Jeez, Roswell is turning into the 'Fermat's last theorem' of ufology (a long standing mathematical puzzle that was thought unsolveable - but it was finally solved quite recently).
Few things about the points brought up here regarding the show.
We don't know that if ET is really visiting, that they are visiting because of an obsession/interest in US.
Of all the reported sightings and the number that must go unreported, very few seem to involve direct interaction or observation of us (humanity). I'm not really sold on abductions being ET either. So for me anyway, there isn't that much evidence that we might be the primary reason for alien visitation and I'm not sure where Jim gets that idea either. I really like hearing from Jim, he will no doubt have forgotten more about ufology than most of us will ever know.
It is a bit human-centric to assume we must be the reason for visitation.
I know Gene also thinks that it is his duty to get as much of Jim's thoughts and knowledge on tape while he is healthy and still young! (Sorry for assuming on your behalf Gene, but I'm sure you agree regarding Jim).
I have often thought most sightings are simply an accident in that the UFO is not there for our benefit to see and photograph. IMO the UFOs are doing something else for their own interest/benefit. The fact UFOs are seen in extremely remote places and not often over very large cities leads me to believe they have an agenda other than showing themselves to us.
I think they neither care or not care whether we see them. We may be insignificant in their priorities. I can think of many reasons to visit this planet. It has an amazing range of life on it. It has abundant water. It has metals and minerals etc. Of course if ET is here and their technology is more advanced than ours (a given I think) then they may be after something we don't even know about that is here around us.
This thing about the distances to other habitable planets I think is just something we cannot comprehend in terms of technology and science. It was not long ago that the idea of circumnavigating the circumference of the world in a day or so would have been akin to a magic carpet ride and certainly thought of us being impossible and no doubt always so for forever and a day. We just could not conceive of powered flight, never mind jet engines that allow speeds hundreds of times the speed of old sailing ships.
To imagine the distances from Europe to Australia being covered in less than a day as a matter of routine for everyday passengers was unthinkable until quite recently.
Scientific conceit is so ingrained even after numerous examples of progress bringing humanity to places once thought impossible. You would think that mainstream science would have learned by now not to make definite predictions of what will never be possilbe. Big mistake!
Yes, physics tends to think there may be certain ways of cheating the fuel/velocity problem - usually with some kind of bending of 3-D space but always the problem in calculation is the energy required.
Once again though, scientific conceit makes scientists think they can predict what we may or may not be able to do in the future. But again, like with speed, we used to think that coal-fired engines were the most efficient and compact way of providing energy for locomotion. We did not know about electricity or batteries, certainly no-one even dreamed that power contained within actual atoms would be unleashed providing staggering amounts of energy from very little mass.
There is almost no point idly trying to make a linear progression of technology today and from that trying to predict what will be possible in 100years. I imagine that some unexpected huge leap in energy will be made, probably by accident and this will completely change what is feasible in the future. Never say never is a good motto for science, cos it is regularly proved correct.
I predict sometime in the future it may be possible to send just the raw information required to create life and intelligence so that one day, just some signal will need to be sent to a host planet, a bit like a seed, that will use the energy and resources of that planet to create life that can then explore that solar system and region. The same can be done again and again, life leap-frogging from system to system.
Back to Roswell for a mintute (groan). I don't think it is a red-herring for the US military to have ordered child-size coffins. In retrospect, possibly it was stupid, but people and military and government employees often make huge mistakes, especially with something new.
It has to be remembered that if there has been a cover-up about alien visitation, then Roswell occured way back at the beginning. People were working blind, writing the book on the whole deal as they went along. Mistakes, and huge ones, are bound to have been made as with all areas of life and over time procedures and rules will have been created in response to events and tweaked and tightened over time as more was learned about how to go about a cover-up on such a scale.
Regardless of what crashed near Roswell, I can see no benefit to issue a press release about captured flying saucers, only for it to be recanted immediately after. At the very least it made the RAAF look inept. If the crash was of a top-secret balloon or aircraft then a suitable cover-story would have been a different balloon/aircraft. Never would it have made sense to use a story about a flying saucer. This is one of the facets to Roswell that make me believe a saucer may indeed have been involved and it was just serious back-tracking that took place as the higher-ups started to appreciate the implications of what they'd said.
I still don't buy the Mogul explanation, simply because all concerned accept there was a large debris field involved and I do not see how a mogul (or any other) balloon can come to such grief that it ends up in thousands of small pieces spread over a wide area. It is the wrong type of material to end up like that from the kind of speeds such apparatus could have reached, even at free-fall. It's terminal velocity would have been way to low. It could only really have been a relatively heavy solid object going very fast to end up the way everyone agrees it ended up?
Good episode and I hope Gene and Chris are already planning when to have Jim back. He no doubt has lots still to say on any number of UFO topics as yet not covered while he has been a guest.
There are so many individual great cases that can be disected in an episode.
