Almost since the day it happened, the Roswell Incident has been presented as pantomime rather than history. The pro-UFO camp cheer whenever a vaguely plausible alien explanation pops up; while the skeptic camp get their kicks from booing stupid theories. Aliens? They’re behind you! Oh, no they’re not!
Well, I’ve had enough. And since nobody else on this whole stupid planet seems able to, I’m now standing up to say: the panto’s over. There were no Roswell aliens. The real story was a bunch of people so scared of losing a Cold War that they would do inhumane things to other people. And should their whole disgusting plan go bad, they believed that a combination of plausible deniability and burning the goddamn evidence would save them from being hanged until dead.
And guess what? It turned out that they were right. But only thanks to a stupid modern fairy story, one that had been playing out in the press for the whole of the previous week.
‘Aliens’
And that in turn was only because one bunch of idiots really, really believed in that fairy story. And that bunch of idiots wasn’t even MUFON.
It was the US Army.
The reaction of Colonel Blanchard (commanding officer of Roswell Army Air Field) was surely typical of many in the US Army. He initially suspected the ‘cipher mystery’ writing on the I-beams in the Roswell debris field was Russian, and that the whole thing was therefore some crazy Russian plot. But… when that writing quickly proved not to be Russian, what was he to believe? Maybe… it… was… aliens… after… all?
So, what did the Army do? They covered it up. And then covered it up again. And when that became too hard to sustain, they covered it up again. The dumbest thing? They almost certainly didn’t even know what it actually was that they were covering up (or whose asses they were saving), but they covered it up anyway. And they probably still don’t know, even today.
What a bunch of colossal idiots.
So, here we are, more than seventy-five years later, and they’re still at it. Everyone in the Roswell pantomime continues playing their traditional parts. It’s the same old stupidity. Nothing has changed.
The pinnacle of academic coverage of Roswell has become metacommentary about how it is some kind of ‘modern fable’. And if there’s a history of the Roswell Incident that has any substance beyond a thin patchwork of fragmentary witness statements, I’ve yet to find it. (Please don’t ask me to reflect on how many miserable non-books I’ve had to trawl through to reach that opinion, that would be cruel.)
It’s 2025, so can we please shut this whole miserable pantomime down now? Aliens didn’t do Roswell, people did Roswell, and it’s blindingly, pathetically obvious that they did. This needs forensic historians with scalpels, not sociologists.
Nick , perhaps we can agree to disagree on Roswell for now. I don’t foresee the Pentagon being forthcoming about this anytime soon. While we are on a perhaps similar subject. What are your thoughts on.the UAPs? Unknown Anamolous Phenomena’s) that have been so in the news. It’s easy to laugh Roswell off as a joke. It’s harmless. Not so much The UAP. Apparently these things have been known to attack! Not so funny. And the whistle blowers about it have been understandably nervous about Whistling!
Matt Lewis: I don’t know a lot about UAPs, I’m just interested in Roswell because it involves some mysterious writing that lots of people independently claim to have seen.
Yeah, the UAP looks like the coffin (balloon gondola) when the stratosphere was tested. Like the TIC TAC that the navy pilot filmed. That is, when the TIC TAC is laid flat.
Nick, ok…I unironically, as the kids say these days, wish you the best in finding that. Happy HollidayS.