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

[Tablizer]

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.

First off, it may be that the visitors have a limited budget, just like anything we do does. One allocates the risk based on this budget. Even though we may have the money to make or buy the Ultimate Safest Volvo, it does not mean we will.

As far as appearence, here are some possibilities:

1. They are interested in us *because* we look like them.

2. They are us from the future.

3. We are a degerate form of them.

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

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

[Fozzyuw]

As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that [they] would crash in New Mexico.

No kidding. New Mexico is soooo, yesterday. Kansas is where anybody who's anybody crashes.

Re:Bombula

[Jace of Fuse!]

Yes, but it wouldn't be hard to believe our military would shoot down an unidentified flying egg no matter how advanced or rare it's occupants might be.

Not that I'm saying... uhm... yeah.

Re:Bombula

[martin-boundary]

Yeah, but think again: did you know that Dick Cheney just appeared one day in 1941 out of nowhere? The day before, nobody had heard of him, and then, poof! there he was. And ever since, he seems to appear for a while and disappear without a trace for long periods. Coincidence? I reserve judgement.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't think they are quite as advanced as we make them out to be. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere online that they decoded the final transmission of the spacecraft.

It was:

You win again, gravity!

Re:Bombula

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more amazing is that in such an advanced society as ours someone could think that tires are bolted to cars.

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

[SageMusings]

And let's not forget the debt we owe them for the anal probes that today's proctology enjoys. Most former alien abductees will testify to the genius of their probes.

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

[click2005]

But how easy could it be to fly an egg?

Mork was a moron and he could fly one just fine.

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

[tomhudson]

"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. ;-)"

Darn it Jim, that WAS our eugenics program!

Re:Bombula

[TapeCutter]

"When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker."

Definitely "unexpected" since sidewinder's had not been invented.

Re:Bombula

[tylernt]

Yeah, it all boils down to who gets laid the most before dying.

Doesn't bode well for /.ers, I'm afraid.

Re:Bombula

[lawpoop]

But you also have convergent evolution. Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC. You mention the head, which has been a reproductively successful adaptation. What I'm saying is not that the first successful body-plan that happen to evolve was the head and thorax, so that's what all descendants got. What I'm saying is that the environment selects body-plans that are beneficial, which is why we observe example of convergent evolution, such as legs and wings in chordates and insects.

As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.

So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?

To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.

Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.

Re:Bombula

[Tatarize]

What part of a signed and sealed affidavit on a death bed did you not understand? Not only does nobody ever lie on their death bed, he signed an affidavit (that you aren't allowed to see) and if he lied he can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law (considering he's dead this involves not being prosecuted at all).

I mean, would you disbelieve the guy who on his deathbed said that he actually faked those Loch Ness pictures? How about the guy who after he died had his family expose how exactly he faked those nice big foot pictures and tracks?

Well, I knew this guy and have a signed and sealed affidavit from him that their signed and sealed affidavit was acquired by threatening his family.

Re:Bombula

[macdaddy357]

An egg shape craft? If they were shot down, it must have gone something like this... Shazbat! we've been shot. We're going down. They are gathering all around the ship. They may want to kill us! Perhaps a friendly greeting will appease them. Greetings! I am Mork from Ork. Nanu Nanu.

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

[QuantumG]

Wow, that's the first time I've ever seen capitalism applied to justify the appearance of aliens.

Well done.

Re:Bombula

[nametaken]

You know what else I find totally unbelievable? That a civilization so advanced that it could send an orbiter all the way to other planets would manage to crash it when it got there... and over something as retarded as metric vs. standard. :)

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

[E 99]

So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.

Or maybe that's why the crashed.
"Turn the egg! Turn the egg!"
"I can't, I don't have any hands!!!"
"AHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

Re:Bombula

[Max Littlemore]

Crypto!! You're not supposed to be posting on Slashdot. Get back to the invasion site immediately!

