US alien-nation

IS this the greatest story never told? In early July, 1947 there were numerous reports of "flashing lights" in the sky over the town of Roswell in New Mexico. On July 7th a local rancher, William "Mac" Brazel, discovered wreckage from some sort of aircraft on his land he had never come across material like this before, it wouldn't bend, break or burn and it was covered with hieroglyphic-type symbols. He brought the 2 kilos of wreckage into the office of the local sheriff who, after examining it, immediately phoned up the Roswell Army Air Field and asked to speak to their intelligence officer, Colonel Jesse Marcel.

Colonel Marcel, an educated and intelligent man, could come to only one conclusion about where the strange material originated. Later that day, he issued a press release which read "The Roswell Army Air Field has gained possession of a flying disc on a ranch in the Roswell region". This was the first time the US military had gone on the record saying that "flying discs" existed, let alone that they had found one.

As the world's media prepared to descend on the sleepy New Mexico town, there was frantic back peddling inside the military and government of the day. First, Mac Brazel was held in-communicado for the following seven days; second, a more senior colonel at the air base called another press conference, the following day, and told the legions of media representatives that the Air Force had made an unfortunate mistake. No "flying disc" was found, it was in fact a weather balloon pieces of a broken weather balloon were then handed out to the reporters who dutifully printed the retraction in the next day's papers. It wasn't until 1994 that the US government admitted the weather balloon story was a cover up and apologised for its actions.

The people of Roswell (pop. 49,000) had never accepted the weather balloon story. Local radio announcers reported they were being threatened by mysterious voices in Washington who said their licences would be taken away from them if they continued to talk about "the incident". One young woman who said she found some material in her garden with unearthly properties "it spread like water right across the table" claimed a military policeman told her if she didn't keep quite about what she found, she ought to remember it was a big desert out there and no one would find her bones.

There was a collective shiver down the spine when further townspeople related their stories a nurse who worked at the Roswell Air Base described how, on the night after "the incident", she had been hurriedly forced into assisting two doctors with a postmortem on a body unlike anything she had ever seen before. Years later, the nurse's story was corroborated by a member of the air base who said that not only had a "flying disc" crashed in Roswell part of the debris landing on Mac Brazel's ranch - but the air force also captured four "bodies" whose appearance precluded any terrestrial origin, they were childlike and large headed with enormous eyes and hands with six fingers. Three were dead but one was still alive.

Back in July 1947, the local undertaker reported receiving a phone call from the Air Base inquiring about methods of embalming and asking him about the availability of small coffins suitable for children.

In all, 160 Roswell people representing all age, gender, race and social status groups made statements about "the incident", but all were ignored by the military and government and the world turned its back on them. After all, they were just a bunch of rural hicks with their silly stories about flying discs and aliens.

The story disappeared for the next few decades and the US turned its attentions to the more pressing concerns of the JFK assassination, Vietnam and Watergate. Then, in 1984, explosive new evidence about what really happened at Roswell in July 1947 was unearthed: Jaime Shandera, a respected TV producer who was working on a documentary about the Roswell incident, received an anonymous package through the post. Inside was an undeveloped strip of film which was found to be a top secret document relating to the affairs of a special government department known as MJ-12" or more simply, "Majestic".

T h e department was allegedly set up by special executive order of then President Truman three months after the Roswell incident, with the express purpose of controlling the release of information about UFOs (remember how Mac Brazel was spirited away for a week, how the local people were threatened the group known as Majestic would now institutionalise such "release of information").

The Majestic document made for sensational reading: it was a series of minutes from their last few meetings, where the 12 strong group discussed its intelligence findings about Roswell. It read: "Following reports that a local rancher (Mac Brazel) reported that one (a flying disc) had crashed in a remote region of New Mexico (Roswell), a secret operation was begun to assure recovery of the wreckage of this object. During the course of this operation, aerial reconnaissance discovered that four small, human like beings had apparently ejected from the craft at some point before it exploded.

"All four were dead and badly decomposed due to action by predators and exposure to the elements. A special scientific team took charge of removing these bodies for study (see Attachment C). The wreckage of the craft was also removed to different locations (see Attachment B). Civilian and military witnesses in the area were debriefed and news reporters were given the effective cover story that the object had been a misguided weather research balloon . . . Implications for National Security are of continuing importance in that the motives and ultimate intentions of these aliens remain completely unknown.

`Tis for these reasons, as well as the obvious international and technological considerations and the ultimate need to avoid a public panic at all costs, that the Majestic Group remains of the unanimous opinion that imposition of the strictest security precautions should continue without interruption ... there remains a contingency plan should the need for a public announcement present itself."

As more and more people, heartened by the disclosure of the Majestic document, opened up, even more revelatory evidence came to light. Just as the famous Zapruder tape of the JFK assasination led to different levels of inquiry about the killing, there emerged the "Santilla tape" of the Roswell incident.

In 1994, Ray Sintilla, an obscure businessman, announced that he had come into possession of a black and white video tape which actually showed the autopsy of one of the aliens retrieved in Roswell. The footage, which lasts for 15 minutes, shows two doctors examining the body of a creature which bears an uncanny resemblance to how eye-witnesses at Roswell described the aliens to be. Later that year, and under pressure from a Republican congressman for New

Mexico, a General Audit Office investigation on behalf of the US Congress finally admitted the government had instigated a cover-up of the Roswell incident and that the weather balloon story was inaccurate.

All this however, is just half the story. There has in fact been an even bigger cover-up of the Roswell incident than many people could dare to imagine. It goes something like this:

To understand the full story, you have to understand the time and the place. First, the time, four weeks before Roswell, Kenneth Arnold, an air force pilot, returned from a flight claiming he had seen nine crescent- shaped "discs" flying over a mountain range in Washington. This was the first time the term "flying disc" was coined and the US fell into a frenzy of "disc spotting" as the country, post-second World War, was on the lookout for a new enemy to focus its hostility and displays of patriotism on. A popular ploy for newspapers of the time was to offer a cash reward to any reader who could produce photos or other evidence of these new-fangled "flying discs". Interestingly enough, MacBrazel found the wreckage on his ranch on June 14th and simply ignored it for three weeks (such was his lack of urgency and concern) until his neighbour

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