Roswell UFO incident - 27 June 1997

There are times, and this is one of them, when I feel I ought, but I’m not going to, talk about several things that have just happened, which are of enormous interest to anybody curious about how government works, especially that form of government that Mr Churchill said was “the worst in the world, except for all the others.” Democracy.

For instance, the Supreme Court has rushed, with almost undignified speed, to polish off a whole raft of decisions which show more than ever how many problems of American life can be solved by that 200-year-old Constitution if only its guileless words are interpreted properly or cleverly or torturously.

I’m not going to talk about the, I think, eight decisions that came down this week because though the headlines that define them are simple, once you get into them, they are excruciatingly complicated. I will just call off one or two issues to show their variety.

The court said then that sex predators can be locked up after they’ve served their term even if they are judged not to be mentally ill. That no sort of presidential immunity can protect Mrs Hillary Clinton from handing over notes of conversations with her lawyers to the independent counsel who is investigating the Whitewater affair. That teachers from the public schools can go into parochial (that is Catholic) schools to teach students who need special help – a decision hailed by many as an "about time" remedy that has nothing to do with religion, but one bemoaned by civil libertarians as defying the Constitution’s prohibition against an establishment of religion; practically an invitation to the pope to become Secretary of Education.

However, talking of anniversaries, which we were a week ago, no sooner had the media given their all to recreate the story of President Nixon’s decline and fall, then the news came from an old trading post in the desert of New Mexico that 100,000 people will assemble there the first week in July to stage a celebration and a protest about something that happened there just 50 years ago.

First I ought to say about Roswell, New Mexico that, not much more than 100 years ago, it consisted of two adobe buildings which served as combination post office, general store and night’s lodging for any traveller or prospector who’d lost his map.

After discovering an artesian well, the place bloomed with a raft of crops from cotton and maize and alfalfa and apples. Then came the railroad and the land boom and an oil boom and during the second war an air force base, and today you have a thriving city, a cottonwood tree-encircled oasis in the desert that was not, I think, what came to mind when I mentioned an old desert trading post.

Until now, Roswell’s fame (such as it is) rested on the memory of two men: Peter Hurd, the desert painter; and a man as famous outside America as in, and Robert Hutchings Goddard, a New England boy who as a student at the turn of our century in 1901 had only one thing on his mind – what sort of vehicle or other means could you invent that could successfully reach the fringes of outer space by the use of rockets.

Needless to say, a young Yankee who was pondering that problem about 50 years before most of us could even imagine such a thing was destined to become the father of American rocketry. In 1926, he fired his first liquid-fuel rocket and then settled down at a desert site near Roswell, New Mexico, to work on his theory of step rockets, which by progressive stages could eventually reach the moon.

He was known to the ordinary citizens as a slightly loony professor they called Moon Mad Goddard. His patents were swiped by the Nazis and developed for their V-2 assault on Britain. He died suddenly three days before the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 and 17 years later, the Goddard Space Flight Centre was named after him. To all astronauts, Roswell, New Mexico, is accordingly a shrine, and I’m glad that the sudden re-emergence of the name gave me the belated opportunity of remembering a great forgotten man.

Well, next week there will descend on Roswell for quite another reason this mob – I don’t know what the proper collective noun would be, a convention, a flight of true believers? – to celebrate the day 50 years ago when a rancher saw what the featured speaker at the Roswell celebration calls “the biggest story of the millennium: a visit to earth by extraterrestrial spacecraft and the cover-up of the best evidence of it in the most egregious government cover-up of all time.” That’s a lot of mosts and biggests, isn’t it?

But there are by now many thousands of Americans who claim to have seen since then positively unidentified flying objects; and the number of people in Roswell next week who will claim to have seen not only other craft, aircraft, but also weird-looking aliens, the number increases as rapidly as the original passengers on the Mayflower.

