Dozens of pages of the Air Force report were also given over to dissecting the witness accounts that permeated the Roswell mythology-pointing out the similarities between words and descriptions and the facts of the dummy recovery operations, with the final argument that the people who said that they'd seen something odd in the New Mexico desert were entirely correct-they had seen something extremely unusual, but it had nothing unusual to do with aliens. Add that to the passage of decades and they'd likely forgotten when precisely they saw what. Was it really crazy to think someone might imagine, upon being asked in the 1980s or 1990s, that something they'd seen in 1949 or 1953 was actually seen in 1947? Altogether, the historical record of the Roswell-related files amounted to about 41 documents that had been declassified across decades-seven Top Secret, 31 Secret, and three that were either Confidential or Restricted. The documents had been authored by officials long before the Freedom of Information Act, with little indication that any ordinary citizen would ever read them, and spanned the government security apparatus, from the military to the FBI to the CIA. As Karl Pflock, the "Pro-UFOlogist" but "Anti-Roswellian" skeptic wrote in his definitive book on Roswell put it, " were created by those whose job it was to crack the flying saucer mystery, who wrote and spoke with the certainty that no unauthorized person would ever be privy to their words top-notch professionals who sat in the highest ranks of American intelligence and official science. " Not a single such document lends credence to the idea that a UFO or alien bodies were recovered in the New Mexico desert. The debunking efforts were mostly for naught-an early example of how "Truthiness" would capture the American consciousness. Roswell was now internationally synonymous with aliens and government cover-ups, whether or not anything had ever actually happened there. As the UFO prankster James Moseley gleefully said at the giant 50th anniversary party the city of Roswell threw itself, "It's the greatest celebration of a non-event I've ever experienced." Yet even as the conspiracies around Roswell and the crash of an alien spacecraft grew, they failed to connect what is probably the single most conclusive piece of evidence that exists that proves precisely nothing of interest happened there in 1947: In theorizing about the most famous UFO incident of all-time, they ignored the implications of most famous single conversation about extraterrestrials ever.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000