“A man is found dead in the desert, next to an open package. How did he die?”
Many will immediately recognise this puzzle format, which became popular for a few years thanks to the 1967 publication of Edward de Bono’s “The Use of Lateral Thinking”. Nowadays, de Bono’s whole “Lateral Thinking” fad is long forgotten, because – in truth – all it really claimed was that not all puzzles yield to linear analysis, so sometimes to get to an answer you’ve got to shake the tree a bit.
Fast-forward now to Peter Senge’s (1990) “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization”, which introduced holistic problem-solving to many. This is the idea that reducing complex systems to individual components can make some problems impossible to solve, because you’re not looking at the big picture. I should also point out that this is oddly reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ book “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” (1987) and its sequels, where seemingly unrelated events turn out to be connected in surprising ways.
But if you’re looking for a funkier, 2020s take on problem-solving under uncertainty that somehow reboots and refreshes these angles, I suspect your search will be in vain. (Perhaps that’s a book I should write?) All in all, the best advice currently on offer for genuinely hard problems would seem to be:
- Shake the tree a bit;
- Make sure you see the full picture; and (if all else fails)
- Ask Dirk Gently.
Roswell as a Lateral Thinking Puzzle
Let’s now lean hard into the witness-centred version of Roswell that appears in Carey & Schmitt’s book “Roswell: The Ultimate Cold Case”, and present that in the same puzzle format:
“A round-ended metal capsule with no engine or life support system is found in the arroyo. It contains three small alien-looking people, two of whom are dead, while the third cannot speak. Two other sites are found a few miles away, one with many shards of paper-thin metal debris, plus fragments of lightweight I-beams with unknown writing on.”
This, I believe, is an (only very slightly) stripped-down version of the puzzle the US Army was faced with in 1947. I further believe that the US Army:
- Latched onto a false solution (i.e. that it was an alien spacecraft);
- Covered that up as an issue of national security;
- Terrorised witnesses and concealed evidence as far as possible; and
- Has, ever since then, kept covering up the messes left by its previous coverups.
Why on earth did the US Army act like this? And, moreover, why does it continue to act like this even now? What kind of mad confuddlery is going on here?
The birth of the “Secrecy Silo State”
To me, Roswell is a symptom of something much, much bigger, which in 1947 had only really just begun: the modern US security state. Though this was made official by the National Security Act (enacted 26th July 1947), the ideas behind it – to create a peacetime security state based on the wartime security state – had already started to be put into practice by President Truman, Oppenheimer, Groves, Conant et al.
This took the set of wartime management practices used by the Manhattan Project and similar tech projects, and codified them into a peacetime management toolkit. The heart of this involved using secrecy not as a choice, but as a de facto starting point for everything. The default position was to disclose nothing, and (later) refuse to confirm or deny anything: and, as per the CIA, use plausible deniability. The state gave no transparency, no accountability, no access: the media were controlled, licensed, sanctioned, and quickly leash-yanked back into line if they started to dig in a ‘wrong’ place.
We can see this with Operation Crossroads in 1946: despite being planned very much as nuclear success theatre, many things went wrong (for example, the first test’s [“Able”] bomb [“Gilda”] missed its target by 649m; decontamination was almost impossible; and so on) and journalists proved much harder to force into line than expected. David Bradley subsequently wrote that “the accounts of the actual explosions, however well intended, were liberally seasoned with fantasy and superstition, and the results of the tests have remained buried in the vaults of military security“.
So, secrecy and accountability were immediate casualties of the new security state. But another wartime management practice accompanied secrecy: silos. Secrets were actively held and managed in small local silos – groups, teams, committees, even individuals. There was no global secrecy, just lots of local secrecy.
And this is, I think, what people often fail to grasp about America since WWII: it’s not that it’s a state that is built on secrets, but it’s a state that is built on lots of silos of secrets, all jealously owned and gatekeeped (gatekept?) by different groups and interests. And which rarely fit together.
The Problem With Silos
You’ve probably already worked out the rest of the arc here, but I’ll be explicit: as Peter Senge highlighted, you really need to see the big picture in order to solve particularly complex problems. And silos full of secrets make that almost impossible to achieve.
Because secrecy silos often isolate problem-solvers from conflicting information and opinions, they can often act as what we now call “echo chambers”, amplifying bad ideas and interpretations, which then (thanks to the way the silo is isolated) can get locked in. My belief is that this is precisely what happened with Roswell: a bad conclusion (about aliens who weren’t aliens) became a gospel truth, one so dangerous that it had to be immediately covered up (and then kept covered up).
Many people have written about the practical issues of secrecy, including Timothy Melley (whose book “Covert Spheres” on this subject I’m currently waiting for). A Professor of English Literature, Melley argues that literature becomes a way that people use to help imagine what the state is “getting up to” inside a secrecy state.
However, I think there’s a big difference between a secrecy state (i.e. one where the state monolithically holds secrets, so that you can talk meaningfully about a ‘government conspiracy’) and a secrecy silo state (i.e. one where lots of silos hold secrets, but not in a joined-up kind of way). For example, The X-Files told stories not only about The Syndicate (an archetypical silo of secrets) but also about lots of other groups holding secrets: yet unless you’re carefully tracking the overall story arc, people often think it’s about a single monolithic government conspiracy, jumpscare lolz, and whether Mulder and Scully are going to finally have sex. So maybe it’s all a bit more complex than the way Melley presents it.
But local silos also lead to disjointed management decisions based on partial (and often incorrect) knowledge, and leadership being forced to make macro decisions based on conflicting reports and opinions. You don’t have to look far into the history of the CIA to to see how this plays out geopolitically – Bay of Pigs, U2 spy plane, etc. I further suspect that bad decision-making built on the culture of secrecy silos played out on even bigger geopolitical stages – weakening Russia so much that it empowered the rise of Putin. But that’s another story.
Roswell 1947
So for me, because Operation Crossroads was in the Pacific, the Roswell Incident seems to have been the very first time that the modern US secrecy silo state was properly tested on US soil, with ordinary people caught in the middle of it all. And the US Army failed every test – they abused human rights in the service of controlling the narrative, covering up something that they didn’t even remotely understand (then or now), simply because that was how the whole modern state apparatus now ‘rolled’.
And as far as I can tell, it is still failing every test to do with Roswell. And you don’t need to be Dirk Gently to figure that one out.