The government, the air force says it has spent 50 years confronting, studying, testing the masses of evidence, testimony from all sorts of people who saw dead bodies of five men built, amazingly enough, like their prototypes in the movies – small men with small heads, thin, slanting eyes, ears moulded to the head, dressed out in tight-fitting gym suits of some metallic material. The air force said, and says, all this is “baloney”. Or rather, with more becoming dignity, a “mirage”.

It started on a July morning in 1947 when a ranch foreman came out from his ranch house and saw the ground littered with what he described as “shiny metallic material”. The man called the sheriff who collected the stuff, agreeing it was mighty strange, and handed it over to the nearby airbase. A few days later, the base released a short report saying that what the man had found was the debris from a flying disc that had crashed. The local newspaper set an example for every other newspaper by translating this into the headline, ‘Army air force captures flying saucer’.

At that point, the air force made what long-time UFO buffs believe was its first mistake. Instead of saying they had no more idea than the sheriff what the debris was from, the air force said of course they’d been mistaken; it was simply a weather balloon that had come down.

That was that, so far as the air force was concerned. But the report and the denial stirred the imagination, some said the memory of other incidents, other strange sights and sounds seen by night and by day. A vast literature came into being. It was so positive, often so highly detailed and often so plausible that Congressmen began to wonder why the air force didn’t go into the Roswell incident more thoroughly and openly.

All right, so only three years ago, the air force put out a 23-page report and came clean. It confessed it had told a couple of white lies. The truth was that the debris was not from a crashed flying disc, not a downed weather balloon, but (now it could be told) that metallic silvery stuff was the scattered debris over many miles in southern New Mexico from a top-secret system the US had devised for atomic spying, a flock of sensors – that’s S, sensors – carried to high altitudes by weather balloons that were capable of hearing the reverberations of a Soviet nuclear blast thousands of miles away. Naturally they weren’t going to publish that truth just when the Cold War was heating up.

This explanation was a relief to the ordinary newspaper reader and telly viewer, but it didn’t satisfy the growing legions of UFO fans, least of all the ones who claimed to have seen aliens in the flesh, so to speak. What about the bodies?

In the fifty years between the Roswell incident and the 1994 report, there are thousands of people who swear they have seen strange aircraft and stranger aliens in other places at other times. So this week, the air force came clean once again. For the first time, it addressed the vital or mortal problem of the aliens. It put out what it hopes is a final report, 230 pages long this time, and bearing the wishful title 'Case Closed’.

Among other awkward challenges, it had to answer the sworn testimony of a man named Dennis, who said in the long ago he’d seen an object crash and bodies on the ground – bodies he swore had been taken to the airbase. He’d been there, he’d talked to the workers there. He noticed that the small, burned and mangled bodies gave off such a stench that they were moved out of the base hospital for the autopsies.

The air force says he’s quite right: there was a crash of a KC-97G military plane near Roswell, come to think of it, and eleven men were killed, and their bodies were disposed of just as Mr Dennis said. Mr Dennis, by the way, is now the president of the International UFO Museum and Research Centre whose headquarters are in Roswell. Where else?

He and his researchers are still not satisfied. How about the falling bodies seen in 1947 in the original incident? Oh that? Well, finally the air force admits, it used artificial dummies in a programme testing parachutes.

But one man claims he saw at the Roswell base a man with a swollen head, a puffy face and slitty eyes. How about him? Quite right, the air force says. He was Captain Dan Fulgham whose helmet shattered on a balloon flight and caused his head to swell, his eyes to puff and so on.

There’s no question, I think, that the air force means what it says and suddenly, after all these years, has precise explanations of the weirdest events. But it leaves an ordinary student of Sherlock Holmes, even Miss Marple, reflecting that if the air force didn’t know the answers, the ones it has cooked up are uncommonly like the ones they’d have to manufacture if they had more alarming evidence to hide.

As for the dropped dummies, one disgusted UFO fan said, “What rubbish! Even a dummy would recognise a dummy.”

So it could still be that UFOs are as much of a mystery as FUOs – Fevers of Unknown Origin.

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