You may not
have noticed (but only if you've been living in a hermetically sealed shipping
container). This month is the sixtieth anniversary of what's politely termed
the Roswell incident.
That incident
unfolded like this. In July, 1947, New Mexico sheep rancher William Brazel
showed up at the Roswell Army Air Field with some unusual debris in the bed of
his pickup – weird leavings that he'd found in a pasture near the tiny town of Corona. This initiated a series of events that eventually became a drawn-out pot boiler
about a crashed, alien spaceship. The plot line is simple: extraterrestrials
came to visit, and accidentally destroyed their craft. The remains were
efficiently collected and perfectly hidden by a government paranoid about
security. According to the die-hard believers, the feds, even now, aren't
willing to fess up to the fact that aliens were on our front porch.
Now Roswell isn't the only story about aliens come to Earth, although it's certainly garnered
more press than most. Admittedly, there's some indication that its popularity,
even among the UFO in-crowd, may be oxidizing somewhat. In a recent query to
ten experts made by the Fortean Times web site, Roswell was mentioned only once
as a "most interesting UFO case." And that single mention was offered
by Stanton Friedman, who, as the greatest proponent of the Roswell story,
certainly has a dog in the fight.
Well, I don't
think aliens had anything to do with what took place at Roswell. There's good
and compelling evidence that what was in play in 1947 was a secret government
research program to develop technology for detecting Soviet nuclear tests. So I
won't delve here, and yet again, into the sticky thicket of claims and counterclaims
regarding what happened. That path has been beaten down to a trench.
In
addition, adding my voice to the Roswell roar doesn't seem to help: I am
perversely proud to note that, according to a poll recently conducted by one
Canadian web site, I am less reliable on this subject than the Easter Bunny. I
didn't lose this vote by a hare either – the vote was five to one against me. (I
note, however, that Mr. Bunny's list of published opinion on Roswell is thin.) In
addition, having written about this before, I've learned that doing so is like
riding a bronco in your shorts – it's just a guaranteed way to set yourself up
for pain. Frankly, every time I voice some skepticism about claims of alien
visitation, I am promptly, and inevitably, rewarded with a flood of abusive
e-mail.
Nonetheless,
the incident remains iconic. So let me point out something that, frankly, I
find strangely comforting.
Roswell was, supposedly, a situation in
which an alien craft came who-knows-how-many light-years to visit Earth before
the pilot punched the wrong button and caused a fatal explosion above the New Mexico desert (this is akin to making a cross-country road trip, and totaling your car
on the garage door as you pull into the driveway). Debris was recovered, as were
alien bodies. And yet, strangely, even after 60 years, the consequences of this
short-circuited social call by a culture able to bridge interstellar distances
are... zilch.
Well, not
entirely zilch. The incident has been a boon to its articulate proponents, to
television, and to the Roswell economy (indeed, for that small and friendly,
but otherwise unremarkable city, the saucer smashup 70 miles outside of town
has become a "crash cow").
But really,
what significant effect has it had? An historical analogy might serve to give
scale. As all readers and everyone else know, Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492. But 60 years later, were the inhabitants of the area still unclear about
whether Spaniards had happened upon their world? Was that still controversial? A
contemporary, Bartolome de Las Casas, wrote in A Brief Account of the
Devastation of the Indies about what changed on the archipelago of islands
that, at the time of Columbus' arrival, "were densely populated with
native peoples... [with Hispaniola] perhaps the most densely populated place in
the world." By 1542, a half-century later, de Las Casas wrote that "We
can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the... years that have passed,
with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain
more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without
trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen
million."
The effect
of the encounter was not subtle, and sixty years after Columbus, the Indians
weren't arguing on late-night radio about whether they'd been visited. And that's
not just because they didn't have radio.
Well, in
the more-than-half-century since Roswell, we still seem to be here with our
lives and economy intact. If there's been any effect from an alien
face-to-face, it's too subtle for me.
As
rebuttal, some people claim that I'm wrong; that there really is a noteworthy
aftermath to Roswell. Namely, that the military has reverse-engineered the
debris, producing all sorts of strategically important technology
breakthroughs. That, at least, would be significant. However, the idea, to
begin with, is about as plausible as talking dogs. Could the Roman legions, a
pretty successful military in their own right, reverse-engineer your laptop? They
were, after all, only two thousand years behind us, and were humans to boot.
But
plausible or otherwise, what's the evidence that we've in any way benefited
from extrasolar imports? As an exercise, I recently graphed the speed of America's top military aircraft over the past century, assuming that if we'd really figured
out the grays' engineering secrets, that fact would be reflected in this
important category of hardware. Well, it won't surprise you to hear that our
military planes are faster now then they once were, and between 1935 and 1970,
the top speed went up by about a factor of ten. But the improvement was
gradual, except for a bit of a jump as soon as the Nazis developed jet planes.
Of course, that was before Roswell.
What about
some new astronomy or physics? Have we learned anything there? Is there some
striking discontinuity in knowledge following 1947 that you can point to?
I think Roswell is important, really I do. But more because it points to our gullibility, not to
any alien guests who, intent on visiting the Land of Enchantment, proved that
they should never have been given a driver's license.
OK, let the
abuse begin.
advertisement
