The Roswell Poll!

[Kieran]

Just thinking about it now. Roswell case if fake? does that mean many cases we have heard, could they be fakes as well. Since people who are eyewitness's can not be trusted?

 

[Hoffmeister]

Give me a better reason than a weather balloon. A secret project developing a prototype plane for eg...i could understand that.

OK, i havent read any other posts after this yet, i am answering one at a time so bear with me. although i did read the post directly after this where you said the theory is gaining more credibility.

First of all i'll restate that i am not claiming to be some sort of all knowledgable power here, i am literally throwing interesting theories out there.
Second of all, let me do what i wish the "old skool" UFO researchers would do and attack my own theory.
Project mogul is basically a series of big balloons carrying a relatively small box underneath. Say it crashed in a field...

1. Firstly, since it is just a balloon, it presumably wouldnt crash with much impact. I mean it is a series of balloons so how would it crash anyway? if one balloon went, surely the other would support it so it would land reasonably slowly. If this was the case, how would it smash into the ground, breaking the box and giving us the broken debris that was described?
2. Also, whilst the whole thing might have taken up a large amount of space, surely only the box would have covered about a few hundred meters worth of area at best, the rest would just be ballon on the floor.... very easy to identify...

So this seems pretty hard to mis-identify...

 

[fitzbew88]

Because the wreckage was identified the Jesse and one other person (i forget who) and they straight away gave out the report to the local radio before checking with anyone.

I don't think this is right; the original press release came from the Army.

Very few people had even seen the wreckage by this point from what i know.

I'd say at least a half-dozen, probably more. If Marcel took Brazel's "sample" debris out to the base before Marcel's excursion, then maybe a lot of people saw it.

....it was during the height of the first major USA UFO wave..

Yes, the sociological undercurrents of what was happening in the U.S. can't be ignored.

 

[Hoffmeister]

The "disks" have been reported as small as a few feet across to giant-sized monstrous vehicles visible from miles and miles away..
No one saw the alleged Roswell craft in the air. So we can't draw any conclusions about potential debris fields.

True, but i was just goig on most of the reports that we know.

I don't think Brazel had any idea what it was. I don't think he even knew about the UFO flap that had been going on since June. Whatever it was, it astounded him enough to go to a lot of effort to present it to the authorities.

It was a country-wide flap, i'm not certain, but i would expect him to have heard about the flap. Also, a guy who lived in the middle of nowhere, i imagine that it would be that hard to "astound him" when it comes to unknown wreckage.

If we stipulate that it crashed, then we must accept the craft had some vulnerability. I don't think anyone at the scene or anyone proximate to the event had any way of determining if any piece of the debris was "unbreakable".

True, i thought about this when writing my post. for all we know the craft could have hit the ground at beyond light speed. the semingly unbreakable material probably has some sort of damage limit.

Unfortunately, this is the nature of historical research. I don't think we can afford to automatically discount witness testimony --- it's all we got.

Agreed, but you can highly question the testimony, there are so many alterior motives. If you were in the jury, you would mainly side with the facts rather than highly questionable testimony.

I like what you are saying here, but I don't agree with the "pretty high chance". My gut tells me: "some chance".

ok, it seems pretty high to me, but we are all different and i understand that you might not find it so convincing.

The root of my skepticism about the Roswell incident is based on the fact that over the next half-dozen years the USAF clearly didn't have a clue about what was going on and they desperately wanted to find out. If they had a crashed disk somewhere, I don't think there would've been such bafflement permeating all echelons of the Pentagon during that period.

Bingo! Couldnt have put it better myself... Although a die-hard would argue that since only a small compartment of the USAF would know about the actual crashed craft because of the way that secrecy works, its not suprising...

 

[Hoffmeister]

Just thinking about it now. Roswell case if fake? does that mean many cases we have heard, could they be fakes as well. Since people who are eyewitness's can not be trusted?

not at all. i am not saying that all eyewitnesses cannot be trusted. Only that eyewitnesses who suddenly come to light 30 odd years after the events, where their memory may we be affected, and they have alterior motives (fame, money for roswell) cannot be used for evidence when talking about potentially the most significant event in the history of humans.... or any event for that matter.

