Deathbed Confession Says Aliens Were at Roswell 1267
xnuandax writes "The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, it may be that the visitors have a limited budget, just like anything we do does. One allocates the risk based on this budget. Even though we may have the money to make or buy the Ultimate Safest Volvo, it does not mean we will.
As far as appearence, here are some possibilities:
1. They are interested in us *because* we look like them.
2. They are us from the future.
3. We are a degerate form of them.
4. The human-like form is somewhat universal after all.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only universal among the uncreative minds of most scifi authors. Even on earth the diversity is so great that you wouldn't consider birds/insects/slugs to be "human-like forms" but even they have most of the parts (eye, head, nose, ears) in approximately the same relative locations. The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but then again consider sharks and dolphins. Very similar in appearance, even though one is a mammal and one is a fish. Frequently they're mistaken for one another even thought they aren't remotely related.
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Interesting)
As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.
So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?
To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.
Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe that's why the crashed.
"Turn the egg! Turn the egg!"
"I can't, I don't have any hands!!!"
"AHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Insightful)
I had read that symmetry is not so much a matter of random luck... but a matter of information efficiency. That is, it is much more efficient/quicker (and therefore more likely to happen) to just repeat existing patterns than to evolve a unique structures for each "side" of the organism.
-matthew
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry but this is just not a conversation that makes any sense. We haven't even got the vaguest idea of what the boundaries are for the conversation "What is Life?". The idea that a species evolving in a different environment, I mean really different, is going to in any way resemble human beings, is simply ludicrous. You gotta cut back on the Star Trek, the numerous humanoid aliens there are simply a function of make-up vs. CGI budget.
We (human beings) are running around with DNA from an ancient ancestor that had 5 fold symmetry, 4 limbs + head, 5 fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and five primary orifices in the skull (think inverted appendage.) Before that we inherited DNA from a worm... if you look at a human body morphologically we're worms that evolved better means of locomotion, and the ability to manipulate our local environment. Any alien you see owning a head with a face you can recognize, a spine, and limbs would have had to evolve on this planet. There are trillions of evolutionary paths that could have made life on earth wildly different, and to assume the path that produced us is the only path that could have produced sentient life with the ability to manipulate it's environment is not only myopic, it's homocentric to a fault.
I won't argue that certain structures would prove useful on earth and evolve repeatedly given our enviornment. Even on earh, however there are vastly different organism operating in wildly different circumstances, no light, crushing pressure and heat, sulphur as an energy cycle, even organisms that exist in ultracold and environments lacking oxygen. That's just on this planet, using precisely the same DNA, and carbon based biology.
I could easily imagine life based on completely different chemistry... carbon will usually be the most likely chemical backbone, though at higher temperatures sillicon and metals might combine in very interesting ways. Sensing is a vital characteristic of life, but organs of sense might be tremendously different for another species. They might sense any or all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and do so with organs very different from ours. How and what they consume and excrete might be very different than what we understand... even on earth what animals breath out, plants breath in... what might setient beings who move as slowly as plants occur to us like? Plants have powerful sensory capabilities, but they are very unlike humanoids.
On earth the octopus is a prime example of a mollusk well on it's way to becoming a technological intelligence. Here's an animal with much in common with human beings but also very alien... communication through melenophores... that's way ourside our normal thinking, and this is an intelligent terrestrial species. How much more different might a being be that evolved in a cold methane lake, or whose fundamental chemisty is composed of complex sugars instead of proteins.
You're going to have to stretch your head a whole lot more if you're goin to imagine life elsewhere. The chances of it being a lot like us is slim at best. Anyway you're going to have to sift through a lot of microoganisms before you find any larger than unicellular life out there. Of course, there's nothing preventing unicellular communities from becoming sentient. That's a kind of life we should be very careful not to miss, simply because it doesn't look like us.
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Funny)
So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?
To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I store my brains in a lower, dangling organ, where they can cool easily - that's the way most of us Bipedal aliens do it. -
Pug
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Interesting)
EYes are really the first localized sense that develops in the body - as I understand it, during the development of the embryo, the eyes actually start out as brain material that specializes. So did the eyes actually develop out of a previously existing cluster of neurons, or did highly efficient clusters of neurons develop in lockstep with the immediately behind the eyes as they became sharper and more useful simply because so much processing capacity was required right there, close by.
