Once they declassify the reports we will know.
Spirits, ghosts, and that kind of stuff
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
I can only suggest that you read the USAF reports, especially the 1997 report The Roswell Report: Case Closed. It has information that may answer your questions.
The report is not a boring read. It has photos and other interesting materials as well.
All this talk about Roswell made me go back and read through some of my old Readers Digest books from the 1980s on unexplained phenomena and I was surprised to discover that none of them mention Roswell in their chapters on UFO sightings and alien abductions.
They all started in the modern era with the Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mt Rainier in 1947, then jumped to the 1950s with a whole spate of sightings.
Now I'm wondering where I first heard/read about Roswell if it wasn't those books.They all started in the modern era with the Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mt Rainier in 1947, then jumped to the 1950s with a whole spate of sightings.
Roswell became a big deal in the mid-'80s because of the Majestic-12 hoax, a conspiracy theory spread via a set of fake government documents.
Yes. As I mentioned, it was a forgotten incident for decades, just one of many supposed sightings during the flying saucer hysteria of June-July 1947 triggered by Kenneth Arnold's reputed sighting. It just wasn't part of the lore until it got dredged up around 1979, had a book written around it, and got increasingly publicized in the '80s and '90s by TV, movies, and that hoax Steve mentioned. Like pretty much everything else about UFO lore, it's a product of pop culture and tabloid journalism.
I shall do that thanks.
Is Bryce Zabel a UFO nut?
I just read his book After Disclosure and it's nutty
The thing I've always found odd about the Roswell Incident is the fact that they initially announced it was a UFO, and then changed their minds and decided it was just an weather balloon. I would think all of the Air Force people who I'm assuming would have made the initial announcement that it was UFO would have known what weather balloon looked like, and would have thoroughly ruled out every possible known explanation before they allowed the announcement that a UFO had crashed to go public.
Did they know what it was at first? No, so it literally was an unidentified flying object. In 1947 people would have been less likely to immediately think that meant an alien spaceship. If anything, people might have been more worried about Soviet spy planes, though it might have been a bit early for that. 1947 was a long time ago, remember.
See, you're making exactly the same mistake as that researcher who dredged up the Roswell report around '78-9 -- assuming that people in 1947 would have automatically interpreted a UFO as an alien spaceship, just because we do so today. It's a profound mistake to assume that people in the past defined their terms the same way we do.
As Steve said, "unidentified flying object" literally just means that -- something in the sky whose nature is not yet known. Remember, Roswell was mere weeks after Kenneth Arnold's June 1947 "flying disc" sighting that started the nationwide hysteria. It was way too early for any consensus idea to emerge about what the "flying discs" were. People didn't know whether they'd turn out to have a perfectly normal, mundane explanation like weather balloons, natural phenomena, or some kind of experimental aircraft, possibly of enemy origin (which is presumably what got the military so interested). Over time, people started coming up with increasingly wild theories, but the alien-spacecraft idea was only one of them, along with extradimensional visitors, time travelers, or some kind of supernatural or spiritual visitation. It wasn't until the 1950s that the alien-ship idea emerged as the leading theory, thanks to its embrace by movies and comic books.
So no, the investigators at Roswell did not "change their minds" or retract their original announcement. They said it was an unidentified object, then they identified it. There is no contradiction there. If the police say they're seeking an unidentified suspect and then they arrest him and report his name, that's not changing their minds, it's just solving the mystery.
As far as I recall, the story was just that some possible debris had been found and people were coming to investigate it, and then once they'd done so, they announced their findings. I see nothing the least bit shocking there. Again, remember, this was not the only UFO sighting that month by a long shot. Kenneth Arnold's claim of "flying discs" following his plane provoked a nationwide frenzy from Americans who'd been conditioned throughout WWII to be hyper-alert for air raids that never came. It was still people's reflex to expect something to come at them out of the sky, and Arnold's report of "discs" gave a focus to that anxiety and people started seeing them everywhere. Roswell was one leaf in the forest at the time, and it surely wasn't the only one that generated local news reports, since authorities would've wanted to investigate just to put people's minds at ease.
But most of those incidents turned out to be nothing and fizzled out over time. The only reason people post-1980 have become obsessed with the stupid Roswell thing is because that UFO researcher dredged it up and built a conspiracy theory around it, while all the other forgotten sightings from the summer of 1947 stayed forgotten. Basically, it's the same deal as the Bermuda Triangle. The rate of disappearances there is no greater than anywhere else on Earth, but a few sensationalist yellow journalists fabricated a "mystery" around it so they could fool gullible people into paying for their books about it. People didn't pay special attention to it because there was anything actually special about it, but just because the media convinced them to think there was. Roswell is the same, just a media-generated meme that's been reinforced by a media feedback loop. Which is why it was a total non-factor in pre-1980 UFO lore but is now practically the only damn thing UFO stories ever revolve around anymore.
