Today, July 8, is the date of the infamous 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico.
During a severe thunderstorm, a crash occurred at a ranch. That much is undisputed. All other elements of this event remain questionable, despite the government attempting to mark it as “case closed” fifty years later in 1997.
Which brings to mind idiocy of a “Mission Accomplished” banner at George W. Bush’s 2003 address onboard a US aircraft carrier regarding the war in Iraq.
After the crash, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating a “flying disc,” as in flying saucer of alien lore, was recovered.
That statement was quickly retracted.
Why are truths but not lies so speedily taken back? Is it any wonder people create theories from the vacuous vacuum concocted by the federal government about any number of issues, including UFOs and aliens?
The US Army Air Force subsequently claimed the Roswell crash was a conventional weather balloon. A lie that has never officially been retracted, although the Air Force spun a different tale in the nineties.
In the late seventies, a retired military officer admitted the weather balloon story was a coverup. Ya think?
Weather balloons are rubber and round, as in spherical, not disc-like. And if that’s all it was, why put out a press release stating otherwise?
In 1994, the Air Force published a report identifying the crashed object on that ranch outside Roswell to be a “nuclear test surveillance balloon.” Okay, so not a weather balloon, then?
It only got more ridiculous.
In 1997, a second report, the aforementioned “case closed” edict, concluded that speculation regarding alien bodies recovered by the military at the crash site were actually test dummies being dropped from high altitude. Ostensibly to measure the effects of high-altitude falls. Uh-huh.
Maybe they should have stuck by their weather balloon coverup. Instead, the Air Force twisted itself in duplicitous knots to explain away detailed elements of what’s been derided as a silly conspiracy theory.
Who looked like a dummy now? The supposedly crazy conspiracy theorists, or the government absurdly claiming fifty years after the event that they operated a nuclear testing apparatus in a severe storm and dropped test dummies onto a private ranch?
Sure, because they didn’t have any government test facilities nearby for such delicate operations, right?
Negative. Two years before the Roswell crash, in July 1945, the US detonated a 20-kiloton atomic bomb at its test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. A mere 117 miles from Roswell.
Is the Air Force covering up an alien crash, or its own dangerous incompetence? Perhaps both?
Today, still more questions abound than valid, rational answers.
In my Other Worldly series about aliens among us and how the world reacts to the knowledge, I offer plenty of snark regarding military coverups, weather balloon claims, and the government’s clueless reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial spacecraft. I posit how it stubbornly insists on using fossil fuels to power crafts not of US government design, resulting in curious contrails shaped like rings.
In my novels, the government goes from UFO coverups to blaming their own mishaps on aliens now that the truth of their existence is revealed.
Because everything is always some other entity’s maniacal manipulation, and it wasn’t a UFO, it was a weather balloon cum nuclear testing thingamajig crammed with errant crash dummies.
That’s why there’s an International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico.
And isn’t it convenient how so many movies portray aliens as the bad guy that big brother must protect us from? Independence Day comes to mind. Then there’s the goofy idiot aliens in movies like Spaceballs, or the book made into an awful movie, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In Being Alien, upcoming fourth novel in my Other Worldly series, there are a few hapless, bad-guy aliens. But they’re not the ones maniacally trying to destroy the good ole USA. Aliens don’t detonate atomic bombs in the American southwest, or dump crash dummies from high altitudes onto private property without regard for the safety of humans and other living things.
One final note about the events of July 8, 1947. After the world learns aliens are among us In Alienable Rights, first book of the Other Worldly series, protagonist Rowan Layne says:
I’ve always known the Roswell incident was no weather balloon as the Air Force claimed because six weeks after aliens crashed in New Mexico, President Truman signed the National Security Act. Some say, follow the money. I say follow the paranoid legislation, and how quickly it’s passed. Look at the PATRIOT Act.
It’s true. Congress passed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947 to provide a “comprehensive program for the future security of the United States.” This law created the Department of Defense, including Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force. It also lead to formation of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency as it’s known today.
The CIA was founded Sept. 18, 1947. Barely two months after the Roswell incident. But sure, it was just a nuclear test crash dummy President Truman’s administration was so worried about.
Uncanny circumstances. Thanks for the history lesson.
You are most welcome. The truth is out there 🙂