ParaNet BBS/rosrev
| File Name: | rosrev.txt |
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| Author: | Unknown |
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| Key Words: | ParaNet, UFO, Ufology |
Book Review: "UFO Crash at Roswell" by Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt (Avon Books, 1991), 327 pages.
(Reviewed by Michael Corbin and James R. Black, ParaNet Information Service. Copyright 1991 by Michael Corbin and James R. Black. All Rights Reserved.)
There are some books that everyone with an interest in UFOs should own. "UFO Crash at Roswell" is one of them. Here, for the first time, is a definitive answer to the long-standing question, "Has the U.S. government ever recovered a crashed flying saucer?" The answer is a resounding "Yes!"
The Story and the Evidence
In brief, "UFO Crash at Roswell" tells how an unidentified flying object struck the earth on July 2, 1947 near Corona, New Mexico during a violent thunderstorm; how the wreckage was found by a local rancher and reported to the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field; how the soldiers of the 509th gathered the wreckage, discovered a second (and possibly a third) associated crash site, took possession of four alien bodies, and transported their finds to Los Alamos and Wright Field for analysis; and how the military brass in the Eighth Air Force and the Pentagon squelched the facts, disinformed the public, and suppressed almost all discussion of the events for decades afterwards.
Such a story could easily be dismissed as the rankest sort of sci-fi nonsense, and in its previous incarnations it has been so dismissed by UFO believers and debunkers alike. When Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore's "The Roswell Incident" made the first tentative steps to cover this ground in 1980, it was mercilessly derided and picked to pieces for its intrinsic unbelievability and its lapses of both fact and logic. But Randle and Schmitt know their history, and they were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Randle is a former helicopter pilot and Air Force intelligence officer; Schmitt is Director of Special Investigations for the Center for UFO Studies, one of the oldest and most respectable of today's UFO organizations. Together, over the course of almost three years, they interviewed more than 200 witnesses, reviewed hundreds of documents, and conducted the first scientific site visit by private citizens to the crash site itself. The result is a mountain of proof which will delight the true believer, astound the open-minded, and hopefully give the debunkers a real run for their money.
Inevitably, much of the book is concerned with sometimes confused tales of unearthly materials and alien bodies. But in our estimation this is not the most important and convincing evidence; much more telling is the downright strange behavior of the government itself, both then and now. Witnesses can easily be mistaken about esoteric technical issues outside their everyday experience; it's much harder to misinterpret being threatened by uniformed men carrying guns. The U.S. military has buried the Roswell event under all the trappings of a full-blown government coverup: the intimidation of witnesses, the destruction or suppression of evidence, and a systematic campaign of lies and disinformation to prevent the truth from becoming widely known. The indisputable fact of the coverup itself is enough to establish that Roswell is truly the tip of the "Cosmic Watergate" iceberg.
The authors have anticipated the inevitable assault by debunkers who "know" that the Roswell event cannot have happened as described. They consider whether the Roswell crash can be explained as nothing more than a downed weather balloon, or a stray V-2 rocket nose cone, or a late-breaking Japanese balloon bomb--and then firmly reject them all. In the end, only one explanation remains: that in 1947 the New Mexico countryside witnessed the crash of a vehicle that was "not of this world".
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
"UFO Crash at Roswell" is not without its flaws. It was published as a paperback original rather than in hardcover, which almost inevitably means it will appear in few libraries and will garner few serious reviews. The cover art (against the authors' wishes) is a classic "daylight disk" photo which has been widely denounced as a hoax and has nothing whatever to do with the Roswell crash. The text is replete with typographical errors and grammatical slips that even casual editing should have caught and corrected. There are mangled and self-contradictory quotations (some of which can be repaired by reference to repetitions of the same material elsewhere in the book), and there are "backward glances" to facts that have not yet been discussed. But these represent a failure by the publisher to take the book seriously, rather than a failure by the authors to write a book worth reading.
Perhaps more disconcerting is the authors' decision to cover the same ground four times from different perspectives: once in a brief historical overview, once in a "just the facts" account of the event itself, once in a blow-by-blow description of their investigation, and finally once more in a day-by-day time line. This occasionally gives the reader an annoying sense of "deja vu", as well as making it difficult to know which part of the book to search through for any particular detail.
