The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [42]
A great to-do has been made of one or more alleged crashed flying saucers near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Some initial reports and newspaper photographs of the incident are entirely consistent with the idea that the debris was a crashed high-altitude balloon. But other residents of the region - especially decades later - remember more exotic materials, enigmatic hieroglyphics, threats by military personnel to witnesses if they didn’t keep what they knew to themselves, and the canonical story that alien machinery and body parts were packed into an airplane and flown to the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Some, but not all, of the recovered alien body stories are associated with this incident.
Philip Klass, a long-time and dedicated UFO sceptic, has uncovered a subsequently declassified letter dated 27 July 1948, a year after the Roswell ‘incident’, from Major General C.B. Cabell, then Director of Intelligence for the US Air Force (and later, as a CIA official, a major figure in the abortive US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs). Cabell was inquiring of those who reported to him on what UFOs might be. He hadn’t a clue. In an 11 October 1948 summary response, explicitly including information in the possession of the Air Materiel Command, we find the Director of Intelligence being told that nobody else in the Air Force had a clue either. This makes it unlikely that UFO fragments and occupants had made their way to Wright-Patterson the year before.
What the Air Force was mostly worried about was that UFOs were Russian. Why Russians would be testing flying saucers over the United States was a puzzle to which the following four answers were proposed: ‘(1) To negate US confidence in the atom bomb as the most advanced and decisive weapon in warfare. (2) To perform photographic reconnaissance missions. (3) To test US air defenses. (4) To conduct familiarization flights [for strategic bombers] over US territory.’ We now know that UFOs neither were nor are Russian, and however dedicated the Soviet interest may have been to objectives (1) through (4), flying saucers weren’t how they pursued these objectives.
Much of the evidence regarding the Roswell ‘incident’ seems to point to a cluster of high-altitude classified balloons, perhaps launched from nearby Almagordo Army Air Field or White Sands Proving Ground, that crashed near Roswell, the debris of secret instruments hurriedly collected by earnest military personnel, early press reports announcing that it was a spaceship from another planet (‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region’), diverse recollections simmering over the years, and memories refreshed by the opportunity for a little fame and fortune. (Two UFO museums in Roswell are leading tourist stops.)
A 1994 report ordered by the Secretary of the Air Force and the Department of Defense in response to prodding from a New Mexico Congressman identifies the Roswell debris as remnants of a long-range, highly secret, balloon-borne low-frequency acoustic detection system called ‘Project Mogul’ - an attempt to sense Soviet nuclear weapons explosions at tropopause altitudes. The Air Force investigators, rummaging comprehensively through the secret files of 1947, found no evidence of heightened message traffic:
There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a higher tempo of operational activity reported that would be logically generated if an alien craft, whose intentions were unknown, entered U.S. territory... The records indicate that none of this happened (or if it did, it was controlled by a security system so efficient and tight that no one, U.S. or otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system had been in