The horde of UFO believers who gathered along a normally lonely stretch of desert in Roswell, N.M., earlier this month is the latest evidence of the foolishness that government cov-er-up can cause.
The visitors gathered for the 50th anniversary of a believed UFO crash, an event the U.S. government probably could have debunked decades ago.Instead, the Air Force waited until a week before the anniversary to produce a 231-page report, "The Roswell Report: Case Closed," which, indeed, offers reasonable explanations for a series of strange eyewitness accounts of events that occurred decades ago.
The "Roswell Incident" has become a central myth of UFO lore. It began in July 1947 when a rancher northwest of Roswell found debris from a crashed object he thought was a flying saucer. Aluminum-foil-like bits and pieces were reported to be impervious to burning or ripping, and after crumpling went back to their original shape without creases.
When the Army Air Force investigated, the first official press release issued about Roswell declared the military had the remnants of a flying saucer. Within hours, however, higher-ups declared the first press release a mistake and explained that the debris was merely a downed weather bal-loon.
The story laid dormant for decades until it was resurrected by a supermarket tabloid in 1978. Since then, at least four books have been published on the Roswell Incident, and it is a central theme in the popular sci-fi TV series, "The X-Files."
The story evolved from the rancher finding the foil-like bits and pieces to purported accounts of one live and several dead aliens being recovered by the Army Air Force around the same time.
A groundswell of interest in the matter finally prompted Rep. Steven H. Schiff, R-N.M. - a UFO skeptic - to ask the Pentagon in March 1993 to declassify everything relating to the Roswell military operation. He offered them a face-saving chance to come out with the truth once and for all. What the Pentagon did, instead, was effectively insult the congressman. The Air Force referred him to the National Archives - which said it had no information.
Schiff didn't take kindly to the brush-off. In late 1993, he called the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, and asked them to look for documents relating to the incident. The GAO investigation for a Republican congressman - then in the minority in the House - was not a high priority.
But the Air Force was spooked enough to try to pre-empt the GAO inquiry. They issued a short report in late 1994 that was intended to be their final word on the matter. The debris was part of Project Mogul, they declared, a top-secret experiment aimed at detecting future Soviet nuclear blasts by monitoring sound waves in the upper atmosphere using high-altitude balloons, sensors and radar reflectors.
The next year, as the GAO was conducting its inquiry, knowledgeable sources told our associate Dale Van Atta that the normally staid, unruffled GAO auditors were convinced the Air Force was still covering up and had not told them everything it knew.
Now it turns out the sources - and our column - were right. The Air Force was still, stupidly, covering up. The recent report proves that Schiff wasn't told about all they had. It includes details and photographs, for instance, not shared with the GAO.
The report does demonstrate that enough was going on back in that post-war era to cause great confusion among the public about any military activity or unusual airborne debris. Roswell was the home of the 509th Bomb Group, which was then one of the Army Air Force units armed with atomic bombs; it was planes from the 509th that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki two years earlier. Not far away was Alamagordo and the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was exploded. The nearby White Sands Missile Range had begun all its top secret tests as well.
Many different events occurred, which created confusion in witnesses when remembered years later. Strange test vehicles did crash; dummies which could look like expressionless aliens were dropped out of planes for parachute tests; a balloon flight accident caused one captain's helmet to shatter and his head to swell abnormally, possibly making him appear alien-like when he walked into a New Mexico hospital.
Every fact recited in the new Air Force report could have easily been declassified more than a decade ago. This reasonable series of probable explanations certainly could have been shared with an inquiring congressman and GAO auditors two years ago.
The upshot is that the truth rarely hurts terribly, but the repercussions of a coverup often do. Just ask Richard Nixon. Or ask the relatives of the 39 suicidal members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who bought into the Roswell conspiracy theory and believed a UFO would come pick them up after they died. That tragedy is not the fault of the U.S. government, of course, but the Roswell Incident, which has been fairly debunked by the U.S. Air Force, was allowed to grow and fester unnecessarily for these and other adherents - when the Air Force could have shared the truth a long time ago.