The Roswell incident is probably one of the most thoroughly scrutinized UFO events in history. Having been overlooked soon after it occurred thanks to a cunningly mundane explanation used as a cover story by General Roger Ramey from Carswell Airbase in Ft. Worth, Texas, this controversial episode simply faded into obscurity. The mist of time held in lieu of the weather balloon explanation that although ridiculous, served its purpose in quelling the public’s obsession with a supposed crashed disc that was reportedly recovered by the 509th Bomb Group stationed at Roswell, Air Field. Case closed right? Wrong.
We won’t go deep into events you have probably already read about and I myself have written numerous articles about. The implications of the Roswell saucer crash that happened sometime near the 8th of July 1947 are fairly well defined. Instead, I think there are a couple of points that need to be reiterated about the entire crash, recovery, and subsequent cover-up that, to this day, still invokes a mixture of wonder, skepticism, and passionate affirmation.
Primary consideration
1) The Roswell incident represents a social and technological realization that brought our society years ahead as a result of an epiphany about the universe as well as ourselves, but for this matter alone it might have seemed significant until adding the military element to the picture. For the first time known to the general public as well as armed service personnel deployed to assist in a recovery and highly classified secret mission that differs in every way, shape, and form ever known to the US armed forces before. For the first time policy, freedom of speech, drastic technical significance, and social impact all came down fast and hard in one singular occurrence and forced high command into a realm of decision making it had probably never encountered before.
Something that involved an extremely unlikely scenario had just taken place, and a challenging set of tactical moves had to be undertaken in order to maintain secrecy, recover exotic hardware not of this earth, and to silence normal, law abiding citizens, who had done nothing but see or hear about a fantastic event that might change humanity forever. Those in power at the time had to think in terms of acting like the American military had never before responded to such a disturbing event. And just as suddenly as the appearance of a crashed spacecraft from another world and the alien occupants within had appeared, the American command structure was going to have to act in several different dimensions at once.
Those objectives were as follows:
- 1) Discovery and retrieval of extraterrestrial hardware and bodies.
- 2) Remove these items under least detectable circumstance clean up evidence at crash site
- 3) Suppression of witnesses and those civilians demanding access to the facts
- 4) Fabricate a believable cover story
- 5) Get the press corps off their backs
- 6) Analysis and evaluation of the crash wreckage
- 7) Implement a completely new policy of mitigating information and compartmentalizing it
- 8) Forming a new command structure tasked with the disposition of this incident and similar events
- 9) Formulation of a new policy toward an emerging and little understood phenomena
- 10) Determine the social impact of this event upon civilization and how to proceed from there
- 11) Establish whether or not this action constituted a national threat
Further dark possibilities
It is clear that the US Armed Forces were faced with an unprecedented proposition that could present a myriad of negative implications if the situation was badly handled. It could mean society could disintegrate under self doubt and mass hysteria. It could mean that civilian law and order to experience a breakdown and refuse to acknowledge the government as an authority. It could lead to the breakdown and decay of morality and religion once the people’s basic belief systems had been sufficiently shocked and proven obsolete. It could mean that society might be gripped with terror and paranoia to catastrophic levels. This had been witnessed when Orson Wells had presented a radio play, “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells in 1938 on Halloween evening resulting in a massive panic that brought death and a terror stricken loss of control. Even with the announcement that it was a radio play in progress, that interjection of normality was thrust aside in the chaos.
Emergence of an officially non-existent agency
A dedicated agency or organization was to be quickly formulated that would administer policy, control intelligence, maintain secrecy, and analyze the potential technical aspects of the recovered wreckage. That was MJ Twelve (the working group) as many whistle blowers referred to it, a secret and unmentionable agency of high ranking Pentagon appointed scientists and command structure personnel.
As if these complex and immediate decisions were not enough for the generals, the scientific community, and President’s cabinet to handle, there was still one major consideration to consider. What was the ultimate cause of the UFO crash, and could it have a more far reaching purpose than what appeared to be the an accident or in-flight malfunction that could have been caused by a disruption from the powerful targeting radars being tested in many parts of New Mexico? Had it been made to look like an accident?
Major consideration number (2) was: Could the Roswell incident have been an attempt to seed humanity on planet earth with more than just technology but with a major revelation about mankind’s own relationship with the universe? The knowledge that the human race was not alone, but that unless mankind behaved as responsible stewards of their technology, their own self destructive nature, still unrestrained, along with the destructive capability of the atomic bomb which could endanger not only the human species but other civilizations beyond planet earth, needed to be dealt with.
Pondering dangerous scenarios
Yet, there was a menacing caveat to all these projected anticipations. Could the crash at Roswell have been a Trojan Horse? Could this influx of sudden and crucial impact have been designed to overwhelm mankind and cause mass panic, chaos, social break down, and fear? It was already a well known sociological and archeological fact that civilizations that are eclipsed by technically superior societies tended to disintegrate from the exposure of their belief systems to a reality that disproves all assumptions and core beliefs that lend credence to a society’s security within itself. To be the devil’s advocate here and examine both sides of the argument played a serious role in the determination of what policies would be administered and under war time footing or peace time procedure. If this all seems confusing to anyone trying to put their feet in the shoes of the powers that be at the time of the Roswell incident, one can be assured that not only was it a daunting task, but the most serious wake up call mankind in the twentieth century was now called upon to deal with.
So where is the actual truth?
Even today, in light of all the events that transpired, the witnesses that have grown old and passed away, the untimely deaths of certain high ranking officials such as Secretary of the Navy, Eugene Forestall, as well as the suspect preponderance of classified DOD (Dept. of Defense) procedure, we grope in a fog for more answers. Did the Roswell Incident occur under the best decision making that could have been devised in order to deal with such a remarkable development? In the light of post war America and our humanitarian disposition at the time based upon predominantly Christian morality, we could have made worse decisions. However, the emergence of a new security state around the time of the Truman administration invoking police state type secrecy authorization did indeed evolve and become SOP fro future administrations. Some point out that it was the beginning of dictatatorial legislation like the present NDAA enactments of 2011 under the aegis of Emergency Powers Acts.
The US could have taken more drastic actions that perhaps the Soviet Union would have adopted which would have led to the pursuit of weaponizing any data that could be extracted from the crash artifacts. We did eventually have to arrive at that conclusion thanks to the ongoing “Cold War” yet, we did not officially arrive at that rationale. The fragmented history we have tells us that our leaders bluffed, sequestered, made up stories, transformed the discovery into a highly classified project, planned a clandestine disinformation program, and allowed a shadow agency to manage it from these subject to a continual need to adjust the parameters over 60 years ago. We can be assured that the members of MJ Twelve all took their oath of secrecy to their graves with them. Is this not an irony enough in itself? Yes, the world definitely changed forever in the wake of the Roswell Incident.
End