This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 2, from 1991.
Ufology in Europe has diverged considerably from that in the USA in recent years. Whereas in Europe ufologists have concentrated much more on psycho-social and links-with-folklore explanations and the comparatively new tectonic strain or ‘earthlights’ theories, in the US the current views are much more oriented towards the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) and, in particular, two main ETH offshoots: abductions and crashed saucers. Abductions have been written about ad nauseam in the literature, so I shall deal only with the crashed saucer fad as it now stands.
Back in 1950 an American author named Frank Scully wrote a best-seller called Behind the Flying Saucers, which dealt with the crash of three flying saucers in the south-west US and spoke of little men from Venus being found among the wreckage. It was, of course, all being hushed up by the US government, who had the alien corpses pickled away in secret laboratories. Scully’s book caused quite a sensation and some consternation in official circles for a while. Unfortunately Scully’s informants turned out to be less than reliable (one was later convicted of fraud over another matter) . The book itself was full of scientific howlers and daft imaginings and was eventually exposed as a fake by True magazine in 1952.
Despite the constant stream of sightings and investigations by both official and private UFO groups, crashed saucers faded out of the news almost completely until the late 1970s when a ufologist named Leonard Stringfield presented some 20 or so new cases to a UFO conference in 1978. He later published his findings in his UFO Crash/Retrieval series of papers. The problem was that all of Stringfield’s informants were anonymous military personnel and the dates and places of the alleged events were usually missing. To this day he maintains a strict silence on the identity of his sources. Few ufologists now take Stringfield’s stories seriously and it is doubtful if they ever did.
However, in 1980 a new book appeared which rekindled interest in crashed UFOs and which has kept interest alive throughout the 1980s, leading to a big new investigative project and with it the hopes of a final breakthrough in the acceptance of UFOs as extraterrestrial vehicles. The 1980 book was The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, who had collaborated on an earlier book called The Philadelphia Experiment, a weird story involving the teleportation of a navy ship during World War ll.
Actually Berlitz did none of the research on the Roswell book and has long since dropped out of the affair, having gone back to more esoteric subjects like the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, with which he was originally associated. Perhaps he found crashed UFOs not to his liking. The two men really behind the Roswell crashed UFO story are William Moore and his colleague Stanton T Friedman; through the 1980s they produced several updated research papers giving the latest dope on the case, producing new ‘witnesses’, gathering new evidence and generally giving the impression that an enormous ‘cosmic Watergate’ was being conducted by the US government.
What exactly is the Roswell story? Unlike other crashed UFO stories, in this one something did actually take place. On day in mid-June 1947, some ten days before Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting that launched the modern UFO era, a rancher discovered some strange debris on his ranch near Roswell, New Mexico the night after a severe thunderstorm. He thought nothing of it at first, but some three weeks later had another look and decided to report it to the local sheriff. He had, in the meantime, heard of the first ‘flying disc’ stories going the rounds, and curiosity prompted him to look again at his discovery and report it, in case it was one of those ‘things’.
The local USAF base was alerted on July 7 and sent two men back to the ranch with the rancher. They spent one night out in the boondocks, collected most of the stuff, loaded it into a truck and carted it back to the air base some 75 miles away. A short press release was then issued saying a ‘flying disc ‘ had come into the possession of the USAF. No description was given of the said object. The local militia (the few who had seen it) were baffled but, upon orders from on high, immediately dispatched the wreckage by plane to higher HQ at Fort Worth, Texas, en route for Wright Patterson Field in Ohio where technical experts would examine and, hopefully, identify the strange material.
All the above was reported in the local and national newspapers during early July 1947. Brief notices even appeared in the UK, in The Times and Daily Telegraph.
The FBI was alerted; then a press conference took place at Fort Worth where several photographs were taken of the wreckage. A weather officer at the base was called in, examined the stuff, and at once pronounced it as a wrecked radar target, shaped like a large 3-dimensional six-pointed star covered in tinfoil and attached to a balloon; this was a Rawin target, then used for meteorological purposes and a device unfamiliar to most military personnel, and certainly to people on remote ranches. The planned flight to Wright Field was cancelled and the press sent home. The story was dead and buried, and stood that way for over 30 years.
Then suddenly it resurfaced in 1978 as a result of a chance remark by someone to Stanton Friedman after a lecture on UFOs he gave in Louisiana. One of the USAF officers who had recovered the wreckage finally broke his long silence and told Friedman he had once handled pieces from a flying disc. Friedman told his pal Bill Moore and together they began locating some 90 ‘witnesses’ and building up quite a story of a spaceship that crashed after an explosion on board, with four to six alien bodies being found, strange writing appearing on the object, secret photos being taken, military aerial reconnaissance being done, super-secret high level meetings, phone calls and so on. The FBI were said to be deeply concerned at the time, witnesses were told to keep their mouths shut; also, the rancher was held incommunicado at the local air base whilst the ranch was combed thoroughly by the military under conditions of the highest security.
It was this story that formed the main part of the Berlitz/Moore book and Moore’s numerous follow-up papers in the 1980s. Moore and Friedman had a monopoly on the Roswell story until 1988, adding more and more pieces of evidence to their ‘cosmic Watergate’ as they progressed. To fit in with another, unconnected, sighting they had changed the date of the initial discovery, insisting it was on July 3, not mid-June. They had also linked it to an uncorroborated and second-hand report of another ‘crash’ story, told to Friedman, which allegedly happened at Socorro, New Mexico; a story which Moore later had doubts about.