And once you have a lot of processing capacity nearby, it's not the long a reach for mother nature to start building the decision making algorithms nearby - I mean, if you've got all this hardware there anyway, you might as well start using it during the 8 hour maintenance cycle for contingency planning and such.
If that works, we might even add extra capacity for processing during the day shift. No promise though, we'll see how this works out . . . [G]
Pug
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm thinking it's us from the past. Considering that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 50,000 years old, and recorded history about 5,000, there's been plenty of time for us to develop a few spacefaring civilizations. If you allow for some alternate branches of the homonid family you have a lot more time than that. You'd expect them to swing past the old farm from time to time to see what, if anything, has changed.
On the other hand, who's to say they're from space at all? Even if the stories are 100% true, there's not a shred of evidence to show that they're from space. We've never seen spacecraft, only aircraft. Is space alien really more plausible than some kind of technologically superior earthling who can live undetected (almost) on the same planet as us?
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Humans are a result of the natural evolutionary process on this planet. We are "humanoid" because it's an efficient shape to have. I think it's fairly likely that there *are* aliens with a humanoid shape (two legs, arms), given that there *are* planets, out there, similar to earth. Is it so difficult to imagine that given similar conditions, life on a different planets could converge towards similar solutions to the same problem of survival in nature?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
People ascribe far too much purpose and design to evolution.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have a look at what paleontologists have reconstructed since the 1960's from the Burgess shale, you will see forms that ARE really weird.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding. New Mexico is soooo, yesterday. Kansas is where anybody who's anybody crashes.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And given the huge number of people deployed to cover many acres looking to retrieve SMALL debris, no weather balloon or Russian nuke detector payload would have justified such effort. And several local people did find and see unusual materials, n
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Shit happens. It didn't make sense that Italy would get bogged down in backwards Ethiopia in WW2, that the English would lose a few battles to Zulus with spears, or that with our technology we can't conquer Iraq. Weirder things have happen
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Interesting)
I realized that that bear would have what we would essentially describe as an abduction experience. The bear was just minding its own business, when a strange vehicle in the sky with humanoids appeared. Suddenly, it felt a pain in its rear, and everything seemed fuzzy and dreamlike. Then the humanoids performed a weird surgery on it, drawing blood and other tissue, and implanting a small device in it. When it woke up, it's memory was incomplete.
And what was the ultimate purpose of the humanoids? They wanted to see how it reproduced! Just like what those abduction people claim aliens are interested in us about. Performing weird experiments on our genitals, taking samples, and implanting small objects. Debunkers will say that this is evidence of the Freudian human subconscious creating the experience -- of course, it turns out to be about sex, because humans are dirty little creatures who are fantasizing all the time. Real aliens would be heavenly, like angels, and never think about such dirty, devilish things, only being interested in 'higher' things, like math, science, and art.
But wait! The whole 'project' of life is reproducing -- i.e. sex. To say that aliens would only be interested in mathematics, philosophy, sharing knowledge, and are some kind of celibate race, is looking at it from a Victorian sexually-repressed world-view. Living organisms, or Life itself, by definition, is all about reproduction. We should think that, from evidence, the first things aliens would want to know about us is how we reproduce, what our private parts look like, and how they work. Do we have male and female? Do we lay eggs? Do we take care of our young? Do we live in groups or alone? Are we in symbiosis with another organism? Everything else you would want to know about humans comes from that. Our reproductive biology is the basis of our existence.
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Funny)
The response I usually get is like the one above you that "oh, those are just dumb animals."
I find that kind of amusing considering how many extremely intelligent animals, and painfully stupid people I have known.
As an example, the cat that, as I type, is laying behind me asleep learned how to lock the front door of the house I used to live in. In fact, he made a habit of locking the door on me while I was outside if I ticked him off. It got to the point where I took my keys with me even if I was only going out to get the mail.
Just maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the contract went to the lowest bidder?
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Insightful)
It would not be terribly strange, for example, for someone who bolts tires to cars on an assembly line his entire life to not know much about computer programming.
