The genesis of modern conspiracy fears
Date: Monday, March 17th, 2008 (CST )
Topic: Conspiracies
 Oh, you had to know it’d come ’round to this sooner than later. The incident in Roswell, N.M., on July 7, 1947, is the granddaddy of many a conspiracy theory, many a disbelief in government, many a thought that “we are not alone.” An alien craft crash-landed on a ranch in Roswell on that date. Or it was a military-research balloon. Or a U.S. craft of top-secret technology. Or an aircraft of foreign (but not alien) manufacture.
The way the story was told is the controversy, more so than the incident itself, the base particulars of which have never been in dispute: Something crashed; something was recovered. The devil (or the E.T.) is in the details.
The chief devil, the genesis of disbelief among many who think that the craft was extraterrestrial and there was a government cover-up, comes from a newspaper — the July 8, 1947, edition of the Roswell Daily Record, a reprint of which can be seen, among other places, on Wikipedia, if one does a “Roswell incident” Internet search.
It was
reported that day on the front page under the banner headline “RAAF
(Roswell Army Air Field) Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell”
that the airfield’s intelligence office had announced it had “come into
possession of a flying saucer.”
Well, indeed, we are not
alone. There’s a bigger world out there. There are sentient eyes other
than humans that are watching our world. What do we do now?
But within hours, the
military was backing away from the story. This was no alien spacecraft.
This was no flying saucer. The news report was wrong. The intelligence
office at the airbase wasn’t. Nothing to see here. Return to your
lives. All’s right with the universe, and there’s no one peeking at us
except maybe the Russians ... or the Chinese.
From that one day’s
headline and the immediate and consistent denials afterward has spawned
an entire universe of charges, countercharges, theories and pop-culture
mania.
And to this day, despite
the vehemence of government denials, it remains inarguable that the
initial report on the incident made clear that this was a “flying
saucer,” which in those days was terminology for something not of our
Earth. And it remains inarguable that no independent study of the
incident has been able to crack the government’s later denials.
One can spend months or
years just reading the existing material on the Roswell case. One can
take it from the government’s denial viewpoint or the conspiratorial
viewpoint.
If one doesn’t want to take
it that seriously, one can travel to Roswell and visit its alien
museum, buy extraterrestrial-themed souvenirs, have an alien wedding,
whatever. Roswell is the epicenter for UFOlogy (pronounce it
you-fology) and has been since that weird day in 1947.
Application of the
scientific method can prove false many purported UFO sightings. Some
are hoaxes. Some are funky atmospheric things. Some are optical
illusions. Some are unclassifiable — the anomalies. The government,
since its initial acknowledgment of the Roswell incident, has
maintained a strict, “nope, can’t be” attitude to all UFO incidents. It
apparently figures that it made a big, big, big mistake once that it
doesn’t want to repeat. Whether that mistake was to tell the truth or
to spin a wild science-fiction tale, that’s never been cleared up to
the full satisfaction of all concerned.
Are we alone? Mathematics
tells us it just can’t be. With millions upon millions of stars in our
galaxy, and millions upon millions of galaxies in the universe, the
sheer weight of mathematical reasoning holds that, even if life exists
only on one-one-trillionth (a wildly liberal number) of the planets
that are out there, the universe is falling over itself with life. The
Big Empty isn’t.
Whether that life has
greater technology that allows it to bring themselves to us, given that
we lack the technology to reach it, is a wholly separate question. And
whether a visitor made an error in the skies over Roswell, N.M., in
1947, or whether the military zigged when it should have zagged with
some bit of top-secret technology, likewise remains a mystery.
Copyright: Lebanon Daily News
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