 

[fitzbew88]

Project mogul is basically a series of big balloons carrying a relatively small box underneath. Say it crashed in a field...

Unfortunately, I think the only Mogul candidate (the only release that was unaccounted for) didn't even have a sensor. So it would just have been the balloon train.

1. Firstly, since it is just a balloon, it presumably wouldnt crash with much impact. I mean it is a series of balloons so how would it crash anyway? if one balloon went, surely the other would support it so it would land reasonably slowly. If this was the case, how would it smash into the ground, breaking the box and giving us the broken debris that was described?

High altitude balloons can explode. As they get higher, the air pressure differential causes them to get bigger and bigger --- eventually they blow up.

So it's possible that one could be in pieces.

And remember that it laid in the desert for possibly weeks, exposed to wind, rain, storms, cows etc..

1. Also, whilst the whole thing might have taken up a large amount of space, surely only the box would have covered about a few hundred meters worth of area at best, the rest would just be ballon on the floor.... very easy to identify...

So this seems pretty hard to mis-identify...

As far as we know, if it was Mogul, there was nothing about it that should have been so perplexing. But...what happens when we add in the factors presented by human imagination, wishful thinking and the power of suggestion? Anything is possible.

 

[Kieran]

I think the personal at the base where a liitle naive to the facts of what they had.That is why they released the original statement about the flying disc.I like your theory hoff, but does the evidence back it all up, i am little confused by it all.

 

[Kieran]

not at all. i am not saying that all eyewitnesses cannot be trusted. Only that eyewitnesses who suddenly come to light 30 odd years after the events, where their memory may we be affected, and they have alterior motives (fame, money for roswell) cannot be used for evidence when talking about potentially the most significant event in the history of humans.... or any event for that matter.

Ya but alot of the cases we look at in ufology are cases from the past. So i am just saying if Roswell was ever proven to be just a fraud. Can we trust the eyewitness's accounts from the more famous cases?

 

[fitzbew88]

True, but i was just goig on most of the reports that we know.

Well, we can't draw conclusions about whether the debris field was too big or not big enough. We don't know how big the craft was. We can't use the size of the debris field to determine whether the event was paranormal or not paranormal.

It was a country-wide flap, i'm not certain, but i would expect him to have heard about the flap. Also, a guy who lived in the middle of nowhere, i imagine that it would be that hard to "astound him" when it comes to unknown wreckage.

Well, he said he didn't know anything about the phenomenon that had been sweeping the nation since the Arnold event in June:

Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947

At the time [after finding the debris] Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter, Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris.


The next day he first heard about the flying disks, and he wondered if what he had found might be the remnants of one of these.

Agreed, but you can highly question the testimony, there are so many alterior motives. If you were in the jury, you would mainly side with the facts rather than highly questionable testimony.

Absolutely. My point was that all of the "facts" in this case are merely testimony. So we are stuck with it...I mean, we are forced to cope with it in order to eventually find the truth.

Bingo! Couldnt have put it better myself... Although a die-hard would argue that since only a small compartment of the USAF would know about the actual crashed craft because of the way that secrecy works, its not suprising...

But such a "small compartment" that it wouldn't include the Director of Air Force Intelligence? Because that's who instructed leaders of ATIC to study the UFO phenomenon in 1951 in order to figure out what was going on. If he [they] already had a crashed disc in a hangar somewhere, what was the mystery?

 

[status4]

So much revolves around the "metal foil" material he was supposed to have found, and it's been clearly accepted that the other materials he found were Balsa wood and some sort of paper. Were the aliens using Balsa wood and modeling glue to build their saucers back then?

I recently saw some video of someone examining a pristine example of a left over radar target from that era, it's clear that's what the metal foil came from, it may not have been from one of the mogul pieces, but it was part of some classified project the military was working on.

