Most people are familiar with stories of aliens visiting Earth in unidentified flying objects (UFOs). For some reason the belief that aliens are here is much stronger in America than in Europe, and thousands of Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens, ushered aboard spacecraft and subjected to physical examination.
Many magazines devoted to aliens/UFOs regularly report UFO sightings and human contact with aliens. Nevertheless, there is, to my knowledge, no hard evidence that aliens are visiting Earth. Probably the most celebrated event in the alien genre is the Roswell Incident. The story of what happened at Roswell is told by Robert Park in the May/June 2000 edition of The Sciences. Park effectively, to my mind, explains away the whole incident as an artificial by-product of paranoid US military secrecy.
On June 14th, 1947, a rancher, William Brazel, spotted a large area of wreckage about 70 miles north of Roswell, New Mexico. The debris included neoprene strips, metal foil, cardboard, tape and sticks. Brazel paid little attention at the time, but several weeks later he heard reports of flying saucers and wondered if the wreckage might be related. He reported his suspicions to a local sheriff who informed the army base at Roswell.
An army intelligence officer, Major Marcel, investigated the site and concluded that the debris was the remains of a radar target or a weather balloon. He loaded all the debris into the boot of his car.
The army information office issued a statement to the effect that the army had "gained possession of a flying disc through the co-operation of a local rancher and the sheriff's office". Park says this was a garbled message which the army quickly corrected, this time describing the debris as a standard radar target. The original press release lit the fire of suspicion and, with the passage of years, the subsequent correction has increasingly been seen as a Government cover-up.
As the years passed, the Roswell story grew into a fantastically detailed saga. The debris that Major Marcel reported had fitted into the boot of his car grew into the wreckage of an entire alien spacecraft that was secretly moved by the military to an air force base in Ohio.
Alien bodies were said to have been found in the spacecraft. The aliens were described as small, with large heads and suction cups on their fingers. One alien was reported to have been alive when found but was kept hidden by the Government.
Park explains the emergence of the Roswell saga as the product of over-active imaginations stitching together bits and pieces of reports of unrelated plane crashes, parachute experiments involving roughly life-like dummies, and so on, even though some of these events occurred many miles from Roswell and years later. The story grew into a full-scale myth of an encounter with extra-terrestrials, the details of which the Government found too frightening to share with the people and consequently they, it was believed, covered up the whole thing.
As it turns out, there was a government cover-up, but not of an alien spacecraft. It involved a secret government programme from the 1940s, Project Mogul. By summer 1947 the Russians had not yet exploded their first atomic bomb, but it was clear this test was imminent. It was most important for America to know when the test took place.
Project Mogul was an attempt to listen for the explosion by launching low-frequency microphones to high altitude where sound waves can propagate around the globe. Microphones, radar tracking reflectors and other devices were sent aloft on long trains of weather balloons to listen for the atomic explosion.
These balloon trains were launched in New Mexico from a point about 100 miles west of Roswell. Flight 4 was launched on June 4th, 1947 and was tracked to within 17 miles of where Brazel found the wreckage, when contact was lost. The debris found at Roswell matches the materials used in the balloon trains. Park believes the crash of Flight 4 was the birth of what has become known as the Roswell Incident.
Project Mogul remained secret until 1994, when Steven Schiff, a Congressman from New Mexico, insisted on an all-out search for records and witnesses to reassure the public there was no government cover-up of Roswell. Had the truth been revealed about Project Mogul in 1947, it would almost certainly have killed off speculation about the Roswell debris, but the truth emerged 50 years too late. For many UFO-enthusiasts, the government secrecy over Project Mogul simply reinforced their conviction that the government also covered up the far more sensitive matter of contact with extra-terrestrials.
The Russians carried out their first atomic test in August, 1949, which quickly became common knowledge. At that stage what possible advantage was there for the government to hide Project Mogul, especially when revealing some details would prevent the growth of a potentially dangerous myth? Any reasonable person would allow government the freedom to maintain a certain level of secrecy in some areas, particularly at times of war or threat of war. Unfortunately this concession to government is wide open to abuse and leads to a culture of secrecy.
Keeping secrets inevitably leads to lies and inevitably some of these lies are found out. This destroys trust. Polls in the US now show a growing number of people think the government is covering up information about UFOs. When the public loses trust in government experts, there is a ripple effect outwards of diminished trust in all expert scientific opinion. As the tide of trust recedes it is smoothly replaced by receptivity to all sorts of pseudo-science and even outright superstition - and this apparently is the unfortunate legacy of the crash of a weather balloon at Roswell in 1947.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC