The 1947 crash in the New Mexico desert that become legendary among UFO fans and conspiracy theorists turns out to have been nearly as strange a visit by an alien spaceship. Long after the Cold War ended, observers continue to report a pattern of UFO activity near missile silos and other nuclear weapons sites. Perhaps it is not surprising that two subjects —nuclear war and alien invasion—should be linked.
At the time of the Roswell Incident in 1947 when a United States Army Air Forces balloon crashed at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, the nation’s only nuclear strike force was based at the Roswell Army Airfield—at the time a closely held secret that may have contributed to the secrecy surrounding the recovery of Project Mogul debris –a string of weather balloons launched from New Mexico’s Alamogordo Air Field in June 1947 more than 600 feet long that carried acoustical sensors and oddly constructed radar-reflecting targets.
Set by a postwar America wary of losing its atomic monopoly, Project Mogul mission was to search high in the atmosphere for weak reverberations from nuclear-test blasts half a world away.
From the X-Files –“Is the Pentagon Hiding UFOs in a Las Vegas Hangar?
“The wreckage,” reported the New York Times, “was quickly whisked away by the Air Force, was part of an airborne system for atomic-age spying that was invented by a leading geophysicist and developed by Columbia University, New York University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, according to an Air Force report on the once-secret project as well as principals in the espionage effort.”
Fast forward to the present: as Politico first reported in late April, the US Navy “is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings—and destigmatize them.” In a statement to Politico, the Navy cited “a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.”
This is reportedly a US government video taken by the forward-looking infrared system of a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet that encountered an unidentified aircraft off the East Coast in 2015. The fighter jet’s pilots were excited by what they saw. Credit: To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science/YouTube
A former senior intelligence officer recently told the Washington Post that the newly drafted guidelines for pilots mean the Navy has credible evidence of things “that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will.”
In addition to “unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft,” the Pentagon refers to such sightings as “unexplained aerial phenomena” or “suspected incursions.” But please don’t call them UFOs. By definition, UFOs are nothing more than unidentified flying objects, but in the popular imagination they have become closely associated with creatures from outer space. As the New York Times noted in a report last week, “No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents.”
From the X Files –“The Pentagon’s UFO Intrigue”
Many UFOs turn out to be identifiable flying objects, atmospheric phenomena, or hoaxes. Sometimes they are secret military projects. The mother of all UFO narratives, the so-called Roswell Incident, is deeply rooted in the nation’s nuclear history.
In 1995, the US Air Force published a 994-page collection of records and information about the July 1947 incident, the alleged crash and recovery of a flying saucer and its alien occupants in a remote part of New Mexico. An Air Force Declassification and Review Team concluded that the Army Air Forces (as the Air Force was known at that time) did indeed recover material near Roswell in 1947. However, this material was debris from a secret experiment launched in the early days of the Cold War.
“Spinning Like a Hypersonic Top” –US Navy Pilots Reported Strange, Unknown Objects
Project Mogul was an attempt to detect Soviet nuclear weapon explosions and ballistic missile launches. Maurice Ewing, a researcher at Columbia University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, had previously discovered an ocean layer that could easily conduct the sound of underwater explosions for thousands of miles, and he hoped to find a similar channel in the upper atmosphere.
Ultimately, detecting explosions with seismic sensors and air sampling proved to be more accurate and less expensive than acoustic detection. As the Air Force explained in a 1997 follow-up report, claims that alien “bodies” were recovered near Roswell, which did not begin appearing until the 1970s, were probably references to anthropomorphic test dummies carried aloft by high-altitude balloons used in unrelated scientific research.
While military sightings of unidentified aircraft are getting more attention of late, UFO sightings by the general public have actually been declining for the past few years, according to the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network, two online sites that collect and analyze reports. One possible explanation: the military’s increased transparency about reporting and investigating alleged encounters.
The Daily Galaxy, Cole Chapman, via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, New York Times and Politico
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