As for the MJ12 stuff, Stan Friedman says that they could be real based on stuff he's seen in the archives over the years, I think they're fake myself.

 

[Hoffmeister]

Hang on a minute...
One thing I have just thought of... The government has spent a fair amount of time in the more recent years trying to convince people that it was mogul. Wouldnt it help if they just wheeled out some of the debris to show us all? Surely they've still got it stored somewhere.

 

[fitzbew88]

Hang on a minute...
One thing I have just thought of... The government has spent a fair amount of time in the more recent years trying to convince people that it was mogul. Wouldnt it help if they just wheeled out some of the debris to show us all? Surely they've still got it stored somewhere.

If it was truly the remnants of a Mogul, I can't imagine why they would keep it. It would be useless. It literally was just trash.

If it was something else (paranormal), then they chose to hide it for reasons still highly speculative. They may not be able to reveal it. If it went into some alternate "black" universe, our leadership today might not have the slightest idea where it is. Our leadership today might not even be sure what happened in 1947.

They had no idea that the Roswell incident was going to be revived with such vigor decades hence.

 

[fitzbew88]

So much revolves around the "metal foil" material he was supposed to have found, and it's been clearly accepted that the other materials he found were Balsa wood and some sort of paper. Were the aliens using Balsa wood and modeling glue to build their saucers back then?

And a framework for dealing with this is also available (right or wrong): Once the AAF knew what it had, Brazel's printed descriptions were carefully sculpted to sound like weather balloon material.

Testimony exists that claims he was a "guest" at the Roswell base for a few days, and that when he returned to Roswell for media work, he was attended by several AAF personnel whose job was to make sure he maintained the weather balloon story.

Brazel can't tell us what happened, so we are forced to deal with these types of claims.

 

[Gareth]

Hang on a minute...
One thing I have just thought of... The government has spent a fair amount of time in the more recent years trying to convince people that it was mogul. Wouldnt it help if they just wheeled out some of the debris to show us all? Surely they've still got it stored somewhere.

Exactly. It aint Mogul dude. Theyve changed their story so many times and the fact that they volunteer the test dummy nonsense to explain the bodies is absurd. They should have just completely ignored the body talk IMO, and that fact that they acknowledge it and even address it speaks volumes I think.

 

[Kieran]

The theorys put forward on this thread by everyone are intrigueing. But i must admit my knowledge on many case's of ufology are lacking expecially the one about the Roswell case.Yes i have seen a few documentarys on the subject, but to me that is not real research. As a result i decided to read more on the case through the web. I cant back up what i am going to say, so any comments are welcome either postive or negative.

Here is what i think could have happened from what i read online?

The press release given out by walter haut. From what i have read on the web, and from what i have learned from that, my understanding of the press was completely wrong, i thought it was released a few hours after the discovery of the object( how wrong was i!)

According to the newspapers , and the wire services of the day, and of course the civilian and military eyewitness's the first and actual press release which contained the flying disc story, was actually released to the public maybe one week after the actual event. Some eyewitness's suggest even longer. Brazel backed up this story of one week in a interview given to the press.

Seriously if this true to me the whole balloon theory is no longer viable.Here is some some theorys that might make sense, or they might not they are based on the Roswell case.

1 brazel and other residents reported a severe electrical storm the night before brazel discovered the wreckage, and some residents even reported to the sheriff of the town, that they were seeing blue lights over the town of Roswell?

i leave a question mark at the end of my theorys, because i can not verify the storys as being true because they are other peoples accounts.

2 Some eyewitness's report the possibility of two craft comeing down in the desert. Interesting thought. The reason given by ufologists to why the ufo crashed is somehow the radar from the base caused a malfuncation with the controls of the craft? To me if the story of what mac brazel siad is true.

Why is the electrical storm not considered as a possibility? Brazel considered the storm to be a very violent one. Is it beyond possibility that thec craft was struck by a lighting surge? or the storm itself caused there controls to malfuncation.

