Witness memory repeatedly plays a vital though agile role in the Roswell saga. Take the example of Dr. Curry Holden, the Texas Tech anthropologist leading a student archaeological expedition who reportedly came across the crashed saucer and alien bodies. Both Mrs. Holden and their daughter, Dr. Jane Holden Kelly, said that Curry had never mentioned the event to them, nor did his personal papers produce any corroboration. When Kevin Randle interviewed Dr. Holden, obtaining his account of the sighting, Holden was 96 years old. Mrs. Holden cautioned Randle that her husband’s memory “wasn’t as sharp as it once had been. He sometimes restructured his life’s events, moving them in time so that they were subtly changed.”
Psychological studies indicate an estimated 25 percent of all human beings are susceptible to false memories, a belief that something imagined, heard, or read, actually happened to them personally. These studies have found memory to be more like an evolving sculpture than a literal recording of events. Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter and other memory researchers note how over time most of us refashion our memories so dramatically that we remember events which never happened and forget what actually did occur. As we go beyond middle age, memory distortion of the distant past gets worse.
University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has accumulated research findings on a phenomena called “rehearsal,” in which over time we play back our memories to ourselves again and again, refashioning the details somewhat with each retelling, until the embellishments become a complete memory and feel like the real event. That is why old married couples or longtime friends will recall a shared experience very differently, each insistent about being in possession of the accurate rendition. Memory also acts as a “prestige-enhancing mechanism,” building up our egos by inflating our own importance or central role in past events. Roswell “witnesses” embody textbook studies of all these various ways in which we can be tricked by our own consciousness in the pursuit of a desire for belief.
In their book UFO Crash At Roswell, Brandeis University anthropology professors Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler call the “Roswell myth” a form of social protest, an anti-government narrative about conspiracy and manipulation, whose genesis is the cynicism engendered by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. That an insignificant crash of a balloon project more than a half-century ago could rapidly evolve into a modern American myth, on a scale comparable to the ancient myths of Greece and Rome, tells us that in an age supposedly dominated by Science and Reason we remain at heart a species of mystic, scanning the inward and outward heavens in our search for a divine spark of meaning.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
(Note: This version of the Roswell events was adapted from Fitzgerald’s 1998 book, Cosmic Test Tube, in which he tried to make the strongest possible case for an extraterrestrial explanation of the debris, followed by this case for a Mogul balloon solution to the Roswell mystery.)
References
Klass, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup (Prometheus Books, 1997)
Korff, Kal K. The Roswell UFO Crash (Prometheus Books, 1997).
U.S. Air Force Report on the Roswell Incident (July, 1994).
U.S. Air Force The Roswell Report: Case Closed (June, 1997).
U.S. General Accounting Office Report on Roswell (July, 1995).
Vallée, Jacques. Revelations (Ballantine Books, 1991).
Roswell UFO Crash, The (Prometheus Books, 1997). Kal Korff makes a case that the myth of a spaceship crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 arose from a highly selective use of facts and witness testimony by a half-dozen sensationalistic book authors. He dissects the credibility of key witnesses to the alleged crash and points out how even the authors of the three major books written about the incident sharply disagree about where it happened and how.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
Ruwa (South Africa) landing On the playground of the Ariel School in Ruwa, a suburb of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, one of the most remarkable “close encounters of the third kind” occurred on Friday, September 16, 1994. It was 10.00 A.M., time of the morning break, when with the ring of the bell children started to pour out of the little class-houses of the Ariel School. That morning they were alone on the playground, without the supervision of their teachers, who had a meeting in the conference room of the office of the headmaster, Mr. Colin Mackie.
According to the story, some of the children suddenly saw a purple light in the sky above the forest, which kept coming and going. A moment later a disk appeared—a huge, shiny craft with a flattened dome on top, surrounded by yellow lights or portholes, which extending a tripod landing gear. The object came down close to a rock on the other side of the swamp area, between the trees on the edge of the forest. Balls of light or miniature disks appeared and flew around for a short while. The pupils who saw it started to scream out of surprise and fear. This drew the attention of nearly everyone on the playground, and within seconds about a hundred pupils reportedly watched the incredible spectacle.
The closest witnesses observed something coming out of the disk. First one, then a second, and finally a third figure came out of the craft from the back of its dome. The beings wore shiny, tight-fitting black overalls and had dark faces. Two of them were bald but one had long, black hair. All three were about 4 to 5 feet tall. They had big black eyes, which some of the young witnesses described as “like a cat’s eyes,” a tiny little mouth, and a small nose. Some of the children could see a metal band around the head. All the younger kids were scared and started crying.
