The POP (popular) culture is often viewed as being
trivial in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream, but its
power cannot be dismissed.
The so called Roswell incident is an excellent example of
pop culture at work.
In the late 1940s, the USAF ran Project Mogul, a top
secret attempt to detect sound waves from potential Soviet nuclear explosions
using microphones flown by high-altitude balloons. On July 7, 1947 Mogul Flight
#4 crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. A rancher found the debris
field and brought some of the debris to the nearby air base. The public
information officer at Roswell Army Air Field made a press release reporting
that a crashed "flying disc" has been recovered. The press went nuts,
cementing the meme of the "flying saucer" in the public's
consciousness. After the sensation hit the headlines, the officer was
reprimanded, and new information was announced: the wreckage was from a weather
balloon. Years after the fact, the story got embellished and mutated into
different versions, becoming the archetypal "crashed saucer" myth,
complete with recovered alien corpses (or live aliens!) and a government
cover-up.
What we truly know is that the Roswell Incident was a
money-making machine for UFO fantasists and the tabloid industry. After Stanton
Friedman wrote his book about Roswell, the supermarket tabloids took charge and
Roswell was one of the POP culture memes.
The urban legend of the ET presence on our planet, the
cover-up and eventual disclosure was reinforced by Steven Spielberg who in 1977
and 1982, made the movies (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial) with "good" aliens and "bad" federal
agencies. These movies tapped into the new mythology and made enormous amounts
of money.
UFO fantasists saw the $ sign, wrote books, invented UFO congresses, desert meetings, pseudo-sciences and pushed the extraterrestrial visitors legend to the
limits of non-sense.
However, Ufology was absolutely human-made, so there was nothing
new. The old myths were reinvented, and the self-proclaimed experts became esoterics
and mystics. The extraterrestrial super-science was now “cosmic alchemy”, and
the ETs angels or demons or both.
There was nothing more to say about all this big fantasy
and when this happens, the show cannot go on.