3There is so many eyewitness's to Roswell that i cant believe they are all lieing. Going back to what i siad when i first started this post the press release. Why issue a press release telling the world that you had a craft from a different world one week after the event?
I have a theory on this.
HAUT release'S the statement to the public. The authoritys in washington give no authority for the release of the press release. The public go into in a frenzy over the press release? higher officials go mad when they hear of this press release and order everything be hushed up quickly and quietly, this is how and why the cover up came into place. This is a simple analysis by me to what could have happened?


Mogul was only brought into the loop in 1994, The original cover up was just an ordinary weather balloon made of tin foil.Yes you could twist it and say the mogul balloon theory was the real story and the ordinary balloon story was used as the cover up because after all mogul was a secret classified program. But why bring dummies into the mix if you have notting to hide.?

So many high ranking official have siad through the years Roswell happened, and i have to agree with them. i think the evidence is there, u just have to do some research, and to be honest what i have touched on here is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Hoffmeister]

I think Dummies was just speculation thrown in to try and explain it without accusing all the residents of roswell of basically either delusional or making it up.
bad move... people got hold of the theory and used it to stoke the fire of conspiracy..

 

[Kieran]

Putting dummies into the mix fueled the conspiracy even more, so i cant see why the military would inflame that anymore, unless they are clueless themselves. I believe the use of dummies didnt match the time period.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Putting dummies into the mix fueled the conspiracy even more, so i cant see why the military would inflame that anymore, unless they are clueless themselves. I believe the use of dummies didnt match the time period.

They didn't. Right hands and left hands not talking to each other, as usual.

 

[status4]

They didn't. Right hands and left hands not talking to each other, as usual.

Gene's correct that the use of the "crash test dummies" doesn't match the time frame of the 1947 incident, they were used much later, but there were a number of other projects that have since been declassified that could account for the "alien bodies."

There were many projects that used various test subjects in an attempt to determine the effects of high altitude exposure on living beings. Some of these included dropping primates, from sub-orbital platforms, in various capsules and ejector seat type devices and allowing them to crash back to Earth, often resulting in the death of the test subjects.

There is documentary film footage of monkeys wearing space suits just like the Apollo mission crews wore, only smaller of course. Now I can imagine that such a thing would look pretty odd to a country rancher in 1947 Nevada. Rhesus monkeys are funny looking.

Here's a Nasa archive image of a Rhesus monkey wearing an early version of a modern fire suit, hey, could be an alien no?

There were other events possibly around the same time that could account for the reports of the weird bodies at the hospital, such as the test pilot who had the capsule that fell on him and crushed his head beneath it for some time, it was said that when he was brought to the hospital he was nearly impossible to make out as human because his head was swollen to twice the normal size and all of his features were impossible to distinguish.

Also the accounts from the undertaker don't add up. He claims he was confronted by a red headed officer and a black sergeant at the hospital and made to leave the area, but it's a fact that in 1947, the army was not integrated, therefore it would have been impossible that a red headed white officer would have a black sergeant on duty with him.

Who knows really? I think it's time to let it go because even if someone who was there, and knows exactly what happened, were to come forward and say THIS IS THE TRUTH and THIS IS what happened, nobody's going to believe them anyway, because at this point 60 plus years later, the theory is more interesting to most people then whatever the truth is.

 

[Kevin Daly]

I'm definitely in the "I don't know" camp on this one.

There is by the way an explanation that's consistent with both something anomalous having crashed, and the continuing supposed bewilderment of the relevant authorities: a craft may have been damaged and (one way or another) dropped débris, but not actually crashed (or the remains/survivors may have been retrieved by their own people). So the authorities might have been left with a lot of "What the hell is that?" on their hands, but nothing that would *conclusively* say "not human".

The evidence for bodies has always seemed to me thinner (no matter how much I want it to be otherwise) than the evidence for something very strange having crashed.