July 3–10, 1997

cover story

Alien Nation

By Ami Eden and Jennifer Lerer Eden

From The X Files to the newsdesk, aliens dominate the media

Locked away in his Ardmore residence, an intergalactic deep throat watches in amusement as the rest of the country catches a case of UFO fever. Unwilling to have his real name appear in print, the 43-year-old Philly native admits to playing a major role in history's most famous UFO sighting — the alleged 1947 crash of an alien spacecraft in Roswell, NM.

Our man was the first researcher to propose that the strange debris found by rancher William W. "Mac" Brazel 50 years ago was actually wreckage from a military balloon associated with the military's top secret Project Mogul, a clandestine attempt to detect Soviet atomic testing. The U.S. Air Force publicly adopted this explanation in 1994 and repeated it last weekin a much-publicized new report entitled "Case Closed," which claimed to settle the debate over whether or not aliens landed in New Mexico.

But don't ask the debunker to take credit for his findings.

"At this point, I'm so embarrassed by the whole thing that I think any association with Roswell is the kiss of death," he explains, before admitting that he once believed in the existence of a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about an alien landing in New Mexico.

He is clearly willing to let go of Roswell.

The rest of the country, however, is not.

This week, an estimated 100,000 visitors (and that's only counting earthlings) are descending upon the small desert town for a festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash. The incident — once a small-town legend, now a veritable piece of Americana — has forced its way into the history books because a decision to ignore or to immediately discount it would be to disregard the testimony of credible eyewitnesses and the initial evaluations of the U.S. military.

As the debate rages over whether or not aliens came to Earth that summer day in 1947, many Americans are likely to see a bald, bulging-eyed critter looking out at them from their television sets or living room coffeetables. Stories about Roswell have recently landed on the covers of Time and The New York Times and reached the network newscasts. The incident has received so much attention of late that the Air Force felt compelled to release its 231-page denial of alien activity in Roswell.

"This comprehensive examination of the so-called 'Roswell Incident' found no evidence whatsoever of flying saucers, space aliens or sinister cover-ups," read the report, issued June 24. "The misrepresentations of Air Force activities as an extraterrestrial 'incident' is misleading to the pubic and is simply an affront to the truth."

Ask any of the UFO researchers who have built their reputations by promoting the "alien scenario," however, and they'll tell you that the only enemy of the truth is the military itself.

For Stanton Friedman — whose research has played a significant role in publicizing the Roswell case — it is easy to understand why; of the myriad alien abduction tales and UFO sightings that have been reported, the 1947 incident is the one that has remained on the pop-culture radar screen.

"It has all the elements that you need in a good story," explains Friedman, who has appeared on Nightline. "It's got crashed saucers, alien bodies, government cover-up and intimidation of witnesses."

Kevin Randle, co-author of The Truth about The UFO Crash at Roswell, agrees that the public's intrigue with Roswell is easily explainable.

"Rather than just having one or two people talking about this, and everything hinging on their credibility and reliability, you've got literally hundreds of people who are involved in this sighting and who have talked about it," says Randle, also a regular on such shows as Good Morning America and Rolonda. "The sheer number [of witnesses] reflects the documentation that can be brought forward."

Undoubtedly, for those in search of a little old-fashioned kitsch and any excuse to drive cross-country, the question of whether or not extraterrestrials crashed in New Mexico is secondary. But for those who are making the Roswell pilgrimage because they believe, there is more to this week's UFO festival than E.T. masks and Vulcan ears. For them, the truth is not only out there — it is humanity's salvation.

"When we realize that we are just one mankind among thousands of other mankinds in a huge universe, the tiny little differences between people, between a black man and a white man, will disappear," says Michael Hesemann, a cultural anthropologist from Dsseldorf, Germany, and co-author of Beyond Roswell. "We will finally realize that we are children of the earth and recognize the common bonds that unite us all."

Government cover-up theories abound.

July of 1947 was a busy month in the skies over New Mexico. UFO sightings were reported with daily regularity by the likes of dentists, housewives, pilots and railwaymen, the majority of whom claimed to have seen flying "discs" zigzagging overhead. In fact, military officials had been tracking unidentified objects on their radar screens for a number of days during this time.

Yet Roswell did not attract worldwide attention until the events of a stormy, windswept July 4 night yielded a crash, an alleged government cover-up and a debate about whether we are alone in this universe. (The following account is based partially upon information contained in Beyond Roswell and The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell.)

Trudy Truelove and Jim Ragsdale, young lovers enjoying a rainy summer night under a tent in the New Mexico desert, were startled when, at about 11:30 p.m., they witnessed a bright flash in the sky above them. Following it with their eyes, they saw it slam, seconds later, into the earth about a mile from their campsite.

