These are discouraging days in Ufology with the continued production of lightweight programs on the science and history channels, and far worse is the almost institutionalized belief that something significant happened in or about Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. A great disservice is being done to Ufology when a myth is adopted as truth, and has come to represent the UFO movement. The word itself, "Roswell", to far too many, stands for the Great UFO Mystery and its Coverup by powerful and secret governement operatives. To those who know, it is the most aggravating red herring, so far unleashed upon the effort to see the truth of UFOs revealed.
It didn't happen. There were no alien bodies. There is no legacy of reverse engineered technologies which we borrow from today. An over zealous military public affairs officer is initially to be blamed for overreacting to a rancher's discovery of unusual debris on his ranch land. Add to that a few hoaxers thirty years later and the rise of the internet after that and you have a thing for which the city fathers and Chamber of Commerce of Roswell are eternally grateful.
You can't base a field of study and erudition on a false pillar. The entire media system and knowledge structure establishment, which believes in UFOs as a real phenomena, accepts Roswell at face value, and reveres it as the most famous and most important evidence for UFOs. Again, this is terribly wrong. The logical and mundane explanations for what happened on those days in Roswell, are piled and piled upon each other.
There are dates and times which do give certainty to a massive, unexplained mystery of our times. July 19 - 26, 1952, Washington, D.C., is one. In the skies over the United States Capitol, tracked on radar, a dozen or more clear echos, active over a period of hours, bedeviled air traffic controllers, pilots, police and anyone else outside looking up.
(As an aside, I personally doubt the US Government holds any special UFO knowledge, other than a certainty they are real, but they remain vastly unexplained. This is exactly the revelation heard when the more relaxed British Ministry of Defence opened their files, and when a semi-officiak group representing the French military establisment, CETA, put it all on the table. So, I do not believe there is much in the way of secrets to possess, thus, little reason for creating super secret committees of geniueses and generals. Still, the government has certainly "spun" information during and after widely known UFO events. Recently released, with the help of the Freedom of Information Act, redacted CIA memos, clearly indicate, the CIA perpetuated confusion and mystery about UFOs to help disguise possible sightings of super-secret spy planes, e.g. U-2, Blackbird).
In 1952, a spokesperson for the government or military, specifically, the Air Force, could not say, acknowledging a giantic hole in the nation's security, "unknown things, of which we know nothing, were in large numbers, tracked in the skies over the Capitol, White House and Pentagon". You would ignore it, attribute it to faulty radar or a temperature inversion. 1952 is a very important year in UFO history.
Looking back at history for a pattern, we see a phenomena to which the general populace of at least the United States became aware in the late 1940s. From that point, we see reports mounting, films, snapshots, awareness growing, then a culmination with a dramatic sighting one weekend, then repeated the next, directly over the seats of government of perhaps the most important power on this world. The complete events of this episode and the entire body of data which can be gathered deserve especially close re-study with all the tools we have available today.
e="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Another candidate for that distinction would be the year 2000, January 5th, to be exact. Starting at approximately 2:30 AM, police officers in five small towns, along a one hundred mile line in southwestern Illinois, pointing straight to St Louis, Mo., watched with their own eyes and communicated with each other by radio, as a massive, silent craft, flew, sometimes at great speeds, sometimes very slowly, over one town, then another, so that police officers in one area could alert the officers in the next town, allowing them to be primed for optimal observation.
Each of the above cases and at least another dozen, are red-letter days in UFO history, because these are the Great Sightings - well-known, well-documented, reliable witnesses, secondary evidence, and highly scrutinized. In fact, many of the red-letter cases were investigated by Project Blue Book and officially declared, "unknowns". Roswell does not belong in this list, and people serious about discovering the truth of the UFO phenomena, must not allow this pop-culture phenomena to be placed in the list, next to to the hallowed evidence.
Ufology owes an enormous debt of gratitude to one of the greatest ufologists, Karl T. Pflock, who did the hard, tedious and even couageous work, in the face of the almost irresistable "will to believe"in Roswell, as if that belief would settle the ongoing doubts about what UFOs are really all about, once and for all. His outstanding work in investigative journalism, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the will to Believe", should be required reading for all would-be ufologists, not only to clear the air on Roswell, but to remind all that "proof" and "truth" must always have absolutely the highest standards and must not be subjected to any form of compromise.
If we could convene a new expert and official investigation to look into to what is known about the UFO phenomena, I would suggest that it focus in one area of the evidence pattern, to finally sweep away the major objections of the scientific-intellectual skeptics. The area would include the numerous and well-detailed reports of commercial and military pilots, air traffic controllers, and ground based reports from military and law enforcement personnel.
In addition to that category of events, the following dates, and the associated UFO phenomena on those dates are worthy of the highest scrutiny:
05/24/49 Rogue River, Oregon
05/11/50 McMinnville, Oregon
08/15/50 Great Falls, Montana
09/10/51 Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey
05/01/52 Davis-Monthan AFB, Tucson, Arizona
07/14/52 - Pan Am Pilots, Virginia
="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">07/16/52 - Paul Hill, Hampton, Virginia
07/19/52 Washington National Sightings - (July 19/20 to 26/27th)
07/27/52 Tremonton, Utah
12/06/52 Gulf of Mexico
08/05/53 Ellsworth AFB Case
08/12/53 Rapid City, South Dakota
07/17/57 Southwest, U.S.
11/04/57 Kirtland AFB, New Mexico
01/06/58 Trindade Island
07/01/62 Paul Hill, Hampton, Virginia
04/24/64 Socorro, New Mexico
09/15/64 Big Sur, California
04/17/66 Portage County, Ohio
03/16/67 Malmstrom AFB, Montana
10/18/73 Mansfield, Ohio
11/07/75 Northern Tier Bases, U.S.
09/19/76 Tehran, Iran
12/26/80 Rendelsham Forest, UK
01/05/2000 - Southwestern Illinois