On the positive side, the authors have taken a very professional and forthright approach to their work. The contributions of previous researchers are acknowleged (and, where necessary, gently corrected); shortcomings in the evidence are freely admitted; witnesses are named, and sources are documented. There are detailed lists of interviewees and participants, a glossary, a bibliography, extensive footnotes, and an index--all of which will greatly assist anyone who wishes to verify their information or to build on their efforts. One senses no "proprietary interests" at work here, which is a welcome relief in a field where information is often jealously guarded and cooperation among researchers is all too rare.
Where Do We Go From Here?
"UFO Crash at Roswell" does not mark the end of crashed-disk research; indeed, it is only the beginning. A moment's consideration yields any number of avenues for further research, some of which Randle and Schmitt are no doubt already pursuing:
(1) The material relating to the second and third crash sites, the discovery of the alien bodies, and their final disposition at the hands of the military is still sketchy and full of holes; further research is definitely needed here, both to find more witnesses and to establish precisely what happened and how it is related to the primary site.
(2) Roswell is not the only rumored UFO crash; Randle and Schmitt list a number of them in an appendix. These other alleged incidents need to be investigated with the same vigor as the Roswell crash, and conclusively verified or disproved.
(3) The role of Kirtland Air Force Base, not only in the Roswell recovery and its coverup but in other landmark UFO events, needs to be thoroughly investigated and documented. Kirtland crops up over and over again in Randle and Schmitt's story--as a source of orders and machinations outside the normal military chain of command, as a transshipment point for material destined for the labs at Los Alamos, as the place where secret scientific reports on the crash were filed, and as the possible source of a military mapping expedition near the crash site years afterwards. Given the prominence of Kirtland in the infamous Bennewitz affair and other disinformation operations which are known to have been carried out by personnel of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, it seems highly significant that Kirtland appears so early and so prominently in the Roswell case.
(4) As far as we know now, Roswell was the first recovery of a crashed UFO; but there is reason to believe that the U.S. government had, to say the least, already given the matter some thought. The speed with which the military responded to the initial report, the forethought shown by the arrangements for transporting the wreckage, and the thoroughness with which the witnesses were hushed up and the evidence eliminated, indicate that the Roswell coverup was not an ad-hoc response to an unexpected event but rather the outworking of a pre-arranged plan. It remains to be seen whether this plan was formulated as the result of prior experience in crashed-saucer retrievals or was merely a contingency plan provoked by earlier encounters with "foo fighters", "ghost rockets", and "green fireballs" in the postwar years.
(5) The revelation by General Arthur Exon of the existence of a UFO control group outside official channels once again raises the spectre of MJ-12. Exon referred to the group as "the Unholy Thirteen" for lack of a better name, but of course this could easily mean nothing more than the twelve principals of MJ-12 plus the President himself, to whom the control group undoubtedly reported. While the controversy surrounding the MJ-12 briefing paper should not be allowed to sully the Roswell event itself, the semi-official acknowledgment that such a group once existed (and presumably still exists) should add new fuel to the MJ-12 fire.
(6) There is a crying need to re-evaluate postwar history in light of the now-established fact of the Roswell crash and retrieval. If the U.S. government successfully recovered an alien spacecraft, alien technology, and alien corpses in 1947, it should have had a profound impact on high-tech research (several witnesses described a material similar to modern fiber optics), on foreign policy, and on the aerospace industry and the space program--not to mention its effect on the government's attitude toward the UFO problem itself. Just as the revelation of the ultra-secret Enigma machine and the allies' successful cracking of Axis codes has required a complete rethinking of the historiography of World War II, so the Roswell event necessitates a reinvestigation of almost everything that has happened in the last 44 years.
(7) Finally, a host of questions remain unanswered about the relationship between the Roswell crash and the "other half" of the UFO equation: abductions, occult phenomena, cattle mutilations, and all the rest. Roswell *looks* like the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft; but that could be because the event has been shaped to look that way, either by the government, by the researchers, or by the forces behind the event itself. It would be a grave error to conclude at this point that Roswell establishes the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as the only solution to the UFO mystery. That something extraordinary happened at Roswell is astonishingly clear. Its ultimate explanation and significance are yet to be determined.
Conclusion
If you have any interest in UFOs, go out and get a copy of this book. Better yet, get two copies--one for yourself, and one to loan out to your friends. You'll be glad you did.
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