a secret cache of Roswell records in the air force archives we may never know.

Of course if there really was an alien crash then all bets are off.
 
There are ultra-skeptics who maintain that absolutely nothing happened at Roswell, no spaceship, no balloons, nada, zip, zero.
http://roswellproof.homestead.com/Duran ... tique.html

And of course beyond them are the hyper-skeptics, who maintain that there probably is no town named Roswell in New Mexico, Roswell being a pretty dumb name for a town after all.

There are even rumours of hyper-ultra-skeptics, who allegedly maintain the position that the very idea of a New Mexico is absurd and redundant, what with the existing old Mexico being more than sufficient by itself.

:p
 
Roswell Conumdrum DIDN'T Start with Charles Berlitz in 1980!

The Roswell Crash (whether it actually took place or not) was front -page news in July, 1947, and I remember my late Dad (ex-Staff Sergeant, USAAF) talking the events (real or imagined) over with friends and neighbors in my Northern Kentucky (Greater Cincinnati, Ohio) hometown.

And the first issues of FATE magazine (1948) were chock-full of Roswell coverage and already claiming "cover-up."

Sincerely,

George Wagner
[email protected]
[email protected]
 
But if the Roswell crash and 'cover up' had been taken seriously at time, surely someone like Donald Keyhoe or Gray Barker or Morris Jessup would have written about it? None of them were backward in accusing the authorities of covering things up, so why ignore what is today considered to be the definitive UFO crash? Why was it left to William Moore (who incidentally has since admitted to spreading disinformation among the Ufological community - see the Bennewitz fiasco) to uncover the case 30 years later?

Edit:
Also, I can't find any obvious references to Roswell listed in the early issues of Fate. Admittedly all I have to go on are cover scans, but surely they would have run it as a cover story? There certainly doesn't seem to be anything about UFO crashes in thefirst issue or in the second, although Kenneth Arnold is given prominence in both. You can find a fairly complete set of cover scans here:
Fate Covers Archive
...but although there are plenty of issues which feature 'flying discs' and even the Shaver mystery, I can't find any mention of Roswell. (Plenty of scantily-clad babes on the covers, though. Why can't the FT have covers like that? ;) )
 
Hi, Graylien

In answer to your questions:

1. None of the gentlemen you mention were active in "flying saucers" research so early as 1947. Gray Barker's interest dates to 1952, when he investigasted the Flatwoods, West Virginia, sighting for FATE. Jessup's first book in the field was 1953, if memory serves. And Keyhoe's public interest seems to also date from the early 1950s. (Indeed, there were NO researchers in the field in 1947, at least not in the modern sense.)

2. I was alive at the time, although very young, and I still remember all the flack. And by the time I developed a more mature interest in UFOs, around 1955, Roswell was ALREADY regarded as a false start. EVERYBODY KNEW that the Roswell "crash" had been nothing more than a downed weather balloon!

3. The first "modern" researcher to re-examine the Roswell evidence wasn't William Moore, but Cincinnati's Leonard Stringfield in the mid- to late 1970s. I remember remarking at that time to a local Fortean friend that "I'm sorry to see Stringfield wasting his time on THAT dead horse - weather balloons don't come from outer space!"

4. My early FATEs are in storage, but I've fairly certain that I'm right. It was there that I first saw the original Arizona newspaper "crash" front page, as well as the photograph of Jesse Marcel holding the "weather balloon" refuse. (I may have seen the latter in 1947 as well, but I don't remember.) The operative articles were PROBABLY written by Ray Palmer using his regular pseudonym there "Frank Patton."
 
And by the time I developed a more mature interest in UFOs, around 1955, Roswell was ALREADY regarded as a false start. EVERYBODY KNEW that the Roswell "crash" had been nothing more than a downed weather balloon!
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Is this still your opinion?
 
There have been a couple of programmes on UK TV ( can't remember which exactly, its been a while ) about the Roswell crash. They always seem to find old residents of Roswell who ' swear ' they saw a UFO crash. Are they for real or just keeping up a long held hoax? Also, what if they saw the baloon slowly coming down again? ballons sometime flaten out a bit and I can imagine that one could appear saucer shaped, Ill try and find a picture to show what I mean.
 
I watched one come down in the sixties (at the time I really thought it was a flying saucer, but I was only ten)
If my memory of that distant event is correct (not guaranteed) it did flatten out and looked more like a cigar or flat disk than a sphere or balloon shape. Possibly the payload came down by parachute (which I believe was the plan in many cases).
I had been watching this white dot for what seemed like hours before it finally flattened out and landed. Several people were watching it, including my much older brother, who identified it as a weather balloon.
On balance he was almost certainly right.
 
