I recently went to the UFO Museum in Roswell, NM.  I’ll give it a mixed grade – some schlock, some serious stuff.  The best part was the library, which had many books and some DVDs.  Again, some of it was serious, and some was New Age or other schlock.  One of the books was on how to survive 2012 because Earth’s magnetic poles would supposedly flip. I’m writing this 10 years later; somehow I survived without reading or even knowing about that book. I guess I’m lucky. One of the pictures on the wall was of the saucer section of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise, as depicted in the first three Star Trek movies, but minus the engineering section and drive nacelles. That was utterly shameless. If there really are aliens out there, it would be quite a coincidence if their starship looked exactly like the U.S.S. Enterprise. (Side note: The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Little Green Men” provided an explanation for the Roswell incident.)

Of course, the crash or other incident wasn’t in the city of Roswell, but in one of the remote areas out of the town. I drove through that remote area on US-285 to get to Roswell. It’s very desolate out there.  There aren’t many gasoline stations, and not much cell coverage; if you drive this road, be sure your vehicle is in good condition and has a full tank! 

Something may have happened back then, but there is so much fluff and schlock that it is hard to tell what, if anything, really did happen. 

It is possible that there are technically advanced alien civilizations out there.  It is even possible that they may have visited or monitored Earth.  I don’t give much credence to alien visits to Earth in pre-industrial times. Earth’s existence might have been known to astronomers from other planets through the use of telescopes that take advantage of gravitational lensing which would be able to see Earth-size planets.  However, in pre-industrial times, with no radio transmissions leaking into the cosmos, no nuclear weapons tests or uses, and no satellites, Earth would be much less obvious to any alien species exploring our area of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Curiously, the Roswell incident happened after Earth had become industrial, just two years after the first detonations of nuclear weapons, and only a few hours’ driving time from the Trinity site, where the first nuclear weapon was tested.

One of the great notions encouraged by the Museum and by many others is that yes, a space alien starship crashed on Earth in 1947, but it was hushed up by the government of the United States, either to prevent domestic panic, or to prevent the governments of hostile nations such as the Soviet Union from learning that there might be other civilizations, with other technology that might be turned against the United States. 

The domestic panic excuse seems overblown. Remember what the United States was back in 1947: the world’s preeminent industrial power and the only nation with nuclear weapons.  The United States emerged triumphant and undamaged from World War II, the greatest conflict in human history.  There was much more national self-confidence back then, and – very important – much more trust in government.  So why bother covering it up?  Possibly the Truman Administration would have been concerned about a panic similar to that caused by the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds.  However, President Truman could just as easily have revealed the presence of aliens to the nation in the calm manner of the “fireside chats” used by his predecessor, President Roosevelt.  He would have been able to describe what happened in a manner designed to avoid panic, using the same techniques that had been practiced during World War II to keep the population calm and enthusiastic about fighting and supporting the war effort. Moreover, it would have been fairly easy to return the United States to a war footing in 1947, only two years after World War II ended.  It would have been possible to hastily establish a presence in space, including armed spacecraft. For a fictional description of this, try Allen Steele’s V-S Day, or Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series.  The scientists brought from Germany to the United States via Operation Paperclip would no doubt have been able to contribute to a crash effort to establish a U.S. presence in space before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.

But none of this happened. Instead, there was the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the unrest of the 1960s.  The Soviet Union, not the United States, was the first to put a man into space. The United States went to the Moon with the Apollo program, but did not stay.  All of this taken together rather strongly suggests that there wasn’t an alien crash or other form of alien contact at Roswell in 1947. There are two alternative explanations.  One is that yes, there was a crash and it was hushed up by the “Deep State”, a catchall term that describes the intelligence services, the armed forces, and the permanent civil service.  However, the Roswell incident happened in July 1947; the CIA was established in September 1947 – hardly enough time for CIA’s influence to become pervasive.  Furthermore, many of the modern intelligence services did not yet exist.  The other interesting explanation is that the government has chosen to ignore or wish away the matter for fear of looking incompetent or impotent.  If that was the choice, it wasn’t much of one; governments the world over are regarded as exactly that, even in those countries where the people are not allowed to do so openly. 

It has now become much more fashionable to discuss UFOs, or the more modern term: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).  It is now openly discussed in the mainstream media and by NASA and the Department of Defense.  Why the sudden interest?  Are aliens truly slavering to invade Earth?  If so, what exactly is it that Earth itself has to offer?  What resources are on Earth that could not be extracted from the Asteroid Belt or the Oort Cloud?  Colonization would be difficult on a planet of almost 8 billion people, and that presumes that the aliens are sufficiently like us to find Earth’s biosphere and gravity compatible. Or is the sudden interest to distract a divided and angry populace from high inflation and supply chain disruptions caused by a ham-fisted response to Covid, as well as other machinations of Big Business and Big Government?  Again, it’s possible that there’s someone out there, but the distraction thesis has merit. If the U.S. government is seriously concerned about an alien invasion, it should be doing much more to defend against it. Instead, we have the same old interventionist foreign policies, debt piling up, no serious attempt to harden infrastructure, no attempt to build High Frontier or a similar program to construct defenses against orbital threats.  The Air Force recently unveiled the B-21 Raider, a new stealth bomber that is meant for flying and fighting in Earth’s atmosphere; it cannot fly into space.  There is the fledgling U.S. Space Force, but as of now, it does not have any fighting spacecraft.  While nothing like the ships of Star Trek or Star Wars is possible right now, it would at least be possible to establish armed space stations for planetary defense, and back them up with ground-based defenses. For a fictional description of what that might look like, try Nick Pope’s Operation Thunder Child and Operation Lightning Strike.  Furthermore, there’s no real attempt to prepare the American people for an alien invasion or for any other kind of war, as is done in Switzerland, Israel, or some of the Scandinavian countries – and this despite the fact that the U.S. government has already admitted that the homeland is no longer a sanctuary. 

The subject of whether anyone else is out there deserves far more serious study than the fluff at the UFO Museum, or the constant evasions of the government.  Perhaps the proposed National UFO Historical Records Center will be able to provide that.  When it opens, I’ll stop by and write a blog post about it. Stay tuned!

The journey home took me through a different area of New Mexico.  I drove through many small towns, some of which were beautiful, and some of which were run-down.  I stopped at Valley of Fires Recreation Area near Carrizozo.  The sunset was beautiful.  New Mexico really is the Land of Enchantment; I’m glad I moved here.  The park was in great shapes: clean restrooms and a short trail through the frozen lava. It’s nice to see a government agency doing something right for a change. 

For further reading:

Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology

Carl Sagan: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot