Roswell That Ends Well

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Of course the Roswell crash didn't happen, but I have an argument against it. People report picking up, beating with a hammer, trying to melt ect. the crash debris from the saucer. Debris! If the saucer were made of uber strong materials how the hell did the debris beak off at all?! The crash couldn't have been nearly as bad as would be needed to tear materials off as strong as these idiots say they are.

 

[c4ts]

The debris was mylar from a failed high altitude parachute test. I guess people hadn't seen it before.

 

[Bronze Dog]

Excellent point, SJ.

Nice little homage to Futurama, btw.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Well, that's the basic silliness about the Rosswell story: The wreckage. The claim is that there was a heap of wreckage and some (alien) corpses, and that the military came and picked it all up and took it to some secret place.

What is wrong with that scenario?

Well, I don't know how big and rugged an interstellar spaceship has to be, but I am sure we can safely assume that one with a crew of several people would not be smaller or more flimsy than, say, a twin engined aircraft, like a learjet. That means that we have about 10 tons of metal (or whatever it is made of) coming down.

Now, a flying craft can crash in different ways; it can make something that could be termed as a very poor landing (a good landing being defined as one you can walk away from), or, at the other end of the scale, it can auger in at high speed and disintegrate totally, leaving a surprisingly big crater and (10 tons of) widely scattered debris. Most crashes are something in between.

Have you ever seen a crash site or pictures from one? Let me tell you that even normal aircraft are much more rugged than living bodies. So, when the aircraft is more or less disintegrated, what do you think the bodies look like ?

Since the alien bodies are claimed to have been recovered with only relatively minor injuries from the Rosswell site (the one shown in the autopsy film just seemed to have a leg wound), we must conclude that the craft must also have been reasonably intact. So we have a 10-ton hull, possibly well battered, but largely in one piece. Now, first of all, that is not what the reports say, and secondly, that is not something you just haul onto a truck and drive away with, in rough terrain; it requires heavy lifting gear (and at that time they didn't have the nifty mobile cranes we see everywhere now), and a big flat-bed truck, probably a belted vehicle in the roadless terrain at the Rosswell site.

Or, we can go with the report that the craft was a heap of debris. So, it was disintegrated by the crash. Fine with that, but then the bodies would have been something you picked up with tweezers and carried away in moisture-tight bags.

Logically, the story falls apart, right from the start .

Hans

 

[Johnny Pneumatic]

The debris was mylar from a failed high altitude parachute test. I guess people hadn't seen it before.

Yeah, but mylar is hardly unburnable or untearable. Thats what the flexible metal is said to have been like. Large sheets of a different metal are said to have been found, and unable to even be damaged with a heavy sledge hammer blow. Nothing of the sort existed at the time that could be the source of the accounts. In short ALOT of making up stuff/miss remembering had to happen.

 

[Seismosaurus]

One of the common theories I've seen re Roswell is that the debris was not at the crash site - the saucer hit the ground like a stone skipping over the water, leaving a pile of bits behind which were smashed off of the bottom. What the farmer found was just that one impact site, the main body of the saucer landed some distance away. In fact the air force guys who found the wreckage apparently concluded that this had happened precisely because there wasn't enough stuff lying around for a real crash site.

I got this off one of those based-on-the-actual-events type "documentaries", I don't know if the serious works on the subject suggest it or if they just made it up for the film. But then, there's no real difference between "serious" stuff on Roswell and just making stuff up, IMHO.

 

[SezMe]

Of course the Roswell crash didn't happen, but I have an argument against it. People report picking up, beating with a hammer, trying to melt ect. the crash debris from the saucer. Debris! If the saucer were made of uber strong materials how the hell did the debris beak off at all?! The crash couldn't have been nearly as bad as would be needed to tear materials off as strong as these idiots say they are.

I don't think the logic is correct. Forget Roswell and consider a current day 747 crash. The bent, twist, torn up fragments of struts, engines, and other "hard" parts would be greatly damaged yet immune to the puny forces that some farmer out in a field would have to bring to bear.

BTW, just so there's no confusion, Roswell is pure bunk in my mind.

 

[SezMe]

Well, I don't know how big and rugged an interstellar spaceship has to be, but I am sure we can safely assume that one with a crew of several people would not be smaller or more flimsy than, say, a twin engined aircraft, like a learjet. That means that we have about 10 tons of metal (or whatever it is made of) coming down.

I think your assumption that aliens would be about our size is very weak and damages the rest of the analysis. What about aliens the size of, say, a grasshopper. Or even a squirrel. Such a craft carrying 3 aliens (our first off-planet craft carried 3) could be quite small.

 

[MRC_Hans]

I think your assumption that aliens would be about our size is very weak and damages the rest of the analysis. What about aliens the size of, say, a grasshopper. Or even a squirrel. Such a craft carrying 3 aliens (our first off-planet craft carried 3) could be quite small.

It is not my assumption, although a number of arguments speak for the idea that rational beings will be in the same size bracket as us.

However, in this case I am simply juxtapositioning the two claims contained in the Roswell myth:

1) The disintegrated spaceship.

2) The largely intact humanoid corpses.

These parts of the myth are contradictory.

Hans

Edited for grammar.

 

[ReFLeX]

Excellent point, SJ.

Nice little homage to Futurama, btw.