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

[Genda]

I'm sorry but this is just not a conversation that makes any sense. We haven't even got the vaguest idea of what the boundaries are for the conversation "What is Life?". The idea that a species evolving in a different environment, I mean really different, is going to in any way resemble human beings, is simply ludicrous. You gotta cut back on the Star Trek, the numerous humanoid aliens there are simply a function of make-up vs. CGI budget.

We (human beings) are running around with DNA from an ancient ancestor that had 5 fold symmetry, 4 limbs + head, 5 fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and five primary orifices in the skull (think inverted appendage.) Before that we inherited DNA from a worm... if you look at a human body morphologically we're worms that evolved better means of locomotion, and the ability to manipulate our local environment. Any alien you see owning a head with a face you can recognize, a spine, and limbs would have had to evolve on this planet. There are trillions of evolutionary paths that could have made life on earth wildly different, and to assume the path that produced us is the only path that could have produced sentient life with the ability to manipulate it's environment is not only myopic, it's homocentric to a fault.

I won't argue that certain structures would prove useful on earth and evolve repeatedly given our enviornment. Even on earh, however there are vastly different organism operating in wildly different circumstances, no light, crushing pressure and heat, sulphur as an energy cycle, even organisms that exist in ultracold and environments lacking oxygen. That's just on this planet, using precisely the same DNA, and carbon based biology.

I could easily imagine life based on completely different chemistry... carbon will usually be the most likely chemical backbone, though at higher temperatures sillicon and metals might combine in very interesting ways. Sensing is a vital characteristic of life, but organs of sense might be tremendously different for another species. They might sense any or all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and do so with organs very different from ours. How and what they consume and excrete might be very different than what we understand... even on earth what animals breath out, plants breath in... what might setient beings who move as slowly as plants occur to us like? Plants have powerful sensory capabilities, but they are very unlike humanoids.

On earth the octopus is a prime example of a mollusk well on it's way to becoming a technological intelligence. Here's an animal with much in common with human beings but also very alien... communication through melenophores... that's way ourside our normal thinking, and this is an intelligent terrestrial species. How much more different might a being be that evolved in a cold methane lake, or whose fundamental chemisty is composed of complex sugars instead of proteins.

You're going to have to stretch your head a whole lot more if you're goin to imagine life elsewhere. The chances of it being a lot like us is slim at best. Anyway you're going to have to sift through a lot of microoganisms before you find any larger than unicellular life out there. Of course, there's nothing preventing unicellular communities from becoming sentient. That's a kind of life we should be very careful not to miss, simply because it doesn't look like us.

Re:Bombula

[pugugly]

The same reason *my* brain isn't stuck into my abdominal cavity where I keep all my other importan stuff - My brain is about 1% of my weight, but produces about 20% of my body heat.

That's why I store my brains in a lower, dangling organ, where they can cool easily - that's the way most of us Bipedal aliens do it. -

Pug

Re:Bombula

[E 99]

Trillions of kilometers? That's about 1/10th of a light year, you need at least 8 light years for interstellar travel (and we'd be pretty amazingly lucky to have intelligent life so close to us).

Try "gajillion bazillion manyillian kilometers". Interstellar space travel is pretty ridiculous, and not just because we can't think of a technology that could do it, but because a technology that could do it and not take millenniums would be impossible.
Most of all why would they bother coming all this way? If they did want to travel so far just to say "hello, what's up?" why not do it via radio? This would be much faster and easier.

Actually travelling can be much faster than radio. Special relativity limits communication between fixed parties to the speed of light, because it limits observed travel to the speed of light. Contrary to popular opinion, it does not limit subject travel to any speed whatsoever. While the traveller will never "technically" see his destination approaching with a velocity faster than the speed of light, he will see the distance to is destination relativistically contracting as his speed increases.