At the same time, a group of Franciscan nuns of St. Mary's Hospital in Roswell saw a brilliant light curve down in an arc toward the earth. They inscribed the event in their logbook, specifically noting the date and time.

Early on the morning of July 5, William Brazel, a rancher and leaseholder of the Foster Ranch in Lincoln County, northwest of Roswell, set out on horseback with a young neighborhood friend to investigate the source of a loud explosion that they had heard the night before. Just south of ranch headquarters, they alighted upon a "field of debris" that, Brazel later claimed, spanned an area three quarters of a mile long and 200 yards wide.

Upon close inspection, they found a variety of substances: seemingly weightless pieces of dull metal; rods covered with what looked like hieroglyphs; and strips of very light balsa wood. Try as he might, Brazel could neither cut nor burn any of the materials that were strewn across the field.

Excited by his find, Brazel gathered a number of the fragments and brought them back to show family and friends, many of whom advised him to share the discovery with authorities in downtown Roswell.

Brazel's decision to bring the fragments to Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox on Sunday, July 6, launched a chain of events that eventually dragged the Pentagon into the case.

Sheriff Wilcox viewed the material, and, unsure of its origins, decided to call the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) for assistance. Ironically, moments before the sheriff picked up the phone, a call came in from Frank Joyce, a radio reporter with Roswell's top-rated KGFL, who was looking for late-breaking news. Wilcox handed the phone to Brazel, who agreed to be interviewed on the spot.

When Wilcox finally telephoned the base, Intelligence Corps Officer Maj. Jesse Marcel fielded the call. Four hours later, Brazel, Marcel and Capt. Sheridan Cavitt, the highest-ranking man in the base's counterespionage corps, headed out toward the crash site, where, as Marcel would later claim, they saw things that he had never seen before in his life.

After having been shown some of the crash remains by Marcel, Col. William Blanchard, commander of the RAAF and its elite 509th Bomb Group, contacted his superior, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, TX. Ramey forwarded the information to the Pentagon, where it was ordered that some of the material be shipped in a sealed container by airplane to Andrews Air Field near Washington.

On July 8,under orders from Blanchard, base press officer Lt. Walter Haut sent out a release stating, "THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE REPORTS THAT IT GAINED POSSESSION OF A 'FLYING DISC' THROUGH THE COOPERATION OF A ROSWELL RANCHER AND SHERIFF GEORGE [WILCOX] OF ROSWELL."

The release was sent to local news outlets and cabled to The Associated Press and United Press International. That day, the radio stations, the sheriff's office and the RAAF were bombarded with calls from cities across the globe including Rome, London and Hong Kong.

Before the day was through, in what some say was an effort to avert a disastrous repeat of Orson Welles' infamous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, several officers from the Roswell base, including Marcel, were sent to brief Ramey in person. The officers were joined on the aircraft by some of the crash remains which were being shipped to Texas for inspection.

Upon his arrival, Marcel was shuttled along with the debris to Ramey's office where he presented the general with the facts of the case. At 6 p.m. Ramey called a press conference, which Marcel was to attend. As reporters and photographers gathered outside the office door, Ramey called upon Irving Newton, a meteorological officer, to identify the aluminum foil-like material that lay at his feet.

Newton responded without hesitation, "It is a Rawin target balloon."

Reports of a crashed "flying disc" dominated radio updates and newspaper headlines on July 8, 1947, but as quickly as the alleged spacecraft fell to earth, worldwide interest evaporated.

With its "weather balloon" explanation, the military successfully diffused the fallout from its initial "flying disc" assessment. For the next 30 years the alleged UFO crash was completely forgotten by most of the public until ufologistStanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and former classmate of Carl Sagan, inadvertently stumbled upon the story.

"I was sitting in a Baton Rouge television station in 1978 waiting to do my third interview [about UFOs]," recalls Friedman, who helped create the video Flying Saucers ARE Real in 1993 and instigated the Unsolved Mysteries episode on Roswell.

"The reporter was late and the station manager was embarrassed. Out of the blue, trying to pass the time, the station manager said, 'Hey, the guy you oughta talk to is my friend Jesse Marcel. He handled pieces of one of those saucers you are interested in, when he was in the military.' That got my attention."

The next day Friedman spoke by phone with Marcel, who was living in Homer, LA. During the coming months, Marcel revealed to Friedman and other UFO researchers that "the stuff exhibited at General Ramey's office was not [the material] salvaged from the crash site."

Thus began the resurrection of what Friedman insists is "the biggest story of the millennium."

Tom Carey

Wing of now boarded up base hospital where alleged autopsies of the aliens were performed.

