I suppose that I’m a stick in the mud, however this Roswell Festival thing makes me a little sick in the old hamburger pit. For those of you who (quite reasonably) don’t know what the Roswell thangs all about, here is the situation in as few words as I can manage.
Pure bullcrap!
The story goes like this.
In 1947 some New Mexico sheriff called a local Army Air base regarding some junk that had turned up on a local ranche’s property. Nothing too spectacular, some metal foil and that kind of thing. A couple of people from the base too took the day off drove out to the ranch and recovered some of the stuff.
Then ended up making at least two trips, someone at the base (a so-called plainclothes man) accompanied them and they managed to clean up the mess. The so called flying disk craze was just taking hold and so the following statement was issued;
The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”
Now mind you, they didn’t find anything resembling an aircraft. What they found was more like pieces of a balloon but not one they recognized.
Someone writing the press release probably asked “what the hell do we call this?”
Aw hell, I dont know!†came the reply, Call it a flying disk!]
And so they did, and the “fun” began.
The term “flying disk” was likely designed to take interest away from whatever the men had recovered, it didn’t; work very well.
Only a few weeks before Kenneth Arnold described some crazy looking things he saw briefly on a civil aviation flight over Mount Rainier. They flew with a motion looking like saucers skipped on water.â
Newspaper reports shortened this to “flying saucer.” Interest in science fiction ideas like people visiting from another planet was increasing at the time and the report that an Army base had captured a flying saucer began to generate interest.
Someone (presumably from higher headquarters) decided this was not a good thing and issued a counter story claiming that the men had in fact recovered a weather balloon. It is very unlikely that it was a weather balloon, what the Army was loath to admit is they were engaged in top-secret operations involving the US atomic program. And this stuff was top-top secret. So secret that most of the guys on the base probably didn’t know about it.
The US had dropped atom bombs on Japan little more than a year before; in the summer of 1947 the bomb was still a closely guarded secret. Everyone know what it was, few people knew how it worked. Apparatus was being developed to determine if anyone else in the world was setting off test explosions, other people in the world really wanted to not only know how they worked but have a few of their own. They were looking at the ruins of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and said “We really want one of these!”
So we waited nervously for the signs that someone else had the bomb. This was done secretly and according to information released since then, it involved instruments lofted…
via balloon.
Now it’s pretty darn obvious that I like simple answers over complex ones. To me, a military PR screw-up, something that happens from time to time is far FAR easier to believe than strange star voyaging aliens just happened to crash one of their *aircraft* in some sheep rancher’s field The first is inevitable in any military organization. The other thing is so unlikely that it is almost not worth talking about.
But, this week in Roswell, a lot of people are talking about it. Amid a carnival-like atmosphere too! Fun and frolic for the whole family! You won’t learn anything new but the hot dogs and beer will be good, and you will spend your hard earned cotter.
Wow, no one saw that one coming! Party on!
Share and enjoy!