Deathbed Confession Says Aliens Were at Roswell

xnuandax writes "The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."

Comments

Bombula

[Bombula]

As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. And the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance are close to zero.

Re:Bombula

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone who buys a car is smart enough to design one. Maybe they're just hick aliens crashing their society's equivalent of a mass-market SUV into some boring planet in the middle of nowhere.

Re:Bombula

[Balthisar]

I don't want to give credence to this, but for the sake of logic, I've got to say: maybe the crew didn't navigate four trillion miles. Consider that Navy aircraft carrier pilots have no idea how to navigate an aircraft carrier from Hawaii to the sea of Japan, but yet you're saying that it's inconceivable that a crashed F-14 pilot could pilot such a craft. I have to think that even an advanced society has some type of delegation of responsibilities that would permit a craft to crash on the Earth. Unless they employed eugenics at some point in their history, there's no guarantee that even an advanced society doesn't have "normal" people. That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team. ;-)

Re:Bombula

[ozmanjusri]

They navigated the craft at least twenty four trillion miles THROUGH SPACE before crashing it in a unique and completely alien atmosphere with flight conditions they have never encountered before and that their craft obviously weren't designed to handle.

I doubt it was the flight conditions.

It's far more likely they navigated all those trillions of kilometres, then sent down what to them was a clearly unarmed, unarmored lander that demonstrated they were peaceful types hoping to say hello to the locals. When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker.

The military then covered up the fact that they'd screwed humanity's chances of ever having friendly chats with some people who could solve the problem of interstellar space travel, cure cancer, save the whales and promote world peace.

Let's face it, if the US military had scored any advanced alien tech, they wouldn't have kept it secret. They'd have used against someone by now.

Re:Bombula

[LWATCDR]

Yea it actually is.
1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type.
2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent.
3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.

Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space.
If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.

You don't know many people in our military do you?

Re:Bombula

[brian0918]

"4. The human-like form is somewhat universal after all."

It's only universal among the uncreative minds of most scifi authors. Even on earth the diversity is so great that you wouldn't consider birds/insects/slugs to be "human-like forms" but even they have most of the parts (eye, head, nose, ears) in approximately the same relative locations. The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.

Re:Bombula

[jd]

Last I looked, space had fewer mountains. Before the advent of the artificial horizon (which would be a meaningless thing to have in deep space), pilots were forever crashing into lakes, snowy hilltops, etc. There's a canal in Europe that is packed full of World War II aircraft who mistook it for a runway or a road for emergency landings. The wrecks have lowered landing gear and seem to have largely made smooth but very unexpected and probably quite fatal splashdowns.

Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.

Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.

Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)

It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.

If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.

Re:Bombula

[BlueStraggler]

2. They are us from the future.

I'm thinking it's us from the past. Considering that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 50,000 years old, and recorded history about 5,000, there's been plenty of time for us to develop a few spacefaring civilizations. If you allow for some alternate branches of the homonid family you have a lot more time than that. You'd expect them to swing past the old farm from time to time to see what, if anything, has changed.

On the other hand, who's to say they're from space at all? Even if the stories are 100% true, there's not a shred of evidence to show that they're from space. We've never seen spacecraft, only aircraft. Is space alien really more plausible than some kind of technologically superior earthling who can live undetected (almost) on the same planet as us?

Re:Bombula

[Torvaun]

That was my first thought on seeing this headline. If on my deathbed, I have the opportunity to fuck around with the minds of half as many people he just did, I would do so, and die a happy man.

Re:Bombula

[bytesex]

No, he meant standard vs. imperial.

Re:Bombula

[Scrameustache]

90% of those deaths are from Iraqi on Iraqi violence and not from American action.
Yes, I've been there, and i know what I'm talking about. "I didn't hurt those people! It was the wasps from that nest I threw rocks at! Stop blaming me for the consequences of my actions!"

Ah!

[McGiraf]

He probably died laughing behind his teethes.

Re:So?

[Bombula]

I disagree. I think humanity is more than ready, and it would do us an enormous amount of good.

Highly improbable

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

I want to believe.....

That being said... the U.S. government is remarkably inept at keeping secrets much less orchestrating a cover up of this size.

Same is true of most conspiracy theories.

follow the money or the little green men ..

[abes]

This was posted on digg, and as someone pointed out, Haut also ran a UFO museum. So .. yeah .. no ulterior motives ..

A simple google search gives one of many such links:

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/07-20-95/cover.htm

Not to say that's the only reason he did that .. who knows. It just a bit odd. Other military people have come forward, including a high ranking general (who released a book). The general claimed all our current technology came from UFOs. Such as the night-vision goggles. This is a fairly outrageous claim even for someone with a rudimentary understanding of electronics.

It's not that I think aliens are impossible. I just am highly suspicious that they'd sneak about so much. Or that our government could keep anything a secret for so long. And crackpots coming out with books on UFOs does not count as the leaks.

Alternate Headline:

[Guppy06]

Dying Man Has Perverse Sense of Humor

anyone curious...

[catbutt]

why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?

Re:So?

[dc29A]

I disagree. I think humanity is more than ready, and it would do us an enormous amount of good. Ready? Lot of people in the west can't tolerate gays, lesbians, blacks, arabs, dogs, cats, Windows and whatnot. We have the most powerful nation on the planet with 92% of it's citizens believe in some magical man up in the sky. We kill each other over silly things like who's God can beat up who's God. We lie, cheat, don't trust anyone and are insanely greedy.

