No bodies. No bulbous heads. No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no government cover-up.
The Air Force on Tuesday made public its latest report on the famous 1947 incident in the New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell that is at the heart of claims by flying-saucer fans that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth and which has become a celebrated part of American popular culture.The report, in voluminous detail, says the supposed mountain of alien evidence is a mirage.
Just as old sightings of squids and whales spawned tales of sea monsters, so, too, the Air Force says, the shadowy doings of brave fliers, high-altitude balloons, lifelike crash dummies and saucerlike craft in the southeastern New Mexico desert at the dawn of the space age were glimpsed and embellished over the decades into false evidence of aliens.
For instance, one serviceman who crashed in a test balloon 10 miles northwest of Roswell suffered an injury that caused his head to swell and resemble the bulbous cranium of the classic science-fiction alien, the report says. This secretive 1959 mishap, it adds, apparently led decades later to tales of a crashed extraterrestrial that walked under its own power into a military hospital.
So, too, dummies were routinely dropped from balloons to test parachutes and were sometimes lost in the desert and disfigured in suggestive ways, their hands often missing a finger.
A distinguishing characteristic of the aliens supposedly sighted near Roswell, the report notes, is four fingers.
Sheila Widnall, secretary of the Air Force, in a foreword to the report, said the service worked for more than three years to find the truth behind therumors and make it public. "With this publication," she said, "we have reached our goal."
She praised the "dedication and accomplishments" of the men and women who served their country in the Southwest decades ago, several of whom were killed or injured in the line of duty.
Some critics fault the government for addressing the topic of alien visitations, laughing it off as ludicrous.
But other experts say America's obsession with unidentified flying objects has never been greater, and they praise efforts to combat what they view as a dangerous mania. They note the recent suicides of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who believed an alien spaceship passing near the Earth would take them to an ethereal paradise.
Not surprisingly, true believers in Roswell are unshaken, seeing the new report as evidence of the most egregious government cover-up of all time, one whose 50th anniversary is to be celebrated early next month with a bash in the New Mexico desert.
"This is the biggest story of the millennium, a visit to the Earth by extraterrestrial spacecraft and the cover-up of the best evidence, the bodies and the wreckage, for 50 years," said Stanton Friedman, who has written about the Roswell incident and ill be a featured speaker at the upcoming gala.
In an interview, he accused the Air Force of false reasoning, selective use of data and lying.
"The evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft," said Friedman, who lives in New Brunswick, Canada, and whose 1992 book, "Crash at Corona," is in its sixth printing. (Corona is a village closer to the purported crash site than Roswell.)
Critics of the report bridle at its main thesis: that civilians are confusing military activities that took place over more than a decade and falsely recalling them as a single incident. Such memory failures, critics say, are highly unlikely.
But the Air Force in its report says the witnesses are often recalling events more than four decades old and could have easily mixed up the dates that badly.
Joseph Kittinger Jr., a retired Air Force colonel who was much decorated for his pioneering jumps from balloons high over the New Mexican desert, praised the report as exhaustive and overdue.
"I'm insulted at how this fraud has been perpetrated and delighted that the Air Force has taken it on," he said in an interview. "Most of those people know it's a fraud, and the others are deluded." The report, he added, "is a great piece of work."
The much-debated incident took place on a desolate stretch of desert that was surrounded by a number of secret military bases. Increasingly, the site or sites (the faithful disagree on its exact location) are today ringed by tourist attractions that play on the extra-ter-restrial theme.
More than 100,000 sky watchers and conspiracy theorists are expected to visit Roswell for the incident's golden anniversary cele-bration during the first week of July.
The hullabaloo got started in July 1947 when a ranch foreman, W.W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material littering the ground. He turned it over to the sheriff, who gave it to the military authorities at the nearby air base.
On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a news release about the crash of a flying disk, prompting a local newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, to run an article under the headline: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer."