Message posted by Peter Merlin on July 06, 2004 at 9:35:44 PST:
The so-called "Roswell Incident" was a non-event in 1947. It generated a brief flurry of media attention due to the interest in "flying disk" sightings at that time. It was quickly determined that the debris found on Foster Ranch was balloon material and the "incident" was quickly forgotten. It didn't start to take precedence in UFO lore until the 1970s. By that time the story had become distorted and it has only worsened over time with more "witnesses" providing more elaborate stories to eager "investigators.". This is largely a matter of bad journalism. It is the same kind of problem that caused a Norwegian F-16 that crashed in Rachel to be described by locals as a "MiG from Area 51." That narrative mutation occurred over a period of several years and finally found its way into the Las Vegas Review Journal in 1994. This was unforgivably poor journalism as the LVRJ reporter should have checked his own archives for the original story. The two best sources of information on Roswell are books that represent very scholarly efforts to get to the truth. They are: "The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know" by Kal K. Korff (1997) "Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe" by Karl T. Pflock (2001) Both authors started out as "true believers" that the incident involved an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Both ultimately determined that it was actually a Project MOGUL balloon. For an excellent summary of Korff's work see: http://www.csicop.org/si/9707/roswell.html
In Reply to: Technological Jump posted by Lee Collins on July 05, 2004 at 22:45:15 PST:
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