One of the entities came closer than the rest and stared in the direction of the children who all started screaming at once. At this moment, several of the children thought they heard a voice in their minds, telling them there was nothing to fear—from the aliens, at least. But the children said the UFO beings had come to warn them that we humans are destroying planet Earth. After about three minutes the creatures went back to their ship, where lights started to flash, before the disk itself disappeared in a burst of light.
During the sighting, several of the children had run into the conference room of the school to tell their teachers to come out and look. But when they eventually arrived, not believing the children in the beginning, everything was already over. Later, one class went to the landing site with their teacher, to find dead birds, strange footprints, burning marks, an indentation in the grass and heaps of dead ants.
Most children told their parents about the incidents who informed the media. The case caused a stir in South Africa but was generally ignored elsewhere. Soon after the event, Cynthia Hind, the Mutual UFO Network’s representative for Africa and a resident of Harare, was able to perform a field investigation and interview the eyewitnesses.
About half a year later, Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack visited the Ariel school and questioned some of the children. He concluded that they certainly had had a real experience, which had left a very deep impression upon them. Several children had nightmares for weeks and month after. Some black children interpreted the incident in the context of African mythology.
When this writer traveled to Ruwa two years later, he was still able to interview 44 of the children, their teachers and parents on camera. The deep psychological impact and the seriousness of the children convinced him as well as Dr. Mack that the case is authentic. Because of the high number of credible eyewitnesses, the Ruwa case is considered by some to be one of the most significant events in the history of the UFO phenomenon.
—MICHAEL HESEMANN
S
Sagan, Carl (1934-1996). Carl Sagan was a first-rate scientist and popularizer of astronomy, whose award-winning 13-part Cosmos series on public television attracted more than 500 million viewers in 60 countries. Dr. Sagan was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University; Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; and co-founder and President of The Plan
etary Society, the largest space interest group in the world.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author for his 1977 #1 bestselling book, The Dragons of Eden, Sagan published numerous books on space, evolution, and the environment, which all together sold millions of copies. His sciencefiction novel Contact (1985) was made into a major motion picture.
His principal research activities were concerned with the physics and chemistry of planetary atmospheres and surfaces, space vehicle exploration of the planets, and the origin of life on Earth. He was also known for his studies in exobiology (now sometimes called astrobiology), the emerging discipline which deals with the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the means for its detection. Dr. Sagan played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo missions to the planets, for which he received numerous awards over the years, including the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences.
He served as chairman of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society and as chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also served as an adviser to the American Geophysical Union, CETI Foundation, International Academy of Astronautics, Smithsonian, and NASA.
Carl Sagan on the cover of Astronomy magazine (November 1999)
In addition to hundreds of published scientific and popular articles, Dr. Sagan was author, coauthor, or editor of more than two dozen books including Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966); UFOs—A Scientific Debate, edited with Thornton Page (1972); Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (1973); Mars and the Mind of Man (1973); The Cosmic Connection (1973), for which he received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science book of the year (1974); The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1978); Broca’s Brain (1979); Cosmos (1980), which topped the bestseller lists for 70 weeks; Comet (1985), with Ann Druyan; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992), with Ann Druyan; Pale Blue Dot (1994); and The Demon-Haunted World (1995).
He received his A.B., B.S., M.S. in physics, and his Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics all from the University of Chicago, subsequently serving as Miller Research Fellow in the Institute for Basic Research in Science, University of California, Berkeley; as assistant professor of genetics at Stanford University Medical School; as astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; and as assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University. In 1968 he moved to Cornell University, where he became a tenured professor in 1971.
Dr. Sagan played a major role in obtaining the first close-up photos of the moons of Mars, in studying the surface changes on that planet, and in the search for life on Mars. He was active in education of the disadvantaged, was a popular lecturer before audiences of nonscientists, and became an activist against nuclear proliferation.
Sagan was also leader of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, organized jointly by the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences in Armenia in 1971, and had the principal responsibility for placing Man’s first interstellar messages aboard Pioneers 10 and 11, and Voyagers 1 and 2, the first spacecraft to leave the solar system.
POSITION STATEMENT: The interest in unidentified flying objects derives, perhaps, not so much from scientific curiosity as from unfulfilled religious needs. Flying Saucers serve, for some, to replace the gods that science has deposed. With their distant and exotic worlds and their pseudoscientific overlay, the contact accounts are acceptable to many people who reject the older religious frameworks. But precisely because people desire so intently that unidentified flying objects be of benign intelligent, and extraterrestrial origin, honesty requires that, in evaluating the observations, we accept only the most rigorous logic and the most convincing evidence. At the present time, there is no evidence that unambiguously connects the various flying saucer sightings and contact tales with extraterrestrial intelligence.
