Better yet, how about if UFO proponents explain the gaping time discrepancy between 1947, when Mac Brazel recovered the debris without ever, as far as I know, claiming to have seen any "dead aliens," and the 1970s, when all those "alien body" stories really got circulating? Hmmmmm?
But of course, like Time magazine and the Pentagon, I'm just wasting ink with all this pesky rationality. The people who believe in the Roswell yarn are only made all the more moist and tingly by official government denials and mainstream media debunkings. Besides, Roswell is like a bad pork chop: the longer you chew on it, the bigger it seems to get. Not only can proponents now add Time magazine to the list of conspirators, but there is always some new element popping up to add to the brew. And the UFO crowd barely had time to dismiss the Time and Pentagon reports before they had a new messiah to hail. It was Phil Corso and his book, The Day After Roswell.
Dateline NBC had the first interview with Corso, a former government official who claims to have taken "a torch" (apparently, those government-issue X-Files flashlights are a recent innovation), pried open a crate (and by the way, where was security when all this was happening?), and seen an alien floating in formaldehyde. He also claims that every modern invention from the transistor to lasers to fiber optics was reverse-engineered from the crashed Roswell UFO (remember, before it crashed we didn't even have flashlights) and that the Reagan-era "Star Wars" program was actually designed to ward off hostile space aliens, which it did (tell it to all those abductees and the entire city of Phoenix, Phil!).
Being a spoilsport, I have to point out that his story, while fascinating in its Lewis Carroll-meets-George Orwell kind of way, also has holes you could drive a military truck carrying a flying saucer through. To begin with, work had been underway on the transistor at Bell Labs for years before the alleged 1947 UFO crash (You know what this means: another UFO must've crashed in the 1930s!). The slow and painstaking development of all of the inventions Corso mentions is well documented (if you don't believe it was a slow evolutionary process, I have a 286 computer in my closet that I'd like to sell you), and most of the people who worked on them are still alive to deny that they figured them out by staring at gizmos from Neptune (although if Corso had claimed Bill Gates was an alien, that I might've believed).
Also, as Tom Mahood points out in his review (search it up on the Internet, another Martian invention), the science in Corso's book is just dreadful. He misstates how stealth technology works, claims UFOs ride "in an electromagnetic wave," which is nonsense right out of 1950's pulp fiction, describes lasers being used for navigational and communications purposes which would be highly inefficient if not impossible, misstates the phrase for which "laser" is an acronym, and on and on. Mahood bluntly concluded that he could go on indefinitely, but he was running out of synonyms for "B.S." And I haven't even mentioned the Foreword, allegedly hoodwinked out of Sen. Strom Thurmond by showing him a 19-page treatment that painted the book as a patriotic memoir about great American military leaders, with no mention of UFOs whatsoever. Or Corso's emphatic claim that he considered sharing this information with a famous mathematician in 1961, even though the mathematician had died in 1957. Or about Corso ending his interview with NBC with an oblique reference to all the other things he could tell them someday about the adventures he'd had with his time machine, which I'm guessing was reverse-engineered from a cuckoo clock.
What is ironic about all this Roswell/Corso hoopla is that while it annoys skeptics like me, it is even more irritating to some of the more serious-minded UFO proponents. Many of them, such as Kent Jeffrey, have gradually come to believe the Roswell Incident is nothing more than a red herring that has started to stink in all that desert heat. They are also expressing fears that Corso's book smells like another "Alien Autopsy" debacle: A wildly profitable media splash followed by a wave of debunking and ridicule that will make everyone remotely connected to the subject look like a dope. For this, they have my sympathy. I certainly wouldn't want to be judged by the crowd of losers I hang out with (just kidding, guys!) And so, we've decided to give them a break and show that not all non-CSICOP UFO researchers are necessarily charlatans and yahoos. We're doing this by running Karl Pflock's response to Stanton Friedman in this issue. Please feel free to copy and distribute it far and wide.
Personally, I think the only space age device to come out of the Roswell crash is the giant tourist magnet that the Chamber of Commerce has developed, and boy, is it pulling in the loose nuts! Thousands of tourists have traveled countless miles to spend a boiling hot July in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no scenery except a dent in the gravel that might or might not been made by something or other in 1947 (you can bet that if there ever were space aliens in Roswell, they weren't there on a sightseeing trip). And they are snapping up every tacky souvenir imaginable: UFO T-shirts, alien dolls, neckties, coffee mugs, quilts — one local waitress said you could paint an alien on a rock and sell it to these people — all while consuming mass quantities of flying saucer flapjacks and UFO cookies, washed down with Alien Star coffee or perhaps a few of the Roswell Inn's "Alien Margaritas." Drink too many and you, too, might crash, then wake up with an alien face tattoo from Romero's Tattoos (offering special discounts for aliens!) If this is the image we present to interstellar visitors, the Earth is well on its way to becoming known as the Rock City of planets.
I could go on forever with this Roswell stuff, but as we established long ago, I'm SICK OF IT!! Nevertheless, I'll leave you with one last tidbit: A couple of days from now, Chris Wyatt, producer of a "documentary" called UFOs, Above And Beyond, will appear in Roswell to unveil a small piece of metal which he claims came from the UFO crash and could not have been made on Earth. This is not the first such claim. One of the UFO museums in Roswell used to exhibit a triangular piece of metal, until one day when a jewelry maker came in and recognized it as his own handiwork, made of layered silver and gold. The museum refused to believe him or take it off display until an Albuquerque newspaper investigated and confirmed the jeweler's story. The museum then claimed that this just proved their rigorous verification system worked, which was, of course, laughably ludicrous.
