Charles Berlitz - The Roswell Incident

Charles BERLITZ & William L. MOORE

Crosset & Dunlap NY, 1980

According to UFO legend, an extraterrestrial spaceship crashed in New Mexico in the early days of July 1947. This would seem to be, on the surface, simply another report that has been kept alive in UFO journals and the thousands of books written about UFOs in all languages. What is different about this case, however, is the vitality of this one single incident and its continuing developments in scientific, government, and legal circles.

At the time this book goes to press a civil action has been brought by concerned parties, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, through their attorneys, against the CIA for the purpose of releasing information about crashed UFOs in accord with the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. CAUS, in addition, has taken over a previous suit of the Ground Saucer Watch against the CIA. Among the charges brought by the suits are suppression of media information, withholding of files, muzzling of witnesses, and, in general, hiding information through the use of now unnecessary security classification.

Events which had been reported in the press and by radio before security regulations were imposed by the Army Air Force (whose name was changed to the Air Force in that very year, 1947) indicate that material from the wrecked UFO was shuttled by high-security government transportation from base to base and that the remains of the UFO and the dead occupants (one of whom was reportedly alive when found) are under high-security guard at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

Those of us who can recall the years before 1947, which was the year of the first well-publicized saucer "invasion," remember reading purportedly factual accounts about what might have been called saucers long before they became popular. These were puzzling reports, carried in meteorological and astronomical journals, containing references to giant airborne objects in the night sky, neither airships nor meteors.

An example from the Monthly Weather Review (March 1904): Lieutenant Frank H. Schofield, commanding the U.S.S. Supply, reported that he and his crew on February 24, 1904, had clearly viewed three enormous luminous objects moving in unison across the night sky, far at sea in the Atlantic, with the largest of them having a diameter six times that of the sun.

In like vein the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (March 1913) carried a compilation of reports by Professor Chant of Toronto about unidentified flying objects crossing east to west along the U.S.-Canadian border at a time that subsequent checks revealed no "human" airships had been aloft that night. The reports, gathered from a great number of observers along the route, agreed that a huge luminous body traveled straight across the sky, that the "body was composed of three or four parts with a tail to each part" and as it disappeared a second and third grouping followed. "There were probably thirty or thirty-two such bodies during the period of an hour... they moved in fours, threes, and twos, abreast of one another. So perfect was this line-up that it seemed almost as if an aerial fleet were maneuvering..."

There were other reports of UFOs prior to 1947 but they were relatively few compared to the many thousands that have since found their way into the world press, radio, and television. (There are reported to be 10,000 pages of classified UFO documents in CIA headquarters alone.) The increasing flood of these reports points up a pertinent fact: The frequency of UFO sightings increases in direct proportion to our scientific and technological development. Radar installations which detect UFOs are an additional check to visual observations, while increasing numbers of plane flights bring pilots and sometimes passengers into startling proximity to unidentified flying objects, and astronauts frequently encounter them in space, all of which are comparatively recent developments.

Nevertheless, extreme interest in UFOs is still considered something of an aberration, possibly because no concrete proof of any such craft is known to have been found or identified as such. In effect there is no corpus delecti.

If there were and if it had been found in territory controlled by any of the great powers or even of some of the lesser powers it would, quite understandably, have been covered up until the national authorities in question decided what to do about it or how to make it serve their own interests and purposes.

This is possibly the explanation of the Roswell Incident. However, far from being just an interesting mystery, one that has had its day in the press and then subsided, the Roswell Incident is still going on. According to reports, the remains of the craft are still being studied (perhaps with a view to duplication), research is continuing on the composition of the unfamiliar metallic (and other) portions of the space vehicle, unidentifiable hieroglyphic figures reportedly discovered on the interior controls are being subject to computer breakdown, and the cell and internal structure of the humanoid though alien crew members is still undergoing medical analysis. From a public interest point of view, new statements from witnesses, and the families of witnesses who were previously unwilling to make statements, and "afterthoughts" from some of the military personnel involved in the cover-up present in the following pages rather convincing proof that this crash of a space ship was definitely not a mass delusion but an actual event.

Since the space age began it has often been suggested that we of the human race of earth are on the brink of making contact with some of our neighbors in the cosmos and obtaining final proof that ours is not the only life form in our galaxy. Perhaps this already happened in New Mexico in 1947 and only now, with the discovery of new information and the eventual help of the Freedom of Information Act, will the consequences become apparent.

UFOs were really never new. Throughout history, whenever men watched the heavens, they saw or believed they saw flying figures, signs, portents, gods, angels, devils, ships, and, in recent times, having lost an earlier faith, they have seen types of aircraft that apparently come from no earthly base. We have no way of calculating how many of these visions have been caused by misinterpretation or a productive imagination. However, if even 20 percent of these sightings are without earthly explanation, as has been suggested by the data in Air Force Project Blue Book, Special Report No. 14, then there must have been millions of unexplained visitors to the skies of earth since the human species first began to record their impressions of celestial visitors.

In ancient and medieval times portents and objects in the sky were taken more or less as a matter of fact, perhaps because there was no known human air traffic at the time with which to confuse them. From ancient Egypt we have a record that describes huge fiery circles coming from the evening sky, menacing Pharaoh as he stood in a chariot at the head of his army, maintaining throughout the incident, however, a commendable though puzzled sang-froid. The prophet Ezekiel may have had dealings with one and with its captain, whom he believed to be the Lord. A reading of the Book of Ezekiel contains an excellent description of the landing of a space capsule, described in simple and understandable language. The ancient skies seemed to be filled with aerial travelers. The Assyrians saw flying bulls, ancient Greeks and Arabs saw flying horses, the opulent Persians thought they saw flying carpets, the warlike Romans watched flying shields and spears and whole battles in the sky at the very moment that they themselves were engaged in earthly combat.