Imagine some aliens sending us some peaceful message, but these aliens look grotesque by our standards. Guess what? The neocons, China and Russia declare "War on Aliens", we'll jihad their asses. Unfortunately, we humans are extremely intolerant, and nowhere near ready to meet aliens. Not even close.

I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceship

[tjstork]

The whole problem, in my mind, with the Roswell "conspiracy", is the part that has a flight of P-51 Mustangs shooting down a spacecraft capable of travelling at intersteller speeds. As good as the P-51 was back in its day, it would be almost miraculous for one of these planes to shoot down a modern jet aircraft such as the F-22 or the EF-2000. Obviously, the technology required for manned interstellar space flight is easily 50 - 100 years beyond what we have now, and so, the claim seems utterly foolish. In any case, if an interstellar ship could reach the earth once, why wouldn't they have sent a rescue party looking for their fallen comrades?

Re:Exactly!

[ari_j]

You're doin' a heck of a job, Generation iPod.

Thanks, mom and dad. I'm doing like you taught me.

A Lieutenant?

[EmagGeek]

Suffice it to say that a Lieutenant is not exactly going to be high on the "need to know" list.

This is a hoax.. no aliens at Roswell..

Re:alien tech wouldn't defy laws of physics

[illegalcortex]

I don't quite understand why this is would be an outrageous claim Well, it's a bit like school. Remember how you always had to "show your work" to prove that you weren't cheating? No big jumps from problem to solution. Well, it's the same way with all this "current technology." Work on it has been incremental through the years. For every breakthrough you can trace the history leading up to it, and find people who almost but not quite got there. The breakthrough of silicon transistors was preceded by years of struggling with germanium transistors. That was preceded by years of trying to figure out how semiconductors worked and what they might be good for. That really picked up steam in the 1920s. And prior to the transistor, you can look at the history of vacuum tubes. They followed a parallel line of development and formed the bridge to the transistor era (early electronics and computers used vacuum tubes).

So for such a claim to NOT be outrageous, you'd have to also claim a vast conspiracy of scientists all over the world through the decades, sitting on most of their findings while publishing just enough to give an incremental step for the next breakthroughs. Or you'd need the aliens to be directing this, handing out tiny little tidbits of information to the scientists, and either swearing them to secrecy or using some sort of mind control on them. So yes, it is quite outrageous.

On the other hand, if next week some scientist produced working plans for a fusion generator that used a grand unified theory totally different than any proposed, now THAT would be what it would take to not be an outrageous claim of getting outside help.

The part of the Roswell crash that never added up

[ruiner13]

Many of the accounts of the crash site at Roswell and the parts recovered claim that there was a metal that despite being super thin, was flexible and impervious to damage. Ok... if they really had such a material, how the heck did the craft crash and scatter debris? If the material was that good, how did it come apart? I'd love to believe, but that part in particular has always made me a bit skeptical of the whole incident.

Re:You think we are aware of all tech military has

[tftp]

I say it's impossible because, assuming your premise:

1. Not a single sample of early but almost-modern NVGs is available.
2. NVGs are not difficult to invent, they are difficult to buy parts for.

For example, we could have a NVG as early as 1930 because you could use the early iconoscope to capture IR light below the visible power and amplify it as much as you want. That's what TV does, basically, and it is not a surprise that some camcorders are IR-capable.

But that NVG would weigh 200-300 lbs and wouldn't be exactly portable. To make it portable you need to advance the technology quite a lot. First portable NVGs were still vacuum tube based, but implemented in a very smart way, as a series of long parallel holes in a glass plate. The front edge, facing the field, would receive the picture, produce electrons, those electrons would then be accelerated within all the tubes and when they hit the end, facing you, the light would be both visible and bright. That worked like a "bug eye" - once the picture is focused it is transferred as if through a bunch of fibers, just with amplification.

With semiconductors you can create far fancier, and more efficient NVGs. But we, as a society, made every single step of this path, and it is proven beyond doubt how exactly each step was made, by who (scientists like to publish!) and who stepped on shoulders of those giants and made the next advance, etc. etc.

As other people mentioned, if you show me a working time machine, or a fusion battery of CR2032 size, or an FTL drive, then I may want to consider the idea of external help - just because no human on this planet has a foggiest idea about how to even approach any of those challenges. But the problem is that every known invention on this planet is 100% traceable to its origins, and origins of those origins, recursively.

Re:So?

[solios]

I call bullshit. On the ready bit, anyway. Just imagine the sheer force of the political shitstorm a First Contact would stir up. Anyone who could decode the garbage we eject into space would be smart enough to scope out the political situation - anywhere you put down, you're going to be politically validating whoever's collecting taxes on the ground you drop on.... and if you don't land in the US, you'll have the US military six feet up your ass muscling whoever else out of the way for first call on photo ops, resources, etc. Land in the middle east and you've not only brought that political shitstorm to a boil, you've also incited two of the world's major religions. Then there's the language thing.

Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.

Re:Its not necessary to have it "shot down"

[LWATCDR]

The original post said that he could see the US military shooting down such a space craft. I was pointing out that odds of a shoot down where about zero. A crash due to mechanical failure of course possible but I would say unlikely but possible.

My best guess as to what was at Roswell if it wasn't weather ballon.
I think it was a failed test of an ME-163. The US captured several but claim that they never did any powered tests of one. They where egg shaped. Could look like a saucer at the correct angle. And if you where flying one with fuel and it crashed you wouldn't look very human when they found you. The fuel was very nasty stuff.