Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal

16. The Roswell Legend

~ Chapter 16 More than a half century ago, in the summer of 1947, the modern UFO craze began. Fed by fantasy, faddishness, and even outright fakery, the mythology has become so well nourished that it has begun to spawn bizarre religious cults like Heaven's Gate. In 1997, the Roswell controversy reached out to involve u.s. Senator Strom Thurmond and a former aide, Philip J. Corso, in a dispute over a memoir by Corso for which Thurmond wrote the foreword. The book claims that the U.S. government used alien technology to win the Cold War ("Thurmond" 1997). This controversy only intensified the planned fiftieth-anniversary hoopla July 1-6 at Roswell, New Mexico, the site of ufology's Holy Grail. From near Roswell, according to a burgeoning legend, in late June or early July of 1947, a crashed alien spacecraft and its humanoid occupants were retrieved and hidden away at a secret government installation. The "Roswell Incident;' as it is popularly known, was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base. He reported that a"flying disc" had been retrieved from an area ranch where it had crashed (Korff 1997, Berlitz and Moore 1980). This came in the immediate wake of the first modern UFO sighting, the famous string of "flying saucers" witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24. Just such sightings had long been anticipated by pulp science-fiction magazines, like Amazing Stories, and by the earlier writings of a crank named Charles Fort. Called"the world's first ufologist," Fort reported on unidentified objects in the sky that he believed indicated visits from space aliens, reports taken from old newspaper and magazine accounts. Soon after the press release about the Roswell sighting made headlines around The Ros\Nell Legend the world, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was announced: the unidentified flying object had really been a weather balloon , said officials, and photographs of the "wreckage"-some flexible, silvery-looking material-were distributed to the press. In 1949 came the first of the crashed-saucer hoaxes-a science-fiction movie, The Flying Saucer, produced by Mikel Conrad, which contained scenes of a purportedly captured spacecraft; an actor hired by Conrad actually posed as an FBI agent and swore the claim was true. The following year, writer Frank Scully reported in his book Behind the Flying Saucers that the United States government had in its possession no fewer than three alien spaceships, together with the bodies of their humanoid occupants. Scully was fed the story by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum-locating device allegedly based on alien technology (Clark 1993). Other crash-retrieval stories followed, as did photographs of space aliens living and dead: one gruesome photo merely portrayed the charred body of the pilot of a small plane, his aviator's glasses still visible in the picture. In 1974, Robert Spencer Carr began to promote one ofthe crashes from the Scully book and to claim firsthand knowledge of where the pickled aliens were stored. According to the late claimant's son, Carr was a spinner of yarns who made up the entire story (Carr 1997). In 1977, a pseudonymous "Fritz Werner" claimed to have "assisted in the investigation ofa crashed unknown object" in Arizona. This included, he said, his actually seeing the body of one four-foot-tall humanoid occupant that had been placed in a tent. Unfortunately, there were suspicious parallels between the Werner and the Scully stories and other evidence of hoaxing , including various inconsistencies in Werner's tale. In 1987, the author ofa book on Roswell released the notorious "MJ12 documents," which seemed to prove that a saucer had indeed crashed near Roswell and that its humanoid occupants really were recovered. The documents purported to show that there was a secret "Operation Majestic Twelve" authorized by President Truman to handle clandestinely the crash/retrieval at Roswell. A "briefing document" for President-elect Eisenhower was also included. However, MJ-12 was another Roswellian hoax, the documents merely crude pasteup forgeries that utilized signatures cut from photocopies of actual letters and documents. The forger even slipped one document into the NationalArchives so that it could be "discovered" there. (The Archives quickly cast doubt on its authenticity.) 119 "t" 120 if' Real-Life X-Files Forensic analyst...