Every few nights, sometimes more often, the History Channel, of all outlets, will throw on some tripe about UFOs. That's right kids, flying saucers. After suffering through hours of this material, I've decided that this is a nation of suckers. PT Barnum was right, except in one thing...apparently the suckers are born exclusively in the continental United States. The dumbshit per capita factor here is through the roof. I'm pretty sure that all you need to sell any sizeable minority on the validity of an idea, no matter how half-baked, is some nice graphics and a serious sounding voiceover artist. Have NONE of you halfwits ever seriously tried to apply simple critical thinking? Of course not. This is a nation where the name "skeptic" is supposed to be worn in shame.
I'm not ashamed of it. If you tell me you have a ghost in your house, I'm interested, but yeah, I'm skeptical. Why shouldn't I be? My own brain misfires enough that I couldn't honestly say whether one of the last twenty conversations I had with other people really wasn't with a figment of my imagination. How the hell would I know? You might, instead of having seen an actual ghost, be in the throes of a psychotic break. I know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that people do indeed have psychotic episodes. I've even been in the room with someone who was having one. Ghosts...well, there just doesn't seem to be any hard evidence, does there? And when some Birkenstock-wearing-crystal-waving-full-trance-channeling person tells me that I have to BELIEVE before I see, pardon me if my skepticism becomes full blown cynicism.
Now there are some people out there who are thinking the dreaded "r" word. You've got it. I'm a reductionist as well, a heretic of the first order against the New Age and all that bullshit. Why? Because seeking holistic answers was how we got the Dark Ages, and because the Enlightenment came when we realized that we weren't as smart as we thought we were. Reductionists, enlightenment thinkers, asked questions of nature with experiments where their forbearers talked of "humors" and tried to solve real problems in pointless logical syllogisms. Medieval thinking kowtows to Authority. Enlightenment thinking is only corrected by Nature itself (and often brutally...if you're famous in one generation, you'll probably be looked on as a dolt by the next...such is life).
Reductionism, and now synthesis, are the lifeblood of science, and because of science, you're looking at this tirade on the Internet. It wasn't faith healing or crystal power that spawned DARPAnet, that little node-creature that has grown into the world wide web. Nope. That was science. Reductionism. Experimentation. All of those things that make the American Simpleton's head hurt. (By the way, how does it feel to be the next slave class, you bunch of mindless fucks?)
OK kids...here's a clever toy from the skeptic's toolkit. It is called Occam's Razor. The chapter and verse is "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything." Very simple, very easy. Basically, the upshot is that the simpler your explanation of a given event is, the better your chances of being right. Keep this in mind, and bear in mind that people lie to you for all kinds of reasons, and you might stand a chance of not kneeling before the new aristocracy. Now let's apply old Occam's rule of thumb to one of those classic cases of the paranormal: the Roswell Incident.
Fact 1: Something crashed in a remote bit of New Mexico desert on or about July 3, 1947.
Fact 2: The military generally bullied civilians and onlookers and gathered up all the bits they could lay hands on.
Fact 3: The government was clearly engaged in some sort of either witting or unwitting cover up of the incident.
Fact 4: World War II had just ended, and the battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn.
Fact 5: The 509th Bomber Wing, from which came the Enola Gay, was stationed in New Mexico.
Fact 6: The United States was flying top secret (and illegal under international law) reconnaissance balloons over the Soviet Union, and Roswell was a primary recovery area for those vehicles.
Fact 7: The United States was also working on high-altitude survival systems for pilots, as a result of bitter experience in WWII. These programs were top secret.
Fact 8: The military's culture of secrecy was (and still is) completely gonzo out of control. In late 1946, the Venona Code, used by Soviet operatives in the United States, has been broken, and red fever is beginning to take root in the upper echelons of the government and military as it is made clear just how compromised many of our programs were in the early to mid 1940's, including the Manhattan Project.
So let's take a look at the hypothesis: An alien spacecraft (presumably interstellar, as no signs of intelligent life exist within our own solar system) crashes, for no readily apparent reason, on a farm in New Mexico. The government seizes it and bullies the civilians into not talking about it. They use this newfound leap in technology to build, among other things, the F-117 stealth fighter and the B-2 stealth bomber (a cause of many UFO sightings itself).
Now for the amusing part, debunking. Both of these "revolutionary" aircraft were actually an evolution of an idea whose roots are in Nazi Germany, of very terrestrial origin. One of the reasons that the British Spitfires had so much success in staving off the Luftwaffe bombers was because of radar. Radar enabled controllers to vector fighters into oncoming bomber formations. To counter this, the Nazis tinkered with all kinds of low-signature shapes, and lo and behold, they came up with, you guessed it, a flying wing.
So no aliens there. We already had jet technology in 1947, as well as computers, of a sort. So what "amazing advances" were made due to this technological boon? Bumpkis. Diddly. Nothing at all. Even the digital computing revolution, probably the most sweeping innovation of our time, came from ideas that can be traced far back in history, at least to Charles Babbage in the time of Queen Victoria. As for aerospace advances, all you have to do is pick up where the Germans and the Japanese left off with their jet technology, and you'll see the heritage of early US jet aircraft. So if the US government nabbed a UFO, they got remarkably little information out of it.