Unfortunately, none of the people interviewed could remember the dates, only a handful had seen pieces of the debris and the original rancher had died long before. In fact every person without exception was interviewed no less than 32 years after the event. Nobody has ever been found who saw the UFO crash; even the word ‘crash’ is a later invention, since the original press reports speak merely of a ‘landing’ or a ‘recovery’ of a light instrument.
In late 1988 the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) decided to launch a new Roswell investigation. In September 1989 a team went out to the remote ranch site and camped there for five days, hoping to find, after a lapse of 42 years, some fragment of the doomed spaceship. Not surprisingly, they drew a blank. To help fund the expedition, CUFOS issued special Roswell expedition T-shirts. The case soon feablred on an ‘Unexplained Mysteries’ TV program; this produced new witnesses and led to yet further interviews.
Two new investigators, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, have since taken up the role of crashed UFO specialists in the US and, under the auspices of CUFOS, have now interviewed nearly 250 people altogether. If this seems an impressive figure, let readers be assured that only about ten (to be generous) are of any real use, the rest being merely friends, relatives and odd hangers-on, who saw nothing first-hand.
Randle and Schmitt have unearthed startling new evidence, all told by these witnesses (42 years afterwards) of even more incredible things: the wreckage was transported to not one but three secret locations, involving at least seven B-29 or C-54 cargo plane journeys and resulting in a total weight of the craft of some 50 tonnes (as opposed to the piffling 5 pounds of debris originally reported in the press), bodies were indeed found and whisked off for examination, a huge 500-foot long trench appeared in the desert where the spaceship had crashed to earth, armed guards were put up around the site to prevent onlookers getting too nosey, and other strange things occurred which, says Randle and Schmitt, can only be explained by the recovered object being indeed an alien spaceship that met its fate that night in 1947.
They also say the details are still held in top secret files at the Pentagon; despite persistent USAF denials that it has any secret crashed saucer reports of any kind, classified or unclassified. (All USAF UFO files were declassified and released in the mid-1970s; Roswell does not appear in them).
In general Randle and Schmitt’s findings match those of Moore and Friedman. However, Moore was not entirely happy with the two usurpers of his crashed saucer story and, as time went on, became more and more disturbed by their methods, claiming that they had pirated his original research and claimed it as their own. He had presumably realised that with their proposed new book in the offing he would stand to lose financially.
Accordingly he fired an angry 9-page missive at Randle and Schmitt in August 1990, charging them with pirating his (and Friedman’s) source material without due credit and permission. He threatened a lawsuit if Randle and Schmitt went ahead with their book. Meanwhile Friedman, who had already joined forces with Randle and Schmitt, became very angry at Moore’s outburst and split with him, probably for good. Friedman accused his former colleague of ‘a load of false charges… most based on ignorance of the facts and seemingly delusions of grandeur’.
Since then Friedman has come out with a statement that, while he goes along almost entirely with Randle and Schmitt’s ideas, there are still minor points of disagreement, thus he had decided to branch off and write his own Roswell book in conjunction with another ufologist, Don Berliner. Moore, meanwhile, has teamed up with his colleague of MJ-12 fame, Jaime Shandera, to provide yet a third Roswell investigation team (!) running concurrently with the other two groups.
Roswell ‘papers’ have proliferated in the UFO literature in the US for the best part of two years now, so much so that even abductions seem to have, temporarily at least, taken a back seat. Meanwhile, further developments are in hand. A special ‘Crashed Saucer Project’ has been set up by the Fund for UFO Research and in July 1990 a conference was called in Washington to gather as much of the ‘first hand’ testimony as possible and record it on videotape with a view to eventually presenting it to Congress. Indeed, it has been the view of several prominent ufologists that the vast amount of testimony gathered is now so overpowering that both the US scientific community and Congress will soon be compelled to take notice and finally force the military to release their super-secret files and admit that ETH is now a proven fact. With the witnesses now ageing, Friedman says: ‘we must work quickly, because we are racing the undertaker’.
However, skeptics need have no fears. Disputes have now arisen about what is depicted in the six photographs that were taken at Fort Worth in July 1947. The photos show something very much like a damaged balloon and radar target, complete with aluminium foil and wooden beams, but Moore and Shandera still stubbornly claim that the wreckage shown is part of an alien spaceship. Randle and Schmitt, while admitting the stuff shown is merely a wrecked balloon, insist that a deliberate switch was done before the photos were taken (the real wreckage having been secretly spirited away by the military). Also, to further muddy the waters, both the photographer and two of the principal ex-military people involved are now revising their statements. A recent witness has even been found who claims to have ‘remembered’ the crash even though he was only five years old at the time. Friedman is apparently very impressed with his evidence. Randle and Schmitt are not, and claim he is a fake.
If all goes well and there are no lawsuits, there should be two new Roswell crashed saucer books out during 1991 with the prospect of further articles and monographs to come, and with debates continuing for a long time yet. In view of the above, it does indeed look as if the UFOs will finally crash to earth sometime in 1991.
