CONSPIRACY'S GREATEST HITS

Roswell, Area 51, Communists, and the conspiracy that just won't go away

By Jacques Daviault

Jacques Daviault is a Montreal-based writer and art director with a curiosity that knows few bounds.

I was only seven years old, eight tops, when I saw what I thought was my first UFO, outside Saint John, New Brunswick. The incident was a snapshot in time, as clear and focused as if it had occurred this morning. I was sure I’d seen, out of the corner of my eye, a long cylindrical object several miles away, just over the tree line. Eventually, the object sank beneath my line of sight and was gone. It was a UFO, but only inasmuch as it appeared airborne and wasn’t identifiable.

Then, at age 17 on Montreal’s South Shore, literally 300 feet from where I am writing this article, I saw my second. One summer evening about 10 o’clock, three lights in a triangular formation flew high overhead, silently. At 17, I knew the night sky and had a nerd’s obsession with aviation and space exploration. Even so, my first conclusion was not that this UFO was in any way connected to an alien visitation.

I WANTED TO BELIEVE

I still have no idea what I witnessed either time. I am sure they weren’t alien spacecraft, but I can’t disprove it, either. Society, media, and the curiosity of youth had me hardwired to prefer the unexplainable. Hollywood convinced me that Earth was teeming with aliens hiding in plain sight.

In July 1947, the Roswell Daily Record and the Sacramento Bee ran frontpage headlines claiming the Air Force had captured a flying saucer.

I really wanted to believe we weren’t alone. My slightly conspiratorial side thought that information might have been kept from us by a well-meaning government intent on protecting us from our own fears. I didn’t think I’d actually seen an alien spacecraft, yet at the same time I do believe other intelligent life exists beyond our solar system. They may even know of our existence. But that’s all speculation.

No place has garnered more attention from ufologists and the intensely skeptical than Homey Airport – adjacent to Nevada’s Groom Lake salt flat. It’s a highly classified U.S. Department of Defence site with a tightly guarded perimeter. It is located on DoD land commonly called Area 51.

THE AREA 51 MYSTIQUE

The Defence Department has never denied its existence, nor has it allowed media access. Workers, who fly into the site every day from Las Vegas aboard unmarked jetliners, aren’t singing, either.

Area 51’s mystique arose soon after 1947’s infamous Roswell Incident – another example of ignoring the ancient principle of Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation is almost always the right one.

To understand the incident, one has to go back to 1947 and the birth of Cold War hysteria. It was also the time of Hollywood’s preoccupation with sci-fi aliens (often used as a metaphor for Soviet infiltration), and mounting reports of unidentified flying objects. While these dots had no real connection, they all came together to form what we know as the Roswell Incident.

In short, the U.S. government was testing radiationdetection weather balloons. Called Project Mogul, the program was set up to monitor nascent Soviet nuclear blasts – still two years away but very much of concern to the U.S. One Project Mogul flight went terribly awry, and the apparatus crashed. The

mishap took place in Roswell, New Mexico, and the incident was witnessed by several people who saw their opportunity for a moment in the limelight. Roswell was not a well-known or active place, so the temptation to make news was palpable.

MAKING HEADLINES

In July 1947, the Roswell Daily Record and the Sacramento Bee ran front-page headlines claiming the Air Force had captured a flying saucer. Once the speculation began, it was unstoppable. Somehow, an alien spacecraft had managed to travel to Earth from a solar system light years away – only to crash-land on arrival. Not a promising prospect for a superior intelligence.

The newspapers ran with it. The public, hyped up on Cold War hysteria, were looking for enemies under the floorboards and in the cupboards. Brilliant. Stupid. It was an accident of astronomical proportions waiting to happen.

According to the conspiracists, the debris from the crash was taken to a secret hangar at Homey Airport in Area 51 and remains there to this day.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

The Roswell Incident assumed its place in the mosaic of alien cover-up conspiracies. By the 1990s, it was no longer front-page material, having been relegated to conversations in roadside diners among people who knew people who knew other people who’d met someone whose uncle had seen it all. Then, interest found a new spark and grew like a cancer with the release of the infamous film Alien Autopsy.

In 1995, Fox Television ran an exclusive premiere of Alien Autopsy, a 17-minute black-and-white movie. Although I missed the original showing, I did see it years later. It was laughable. You really would have to have wanted to believe it to be fooled by this amateurish production. The bait, however, was eagerly swallowed by those Americans mistrusting government after the Oklahoma City bombing, the rise of fringe right-wing elements, and the growth of the militia movement.

A LITTLE DISINFORMATION CAN GO A LONG WAY

The U.S. government still keeps a tight lid on anything connected to Area 51, but was more forthcoming in a 1994 published account that supported a more down-to-earth explanation.

So why didn’t they come clean earlier? Their silence all but assured a cottage industry in alien cover-ups would emerge. And it did.

While no one has admitted the government’s motivation for allowing the conspiracy to grow, there can be only one reasonable justification – the Department of Defence preferred rumours of an alien crash-landing to the truth: They were monitoring potential Soviet nuclear tests. Revealing that would confirm they could, in fact, do so. There’s nothing like watching someone who doesn’t know they’re being watched.

The public, hyped up on Cold War hysteria, were looking for enemies under the floorboards and in the cupboards.

The Roswell Incident was a cover-up, but not of aliens. That suited a paranoid U.S. government that would in a few short years see Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous communist witch-hunt.

The United States was in a state of hyper-vigilance. And if there were commies hiding in government, who was to say aliens pulled from the Roswell wreck weren’t being kept in cold storage at Area 51?

Totally plausible.

Not.