Thrive by creating devastating effects on the rest of the world you mean. I may be reading his idea incorrectly--but the basic premise is that aliens coming to Earth would completely destroy all aspects of our way of life.
Yes, that's a commonly held assumption that you find throughout popular culture, and my point is that it's a myth that we tell ourselves to absolve Western civilization of guilt for the damage colonialism inflicted on the rest of the world. "Ohh, it's just an inevitable law of nature that contacting a less advanced culture will automatically destroy it, so it's not the colonialists' fault that they didn't know it would happen. It was just a tragic accident that's nobody's fault." That's bull. It's blaming the victims' weakness for what was done to them. The truth (as I learned from my studies of cross-cultural interactions as a history major) is that a less advanced culture can survive a contact and even thrive from it, as Europe did, as long as it's given freedom of choice, as long as nobody imposes anything on it by force. History shows that cultures given free choice will only adopt those outside ideas that suit their needs, adjusting them to fit their own cultural context, and will reject those outside ideas that are incompatible with their beliefs and way of life. What devastated the less advanced cultures that European colonialists contacted was that they actively tried to assimilate or destroy those cultures because they assumed European culture was superior.
We got lucky with some (perhaps) biological markers of a planet 125 ly out or so—but geology products ranks up there with pulsars in getting people’s hopes up.
A fossil transistor radio I would consider proof of ET and/or Silurians.
Ouamuamua is the only body we know came from outside.
Miranda looks strip-mined—though it likely wasn’t.
The Great Daylight Fireball still has me scratching my head.
I have seen bolides break up in pieces—but the contrail of the Teton event resembled Stardust sample -returns in that the trail left behind was quite steady—uniform.
It makes me uncomfortable that we've drifted into a discussion of the scientific search for alien life in a thread titled "Spirits, ghosts, and that kind of stuff." There's nothing supernatural about extraterrestrial life or the search for it, and it bugs me when it gets lumped together with UFO beliefs (which are firmly rooted in superstition and mystical thinking).
Okay, granted, there have been people who have purported -- often in bad faith, but sometimes sincerely -- to pursue a scientific investigation of whether ghosts existed, and one could argue that we're at a similar point in our pursuit of the question of whether alien life exists. The fundamental difference, though, is that we know for a fact that life can and does exist here on Earth, so there's no reason why it couldn't exist somewhere else; it's just a question of finding it. With ghosts and supernatural entities, there's no hard evidence that they even can exist, let alone do. So it's hardly the same sort of thing, and thus a discussion of astrobiology or SETI seems beyond the purview of this thread.
I remember one local conservative radio talk show host (now deceased), who, every time it was announced that an Earth like planet had been found, would go on the air and say that there were no other planets in the universe capable of supporting life because G*d wanted us to be unique and his chosen children.
It's always so weird to me when people claim to believe in an infinite, all-knowing God, yet insist that God's imagination or perspective (or compassion) is as limited as their own.
It's also interesting how many people assume that God built the universe in a way that enshrines their own group as special or superior. How conveeeeenient for them.
Hmm... I bet there are probably some fringe believers out there who split the difference between science and religion and believe that space is heaven, that people who die are reborn as aliens on other planets. Sort of like Riverworld, except in those books, people are reborn as themselves rather than aliens. (Also sort of like the Minbari idea of souls in Babylon 5, vaguely.)
Our Sun will eventually expand to our orbit as it consumes the hydrogen in the core. Earth and the Moon will become lumps of molten iron spinning inside the stellar corona, so there won't be life here at all. I wonder what he'd think of that!
Imagine our universe as an infinite number of galaxies without life.
And how inconvenient for everyone else! I wonder how people can say that everyone else who doesn't believe exactly like they do is doomed to an infinite afterlife of torment and pain, even if it's just a disagreement about things as small as the interpretation of a minor verse while also saying He loves all of us at the same time. There's over 30,000 different christian sects, all of whom insist they are the chosen. So which one is the right one? You have 29,999 to 1 odds here. Not to mention Hindus, Buddhists, Islam, and so on.
Most people follow the dominant religion where they were born, and in some cases it's deadly to believe differently there. Or they follow the faith of their parents. So they're predamned because of who their parents were or where they live.
Doesn't seem right to me.
Deep thoughts on Easter Sunday, huh?
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