Happy 60th Roswell--but Arnold was first
Well, well, well. Happy 60th, Roswell, New Mexico. For true believers, yours was the definitive UFO incident.
Yet, if it weren't for another state you might not have made into the national lexicon in the first place.
The state to which I refer is the Evergreen State; Washington. You see, Roswell's "incident" was July 8, 1947. But in Washington on the previous June 24, a lone pilot was flying east over the Cascade mountains in his small plane. Suddenly, Kenneth Arnold looked out to the north and saw nine silver objects flying at what he estimated to be around 1200 mph. At that time, the fastest jets did about 660 mph.
When Arnold got back on the ground, he described the objects as being crescent-shaped, but said they flew like "a saucer skipped across water." The press took that quote and created a new term from it: flying saucer.
Now, 60 years later, the Roswell Incident had overtaken the public mind, and public debate rages. But it wasn't always that way.
The Arnold story dominated through the '40's, '50's, '60's, and most of the '70's. But then Ufologist Stanton Friedman wrote the first book on Roswell, and the floodgates were opened. After Friedman's brief chats with just a few witnesses, the other witnesses came out of the woodwork. And so did new accounts. And a lot of them conflicted. And of course the people who said they were there then are getting or are quite elderly or they've passed on.
Even when the Air Force released its files from that time, including 1997's Case Closed, the believers weren't buying it.
Now, you're everywhere. Not just in the town of Roswell, N.M. but in our minds, too. You're in our pop culture. Books, magazines, TV, the World Wide Web. Even the British had fun with it. In the first season (or series, as the British call them) of the revived "Doctor Who," there was one episode that mentioned Roswell twice.
If a UFO really did crash at Roswell, then maybe Arnold isn't important, other than giving your late press officer Walter Haut a term to feed the press (although Haut said "flying disc").
But if you're really nothing more than a bunch of materials retrieved from a crashed spy balloon, well, pardon the pun, but you're just full of hot air.
The fact remains that Arnold was the first to make a modern UFO report and that is why, to this day, he is still called, "The Man Who Started it All." But all he could provide was his eyewitness account and some sketches. So who knows if he was telling truth; he'll never tell, now. He died more than twenty years ago.
So Happy Anniversary, Roswell. Maybe you deserve it, maybe you don't. But, you were not the first. For that matter, maybe Arnold wasn't, either.
See article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070708/ap_on_fe_st/alien_anniversary
(Danacasso actually wrote this on the anniversary)
Comments
There is no such thing as UFOs so don't believe it! And that human person is not taking a photo of my grandpa! (He doesn't look very good there, does he?)
Posted by: Alien Visitor | July 14, 2007 04:14 PM
Alien Visitor,
I'm going to hope that you read what I wrote and realize that I never said that I believed in UFO's. I am hoping that you are just joking. From the tone of your post, I suspect that's the case.
Posted by: danacasso | July 14, 2007 10:25 PM
I think there are UFOs and the government is hiding it all. Why would there be so many reports if it wasn't true? And why does the government spend so much time and effort denying it?
Posted by: Big Al | July 18, 2007 06:11 PM
What is clear is that the American government lied to the American people. The officials claimed in 1947 and after that the "UFOs" were just everyday weather balloons or weather phenomenom. In the 1997 report, they said some of those sightings were actually experimental aircraft that they had known about. Either they lied in 1947, or lied in 1997, or lied both times. So what do we believe?
Posted by: Alden Loveshade | July 18, 2007 06:41 PM
All right, there most definitely WAS at the time of the Roswell crash a top secret Air Force program called "Project Mogul" that used balloons fitted with microphones to listen for Soviet nuclear tests (this was before satellites and even the U-2)and right around the time of Roswell, one of these balloons was lost. This supposedly was the "wreckage" that Maj. Jesse Marcel and Gen. Roger Ramey posed with for the newspapers.
Then Roswell was forgotten for 31 years. All kinds of other UFO sightings dominated.
Now, I grew up around airplanes and I have spent a lot of time looking up at the sky or out of airplane windows and I HAVE seen unusual things in the sky. But I have to partially go with the skeptics and believe that many UFO sightings are not genuine. It will take more than lights in the night sky to convince me. And just because a smaller light suddenly pops out doesn't mean a smaller vessel has just left; it means the plane just shifted so that one of its anti-collision lights just came into view.
But I will not say that UFO's and aliens can't happen. The universe is just too damn big and quite a bit still unknown for us to be 100% certain either way.
The govenment has definetly lied to us about a lot of things, including UFO's. I've seen alleged UFO documents released under the FOIA and they're almost completely blacked out. Why?