Fast forward to July 4, 1996. Americans are indulging in a familiar array of holiday weekend activities: pool parties, fireworks and barbecues. But, after dinner, the skies grow eerily dark and shadows creep over trees, cars and houses. Fear is thick in the air. Independence Day has arrived.

The sci-fi flick — which turned a national obsession with extraterrestrials into a multimillion-dollar-grossing special effects spectacular starring Will Smith as an alien-whopping pilot — introduced millions of viewers to the legend of the Roswell crash.

Men in Black, this summer's most anticipated creature feature, has Smith fighting a whole new crop of extraterrestrials. But while Hollywood likes to limit alien activity to summer blockbusters, there are those who believe that, when it comes to alien movies, art serves to imitate and even explain life.

"I believe that the message of Independence Day was to make the government's policy understandable to the people," says Michael Hesemann, referring to his belief that alien movies such as Independence Day and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the products of a deliberate government plan to prepare the public for the truth and to justify the cover-up of the Roswell incident. "Number one, in Independence Day the president didn't know anything. Plausible deniability. Number two, that's the reason the government covered it up; they wanted to develop weapons. The case for lying to us is featured in the movie. They did it to protect us... from the Independence Day scenario," he says.

One does not have to look very far to find Americans who, like Hesemann, believe that the government has something to hide.

From the vast array of JFK assassination theories to the recent announcement by Martin Luther King Jr.'s family that they believe the civil rights leader was gunned down by at-large government agents, Americans have increasingly shown a willingness to accept that the unfolding of history reflects the secret will of the highest levels of authority. Ufologists and Roswell believers fall squarely in the center of this long, proud tradition of American paranoia.

"You'd think it would be obvious," says Friedman, with a condescending snicker, when asked why the government would want to cover up the truth about flying saucers.

"First they'dwant to figure out how the darn things work. [Alien technology] makes for wonderful weapons and defense systems. They can fly circles around anything we got flying," Friedman explains. "Secondly, what if the other guy figures out how they work before you do? How do you defend against them? You don't want them to know that you know that they know."

There is also the tricky issue of maintaining the credibility of Christian fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, says Friedman, who have proclaimed that we are the only life in the universe. "If the government were to announce that alien life existed they would be up the creek without a religious paddle."

A review of human history, according to The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell co-author Kevin Randle, would give leaders reason to fear the arrival of an alien race. To prove his point, Randle refers to an early 1960s study that examined the theoretical results of a confrontation between humanity and an advanced civilization.

"Everyone interviewed argued that the results would be disastrous for the earth because any time a technologically superior civilization comes in contact with an inferior civilization, the inferior one ceases to exist," says Randle, though he prefers to view these inevitable changes as positive steps in the evolution of humanity's technological capabilities.

Any recent attempts by the government to sweep Roswell under the rug, however, have proved unsuccessful in stemming a growing belief in extraterrestrial life.

While in 1947, the government's explanation of a crashed weather balloon was enough to convince many Americans that aliens were to be found only in comic books and movie houses, the situation had changed drastically by 1994.

In July of that year, under pressure from New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff, the Air Force admitted that its 47- year-old weather balloon explanation was a lie, meant to conceal Project Mogul, a top-secret, balloon-based spying program. Yet faith in the government had reached such a low that the admission did not curb the country's growing fascination with aliens. Since Friedman's 1978 reopening of the case, the Roswell legend has grown to include theories of multiple crashes and the recovery of alien bodies.

Researchers have conducted dozens of interviews with people claiming to have seen the bodies and wreckage first hand. Several of them have come forward and accused the government of intimidating them into changing their stories or simply keeping quiet.

The most famous piece of new evidence is the so-called Alien Autopsy footage, aired by Fox TV in August '95, which promoters claim was actual footage of the aliens who crashed in Roswell.

John Price, founder and director of Roswell's UFO Enigma Museum and a second-generation resident of the town, experiences this boom in UFO fascination on a daily basis.

"You'd be surprised at the undocumented sightings people have had," says Price, who claims that approximately 80 percent of the 30,000 annual visitors to the remote tourist attraction believe in aliens. "In every family that comes through, seems to be at least one person in each family that has seen something themselves."

Even in a small desert town the Enigma Museum plays second fiddle to the centrally located International UFO Museum Research Center, which hosts about 500 people a day, according to Price.

"It is almost impossible for us to review all of the information on UFO sightings that come through the museum," says Dennis Balthaser, the museum's operations manager and a certified UFO investigator.

The proliferation of UFO museums during the past 10 years and the increasing popularity of alien films is testament to the readiness of the American public to accept the fact of alien life without losing its collective mind, claims Hesemann.

"The government didn't have any other choice but to hide the facts in 1947," he says. "But today everyone knows about Roswell. Over half the American population believes an alien spacecraft crashed there. The time is right."

