By KURT LOFT
The Tampa Tribune

TAMPA - It reads like a mawkish 1950s science-fiction script.

A foreman in a remote part of New Mexico finds strange wreckage on his ranch and calls the sheriff, who then notifies the military. Soldiers scour the area, gather up the scattered debris and take it to a secret location. Area residents are told to keep their mouths shut. A cover-up ensues.

Soon, conspiracy theories abound over the whereabouts and occupants of a mysterious object — presumably a spaceship from another world.

So begins the Roswell incident — and America’s fascination with unidentified flying objects. What happened 60 years ago this week near the small town of Roswell remains one of the most contested events in the annals of popular culture, and one the science community prefers to leave to others.

The tale won’t go away. The annual Amazing Roswell UFO Festival kicks off this month; a new book has hit the stores; and extraterrestrial advocates and skeptics continue to argue the facts and fan the myths.

Is the military still hiding something? Are alien corpses in deep cryogenic freeze? Was it a flying saucer or a failed military balloon? Can the evidence corroborate the oral histories? What did people actually see?

Donald Schmitt and Thomas Carey are revisiting these questions in their new book, “Witness to Roswell” (Career Press, $15), an interpretation of recently shared accounts by people who say they saw an object crash in the desert. The authors also challenge past and recent statements by the Air Force. Regardless of what people believe, Schmitt says, the incident was big news at the time.

“You only have to go to a public library and pull out all the microfilm on the summer of 1947, and it was as though we were being invaded by aliens,” he says by telephone from his home in Milwaukee. “The skies seemed to be full of flying discs. The military was on standby, and pilots talked about chasing flying discs.”

The Roswell incident fueled the fascination spawned a week earlier, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a series of high-speed winged craft flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State. The report made national headlines, and soon everybody was talking about saucer-like objects in the sky.

Oddly, Arnold never said the objects looked like saucers, only that they flew like a saucer skipping off water. It didn’t matter; the country’s borders had been breached by something — or someone — foreign.

“I think it was a paranoia about whether we were dealing with something from Russia,” Schmitt says of the military saber-rattling with the Soviet Union. “Most people didn’t think we were dealing with something from off the planet.”

In those early postwar days, it wasn’t surprising to see weird things in the skies, especially in New Mexico, where in the summer of 1945 scientists unleashed the world’s first atomic explosion.

Through the next decade, the era of modern rocketry took flight over the state’s most desolate patches of Earth. Nearly 100 Nazi V-2 rockets — captured from Nordhausen in Germany during Operation Paperclip — were shipped to New Mexico for testing. With their primitive guidance systems, some of the rockets ventured and crashed far from their intended targets, startling unsuspecting locals.

More intrigue rose out of Roswell Army Air Field, where the 509th Composite Bomb Group flew all sorts of cloak-and-dagger missions in its role as steward of America’s atomic arsenal.

Then, there was Project Mogul. This top-secret operation sent high-altitude acoustic helium balloons into the upper atmosphere to monitor Soviet atomic bomb and ballistic missile tests. On June 4, 1947, the fourth Mogul flight was launched from Alamogordo, N.M. Viewed from the ground, the large balloon resembled a flat dish. Less than four weeks later, it crashed outside of Roswell.

The military was called in to clean up the highly sensitive material, but not before area residents took notice. Those who first happened on the scene found strange shrapnel scattered across the desert floor and later described it as alien. The military ran interference with its own flying saucer story, then recanted, saying the unworldly evidence was no more than radar reflectors, aluminum rings and an acoustic sonobuoy.

Even at the time, any thought of an extraterrestrial ship was a stretch of the imagination, says Gary Posner, founder and executive director of the Tampa Bay Skeptics, a nonprofit group that investigates subjects involving the paranormal and fringe science.

“Clearly, it’s just a myth, because the explanation is crystal clear,” he says. “We had a top-secret project going on. One of the balloons did go down in the general area of Roswell, and the material recovered was exactly what was used in Project Mogul.”

The late astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan derided supporters of the alien theory and argued that UFO incidents and stories should be tested before they are believed. In his book “The Demon-Haunted World,” Sagan said most, if not all, UFO reports are anecdotal and not supported by irrefutable evidence.

“I would be very happy if flying saucer advocates and alien abduction proponents were right and real evidence were here for us to examine,” he wrote in his 1995 book. But no anecdotal claim, Sagan said, “carries much weight on such important a question.”

But newly revealed anecdotes in the form of eyewitness accounts convinced Schmitt and Carey that there is more to the story than a secret balloon crash and cover-up. Their book explains how many who lived in Roswell at the time have remained silent until recently, realizing that the incident no longer is a matter of “national security.”

“We had to consider that we’re dealing with a World War II generation,” Schmitt says. “They were told [by the government] that they would never say another word about this incident.”

Government persuasion eventually buried the Roswell incident, and it was more or less forgotten for 30 years, the authors say. But, by the late 1970s, the story came back to life; new investigations were launched; television specials focused on the subject; and the many members of the aging body of Roswell witnesses came forward to speak about their experiences.

Schmitt and Carey interviewed more than 600 people with specific memories of the 1947 incident and found them to be “compelling and striking” in detail.

“As people get older, the truth has a way of bubbling to the top,” Schmitt says. “All of the witnesses involved are telling us, swearing, that it was an actual flying saucer.”

Are they telling the truth? Did they really see an alien spaceship? The controversy alone is as good as gold to Guy Malone, coordinator of Roswell’s UFO festival, which continues through Sunday. Hotels in Roswell and surrounding towns have been booked for months, he says, and a large part of Roswell’s economy — and more 12 percent of the city’s employment — is linked to its annual UFO celebration. This year’s event features such artists as The Alan Parsons Live Project (“Eye in the Sky”) and War (“Why Can’t We Be Friends?”) and actors from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “The X-Files.”

“Nobody’s mad about the money it brings in,” he says, “because that’s more money we have to spend on police and schools.”

As an estimated 50,000 visitors are invading Roswell this week, many dressed as little green men and bug-eyed aliens, conversations inevitably will shift to the past, to what happened at 11:30 one night in the desert six decades ago.

If the military has answers, it isn’t telling. If high-level government officials are keeping a secret file on the incident, it’s under lock and key.

For most everyone else, Roswell echoes mystery and intrigue. Some might call it a cosmic conundrum.

“It’s incontrovertible that something crashed out there and was covered up by the military,” Malone says. “It’s just a question of what it was.”

Reporter Kurt Loft can be reached at (813) 259-7570 or kloft@tampatrib.com.

 

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