Anyway, James Randi has already offered a $1.1 million prize if a group of independent metallurgists confirms that Wyatt's shrapnel is not of this earth. I have a feeling Randi's money is as safe as it's ever been, which is a good thing since he's also offering a $1 million reward to any practitioner of "therapeutic touch" who can prove that he really can detect an "energy field" around a human body by waving his hands.
Frankly, if I had $1 million, I'd offer it to the Amazing Randi, provided he would just wave his hands and make all this Roswell puffery disappear.
Confidential Memo
TO: Editors of "The Skeptic" DATE: 10 Jun 97
FROM: Joe Voelkering VIA: MOOFON (see "remarks")
RE: Appended message from "mi"
REMARKS: MOOFON = Mutual Odd-ball Observers of Flying Objects Network
The epistle that follows was on a diskette that I found in my dog's food bowl —
The dog was
Thus, I suggest appending a
A little known fact is that "do" and "ti" share a common/mutual brother — and, also, a common/mutual half-sister — who were joined in a common-law marriage for a number of years (which is not really all that common). I am their adopted son (which should
I am also "El Segundo Grande" of the largest group of remaining members of the "Heaven's Gate" group. Our "Head Honcho" is "la" — who uses a number of different earthly containers — including ones that go by the names "Shirley MacLaine" and (when the "MacLaine" container is not handy) "Demi Moore."
According to David Letterman, the "Shirley MacLaine" container spends a very high percentage of its weekends at its time-share condo on Pluto (or maybe the condo's on Goofy — I forget). In any case, the "Demi Moore" container is generally utilized a lot on weekends.
Further, the chap claiming to be member "#40" — who calls himself "REO" and stayed behind to present the tapes — prefers to call his "container" a "vehicle." I guess that might be expected from a character that picks the name of a truck, though. Apparently "REO" was his third choice, however — since there already was a "Mak" and "do" wouldn't let him use "Peterbuilt."]
Regretfully, "do" really blew it with that Hale-Bopp comet deal. The
So, with the Boggs/Jonz incident, we have: 1) A pilot who can (more-or less, by his own admission) fly "the box the airplane came in"
The
Now: It's
However, to validate our contentions, we retained the well-known MOOFOlogist Budd Hopkins — to "reconstruct" the Boggs/Jonz flight, etc. He found the following: 1) Jonz encountered icing conditions so severe that even
(Note that item #4 clears up the "dollars and quarters" enigma. Again, "do" really screwed up. Jonz wants his airplane back — merely as a "keepsake." Thus, asks those aborting their "earthly containers" to bring at least a minimum number of the
Therefore, we believe the Hale
Thus, we've made all of the appropriate preparations to "abort our earthly containers" (including the zip-lock bag versions) — and, when the "shuttles" from the Boggs/Jonz "Mother Starship" arrive to "beam us up,"
The "Heaven's Gate" incident has prompted a huge number of tongue-in-cheek comments — including the author's observation that it may be the best example of Darwinian evolutionary theory he's ever seen. (It certainly removed a bunch of whackos from the "gene pool," didn't it?)
At the same time, it points out the hazards of uncritical thinking. Like the "What's the harm in believing that astrology works?" attitude, we frequently see a similar attitude regarding alien UFOs.
(I say "ALIEN UFOs," primarily because I've seen an extremely large number of flying objects that APPEARED to be aircraft — and SOUNDED like aircraft — right down to the point where I would give you excellent "Vegas" odds on the make and model, etc. However, in many cases I could not ACTUALLY VERIFY that they really were, in fact, aircraft — because it was dark, etc. Thus, I have to admit they TECHNICALLY were "Unidentified Flying Objects" — albeit, ones that I personally FELT were, FAR BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, merely some type of an aircraft. [As I noted during a TV news interview one time, if they WERE alien UFOs, it certainly was very nice of the aliens to comply with all of the FAA/military aircraft lighting standards!])
In any case, regarding "Heaven's Gate," one can almost hear James Randi saying "When you begin to accept pseudoscientific claims — and start basing decisions on declarations by the fakes and the frauds, the cheats and the charlatans — you not only turn over your money to them; you're well on the way to turning over your entire life to them."
With the members of the "Heaven's Gate" cult, that appears to be exactly what happened: Their unquestioning belief in alien UFOs ended up being fatal.
Regretfully, that "terminal" level of credulity need not be one's own — as vividly demonstrated by the Oklahoma City bombing. Reportedly, McVeigh viewed a video titled "Waco - The Big Lie" at least 50 — and possibly more than 100 — times. Among other things the producers claimed that the "feds" started the fire using a "flame-thrower mounted on a military-type tank" — and included segments of some [very carefully edited] news-video, claiming that it was the "proof."
At least two NTS members reviewed the "...The Big Lie" for a local professor who was hired as an expert witness for the Waco litigation. In general, we found that it was a rather poorly done "cut-and-splice" presentation that was obviously edited to "show how the ATF & FBI 'murdered' Koresh and his followers. More specifically, we were able to locate unedited copies of the original TV video that contained the alleged "flame-throwing tank" scene — and discovered it was merely a "combat engineering vehicle" carrying a number of building panes that had fallen on a relatively flat area of its upper front.
McVeigh appears to have believed the allegations cited in "...The Big Lie," however — and that credulity cost the lives of many people that probably never even saw that video. — J.V.
Editor's note: What's New is distributed by Bob Park of the American Physical Society. What's New is available through the APS URL:http://aps.org/
EMF: THEY SAY IT'S NOT OVER TILL IT'S OVER — WELL, IT'S OVER.
A long-awaited National Cancer Institute epidemiological study of residential exposure to magnetic fields and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in children (WN 8 June 90) was published this week in
COLD FUSION: IT'S BACK! AND NOW IT NEUTRALIZES RADIOACTIVITY.
It was a stern test of my dedication. I had been assured that, because of its importance, the story would be in the first hour of
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by Bob Park