ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 28, 1995 TAG: 9512290001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WHY THINGS ARE COLUMN
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
Q: Why do some people believe the Air Force recovered extraterrestrial bodies from a UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947?
A: The Why staff is shutting down operations at a perilous time. Many people are struggling to discern the probable amid the merely possible. Others are seduced by the blatantly implausible. The patently ridiculous is promulgated by tabloids and taught by tenured Harvard professors.
There are so many competing models of reality that even the most educated, sensible people may find themselves thinking that nothing can be known for sure, and thus anything - even UFO stiffs in a government lab - is possible.
It's a fact that in July 1947 something crashed on a ranch near the Army Air Force base at Roswell, N.M. What was it? The rancher told the local newspaper that he found what looked like tinfoil, paper, sticks and tape, with fragments of a balloon attached. All told, it weighed maybe 5 pounds, he said.
At the time this happened, the United States was in a UFO craze, with numerous alleged sightings of ``flying disks'' all over the country. For unclear reasons, a spokesman for the Roswell base, William Haut, issued a news release saying the Air Force had recovered part of a flying disk. The Air Force brass then told him to change the story to say it was just a weather balloon.
``This was the start of the massive cover-up on UFOs,'' says Walter H. Andrus Jr., international director of the Mutual UFO Network.
What's odd is that no one in 1947 came forward to say they found a flying saucer. Nor did anyone announce that they found alien bodies. Not for three decades did the memories start kicking in. It was in the late 1970s, around the time of ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' that the Roswell Incident took off, becoming the subject of several books. Among many news claims was the assertion that two UFOs crashed, with four bodies recovered near one site.
The story kept growing. A Roswell mortician said he had seen four child-sized caskets and body bags taken to the scene. He also said he was told by a nurse that she had witnessed an autopsy of what looked like aliens.
One new eyewitness said he and a friend discovered a flying saucer stuck into the side of a cliff, and the next morning found what looked like bodies. Later he embellished the story to say he pulled off their helmets and saw their big black eyes.
The case grew more absurd this year when Fox television broadcast, several times, a show called ``Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?'', featuring snippets of a black-and-white film allegedly showing a Roswell alien being carved up by doctors. It's very intriguing!
But the film has some major credibility problems. The doctors are in hooded suits and are unidentified. And where is the unnamed ``elderly American cameraman'' who purportedly shot the film? Why did he wait half a century to come forward? Ray Santilli, the promoter of the film, claims the cameraman wants to be anonymous because he fears government reprisal. The producer of the Fox show, Robert Kiviat, grumbles, ``We're a little bit disappointed that we have not yet interviewed the cameraman.''
In the TV show, a Kodak expert says the film stock is consistent with that used in 1947. What the TV audience wasn't told, though, is that Kodak wasn't allowed to examine the film, only a single frame that could have come from anywhere. A Kodak spokesman told the Sunday Times of London, ``Sure it is old film, but it doesn't mean it is what the aliens were filmed on.''
According to UFO skeptic Philip Klass, the AT&T telephone mounted on the wall in the film wasn't introduced until 1956 - proof that the film is a hoax.
Ah, but what about the body? Isn't it realistic? Don't the special-effects experts quoted on camera say that it would be hard to create a fake body like that? Not exactly: They say it would be a quality job of fakery. A special-effects expert interviewed by the TV show ``American Journal'' said it appeared to be ``a very good fake body'' and that it was probably cast in an upright position, because ``the general posture and weighting of the corpse was incorrect for a body in a prone position.''
And finally, at crucial moments, such as when internal organs are being removed, the film goes out of focus. Darn the luck! No group of people in history has ever had a harder time focusing cameras than the people who see flying saucers, alien beings and Bigfoot.
(The irony is, many UFOlogists also think the autopsy film is fake. Reason: ``I can find nothing in the footage that looks like the bodies as described by the witnesses,'' says Stanton Friedman, the self-described ``original investigator'' of the Roswell Incident.)
With the Roswell case so controversial, the Air Force in 1994 launched its own investigation. The result was a 600-page report concluding that the debris near Roswell was from a then-classified government operation called Project Mogul. The project used balloons to carry sensing equipment designed to detect atomic weapons experiments in the Soviet Union.
The Air Force found that one of these balloon devices, launched on June 4, 1947, was never recovered, and probably wound up as the Roswell debris. The report didn't spend much time on the issue of Martian corpses, noting that ``the pro-UFO groups who espouse the alien bodies theories cannot even agree among themselves as to what, how many, and where, such bodies were supposedly recovered.''
That doesn't mean it didn't happen!
But if we have to pick something unprovable in which to invest our faith, we might pick something like ``Love conquers all'' rather than ``Government has ET on ice.''
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Richard Thompsonby CNB