And, more recently, Sagan posed these questions:
Which…is more likely: that we’re undergoing a massive but generally overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that people are experiencing some unfamiliar internal mental state they do not understand? Admittedly, we’re very ignorant both about extraterrestrial beings, if any, and about human psychology. But if these really were the only two alternatives, which one would you pick?
And if the alien abduction accounts are mainly about brain physiology, hallucinations, distorted memories of childhood, and hoaxing, don’t we have before us a matter of supreme importance—touching on our limitations, the ease with which we can be misled and manipulated, the fashioning of our beliefs, and perhaps even the origins of our religions? There is genuine scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions—but it is, I think, of a distinctly homegrown and terrestrial character.
(Position statement was adapted from Sagan’s article entitled “Unidentified Flying Objects” in the Encyclopedia Americana, 1975, and from his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World.)
St. Clair (Illinois) police sighting Not only did UFO sightings begin soon after the beginning of the 21st Century, they started with a “bang,” with one of the possibly most dramatic, and well documented cases in recent years.
At approximately 4:00 A.M. (Central Time) on Wednesday, January 5, 2000, Mr. Melvern Noll of Highland, Illinois, stopped at his miniature golf course on his way home from work to satisfy himself that the facility was secure. As he returned to his truck, he glanced to the northeast, where minutes earlier he had noticed an unusually prominent “star.” He was surprised to see that not only did the “star” now appear brighter, but it actually appeared to be drawing closer to his location.
He stood for several minutes watching the light, and quickly came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, attached to a much larger, rectangular shaped object. What shocked him most of all, however, was that the object appeared to have two rows of “windows,” located toward, or on, its aft end. In addition, its ventral surface exhibited many small red lights, and it appeared to be perhaps the size of a football field!
Mr. Noll’s sighting was the beginning of a long chain of events that morning over St. Clair County, Illinois, that would involve multiple police officers from eight police departments, several citizens, and possibly Scott Air Force Base personnel. The incident quickly gained considerable attention from the press, and the events were still being debated in the public forum weeks afterward.
Mr. Noll drove directly to the Highland Police Department, hoping that he could convince anyone on duty there to step outside and look at the object. Most of all, he wanted the police dispatcher to broadcast an alert to surrounding areas so that others would observe it, which they did.
Police Officer Ed Barton, of the Lebanon, Illinois, police department, heard the transmission from the Highland Police dispatcher, which caused him to start scanning the night sky to the northeast from his location in Lebanon. What he saw were two intensely bright lights, close to the horizon, and in the direction of Highland. The lights were positioned very close together, and they were so bright that they appeared to radiate “rays,” or “spikes,” of light into the dark morning sky.
Officer Barton started driving in the general direction of the object, at times traveling at 75 or 80 miles an hour, and with his overhead flashers on. As he drove east from Lebanon, he realized that the very peculiar-looking object appeared to be moving in his direction. He stopped his vehicle, turned off the lights, and sat quietly, hoping to hear whether any sound might be detectable.
As it got closer, he could see that it looked like a slender triangle, longer than it was wide, with a very prominent white light in each of its corners. He estimated that it was at least 75 feet long and perhaps 40 feet wide, although he could not estimate his distance from the object at the time. He noted that the body of the object “blotted” out the stars as it moved s
lowly across the sky, confirming his suspicion that it was a “solid” object.
When the object was at its closest to Officer Barton’s police cruiser, perhaps 100 feet horizontally and at an altitude of perhaps 1,000 feet, he estimated, it suddenly rotated in the horizontal plane, so it was then pointed to the southwest. The officer radioed the St. Clair County Dispatch to apprise them that he was observing the object, when it almost instantly accelerated so dramatically that his eyes were not able to track it.Subsequent analysis suggested to investigators that the object probably moved not less than 8 miles across the Illinois countryside in the approximately 3 seconds that Officer Barton was observing it!
Next, Officer David Martin of the Shiloh, Illinois, Police Department witnessed the object moving slowly to the west. His description of the object’s appearance was similar to Officer Barton’s; namely a strange, triangular object with three white lights in the corners, and with red and green lights on its aft end. Officer Martin was watching the object from his cruiser as it suddenly increased its velocity an estimated five-or six-fold, and disappeared from his sight to the west of Shiloh.
The third police officer to witness the object was Officer Craig Stevens of the Millstadt Police Department. He drove his police cruiser to Liederkranz Park, in the north end of Millstadt, and observed the object in the northern sky from that location. He estimated its elevation at 500-1,000 feet, and he thought he could detect a faint buzzing or humming sound emanate from the object. The object appeared generally triangular in shape, with white lights in the corners, and a red light in the center of the ventral surface of the craft.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 93