You never know where an alien might turn up.

"It's clear to me that the debris on the Foster ranch came from a balloon launched and supported by Project Mogul," says the anonymous Ardmore-based debunker.

Karl Pflock, author of Roswell in Perspective, became the first person to publish the Project Mogul theory, beating the Air Force by several months in 1994.He credits the Philly sleuth with providing the basis for his own work.

"The body of circumstantial evidence stacks up a mile high on the side of the mundane Project Mogul, while the body of circumstantial evidence in favor of a flying saucer crash is an inch deep at best," says Pflock, whose debate with Kevin Randle will be the centerpiece of this week's Roswell festivities. "We don't have any actual Project Mogul balloons left, but we do have detailed diagrams that show all the materials that were used and they are almost identical to what has been described by many of the witnesses."

The unnamed debunker is not impressed with some of the more recent eyewitness testimony that has been obtained by UFO researchers.

"There is no documentation of any kind for any other crash site or anything like that. There was no mention of bodies in 1947. That's a more recent development," he says.

The alien bodies recalled by several eyewitnesses were in fact a combination of injured pilots and lifelike crash dummies, according to the recently released Air Force report on Roswell. However, several ufologists have pointed out that the Air Force's explanation relies on events that did not take place until the 1950s.

Our intergalactic deep throat wonders why the UFO community refuses to reevaluate the evidence.

"I have no idea why these stories are given any credence today," he says. "It's the desire to believe, I suppose."

Listening to Friedman and his colleagues prophesize about the impact that an alien revelation would have on the world, it easy to understand why they might want to ignore evidence that undermines their own theories about Roswell.

"Nationalism is the only game in town. No government wants its citizens to owe their allegiance to the planet instead of to that individual government," says Friedman, before painting a picture of planetary unity that would emerge in a UFO era. "What would happen? Based on 600 college lectures that I have given over the years, the biggest thing is that the younger generation would immediately push for a new view of ourselves as earthlings, instead of as Americans, Canadians, Cubans, Greeks, etc."

Ronald Reagan hinted as much, says Hesemann, while addressing the United Nations in 1987. The Gipper admitted to wondering how quickly humanity's differences would disappear in the face of a threat from another planet.

"I don't believe in an alien threat, but I believe in an alien challenge. A challenge for our thinking, our world view, and our consciousness," Hesemann adds. "If Bill Clinton wants to go down in history for something other than Gennifer Flowers, then he should announce the truth."

If there is a cover-up, Clinton's previous statements on Roswell suggest that he is party to it or has been shut out of the cosmic intelligence loop, just as Commander-in-Chief Bill Pullmanwas in Independence Day.

"No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947," said Clinton during a 1995 state visit to Ireland in response to a letter from a 13-year-old Belfast boy. "If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it either, and I want to know."

Many of the leading Roswell investigators reject Clinton's claim of ignorance. In fact, they believe that every president since Harry Truman has known about the visitors from outer space.

Defense Secretary James Forrestal's 1949 suicide, the JFK assassination, Marilyn Monroe's death — all products of the Roswell crash and the government's subsequent attempts to conceal the truth. Hesemann goes so far as to claim that the fear of an alien invasion was the real impetus behind the United States' military buildup during the Cold War.

According to several ufologists, the fallout from Roswell explains much of what has gone wrong in our society during the past 50 years, and only full disclosure will cure these ills.

Such is the premise in Independence Day. Our heroes finally save the planet in a smash-'em-up final scene that pits humans against the alien mothership. By uncovering the government conspiracy of Roswell and using the remnants of that crash (stored at the infamous Area 51) — namely a still-viable spaceship and information gleaned from tests performed on aliens kept in large, liquid-filled tanks — humans emerge triumphant.

The UFO community identifies with the movie's message that knowledge is power. Specifically, it was the knowledge that aliens did crash at Roswell and the subsequent opportunity to utilize their advanced technology, which gave humanity the power to unite and to finally set itself free.

This theme might explain the motivation behind people's desire to believe in something as fantastic as alien life. The belief offers a glimmer of hope, a chance for change. To trust that there is life beyond earth is to trust in the possibility of unity for humankind.

Even Pflock, a man who is certain that the crash at Roswell was nothing more than a failed human endeavor, insists that extraterrestrials exist.

"In my heart, even though I know in terms of critical thinking and objective analysis, we don't have proof at this point, I am convinced that at least some of the UFO reports represent observations of alien spacecraft," Pflock admits. "There is no one who was more disappointed than I when I discovered there was a whole heck of a lot less to Roswell than meets the eye. I wouldn't have spent literally the years of my life involved in this one if I didn't think that we might finally have the Holy Grail, that is, physical evidence. I was gravely disappointed."