Roswell in Context

One of the most oft-repeated claims of the proponents of the Roswell Incident as a crash of an alien spacecraft is that highly trained personnel at the 509th Bombardment Group stationed in Roswell, such as Jesse Marcel, could not have possibly mistaken a balloon, even if it was part of a top secret project like Mogul, for a "flying saucer," by which the Roswell proponents mean "alien spacecraft." In doing so, the Roswell proponents have committed two of the most grievous mistakes that anyone can make when conducting historical research - they have projected their own interpretation on to events, and they have ignored the context surrounding those events.

I have written about that context before, as have others. The Kenneth Arnold sighting, which received major media coverage, was still fresh in everyone's minds. While memes did not spread quite as quickly in the late 1940s through old school media as they do today in the Internet age, they could still move pretty fast, and they could sweep up a populace in hysteria (and other emotional responses), responses which could quickly take root. Flying Saucers were everywhere in the media in late June and early July 1947, to the point that we should not be surprised if someone - even an intelligence officer like Jesse Marcel, or an information officer like Walter Haut, both of whom would have been inundated with the same media sensation reports as everyone else - made a mistake in the heat of the moment when confronted with something that was a bit anomalous to them, and identified it as one of the "flying discs / saucers" that they had been hearing so much about.

It wasn't just the United States, either. Here is a front-page piece from the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia from 8 July, 1947, talking about flying saucers, both in Australia and also Canada.

Jesse Marcel and Walter Haut were not superhuman beings with perfect powers of observation, and an immunity to the broader social dialogue that was taking place at the time. Neither was anyone else stationed at Roswell. Any reasonable person can see this - certainly any historian of repute can recognize what was at work, not just in Roswell but world-wide. Sightings begat reports which begat other sightings which begat more reports which... well, you get how it works. This isn't to say that some of the sightings may not have been real; but the vast majority, and perhaps even all of them, were the result of a frenzy of interest whipped up during that time period by media reports. As it turns out, people who knew what they were talking about at the time recognized what was going on, as can be seen from the following article in The Daily Illini in Illinois a few days after the Roswell incident was reported.

The Roswell incident fits that pattern to a "t", which is why it was so quickly forgotten. It was only decades later, when memories had gotten shorter and the tales had gotten taller, that the story resurfaced and was mythologized by a group of UFO proponents who ignored the context of the original story, and who placed an interpretation on events coloured by their own belief systems.

Paul Kimball

Stanton Friedman on the Condon Committee

Meanwhile, because there is more to life, and even UFOs and ufology, than the Roswell slides, here is a fun blast from the past - an article from the January 30, 1969 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette featuring the one and only flying saucer physicist, Stan Friedman,  taking shots at the Condon Committee report on UFOs.

Paul Kimball

Adam Dew... Wrong Again!

"Roswell slides" promoter Adam Dew. Photo by Robert Sheaffer.

Roswell slides promoter Adam Dew has been doing a fair bit of media lately to gin up interest and sales for the May 5th reveal event of the slides in Mexico City, hosted by paranormal con promoter Jaime Maussan, and along the way he has made a number of statements that are simply wrong. For example, he identified the military "witness" to the dead alien as a Lieutenant in his film trailer when in fact he was a Private First Class, Eleazar Benavides.

Another egregious example can be seen in Dew's oft-repeated statement that nothing in pop culture looked like the small bodied big-headed alien prior to 1947. In a recent interview with Open Minds, Dew states, "People in the late 40s were not staging aliens, as far as I can tell. That image of the big head and skinny body didn’t become popular in pop culture until the 60s. So we know that it is not a fake staged alien, as far as I can tell.”

This is Dew responding to a straw man of his own creation. Nobody is suggesting that the bodies depicted in the slides were faked in 1947. Therefore, his argument is irrelevant. Making matters worse, however, is that it is also incorrect. In fact, big-headed small-bodied strange creatures were indeed a staple of science fiction and pop culture well before 1947. If someone had wanted to fake an alien body in 1947, they could have easily drawn upon this meme.

