Phactum sampling

Did Aliens Crash at Roswell?

-- by Eric Krieg

On January 24, Tom Carey, the local director of MUFON, described to us his years of investigating the Roswell crashed saucer claim. He started out by playing a tape of the July 8th, 1947 radio announcement of a crashed saucer being recovered and shipped to Wright Field. [Now Wright-Patterson Air Force base. No, the reporter was not Orson Welles.] This report described a non-rigid light-weight object. Then Carey played a tape of the less exciting report the following day which claimed it was just a balloon. He then showed us slides of the alleged crash sites, of himself talking to witnesses, and of sketches of the saucers and their occupants .

Carey claims the "Brazel" site was where a craft was hit by lightning and shed some debris. It then somehow flew on some miles before crashing for good and killing five little non- humans. Unfortunately, the incident was not investigated until the 1980s and by then many first-hand sources had died. Investigators are now interviewing the children and friends of the original sources.

Although the audience had been asked to be "nice" Carey was visibly shaken by the fervency of the questions. Amongst a barrage of objections, were: Why the changing story about the dates of events? Why did some of the pictures in the slides have misleading markings. Why did a star witness lie about the name of a nurse who had seen the aliens? Can we count on 50 year old memories of alien symbols? Why did so many people change their stories? Why did most people wait so long to come forward with their accounts? Why would the military report they had recovered a crashed saucer if they were already trying to cover up a real crash?

We didn't get all our questions answered, but we did get a neat look into the mind of a very dedicated UFO believer. To his credit (and our relief) Carey made derisive comments on Fox's alien autopsy film. He also feels that Stanton Friedman's theory about a third crash site is unjustified.

Tom Napier, who had debated Carey on a radio program, felt that a cover-up by the military was plausible, albeit for mundane reasons. The once top-secret Project Mogul, which has been described by first-hand living witnesses, was to have used balloon-borne microphones to listen for Russian atomic tests. The one balloon which was never recovered was radar tracked to within 17 miles of the Brazel ranch. The materials reportedly recovered at the crash site closely match parts from a Project Mogul balloon train, right down to the strange markings on the structural elements. Looks like a smoking gun to me!

Other questions on crashed saucer claims that come to my mind are: Why does critical hard evidence always seem to disappear? Why do the money making elements of UFO-dom ignore information turned up by the likes of skeptic Philip Klass. Wouldn't the former Soviet Union, with three times our land mass, have more crashed ships and more reason to put them in museums? Wouldn't at least some of the scientists brought in to investigate crashes disregard their secrecy oaths in favor of humanity's right to the biggest news of all time? Why are we still using rockets based on WW II German technology if we have captured interstellar ships? Why are the descriptions of the aliens and their ship all so very different?

It's worth noting that while few skeptics believe there is adequate proof of the Roswell claims, most of us think it likely there is other life in our vast universe. A few think it likely that our planet has been visited.

To get a UFO perspective conspicuously absent from shows like Sightings and Encounters, check out : Saucer Smear at http://www.mcs.com/~kvg/smear.htm , Robert Sheaffer's UFO investigation pages: http://www.patriarchy.com/~sheaffer/ufo.html or Phillip Klass' new book , The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup.

One footnote: The audience included a reporter from an Allentown newspaper who took lots of photographs of Carey's slides. It will be interesting to see which topic gets the most attention in his report, the artists' impressions of aliens or the skeptical comments from our members?