However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of navigating a craft at least twenty four trillion miles to not know how to fly a spacecraft well enough to avoid crashing.
Unless they were on the "B" Ark...
=Smidge=
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Not that I'm saying... uhm... yeah.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
It was:
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type.
2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent.
3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.
Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space.
If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.
You don't know many people in our military do you?
Aeroflot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Aeroflot (Score:4, Interesting)
Unlikely. Civillian flights have to follow flight-plans which constrains you to fixed corridors without much deviation allowed. Over Europe there was a big slice of heavily restricted airspace called the ADIZ where flights had to followed fixed paths and maintain contact with the appropriate ATC.
Most Soviet teaser missions were with straight military aircraft such as the "bear" bomber. No ambiguity there, they were clearly military aircraft and were marked as such. In any case the Russians would not put any high-tech military gear onto an aircraft that landed in an unfriendly country. They were paranoid about their technology (and how backwards it was at the time). What may have been confuing though are aircraft like the Tu-134 [wikipedia.org] with a glass nose, looking very much like "Crusty", its bombing variant. These apparantly were dual-use and could be used for recon.
Re:Aeroflot (Score:4, Insightful)
In the book "Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, he says (and provides evidence to support) that from roughly 1949 to the day Frances Gary Powers was shot down, there were US aircraft flying in Russian airspace twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. He goes on to say that every year throughout the early 1950's the US would do trial bombing runs with several dozen bombers and accompanying fighters over major Russian cities, during broad daylight, because the Russians didn't have anything that could stop them, and says that throughout the '50's the US recon aircraft were clearly visible, flying over, and the best the Russians could do was fly mass numbers of airplanes below the US recon aircraft to try and physically block views of things they wanted to keep secret. If you read a bit about Curtis LeMay, you'll end up A: amazed that WWIII didn't happen, and B: with a much better understanding of why the USSR didn't like the USA very much. We were acting like the biggest bullies on the block, unashamedly.
Re:Aeroflot (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you count all the countries in the Carribean, Central America, and half of South America.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Informative)
I would agree though that the number of recon shootdowns by the Soviets doesn't actually mean anything. The Soviets really didn't need to do much aerial reconnaissance. Once they got a man into the U.S. (or Canada - the border is unfenced and unguarded), he could do a much more thorough job collecting intel just by driving around with a camera while "on vacation." That wasn't the case for the U.S. The U.S.S.R.'s closed and restrictive society left aerial reconnaissance as one of the only means of gathering intel on what was going on inside. And from the 1970s on, both sides shifted towards satellite recon.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I've been there, and i know what I'm talking about.
Re:Its not necessary to have it "shot down" (Score:5, Insightful)
My best guess as to what was at Roswell if it wasn't weather ballon.
I think it was a failed test of an ME-163. The US captured several but claim that they never did any powered tests of one. They where egg shaped. Could look like a saucer at the correct angle. And if you where flying one with fuel and it crashed you wouldn't look very human when they found you. The fuel was very nasty stuff.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, would you disbelieve the guy who on his deathbed said that he actually faked those Loch Ness pictures? How about the guy who after he died had his family expose how exactly he faked those nice big foot pictures and tracks?
Well, I knew this guy and have a signed and sealed affidavit from him that their signed and sealed affidavit was acquired by threatening his family.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Weren't there nine of these things seen and then only one on the ground?
If any of this is true (which, of course, it isn't) then the most credible conclusions are:
- The aliens look human therefore they are human.
- They are on earth therefore they came from earth.
- Their technology is more advanced than ours therefore the crash was an accident or caused by someone of sufficiently advanced technology.
So we have some theories:- At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)
- Humanity in a parallel dimension was experimenting with cross dimensional travel and it went wrong.
- At some point in the past a super intelligent branch of humanity separated from the rest of us and has been living in secret along side us for a while now. They were pissing around buzzing some country-folk and something wet wrong. Maybe a teenager stole the keys to their dad's flying-egg-car?
- Any of the above except it was an escape attempt by some dissident / terrorist / freedom-fighter / messiah / anti-christ / "crack commando unit sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit" and they were shot down by pursuing craft.
