extraordinary%20encounters

misunderstanding about a downed weather
balloon. During his travels, Friedman met a
retired air force officer who, at the time, had
been stationed at Roswell Army Air Field; the
officer, Major Jesse A. Marcel, had been the
first uniformed officer on the site, and his observation
and experience over the next few
days put into question the long-accepted balloon
explanation. Friedman also interviewed a
woman who had worked at an Albuquerque
radio station. She vividly remembered how
the U.S. Air Force had squelched coverage of
the story. Both she and Marcel believed that
some kind of extraordinary event that had
badly rattled the military had happened.
Mo o re’s The Ro s well In c i d e n t ( 1 9 8 0 ) ,
written with Bermuda Triangle popularize r
Charles Berlitz, would be only the first of
many books to address the subject. As inve stigators
spoke with a growing number of informants,
military and civilian, they established
that a cove r - u p, maintained in part by
the threatening of witnesses, had been put
into place and that the official story was not
the real story. Some witnesses even assert e d
that the military had re c ove red bodies of little
men at either the original crash site or
a n o t h e r, related one some miles away. In
time, the Ro s well incident, as eve ryo n e
called it, was no longer an arcane fascination
of ufologists but a much-discussed item of
pop culture, influencing any number of television
shows, documentaries, movies, jokes,
and more .
After years of denying that the air force had
covered up the Roswell incident, the General
Accounting Office, at the behest of New Mexico
Congressman Steven Schiff, searched official
archives for relevant documents, uncovering
little of interest. Around the same time, in
1994, the U.S. Air Force declared that there
had indeed been a cover-up; it had been of
Project Mogul, a highly classified project in
which balloons were sent aloft to monitor
possible Soviet atomic tests over the horizon.
A Mogul balloon had come down near
Roswell, and the military’s effort to keep it a
secret sparked the legend of a UFO crash. In
Dead extraterrestrials 85
the face of press and popular skepticism
(much of it focused on the explanation’s failure
to account for reports of bodies) the U.S.
Air Force renewed its inquiries. On June 24,
1997, it contended that the supposedly alien
bodies were in fact “anthropomorphic test
dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air
Force high altitude balloons for scientific research”
(The Roswell Report, 1997). The problem
with this theory was that tests involving
such dummies did not occur until 1953, leaving
the air force with the rationalization—unpersuasive
to many—that the informants simply
had their time mixed up.
Still, many ufologists, as much out of fru stration
as firm intellectual conviction, accepted
the Mogul explanation, whatever its
i m p e rfections. The Ro s well incident had
spawned an industry and generated a huge
body of often confusing, contradictory (and
sometimes demonstrably false) testimony. It
e ven generated documents (most notably the
notorious and deeply suspect “MJ-12” papers,
purportedly from the supersecret pro ject
overseeing the UFO cover-up). On the
whole, it did not accomplish a great deal except
to line the pockets of opportunists who
d i d n’t much care about the truth—which, in
any event, seemed irre c overable so many
years past the original event. Ro s well also ins
p i red one of the most brazen hoaxes in UFO
h i s t o ry, the so-called alien autopsy film that
a i red on the Fox Ne t w o rk in the mid-1990s,
p u r p o rting to show the dismemberment of
an extraterrestrial body by government scientists
in 1947.
The failure of the Roswell story to come to
firm resolution after two decades of furious
controversy sobered many once-enthusiastic
or hopeful ufologists. But as long as questions
remain, the mystery will stay open to those
who are sufficiently determined to keep
thinking—or, perhaps, thinking wishfully—
about it. And Roswell or no, rumors, tall tales,
and—on rare occasion—genuinely intriguing
reports of dead extraterrestrials in our midst
are likely to entertain live humans for some
time to come.