No other case has prepetuated the UFO myth as much as the alleged "Roswell Incident" of 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico-- a case that is over 50 years old, of which most or all of the "first hand witnesses" are dead, and which has been told and retold by so called "researchers" taking heresay accounts from people who heard their accounts from second or third parties themselves! Some witnesses were found to have mistaken the events of 1947 with events that happened years later. Other witnesses were found to be blatant liars, just wanting to cash in on the Roswell fame. Some witnesses never existed!-- but were made up to confirm other eyewitness accounts, supposedly "researched" by certain "UFOlogists." Many of the eyewitness accounts contradict each other, thus losing their credibility. Add to that some over-zealous reporters, military officers looking to save their reputations, and UFO proponents, and you begin to see how this case had gotten way out of hand, perpetuating the UFO myth.
By now, everyone is at least a little familiar with the Roswell fable. Allegedly, the U.S. government successfully recovered an extraterrestrial craft, along with it's dead crew members, from a crash site on a farm in New Mexico, roughly around the July 4th weekend, in 1947. Between then and now, the government has supposedly been involved in a massive campaign of dis-information in order to cover up this incident. However, the actual events which lead up to the Roswell myth were quite mundane.
The Real Roswell Events
The Roswell incident began roughly after the 4th of July weekend in 1947 (though, depending on who you ask, it either happened on the Sunday, during the weekend, or the Monday following the weekend) when a rancher named William "Mac" Brazel reported to the local sheriff, George Wilcox, that he might have recovered the remains of what he thought could be a "flying saucer." Wilcox (who seemed not at all concerned with Brazel's story) hands Brazel over to a reporter Frank Joyce (who had called Wilcox's office trolling for a story.) Seeing that there wasn't much to Brazel's story, Joyce then tells Wilcox to contact military authorities at nearby Roswell Army Air Field, where Major Jesse Marcel was assigned to investigate.
Marcel and two Counter Intelligence Corps agents, Sheridan Cavitt and Lewis Rickett, drove out to the ranch where Brazel worked to examine and collect the wreckage (the time line as to when they drove out to the ranch gets fuzzy here, too.) On July 8, 1947, the public information office at Roswell AAF made the startling announcement that they had recovered the remains of a "flying disc."
However, by the next day the excitement was over. Brigadier General Roger Ramey, who had ordered the wreckage sent to him for examination at Carswell Air Force Base (also known as Fort Worth), held a press conference, with Major Marcel present, and announced that all the hoopla had been over a mistaken weather balloon, and nothing more (hence, out came the famous pictures of Major Marcel holding up the remains of the torn up "weather balloon.")
With Ramey's deflating announcement, the Roswell "flying saucer" story was effectively dead and would remain so for decades. Then, in 1978, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman happened to meet Marcel. Because Marcel dredged up his recovered-saucer story-- (probably to regain some respect he had lost because of this incident)-- and Friedman thought he had at last found a "star" witness who could blow open the U.S. government's alleged coverup of crashed saucers and pickled aliens, the Roswell myth began anew.
So, You Call This "Research?"
There have been many "researchers" who have waved the "Roswell UFO" banner, such as Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt (1994- "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell," 1997- "Conspiracy of Silence.") But, none has been a more vocal and visible champion for the Roswell cause than Mr. Stanton Friedman.
Friedman worked for 14 years as a nuclear physicist, employed by the likes of GE, GM, Westinghouse, TRW, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell-Douglas. He worked on projects such as nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and nuclear power plants for space. All projects were eventually cancelled. It is unclear why he then switched careers to become a UFO researcher, but it is obvious that he mistakingly saw his background as reason for him to be an accurate investigator-- which, most of the time, is highly untrue!
More times than not, he takes second and third hand accounts as accurate and true, without even cross-referencing them with other eyewitness accounts to confirm them (something every professional investigator does.) To date, the only real first hand witness he has interviewed is Major Jesse Marcel who, because of his role in the Roswell conspiracy, does not come off as a reliable witness. The rest have been sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, cousins and distant relatives, and grandchildren and close friends of "alleged" first hand witnesses. These types of witnesses are highly unreliable, simply because the accounts have been told and retold to them and by them, and events within the accounts surely have changed since the first telling of them. However, these are the "reliable witnesses" that Mr. Friedman uses as evidence to the accounts he writes about!
When challenged about some of events or witnesses in his book, Friedman immediately goes into a defensive mode. When he cannot come up with an answer, he challenges the credibility of the individual asking the question. Then, somewhere along his line of reasoning, the questioner becomes "part of the conspiracy." The questioner is obviously part of the "dis-information campaign to cover up the actual events of Roswell!" I've written about just this type of situation in "My Dealings With Die-Hard Believers," where, when they cannot come up with an answer, the believer will "turn it around on you." It gets the believer-- in this case, Mr. Friedman-- out of the line of fire for a little while, until he can come up with something. It's just a stall.
In all fairness to Mr. Friedman, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt have done the fair share in perpetuating the Roswell myth. All of their witnesses were no more reliable (some even less) than Friedman's were. Many of their witnesses were interviewed on their deathbeds, with either Schmitt or Randle asking obvious leading questions! Usually a man in his deathbed is not at full mental capacity, and will agree with anything that is said to him. But Schmitt's and Randle's goals were to merely get the interview to add more fodder to their books.
A few of their witnesses were blatant liars. One such witness was a man named Frank Kaufmann. He has gone by the names "Joseph Osborne" and "Steve MacKenzie." However, Schmitt and Randle don't let you know this because these other names are listed as witnesses as well! As the "MacKenzie" persona, Kaufmann says that he was a radar operator monitoring UFOs 24 hours a day. However, his desciptions in the book on the operating procedures of radar is all wrong! He then goes on to explain that he was one of the first officers(?) at the crash site, and he described the craft as "heal shaped," while in another part of the book, he describes the craft as "saucer shaped." When pushed even more for a better description, he states that the Stealth Bomber is very reminicant of what he saw at the crash site. All three of his descriptions are nothing alike!
It is clear that these "researchers" did not have the truth as a goal in their alleged "investigations," but merely wished to have a "cash cow" to milk the dollar signs out of. Though there are other "researchers" who pony up to the bar, these three are the perpetuators, and it is obvious that the Roswell conspiracy will not end anytime soon.
Here is a link to a very indept case study done on the Roswell Incident by astronomer Tim Printy. Click here.
