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Mystery
of Roswell spaceship crash still intrigues people
The
following article was published in “The San Francisco
Chronicle”, 16th August, 2004
Ten years after the U.S.
Air Force closed its books on the claim that a UFO crashed
in Roswell, N.M., in 1947, a top Democratic Party figure wants
to reopen the investigation into the cosmic legend.
Despite denials by federal officials, many UFO buffs cherish
the notion that in early summer of 1947, a flying saucer crashed
in rural Roswell, scattering alien bodies and saucer debris across
the terrain.
Now Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who chaired the recent
Democratic convention in Boston, says in his foreword to a new
book that
"the mystery surrounding this crash has never been adequately
explained _ not by independent investigators, and not by the
U.S. government. ... There are as many theories as there are
official explanations.
"Clearly, it would help everyone if the U.S. government disclosed everything
it knows," says Richardson, who served as Energy secretary under President
Bill Clinton. "The American people can handle the truth _ no matter how
bizarre or mundane. ... With full disclosure and our best scientific investigation,
we should be able to find out what happened on that fateful day in July 1947."
The passage appears in a paperback titled "The Roswell Dig
Diaries,"
published in collaboration with TV's SciFi Channel by Pocket
Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The "dig" of
the title refers to an archaeological dig at the supposed crash
site.
A Richardson aide, Billy Sparks, confirmed the governor's remarks.
Richardson "is interested in either debunking the story
or (encouraging) full disclosure" of any unreleased records
on the case, Sparks said.
To the Air Force, though, there is no mystery _ and there hasn't
been for a long time. In 1994, the Air Force published "Roswell
Report: Case Closed, " which asserted that so-called saucer
debris was, in fact, the ruins of an unusual type of military
research balloon, which contained hypersensitive acoustic sensors
designed to detect the rumble of any Soviet A-bomb tests. A subsequent
investigation by the U.S. General Accounting Office was unable
to locate any unreleased records on the case.
Hence, Richardson's foreword drew scorn from veteran UFO investigators
and science popularizers.
"We're kind of disappointed in Richardson for perpetuating the mythology
of that thing," said Dave Thomas, president of New Mexicans for Science
and Reason, a skeptics group in Albuquerque.
The grand old man of skeptical UFO investigators, Philip J. Klass,
who has written for Aviation Week & Space Technology since
1952, said: "Gov. Richardson _ whom I previously admired
_ is wrong about Roswell and too trusting of TV network promoters.
After more than a third of a century of research, I have found
no credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitors."
Andrew Fraknoi, a noted astronomy popularizer, critic of pseudoscience
and faculty members at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, called
Richardson's foreword unbelievable.
"This continues to confirm that election or appointment to high office
does not guarantee wisdom in all areas of human thought," he said.
But in a show of extraterrestrial bipartisanship, the executive
director of the New Mexico Republican Party is taking Richardson's
side. Greg Graves, a Roswell native who suspects the crashed
object was "something more than a weather balloon," wants
to know what really happened in the Southwestern desert two years
before his birth. |
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