As just a couple of examples, here are two covers from the popular pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, both from the 1930s, and both featuring alien creatures with big heads and much smaller bodies.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Vol. 8, No. 1, August 1936

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Vol. 13, No. 3, June 1939

There are plenty of other examples for anyone willing to look. Here are two from 1940.

Thrilling Wonder Stories, March 1940

Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1940

Again, this is all an irrelevant sideshow to the basic question of whether the slides were hoaxed or not, because when people talk of a con or hoax they are invariably referring to either someone who created the slides much later than 1947, a la the "alien autopsy" film of Ray Santilli, or of someone who has used actual slides of a mummy-like human figure that may have been taken around the late 1940s and represented them as space aliens today. But Dew and his fellow slides promoters want you to focus on the straw man suggestion that what skeptics are saying when they talk of a hoax is that someone hoaxed them in 1947, which is not the case at all. However, even if it was what skeptics were suggesting, then it is clear that Dew is wrong in his assertion that there was nothing in pop culture that a hoaxer in 1947 could have drawn upon to come up with such a hoax.

In short, even when Dew is making irrelevant arguments, they seem to have a tendency to be flat-out wrong. The only question people are left to determine is whether this is the result of incompetence, or dishonesty. Given the crowd with which Dew has chosen to associate himself, either option is plausible.

Paul Kimball

Stanton Friedman - Charles Berlitz and "The Roswell Incident"

In this clip from the interview I conducted with Stan Friedman in 2001 for the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real, he discusses the writing of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident and his relationship with Charles Berlitz.

Paul Kimball

William Lyon MacKenzie King

William Lyon MacKenzie King, Canada's longest serving Prime Minister (1921 - 1926; 1926 - 1930; 1935 - 1948), and the architect of our social welfare system, was a devoted spiritualist and occultist. He regularly attempted to commune with spirits, including those of Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (his mentor, and a former Prime Minister), his dead mother, and several of his Irish Terrier dogs. He also owned and used a Ouija board, and claimed to commune with the spirit of the late President Franklin Roosevelt, his fellow Allied leader during the Second World War. His occult interests were kept secret during his years in office, and only became publicized later. 

One of the greatest Canadians... and a genuinely weird guy!

Paul Kimball

Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings - Opening and 1561 Nuremberg case

The opening and the #10 case, the 1561 Nuremberg case, from the documentary Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings.



A note: the top 9 cases were voted in as described by the narration. As I've made clear in a number of interviews since the film was released, I exercised my editorial discretion to bump the case that came in at #10 in the voting, and replace it with the Nuremberg report, as an avatar for all of the cases that pre-date the modern era of UFO sightings, which dates from 1947 and the Kenneth Arnold sighting. As researchers like Jacques Vallee have pointed out, the phenomenon has been with us much longer than the past six decades.

Paul Kimball

Modern UFO Cases and Historical Perspective

Yours truly from the Retro UFO 3 conference. Here I was answering a question as to why the Phoenix Lights case wasn't in my film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings.



The answer is simple - of all the experts I polled, only one picked the case for his or her top 10 list, and even then it was at #10. The case just hasn't been around long enough to merit consideration as one of the best ever - a point I tried to drill home here when talking about the need for historical perspective.

Paul Kimball

Ufology and Perspective

Three years ago, a well-known ufologist sent me a de-classified Top Secret memo from 1947 that read as follows:

16 December 1947

MEMORANDUM FOR DR. BUSH:

Subject: Preparation Against a Sneak Attack

1. At the meeting of the War Council on 18 December the following decision was reached:

Secretary Forrestal appointed a committee consisting of Dr. Bush, Mr. Souers, and General Gruenther, with Dr. Bush as chairman, to examine this problem in all its facets, particularly its relation to civil defense. This committee is to render a report covering the best manner of handling these problems from an organizational standpoint.