Roswell

Graylien, the point I was attempting to make is that Roswell was certainly not "forgotten" from 1948 to 1980. It was merely that the citizens of the United States BOUGHT the Air Force's explanation that all that had been found near Roswell was weather balloon debris. Even strong believers in the existence of UFOs didn't bother with Roswell any longer, because we KNEW (or THOUGHT we knew) what had actually happened there.

But, no, I DON'T believe it was a weather balloon.

SOMETHING big happened at Roswell, something so big that (unless ALL the pertinent witnesses were not only lying but carefully compared notes together before their various testimonies) the Air Force threatened at least several civilian witnesses with death if they talked about what they had seen.

I don't believe that "weather balloon" would have been anywhere near enough to earn that ferocious response.
 
Ah, but although it was a balloon (allegedly), it wasn't just a weather balloon. What the balloon was being used for went way beyond that in terms of secrecy - so it's not all that surprising that efforts to keep this under wraps were made. And just because an object as seemingly innocuous as a balloon was involved, it's best to not forget what it was being used for and for what reasons, and what the political climate was like at the time. You can't really view the Roswell event without those things in mind.
 
Quite an interesting piece here about Project Mogul, and, in the interests of balance, a rebuttal here: An Engineer Looks at the Project Mogul Hypothesis.

The inevitable conclusion seems to be that if the debris was caused by Project Mogul, then Jesse Marcel was hugely exaggerating both the amount and the characteristics of the wreckage. If, on the other hand, Major Marcel was telling the truth, then the wreckage couldn't have been caused by Project Mogul.

As expected, opinions on Marcel are divided. Some researchers claim to have caught him out in a number of falsehoods:
The Myth of Jesse Marcel

On the other hand, Marcel's Service Evaluations have been cited as evidence that he was an exemplary officer, although ex-military bod Tim Printy points out that Ufologists are hardly qualified to interpret service evaluations and gives his own less complementary interpretation here: Jesse Marcel Sr.: GI Joe or GI Doe?

So the question is: did Jesse Marcel and a handful of other alleged eyewitnesses lie and/or exaggerate, or has the US Government and the military been involved in a successful 50 year long cover-up (despite the fact they can't even cover up what the President gets up to with his intern)?
 
IMHO, the engineer's rebuttal is somewhat speculative - after all, it lacks any real data from the time, so to infer much from that would be unwise.
 
Marcel

One of the problems with the criticisms of Jesse Marcel, Sr., is that a lot of the admittedly gassy speculations and fuzzy claims made by Marcel in the final years of his life are being used to judge the actions, intentions and integrity of the young military officer of 1947.

That's not only grossly unfair, but EXTREMELY counterproductive.

And let's not forget that Jesse Marcel , Jr. (M. D.), ALSO saw and examined the infamous "I-Beams."
 
1) Yes, but it was the older Jesse Marcel's testimony on which the Roswell myth is based.

2) If you look at what Jesse Marcel Junior actually remembers seeing, there's really nothing very extraordinary about it;

There were three categories of debris: a thick, foil-like metallic gray substance; a brittle, brownish-black plastic-like material, like Bakelite; and there were fragments of what appeared to be I-beams.
[emphasis added]
source
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Note that he makes no reference to the indestructable "memory metal" which his father allegedly took a sledgehammer to, then tried to burn. (And incidentally, if the material was so indestructable, why did the alien spaceship shatter into pieces when it crash landed?)
 
Your last point there is one that's always bothered me WRT the Roswell crash. It seems rather contradictory ;)
 
One more point, the debris on Marcells ranch was spread over quite an area, I wonder if the military actually gathered up all the pieces or are there fragments buried under the soil still on the land?
 
An I-beam is a trype of metal strut - it's cross-section is in the shape of a capital 'I'.

IIRC, there have been attempts by some reaearchers to go over the crash site in search of any debris. AFAIK they haven't found anything.
 
When Did the Roswell Myth Start?

Graylien, you wrote that "Yes, but it was the OLDER Jesse Marcel's testimony on which the Roswell myth is based."

Sorry, but I really do have to disagree with that assessment. I've been paying attention to the Roswell evidence (or lack of it) from 1947 on (beginning, as I said earlier, at age five). The Roswell myth/truth/lie/fact/legend/nonsense/whatever had been around for THIRTY-TWO YEARS before Jesse Marcell went public in 1979!

So there would almost certainly have been a "Roswell myth" had Jesse Marcel never even been born.
 
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