Anythying else is just pure speculation and fantasy.Re:Bombula (Score:4, Interesting)
funny how computing exploded in capabilities right after that date.
Strange how electronics jumped 10 fold giving us a rapid advance in technology.
rocket designs improved, lots of technological advancments started after that dat that were faster than ever recorded in histroy.
Velcro.. Yeah that was a NASA invention, riiiiight. I bet the egg was full of the stuff.
The funny part is that talking like that really riles up the conspiracy nutjobs. They get wild eyes and start yelling "You're right! OH MY GOD! YOUR RIGHT!"
and start calling friends about their new proof that the aliens were real because of technology.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
"That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team. ;-)"
Darn it Jim, that WAS our eugenics program!
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Well done.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's likely that 99.999999+% of that distance was interstellar space, not in any planet's atmosphere or near any large object's gravity. It's also most likely it was on autopilot most of the time.
Of course, it's also unlikely they'd bother traveling that far and not prepare for such flight. But how easy could it be
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Mork was a moron and he could fly one just fine.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see how that is unusual at all. They navigated the craft at least twenty four trillion miles THROUGH SPACE before crashing it in a unique and completely alien atmosphere with flight conditions they have never encountered before and that their craft obviously weren't designed to handle.
That doesn't seem all that strange to me.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it was the flight conditions.
It's far more likely they navigated all those trillions of kilometres, then sent down what to them was a clearly unarmed, unarmored lander that demonstrated they were peaceful types hoping to say hello to the locals. When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker.
The military then covered up the fact that they'd screwed humanity's chances of ever having friendly chats with some people who could solve the problem of interstellar space travel, cure cancer, save the whales and promote world peace.
Let's face it, if the US military had scored any advanced alien tech, they wouldn't have kept it secret. They'd have used against someone by now.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Definitely "unexpected" since sidewinder's had not been invented.
Re:Bombula (Score:4, Insightful)
Try "gajillion bazillion manyillian kilometers". Interstellar space travel is pretty ridiculous, and not just because we can't think of a technology that could do it, but because a technology that could do it and not take millenniums would be impossible.
Most of all why would they bother coming all this way? If they did want to travel so far just to say "hello, what's up?" why not do it via radio? This would be much faster and easier. If they wanted to invade or take over, assuming our planet is hospitable to them, wouldn't they send more than an "egg"?
(And why do the accounts of these interstellar travelers involve anal probes, corn, barn dances and farm animals?)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Informative)
Actually travelling can be much faster than radio. Special relativity limits communication between fixed parties to the speed of light, because it limits observed travel to the speed of light. Contrary to popular opinion, it does not limit subject travel to any speed whatsoever. While the traveller will never "technically" see his destination approaching with a velocity faster than the speed of light, he will see the distance to is destination relativistically contracting as his speed increases.
Therefore, in a space craft that could accelerate and 1g for half the trip, then decelerate at 1 g for half the trip, Special Relativity predicts you would reach the center of the galaxy in 20 years, covering a distance of (from earth perspective) 30 thousand light years. From earth perspective, our max speed was 0.999999999 c and it took us hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Our perceived speed at any instant was never any faster, but because of the changing length contraction, at journey's end, our perceived distance travelled over time was 1500*c.
These are the lengths of time it would take to travel to the following places using the 1g acceleration/deceleration method. (From http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/
4.3 ly nearest star ==> 3.6 years
27 ly Vega ==> 6.6 years
30,000 ly Center of our galaxy ==> 20 years
2,000,000 ly Andromeda galaxy ==> 28 years
n ly ==> 1.94 arccosh (n/1.94 + 1) years
As an added bonus, if you made the trip to Andromeda, you'd get observe 2 million years of galaxy evolution over your 28 year trip.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.
Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.
Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)
It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.
If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I am not agreeing with the GP, but as a birdwatcher I can tell you that they use their wings regularly to maintain balance.
Animals that stand erect with only two dominant limbs (weight bearing) almost either have
I don't suppose... (Score:4, Funny)
Ah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But he will go to jail! (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously folk, why should we listen to people on their death bed or to voices from beyond the grave? Do we really think that when people have nothing to lose or are dead they somehow get enlightened and honest?
