Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Charles B. Moore, the engineer for the balloon development project, has written a detailed history of the project (Moore 1997). After initial testing of balloons in Pennsylvania, testing was moved to an army base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, about one hundred miles from Roswell, in the spring of 1947. The weather there was better suited for the testing. On June 4, 1947, one of the balloons, complete with a radar reflector used to track the balloons, went missing during a test launch. Moore argues convincingly that it was the crashed debris of this test balloon that started the entire Roswell ball rolling.

This raises and important question—how could the remains of a fairly small balloon and radar reflector be mistaken for a flying saucer? The answer is simple—at the time, it really wasn’t. The debris was found initially on June 14 by a rancher named Mack Brazel and his son, Bill. They didn’t think much of it at first and only returned to the location weeks later to collect it. Now, if someone had come across the remains of a real crashed flying saucer, it is highly doubtful if he would have simply gone about his business for several weeks! In fact, it is clear from Brazel’s description of what he found that it was in no way the remains of a flying saucer. In an interview in the Roswell, Daily Record of July 9, 1947, Brazel described what he found as “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tin-foil, a rather tough paper, and sticks” (quoted in Ziegler 1997, p. 6). This description turns out to be quite accurate. Such a collection is hardly what would be expected from the results of the crash of an interstellar space craft. Kenneth Arnold had reported seeing his flying discs only a few days before the interview (on June 24), and the story was given extensive media attention. In his interview Brazel did speculate that the debris “might be remnants” of such a disc. But it must be recalled that at this time, less than two weeks after the Arnold report, the idea that the flying discs or saucers were metal extraterrestrial craft piloted by beings from other planets had not yet been suggested widely. So while Brazel did mention the flying discs, he was certainly not arguing that he had found the wreckage of anything remotely similar to the “flying saucers” of later fame. Rather, as Ziegler notes, “because he lived in the vicinity of an army air field, Brazel apparently suspected that the wreckage he had found was associated with a military project”, as indeed it was (p. 6). Supporting this view is a Gallup poll that shows that during the period of the initial events at Roswell, “virtually no one thought of associating flying disks with extraterrestrial spaceships” (cited by Ziegler 1997, p. 6).

The remains were turned over to army air corps authorities, who tried to figure out just what they had on their hands. Since this was clearly not the remains of a standard weather balloon, these authorities were unable to identify the source. Interestingly, the remains stayed unidentified until Moore’s (1997) paper because as the authorities were taking possession of the remains, the staff of the balloon project was on the way back to the East Coast. “Thus, the people in the area who were most competent to recognize the debris as the wreckage of a balloon train and a radar reflector were unavailable, and no one at Roswell Air Field was able to identify the debris when it arrived there” (Ziegler 1997, p. 9).

A Roswell base public relations officer then issued a press release in which he made reference to the acquisition by the base of a “flying disc,” again in the nonextraterrestrial spacecraft sense of the term. The rubber, foil, paper, and sticks that would years later cause so much commotion was then delivered to the commanding officer of the 8th Army Air Force, one Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey. In a radio interview on July 8, Ramey identified the remains correctly and stated that “the wreckage is in my office now and as far as I can see there is nothing to get excited about” (quoted in Ziegler 1997, p. 9). Following wide reporting of this and other statements of Brig. Gen. Ramey, “the historical Roswell incident faded quickly from public memory and entered the limbo of over-publicized nonevents, where it remained for more than 30 years.”

Then, with the 1980 publication of The Roswell, Incident by Charles Berlitz (yes, the same Charles Berlitz who made up the Bermuda Triangle nonmystery) and William L. Moore, Roswell reentered the UFO world—and it has never left. The history of the Roswell myth since 1980 is a history of ever-growing distortions, made-up events, deliberate misinterpretations, and previously unknown “witnesses” with ever more fantastic stories to tell. Readers interested in detailed analyses of these can consult the excellent books by Saler, Ziegler, and Moore (1997); Klass (1997); and McAndrew (1997). The latter is the official report of an investigation conducted in 1994 by the United States Air Force.

In May 1987 another chapter in the continuing saga of claims that the federal government knows “all about” UFOs and is hiding the truth from the American public unfolded with the announcement by UFO proponents William Moore (one of the authors of The Roswell Incident ) and Stanton Friedman that new secret government documents had come to light proving that the government knew that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. The documents concerned an alleged super-secret project called Majestic 12 (MJ-12). According to the documents, MJ-12 was set up to further the investigation of UFOs because the government had recovered crashed saucers at Roswell. The documents were not, as one might suspect, found in government archives. In fact, physical copies of the documents have never been found. What Moore and Friedman claimed to have received in the mail was an undeveloped roll of film that, when developed, had photographs of the new evidence. Included were photographs of three different documents: a 1947 memo from the President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal; a 1952 briefing paper for President Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower; and a July 14, 1954, memo from Robert Cutler, a special assistant to President Eisenhower, to Gen. Nathan Twining. The briefing paper describes the recovery of alien spacecraft and bodies at Roswell in 1947. This last memo informed the general that a briefing at the White House on MJ-12 would take place on July 16.

As might be expected, the MJ-12 documents immediately generated huge interest. Here, at last, seemed to be real proof that the government had been keeping the existence of UFO debris secret all these years. But almost at once serious problems were noted with the documents. Klass (1987–88a, 1987–88b) has pointed out several of these. For example, the second document, the briefing paper, used a format for the dates that was never used by the military. Specifically, throughout, dates are given thus: “07 July, 1947.” Authentic documents from the period never use a “0” in front of a single digit in a date and never use a comma following the month. Interestingly, as Klass notes, the date format used in the MJ-12 documents is one that William Moore used in his own correspondence. Another problem is that real secret documents later declassified show that one of the alleged members of the MJ-12 team, Lloyd Berkner, took part in a real CIA assessment of the nature of UFOs. This assessment “concluded that there was no evidence that any UFOs were extraterrestrial craft or posed any threat to national security” (Klass 1987–88b, p. 283). This assessment was conducted years after the alleged creation of MJ-12. So if the government in general, and Berkner in particular, already knew about UFOs, there would have been no need to conduct the highly secret assessment.