Roswell

Sixty years ago today, newspapers and radio stations across the country and over the world reported that a "flying disk" had been recovered in the desert around Roswell, New Mexico. Later that day, the United States Government denied any such thing had happened.

Fifty years later, the U. S. Air Force put out a report arguing the Roswell UFO story could be explained by the crash of a high altitude balloon that was part of Project Mogul, a program designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

After that, the USAF put out yet another report, this one arguing that the alien bodies associated with Roswell were in fact six-foot crash test dummies used in high altitude tests in the 1950s.

Many Americans find these sequential truths unconvincing. Whatever their objective merits, the various stories are seen by many against a background of Vietnam and the social turbulence it caused, clear cases of government lies in the interests of secrecy during the Cold War, Watergate, and the general decline in trust in not only politicians and government, but in the mainstream media, as well.

Each Roswell researcher seems to have his own version of what happened during a thunderstorm in 1947, but the basic story of a crashed alien spacecraft has taken its place in American popular culture. It has also boosted the Roswell economy, grafting a tourism industry onto an otherwise quiet ranching community.

By now, after all these years, the only way to get one side to agree with the other about what actually happened may be to have the aliens come back, openly, perhaps in search of their fellows. Anything less would be subject to interpretation. Of course, that means that finally proving nothing out of this world happened may be impossible.