Egg-shaped craft?!?!?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Highly improbable (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said... the U.S. government is remarkably inept at keeping secrets much less orchestrating a cover up of this size.
Same is true of most conspiracy theories.
Re:Highly improbable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Highly improbable (Score:4, Funny)
+1 Insightful (Score:3, Funny)
You can't keep anything secret for 60 years.
The most recent vast government conspiracy is of course that GWB et. al. Either orchastrated, or allowed to happen and then embellished, 9/11. Of course, all of this hinges on a grand conspiracy being meticulously carried out by Bush Administration. I'm sorry. But THIS adminstration? The adminstration that brought you Iraq and Katrina? I'm sorry, but we've seen the MO for this adminstration and competence, just isn't it.
Re:Exactly! (Score:4, Funny)
You're doin' a heck of a job, Generation iPod.
Re:Exactly! (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks, mom and dad. I'm doing like you taught me.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a trustworthy source (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a trustworthy source (Score:5, Funny)
Because it's powered by hats?
Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor (Score:5, Funny)
And I'd be really creeped out if I were the coroner...
follow the money or the little green men .. (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple google search gives one of many such links:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/07-20-95/cover.htm [tucsonweekly.com]
Not to say that's the only reason he did that
It's not that I think aliens are impossible. I just am highly suspicious that they'd sneak about so much. Or that our government could keep anything a secret for so long. And crackpots coming out with books on UFOs does not count as the leaks.
Re:alien tech wouldn't defy laws of physics (Score:5, Insightful)
So for such a claim to NOT be outrageous, you'd have to also claim a vast conspiracy of scientists all over the world through the decades, sitting on most of their findings while publishing just enough to give an incremental step for the next breakthroughs. Or you'd need the aliens to be directing this, handing out tiny little tidbits of information to the scientists, and either swearing them to secrecy or using some sort of mind control on them. So yes, it is quite outrageous.
On the other hand, if next week some scientist produced working plans for a fusion generator that used a grand unified theory totally different than any proposed, now THAT would be what it would take to not be an outrageous claim of getting outside help.
Re:You think we are aware of all tech military has (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, we could have a NVG as early as 1930 because you could use the early iconoscope to capture IR light below the visible power and amplify it as much as you want. That's what TV does, basically, and it is not a surprise that some camcorders are IR-capable.
But that NVG would weigh 200-300 lbs and wouldn't be exactly portable. To make it portable you need to advance the technology quite a lot. First portable NVGs were still vacuum tube based, but implemented in a very smart way, as a series of long parallel holes in a glass plate. The front edge, facing the field, would receive the picture, produce electrons, those electrons would then be accelerated within all the tubes and when they hit the end, facing you, the light would be both visible and bright. That worked like a "bug eye" - once the picture is focused it is transferred as if through a bunch of fibers, just with amplification.
With semiconductors you can create far fancier, and more efficient NVGs. But we, as a society, made every single step of this path, and it is proven beyond doubt how exactly each step was made, by who (scientists like to publish!) and who stepped on shoulders of those giants and made the next advance, etc. etc.
As other people mentioned, if you show me a working time machine, or a fusion battery of CR2032 size, or an FTL drive, then I may want to consider the idea of external help - just because no human on this planet has a foggiest idea about how to even approach any of those challenges. But the problem is that every known invention on this planet is 100% traceable to its origins, and origins of those origins, recursively.
Alternate Headline: (Score:5, Insightful)
Speculated Where??? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Government and Secrets - An Analysis (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, let me get this reasoning straight.
a) There's no way that the government could keep a secret that long.
b) How do we know that there's no way that the government could keep a secret that long?
c) Because if the government tried to keep a secret that long we would have beard about it.
Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um
(especially if they used secret alien technology to keep it secret!)
I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceship (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceshi (Score:5, Interesting)
F-117 or why there are no aliens visiting... (Score:4, Funny)
The "Stealth" planes are one of the greatest examples of why there are no advanced Alien Technologies. The F-117 is very visibile to most modern high-tech anti-air defense radar, its just a smaller bleep than it should be which makes it slightly trickier. This makes it difficult for crap 20+ year old radars to see it, e.g. the ones that the French, US and Brits sold to Iraq. If the F-117 was actually invisible to radar then they wouldn't be flying it at 30,000ft all the time.
If the US really does have alien technology and it led to the F-117 I'd really suggest complaining back to the "superior" race that invented it.
Now Stealth Ships however tend to work because they build on the radar clutter that the sea causes thus making the ships nearly impossible to make out from the background noise.
400 Government/Military Witnesses - On Record (Score:5, Interesting)
The Disclosure Project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk [youtube.com]
Yeah it's almost 2 hours long, but it will blow your mind!
I wonder how much longer they can keep denying the more than obvious.
Nuff said.
Adeptus
A Lieutenant? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a hoax.. no aliens at Roswell..
UFO's weren't classified in the 40's. (Score:4, Interesting)
Need to know what? UFO's weren't classified in the 1940's. They were new and weird. The military and political structures of the day were making it up as they went with regard to the super-paranoid secrecy structures we are so familiar with today. That's why the Roswell staff made the decision to broadcast to the world that they had retrieved a crashed flying saucer. They didn't have standing orders not to.
--And I imagine that if you work on a dull little air training base in the middle of nowhere, when something like a crashed UFO enters your life, you might consider it awe-inspiring and important to all humans on the Earth. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to share news of it with the world. The gues at Roswell weren't paranoid presidential military advisors. They were Air Force working stiffs posted in the middle of nowhere on a boring little training base.
Of course, when the brass from the important parts of the military showed up, they put an end to that. The gears of secrecy had been beginning to turn in Washington for a few years with regard to UFO's, and though there was no official doctrine at that point, when a UFO crashed in your backyard, the government had enough paranoid minds at the top to know it was in their best interest to lock everything down tight. So the Roswell staff was forced to officially retract the original story and replace it with the tin-foil balloon thing.
-FL
The part of the Roswell crash that never added up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine some aliens sending us some peaceful message, but these aliens look grotesque by our standards. Guess what? The neocons, China and Russia declare "War on Aliens", we'll jihad their asses. Unfortunately, we humans are extremely intolerant, and nowhere near ready to meet aliens. Not even close.
Re:Flip side... (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean kind of like how, in the face of proof of things like how the universe didn't revolve around the earth, the Catholic Church changed its views on cosmology.
Oh wait. No, they opted for things along the lines of killing the people who presented the evidence instead. My bad.
*Never* underestimate the lengths that people in power will go to in order to remain in power.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some guy signing a docket on his deathbed is strange behavior that needs explaining, certainly, but the best explanation may well not be that there actually were aliens.
Perhaps the CIA was testing LSD or an experimental new drug at that site at that time to see what it would do to young army officers. In fact that seems a lot more likely to me than aliens crashing in a desert.
anyone curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:anyone curious... (Score:5, Informative)
why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?
How often have you seen a source document in a news article? Almost never. The audience tunes out; you lose readership. It's a waste of column space.
Someone posted the affidavit text on digg:
2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT
DATE: December 26, 2002
WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx
NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan
(1) My name is Walter G. Haut
(2) I was born on June 2, 1922
(3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203
(4) I am retired.
(5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town.
(6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate.
(7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more.
(8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris.
(9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished.
(10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch.
(11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out."
(12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg
Re:Eggheads! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Phoenix Lights. (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, I'll play your silly game if you just want to throw the truth out because you don't like it. It wuz aliens. Seriously, as an ex Gulf War I crew chief on A-10s there is little doubt in my mind that they are flares dropped from A-10s. That is *exactly* what flares look like from a great distance that are dropped from an A-10. The kind of flares I am talking about are not roadside flares but they are much much bigger and brighter and descend on parachutes. They are used to light up a battle field and they do a mighty fine job of it. I saw show on television where they superimposed actual video footage of the lights over a daylight shot of the mountain range from the exact same perspective that the video was shot from. The "lights" disappeared one by one on the video at the same point they would have dropped below the peak of the mountain (the flares were dropped on the other side of the mountain). Really, the glove fit perfectly.
If you don't believe me here is some more:j an/m26-005.shtml [virtuallystrange.net]
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2007/
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4041 [skeptoid.com]