Futurama? Futurama! This was the name of a map in Carmageddon years earlier. A good one, too.

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

Even though someone uses space-age materials, they still tend to use just enough to do the job and no more. If you make an aircraft from the strongest material known to man you make it with just enough of that material to make the vehicle safe without expending more money or adding weight. If your hull material is 6 times stronger than aluminium then your aircraft would have skin and spars 5 or 6 times thinner than current aircraft, not the same thickness AND 6 times stronger.

There's also the problem that we are meant to believe that these alien craft utilise advanced field technologies, if we believe Bob Lazar and his supporters, and therefore the structural strength of these vehicles could be supplemented or enhanced. If the ship has inertial dampers, to borrow a Star Trek device, then there's no need to build it to withstand more than 1G, since it should never experience any more than that in normal operation.

What does this mean? It means I think we can have super-weird material and still have wreckage and bodies. Do I thinkan alien crash happened? Hell no. No offence to Max Brazell and friends, but I dont think it would be hard to come up with material that a rancher in the 40's hadn't seen before.

 

[Psi Baba]

The debris was mylar from a failed high altitude parachute test. I guess people hadn't seen it before.

That's what I always thought from the first time I heard the debris stories. Two pieces of debris are usually described. One was obviously mylar (mysterious "foil" that wouldn't stay crumpled up, but unfolded by itself), and the other was likely titanium ("grey metal lighter than even aluminum, but very strong"). How many regular civilians had even heard of, much less physically handled mylar and titanium in 1947? These materials certainly would have seemed strange to most people back then.

 

[ungoliant]

fascinating replies. i've always felt that the roswell crash may have been something official and experimental, but you guys put it together in such a way as to make me think, "hey, yeah, it could have been experimental materials."

mind you, i have no idea what it really was, but it was almost certainly not extra-terrestrial in origin, IMHO.

but you can never say never!

tell the truth, not having been there or even alive then, for all i know nothing happened there that day at all!

 

[LW]

1) The disintegrated spaceship.

2) The largely intact humanoid corpses.

These parts of the myth are contradictory.

Not necessarily. There have been survivors from real-world aircraft crashes where the planes completely disintegrated. One such case that I read about lately was a WWII Lancaster crash where the tail gunner escaped with a couple of broken ribs and mild concussion because he was thrown out of the plane when the tail broke off. The rest of the plane went up in a great fireball.

In general, it is possible that the crew compartment of an aircraft is stronger than the other parts and thus protects the crew somewhat during a violent crash.

 

[CurtC]

ungoliant, you may not have been paying attention to this story, so you're not familiar with it, but it's pretty common knowledge now.

It's not even that they were "experimental" materials - the project itself was experimental, but it was the electronics payload. The balloon that lofted it I think was pretty standard for weather balloons etc. even then. In those days, though, the average Joe on the street wouldn't have been familiar with them.

Project Mogul was pretty secret at the time, but it's out now, and there are corroborrating stories from people who were actually involved in it, describing the receiver, how they launched it, others launched, on and on.

I think it's telling that the Roswell story was pretty much forgotten for 30 years or so, then dredged up in the 1970s when UFOs became a popular subject again. Of course, this time, there are several people who now state that they saw aliens, the space ship, etc., but they only said this 30 years after the fact. I always think to myself, that if you take any town's population, how many of them are strange enough to make up stories about themselves and events 30 years before to get attention? Several? Well, that's what happened at Roswell.

 

[ungoliant]

ok, so not 'experimental' but materials unfamiliar to pop knowledge? i know there's a difference, but it still is in line with what i was thinking.

some hicks got a look at some high-tech stuff, and later blew it up into a UFO story.

i highly doubt it was a UFO, or aliens, or whatever. but i think it is plausible that it was a piece of US high tech that crashed.

i know the part about it being 'resurrected' later in the 70s. people remembering some shiny unfamiliar material would certainly be apt to fantasize about it all those years later.

 

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

The only bit of the story that lends any credence to any of this stuff is the fact that the US Airforce actually released a press release saying they'd captured an alien spacecraft. That's a bit out of the ordinary, I think you'd agree. Never mind any of the stuff the ranchers and kids are coming out with, the US armed forces called it a captured saucer. Hmmmmmm....

 

[Diamond]

I've heard that Roswell is a very boring place in New Mexico where Demi Moore came from.

 

[LTC8K6]

The only bit of the story that lends any credence to any of this stuff is the fact that the US Airforce actually released a press release saying they'd captured an alien spacecraft.

Mogul was TOP SECRET, so few knew about it unless they needed to. The officer who issued the release was likely entirely unaware of Mogul. It seems likely that Haut just went off half cocked.

http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/hautstory.htm

 

[rwguinn]

I've heard that Roswell is a very boring place in New Mexico where Demi Moore came from.

Actually, It is quite a nice place. Boring is what you make it. There is, within 150 miles, several hundreds of square miles of public land, 2 National Monuments, Mountains to near 12,000 ft, and pretty much every climate zone available above 3500 ft.
Lots of beach (no ocean, however), the Pecos River, Lots of places Billy the Kid used to hang out around, WSMR, and of course, the places where Robert Goddard started proving pretty much that "What every schoolboy knows" was pretty much dead wrong...
But I anly lived there for 7 years--this time.