Some of it's to cover up REAL government projects although I do not believe that any foriegn power really as the ability to duplicate what we do. And, no I do NOT believe our technology is advanced beacause we reverse-engineered alien spacecraft. If you look at our technology of the last 120 years you can see a logical progression.
So, what is the government hiding? And from whom? The American people? Why? What would be so disastrous for us to know about?
For 60 years, it's been said that the gov't. has been hiding the truth to avoid panic. But would we panic now? We're so used to this stuff now that I personally think if one of those li'l grey guys sauntered down a major city street in broad daylight, he might just get curious glances.
Posted by: danacasso | July 18, 2007 11:50 PM
No Danacasso I think Alien is totally serious. Get real. And there are space aliens I married one!
Posted by: Alice Mayfield | July 19, 2007 03:41 PM
There ARE NO aliens. There are just Angels and Demons. Angels don't have to hide. These aliens are really Demons!
Posted by: Greg for Christ | August 3, 2007 08:19 PM
Okay, if I am going to say Kenneth Arnold was the 'first', I have to acknowldge other candidates, as well. I have been aware of the Prehistoric/Ancient Astronaut theories for years, if not decades, and I'm also aware of ancient legends telling of contact by humans of from the beginning of civilization until after the Renaissance with beings with amazing abilities.
These do NOT prove anything because the people back then most of the time were at a loss for words for what they said they saw. Starting around the 16th century, some enterprising minds were concocting ideas for machines that would fly.
But people really wouldn't recognize an airplane as such until after the experiments of Sir George Cayley in the first half of the 19th century.
But going back to ancient observers, some accounts are really intriguing. Ezekiel truly does sound like he's describing a metal machine and it is hard to imagine someone coming up with something like that completely out of the blue.
Or Alexander the Great at the Seige of Tyre. Accounts say the Macedonians broke the Phoenecian walls with the help of two aerial objects which shot beams of light at Tyre's walls, causing them to collapse.
Kites were invented about 2800 years ago in China (actually, this was about 600 years before there was a unified Chinese empire) so some people knew how how to build flying craft nearly three millenia ago, but they were wood with silk, then paper skins.
Yet, some were big-and strong-enough to carry human passengers. But, they were still tethered to the ground. And un-powered.
Today, human-carrying kite-like craft still exist; we call them hang-gliders.
But it's only been in the past 200 or so years that people began seeing man-made aircraft and recognizing them as such.
When the Montgolfier brothers invented the hot-air balloon in the late 18th century, it was so new that when one landed in a French village, the panicked villagers attacked it with farm and kitchen tools and destroyed it.
Airships were flying as early as the 1860's but it was the ones of later years that people remember.
And, no, I don't mean the Hindenburg.
These were the reported 'mystery airships' seen in on the East Coast in 1887.
Then, from 1896-7, airships were reported in California and heading east.
These airships were reported to have speeds that even MODERN airships can't achieve.
But we always hear about government projects that we're not SUPPOSED to know about.
One delightful report had an 'eyewitness' account of such a ship's occupants. One was a beautiful woman "clad in nature's garb" (naked).
The most spectacular incident 'occured' in Aurora, TX in 1897.
A 'ship', making noise and trailing smoke, struck a windmill-actually a sump pump-of a Judge Proctor's farm and crashed.
The story made the paper of one of the bigger cities and quoted an Army officer and astronomer who looked through the wreck and found the 'remains' of the 'pilot' who was "not of this world." (I may have that quote wrong.)
The problems are;
1)Aurora had been bypassed by the railroad,
2)the town had been struck by a disease outbreak (smallpox, I think),
3)the town was going downhill-FAST.
What better way to try to save it than by concocting a story that cashed in on the 'airship mystery'?
Today, the town still exists, but it's even smaller than it was when the 'ship' 'crashed'.
The 'wreckage' was dumped down Proctor's well and the 'pilot' was given a 'Chritian burial' in a cemetary that still exists.
At one time, there was a strange 'headstone' marking the 'grave' near an old tree and it was possible to use a metal detector over it and pick up metal.
In 1973, the local sheriff closed off the cemetary for a while, keeping the UFOlogists out.
Now, there is no more headstone nor can ANY metal be detected even though investigators know-at least-where the grave WAS because the tree is still there, although the front gate has a commemorative plaque of the event.
Additionally, the well, which was already on private, not public, land was sealed in concrete, a stout brick shed with a strong door built around it, and if that wasn't enough, the shed is surrounded by a high chain-link fence, topped with rows of barbed wire and fitted with a heavily padlocked gate.
For a WELL???????
Posted by: danacasso | September 13, 2007 05:00 AM
Nice of you to take the time sharing this with us, This is what makes the Internet so great
Posted by: Andy Clark | March 19, 2010 09:52 PM