Even assuming such a premise, you would have to admit that the research effort to "crack" the alien technology would span many disciplines. Engineers, metallurgists, biologists, anthropologists, physicists...the list just goes on and on. A truly alien artifact would have profound implications in all these fields. A really professional research effort on such a thing would bring together a collection of scientists at least as big as the Manhattan Project, and that many scientists together are a serious security problem. We're gregarious by nature. Sharing information is one of the ways that breakthroughs are made. Keeping such an effort secret would be nigh impossible, as the US learned during the effort to build the bomb. The Russians weren't the only ones who heard reports of the progress of that development. Nazis also had their ears to the ground, and were well informed of Manhattan's aims, if not its status.
So I have my own thoughts. Posit a B-29, fully loaded and armed with an atomic payload at the ready in case the USSR tried any hanky-panky, or perhaps just on an operational drill. We know these existed in the 509th Bomb Group. The 29 hits a nasty thunderstorm (they get big ones out there in the high desert summer), and has issues. We also know that the safety record of those birds was nowhere near that of the B-52. The bomber goes down.
Now anyone who saw the wreckage of United Flight 93 on 9/11/2001 will admit that a very large aircraft can be reduced to surprisingly little wreckage. The B-29 was tiny compared to a Boeing 757, and of much lighter construction. It isn't any particular surprise that an untrained observer, upon seeing the shattered aluminum of the wreck, would be mystified, particularly if the plane came in at a high angle to the ground. Equally understandable would be the military's need to get every piece of that aircraft back.
Remember, this thing was carrying an atomic bomb. That's a whole chunk of nasty sitting right in the middle of a field. Not only does Uncle Sam not want old Farmer Whatshisname to die of radiation sickess, the kind Uncle would rather nobody knew about this little mishap, especially the Soviets, who could make it tough in the media for our dear Uncle. Third, imagine the lawsuit (not wholly unknown in 1947) that Farmer Whatshisname would have. Now put yourself in the shoes of the public relations officer. When pimply-faced teen Resident X, who spends his days reading Amazing Stories, asks you if it was a flying saucer, what should you do?
Flying saucer mania was all over the country. Fed by stories from WWII pilots and others, they were the ever-present OTHER we could pin our fears on now that the Nazis and the Japanese were gone, and the Soviets weren't quite our enemies yet. As that public information officer, the best thing you could possibly do is to deny, vociferously, that there had been a UFO crash. Deny it loudly in front of as many people as you can scrape together. Better yet, deny it on radio, once and once only, and then deny denying it. The stories will take care of themselves, and like Paul Bunyan, people will eventually remember themselves meeting little green men and sharing tea with them.
Too trite for you? Too farfetched? It sure is simpler than assuming the existence of beings clever enough to cross the void of interstellar space, and then crash in the desert in some misguided Evil Knevil stunt. Or maybe they collided with a weather balloon? My scenario counts on elements we know existed at the time, aircraft, atomic bombs, and human nature.
For the fellow skeptics among you, here are three similar incidents that the US military actually admits. Note that two actually involved bombers in the air. Go team. (This, by the way, for you paranormal investigator Agent Mulder wannabees, is what one could call corroborative evidence, and yes, it is anecdotal, but thank your god or your whatever for that.)
11 APRIL 1950: Shortly after departing Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB) in New Mexico, a U.S. B-29 bomber carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into a mountain. The bomb was destroyed but its nuclear capsule with the fissile materials, which was also on board the aircraft, had not been inserted for safety reasons.
27 JULY 1956: During a routine deployment to England, a U.S. B-47 bomber skidded and slid off a runway at Lakenheath Royal Air Force (RAF) Base. The plane burst into flames and crashed into a nuclear bomb storage igloo in which there were three Mark 6 nuclear bombs. The bombs did not explode.
21 JANUARY 1968: A U.S. B-52G nuclear bomber crashed on the ice seven miles west of Thule Air Base in northern Greenland. The aircraft was on an airborne alert flight and carried four B-28 thermonuclear bombs. Upon impact with the ice the bomber exploded and all four nuclear bombs were destroyed, scattering radioactive materials over a large area.
The Roswell Story isn't discomforting because it is a story about your government lying to you about UFOs. It is frightening because it is a story about your government covering up an incident of a top secret, possibly nuclear nature, so well that the conspiracy nuts are still digging for the wrong thing. UFOs have been a positive boon for Air Force test programs. Keep in mind that when the F-117 stealth fighter was finally unveiled to we the people, the number of UFO sightings near Nellis AFB dropped to near zero, at least until the next prototype started test flights. Doesn't that suggest anything to you?
Get skeptical, America. Get smart. Otherwise you might just elect a president who goes to war under false pretenses without the vaguest clue of how to bring the occupation to a conclusion.
Oh crap...never mind... Keep your crystals and your tarot cards America, and prepare to stretch your necks and bare your backs for the next ruling class. The Dark Ages are back upon us with Jihad and Crusade. I suppose the Inquisition will crank up again soon...oh, wait a minute, Guantanamo Bay, anyone?