Therefore, in a space craft that could accelerate and 1g for half the trip, then decelerate at 1 g for half the trip, Special Relativity predicts you would reach the center of the galaxy in 20 years, covering a distance of (from earth perspective) 30 thousand light years. From earth perspective, our max speed was 0.999999999 c and it took us hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Our perceived speed at any instant was never any faster, but because of the changing length contraction, at journey's end, our perceived distance travelled over time was 1500*c.

These are the lengths of time it would take to travel to the following places using the 1g acceleration/deceleration method. (From http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/S R/rocket.html)

4.3 ly nearest star ==> 3.6 years
27 ly Vega ==> 6.6 years
30,000 ly Center of our galaxy ==> 20 years
2,000,000 ly Andromeda galaxy ==> 28 years
n ly ==> 1.94 arccosh (n/1.94 + 1) years

As an added bonus, if you made the trip to Andromeda, you'd get observe 2 million years of galaxy evolution over your 28 year trip.

Re:Bombula

[JoeKilner]

Who is to say that _we_ shot it down?
Weren't there nine of these things seen and then only one on the ground?
If any of this is true (which, of course, it isn't) then the most credible conclusions are:

• The aliens look human therefore they are human.
• They are on earth therefore they came from earth.
• Their technology is more advanced than ours therefore the crash was an accident or caused by someone of sufficiently advanced technology.

So we have some theories:

• At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)
• Humanity in a parallel dimension was experimenting with cross dimensional travel and it went wrong.
• At some point in the past a super intelligent branch of humanity separated from the rest of us and has been living in secret along side us for a while now. They were pissing around buzzing some country-folk and something wet wrong. Maybe a teenager stole the keys to their dad's flying-egg-car?
• Any of the above except it was an escape attempt by some dissident / terrorist / freedom-fighter / messiah / anti-christ / "crack commando unit sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit" and they were shot down by pursuing craft.

Anythying else is just pure speculation and fantasy.

Re:Bombula

[Solandri]

If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost

And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.)

I don't think there were many into U.S. territory. They did happen though (bottom of page 8). Most of the incursions were prolly into Canadian airspace. And a favorite Soviet flight path was from the Arctic down to Cuba, right along the U.S. coast (but in International waters).

I would agree though that the number of recon shootdowns by the Soviets doesn't actually mean anything. The Soviets really didn't need to do much aerial reconnaissance. Once they got a man into the U.S. (or Canada - the border is unfenced and unguarded), he could do a much more thorough job collecting intel just by driving around with a camera while "on vacation." That wasn't the case for the U.S. The U.S.S.R.'s closed and restrictive society left aerial reconnaissance as one of the only means of gathering intel on what was going on inside. And from the 1970s on, both sides shifted towards satellite recon.

Re:Bombula

[bytesex]

No, he meant standard vs. imperial.

Re:Bombula

[indifferent children]

No. He meant Rebel 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!"

Re:Bombula

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you're wrong. The translation of the last transmission was something like:

Male: No Honey, we are not asking for directions, I'll take a look to the map, hold the wheel.

I don't suppose...

[wesley96]

the craft's name was 'Humpty Dumpty'?

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.

Not a trustworthy source

[evildogeye]

He was the founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM. I think that makes it necessary to take his death bed statement with a grain of salt.

Re:Not a trustworthy source

[l0ungeb0y]

"Ultimately why would a space craft be built out material resembling tin foil. "

Because it's powered by hats?

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

Re:Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor

[gEvil (beta)]

I'd be laughing all the way to the mortuary, if it were me...

And I'd be really creeped out if I were the coroner...

anyone curious...

[catbutt]

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

Re:anyone curious...

[lawpoop]

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

How often have you seen a source document in a news article? Almost never. The audience tunes out; you lose readership. It's a waste of column space.

Someone posted the affidavit text on digg:

2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT

DATE: December 26, 2002
WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx
NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan


(1) My name is Walter G. Haut

(2) I was born on June 2, 1922

(3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203

(4) I am retired.

(5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town.

(6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate.

(7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more.

(8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris.

(9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished.

(10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch.

(11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out."

(12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg

Speculated Where???

[DumbSwede]

"This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."

I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"

Re:Eggheads!

[JustOK]

Eggs can fly, as long as they're in a 3oz or less container.

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.

Government and Secrets - An Analysis

[rueger]

There is no way they could keep a secret of this magnitude and cover it up for 60 years.

Ok, let me get this reasoning straight.

a) There's no way that the government could keep a secret that long.
b) How do we know that there's no way that the government could keep a secret that long?
c) Because if the government tried to keep a secret that long we would have beard about it.

Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um ... keep a secret secret? Is it possible that we wouldn't have heard about it?

(especially if they used secret alien technology to keep it secret!)

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:Phoenix Lights.

[Anonymous Coward]

I need an explanation, that isn't flares, cause that explanation stinks.

Ok, I'll play your silly game if you just want to throw the truth out because you don't like it. It wuz aliens. Seriously, as an ex Gulf War I crew chief on A-10s there is little doubt in my mind that they are flares dropped from A-10s. That is *exactly* what flares look like from a great distance that are dropped from an A-10. The kind of flares I am talking about are not roadside flares but they are much much bigger and brighter and descend on parachutes. They are used to light up a battle field and they do a mighty fine job of it. I saw show on television where they superimposed actual video footage of the lights over a daylight shot of the mountain range from the exact same perspective that the video was shot from. The "lights" disappeared one by one on the video at the same point they would have dropped below the peak of the mountain (the flares were dropped on the other side of the mountain). Really, the glove fit perfectly.

If you don't believe me here is some more:
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2007/j an/m26-005.shtml
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4041

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.

400 Government/Military Witnesses - On Record

[Adeptus_Luminati]

Big deal 1 guy admits it, the video below shows 22 of 400 senior Government, NASA, Airfoce & other top Military personel admitting it on National/International television that aliens are real & Gov has been hiding it.

The Disclosure Project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk

Yeah it's almost 2 hours long, but it will blow your mind!

I wonder how much longer they can keep denying the more than obvious.

Nuff said.

Adeptus

Re:I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceshi

[robogun]

I believe the first F-117 Stealth (invisible to all high tech anti-air defenses) was brought down over Serbia by an AK-47. The Pentagon story is it was brought down with an SA-3 with a hacked radar, but either way a primitive tool brought it down.

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.

Just maybe...

[Eric Damron]

"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."

Maybe the contract went to the lowest bidder?

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.

Aeroflot

[Savage-Rabbit]

If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.) That depends on what type of recon asset you are talking about. There was frequent probing and prodding of US and NATO borders by all sorts of patrol aircraft like the Tu-95 and Tu-16 etc as well as faster recon aircraft based on jet fighters such as the MiG-25. The actual overflights however were usually conducted by much less spectacular aircraft that remarkably enough seem to have gone mostly unnoticed by the public in the US and Europe. This strategic recon force was known as Aeroflot. It seems Soviet airliners frequently made the most illogical flights simply in order to fly as close to as possible to sensitive sites or even right over them if they thought they could get away with it. They were even known to fake mechanical problems simply to be able to land in restricted areas. Later on the Soviets much preferred a combination of space based and human intelligence gathering but I don't think they ever stopped using the Aeroflot fleet for intelligence purposes. It was a much more elegant way of doing it than the U-2 and SR-71 flights were and as long the scheme remained undiscovered by the public in the west it was a far less provocative way of gathering intel. I was born well before the cold war ended and I can only recall one minor stink being raised when some journalist photographed an Aeroflot machine equipped with what looked like camera gear (presumably this aircraft had an extensive suite of well camouflaged ELINT equipment as well). Of course western intelligence services knew all about this but the public was for the most part blissfully unaware. Of course the USA and the Europeans did the exact same thing if possibly on a smaller scale.

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.