2. Your committee will be considered a committee of the War Council, and his office is prepared to furnish such personnel, funds, and other forms of assistance as may be required in the prosecution of the committee's work. As in the case of all committees of the War Council, your committee will be authorized to call on all agencies under the Secretary of Defense for such assistance as the committee may from time to time require.

3. I recognize that the problem before your committee is a difficult one and that it will require some time for you to prepare any recommendations. At the same time, I would appreciate it if you would keep the War Council periodically advised as to the progress which is being made.

JOHN H. OHLY
Special Assistant to the Secretary

Now, if you were to show this to anyone outside ufology even remotely familiar with the time period, they would no doubt tell you that the meeting was clearly designed to deal with a sneak attack from the Soviet Union, which is what all American defense planning was focused on in 1947, a very turbulent year at the beginning of the Cold War, where the risk of a "hot war" was very real indeed (see the Wikipedia entry for that period for a reasonably good summary of events).

The ufologist who sent this to me, however, saw it differently, as seen by the fact that he wrote "by whom?" in the margin next to the phrase "Preparation Against a Sneak Attack" - the implication being that the meeting may have been discussing a sneak attack by aliens, not the Soviets.

This... "interpretation" (to be kind) shows a complete lack of historical perspective and understanding. It also shows a ufologist who is sadly typical, particularly amongst the "Cosmic Watergate" group, i.e. one who is less concerned with logic, reason, and the truth, than he / she is about fitting everything into their very small "it's all about Roswell / ET / conspiracy" box. You can see the most recent manifestation of this way of "thinking" this week in Steven Bassett's paranoid ranting about how Google has censored his "open letter" to Senator Hillary Clinton (see here for the text of Bassett's press release).

This is what the ET / conspiracist types do - they filter everything through their own myopic world view. Unfortunately, this is the point of view that gets reported most often in the mainstream media, not because they are part of some over-arching conspiracy, but because the conspiracists themselves are the people amongst all UFO researchers who yell the loudest, and so therefore attract the most attention.

This is bad history, pure and simple - the kind that would get a person flunked out of a 1st year university course. But in the wacky world of ufology, it often passes as received wisdom from on high... which is a sad but telling state of affairs.

Paul Kimball

History and Ufology - The need to avoid ahistorical analysis

One of the most common things you'll see in ufology is ahistorical "reasoning". Some of it has popped up in the comments to the MJ-12 / Landry post a few days ago. Folks who make this error usually mean well, but what they're doing is taking historical events out of their proper context and trying to fit them into their own view of how the world works today.

An example would be something like:

"Well, George Bush did X, which means that a president fifty years before must have or probably also did X." Or words / meaning to that effect.

Or this (one of ufology's favourites):

"Our intel and military services act like X today, which means that they must have acted like X in 1947."

And so forth.

History students are taught from day one to avoid this kind of "reasoning", but even there it rears its head more than you might think (I marked enough undergrad history papers to know whereof I speak - indeed, I've been guilty of it in the past myself).

Ahistorical analysis can be difficult to detect sometimes, particularly when the time periods are relatively close to each other, as is usually the case when the conversation is about UFOs (the difference between 1947 and today, which spans the modern UFO era, is a drop in the temporal bucket).

But try it this way:

"Our intel and military services act like X today, which means that they must have acted like X in the Revolutionary War."

That doesn't make much sense, does it?

This does not mean that there are not common threads that run through history. But these are patterns / conclusions that are drawn from common facts, not the other way around.

When examining historical events, we always have to remember to view them in their proper context, and not view them through the prism of our own time and experiences. In other words, we should stick to the facts as they were, not as we would like them to be, or think they were, and draw our conclusions from that. We can still be wrong (facts often support more than one reasonable interpretation), but at least we'll have gone about the process in the proper fashion, which always decreases the chances for error.

Paul Kimball