As we wrote before, in Ufology Nothing Happens and as a result, professional researchers are forced to create new stories or reinterpret old and even forgotten factoids.
"The many rumors regarding the flying disk became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eight Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the co-operation 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 Major 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."
(San Francisco Chronicle - July 9, 1947)
(San Francisco Chronicle - July 9, 1947)
The landing created by the imaginative journalist, became then a crash.
First of all, the debris found didn’t look like a disc, the object didn’t land but crashed, and it’s not true that the rancher McBrazen stored any disk.
In the evening of July 8, the Army Air Force base in Fort Worth had examined the wreckage and identified it not as a flying saucer, but as a high altitude weather balloon carrying a radar target made of aluminum and balsa wood. An AAF news release correcting the misidentification was published RDR on July 9, but by then it was too late. The Roswell paper, sheriff’s office and the Air Force base were already being bombarded by calls from all over the country, mostly journalists looking for a story.
Anyone who reads what Stanton Friedman and many others wrote about the Roswell incident, must have a powerful will to believe in the myth of the crashed Flying Saucer. Friedman rediscovers the forgotten Roswell event in 1978 when he was giving a lecture in Baton Rouge and received a phone call from a man who told him that he had handled the wreckage of a crashed spaceship.
By the way, Jesse Marcel, the man who made the claim, couldn’t remember either the month or even the year of the event.
Of course, the Roswell incident is given by those who believe in the UFO=Extraterrestrial hypothesis as an evidence of what they say.
But there is more: the whole incident can also be interpreted as a failed piece of disinformation directed to the Soviet Union in the beginning of the Cold War. The unwanted echo in the American press forced the disinformers to go back to the real thing: the weather balloon.
UFO Phenomenon is old, perhaps older than men, and truth is that never was any crash of extraterrestrial or para-terrestrial artifacts whatever these are.
| For anyone interested in tracing the story of Roswell through its many different variants, we suggest reading: UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore. Smithsonian Institution Press. Washington and London. 1997. |
Tomas Scolarici
