The Roswell ‘Alien Alphabet’: What Happened Next?

Given that many different witness accounts mentioned that the ‘beams’ found initially at the Roswell debris site had unreadable writing on them, this would surely seem to be a sensible starting-point for further cipher mystery research.

We then, as I posted before, have three separate reports suggesting that the US Military took control of the beams (and hence the writing with it).

So what happened to those beams? I decided to have a look at a few (of the many tens of thousands of) UFO books out there. And it didn’t take me long to find Philip Corso…

Corso & Birnes (1998) – “The Day After Roswell”

This is presented as a tell-all book, written by a key military insider (Philip Corso) on the Foreign Technology Desk, who sat between the US military, the Pentagon, and US government. Written at the peak of X-Files mania (before it all got a bit silly with Series 6), it tells you pretty much everything you ever hoped or feared to hear about aliens. Basically, its central claim is that American technological ascendancy came from reverse-engineering alien space tech taken from a crashed flying saucer, all thanks to the personal brilliance of – you guessed it – Philip Corso. Unsurprisingly, the book was a huge bestseller (though it was later claimed that Corso, who died not long after, got bilked out of his royalties).

In many ways, I suspect that this is THE central book of modern Ufology, in that your attitude to it squarely defines what you think about the US and UFOs. It’s extraordinarily hard to read it in a “halfway-house” evidence-cherry-picking kind of way: you pretty much have to either accept it all or reject it all.

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that Corso did genuinely hold the positions he claims to have held (or at least very close to them). And there’s no shortage of people who want to defend his account against the numerous UFO researchers who don’t believe a word of it – perhaps one of the best-presented defences is Michael Salla’s two-part article (here and here, or perhaps here and here).

Note that Salla flags that the FBI thought poorly of Corso (“shifty-eyed”, “rat”, “a parasite”), but that this was because Corso had been told by someone in the CIA that Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant, but wouldn’t tell the FBI who had told him. Also, I’m a bit dubious about Salla’s claim about General Trudeau: the book I have on Dulles (“The Devil’s Chessboard”, p.278) says that Trudeau was ejected for trampling on political toes by meeting with Konrad Adenauer in 1954 to talk about paranoid German spy chief Reinhard Gehlen.

On the other hand, Brad Sparks’ debunking is typical of the criticism the book received from the UFO research community (if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you). In 2001, The Guardian newspaper famously included “The Day After Roswell” in its Top Ten list of literary hoaxes, right up there with the Donation of Constantine, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Hitler Diaries. (Personally, I’d have included the Priory of Sion and the Rosicrucian Manifestos, but each to their own, eh?)

For me, I can’t help but notice that Corso talks explicitly (and at length) about Majestic 12 (MJ-12), which became known through thin bundles of extraordinarily fake-looking photocopied documents (with badly-copied fake signatures) that first started surfacing in 1984. If you think MJ-12 is an outright fake (as I do), then I really think you can only sensibly conclude that Corso’s account in “The Day After Roswell” is no less fake.

Conversely, if you think MJ-12 is real, why not believe Corso’s account too? Go ahead, knock yourself out.

The Fork in the Road

In the historiography of Ufology, then, “The Day After Roswell” marks a sharp fork in the road. Here, one path leads to an “X-Files” vision where just about everything short of The Cigarette-Smoking Man’s Ultimate Conspiracy is confirmed as True-As-Hell; while the other path leads you to a world where you have almost nothing direct to work with.

Hence UFO researchers seem utterly trapped between this Scylla (of believing everything) and Charybdis (of believing nothing). Even an assiduous writer like Timothy Good (who works hard to collect and collate information) is only able to do what he does by suspending disbelief on an almost industrial scale.

More broadly, the ‘normal’ approach to writing UFO books seems to be completely believe some ‘new’ witness source you have uncovered, while supporting that source by selectively quoting pieces from wherever suits your new source best. But the reality seems to be that Corso either gives you everything at once (i.e. the whole Big Kahuna Conspiracy) or takes everything away from you.

From my perspective, the key thing that differentiates these books from proper historical research seems to be that belief and disbelief are the starting points for inquiry rather then the endpoints – inputs rather than outputs. Moreover, if you don’t like Testimony X, it’s easy as pie to weave a story about how it was obviously misinformation to cover up Secret Project Y. And so the merry-go-round continues to spin.

So: Back To Roswell, Then?

In my opinion, this probably explains why there is now more interest in the original Roswell “debris field” incident than in Corso’s claims, or the stories of saucer crashes / alien bodies in Corona or the Plains of St Augustine or wherever. This is simply because you don’t have to drink Corso’s Kool-Aid or believe every line of “The Roswell Incident” to believe that something probably did crash at the ranch outside Roswell in 1947.

In the end, whether that was a Project Mogul balloon or an alien whatnot is perhaps less important than the fact it marks a place we can all agree to start from.

Is it any wonder I want to see what the symbols on the beams looked like?