A New Annoyance to Include Roswell and Socorro

 

Yes, I’m annoyed again, which, given the situation in the United States today shouldn’t be a surprise because I suspect everyone is annoyed about something or other. What set me off was another of the special edition “magazines.” This one dealt with the paranormal and, of course, UFOs were lumped in with the paranormal, which is something of a misnomer and a minor annoyance all by itself.

Of course, there was a section on Roswell that was about 300 words long. They seemed to believe the Project Mogul explanation but did note that many of us don’t accept it. I would say that this analysis is more or less neutral, but then, how do you explain a major UFO event in so few words?

The Roswell UFO Museum in downtown Roswell (where else?)

But the real problem was the short section that was devoted to the Socorro UFO landing and Lonnie Zamora. At the end, they noted that explanations had been offered including a hoax by high school students or that the mayor and Zamora had engaged in a different hoax with different motives.

Ignoring, for the moment, those explanations, I will note that Lieutenant Colonel Hector Quintanilla, the chief of Project Blue Book at the time, labeled the Socorro sighting as “Unidentified.” He wrote that he had searched long and hard for an explanation, that he had the proper clearances that would have allowed him to seen any top secret projects under development at either White Sands or Holloman Air Force Base and he could tap into sources unavailable to civilian researchers. He wouldn’t have had to probe very deeply, or known very much about those secret projects, if they fit the descriptions, timing, and location to offer a plausible solution. He came up with nothing.

Now, I look at these two explanations. Philip Klass concocted the explanation that the mayor owned the land where the UFO touched down, and it was the mayor’s plan to build some sort of monument or tourist attraction there. It was to create a situation in which his nearly worthless land would become a valuable property as a tourist attraction with possibly a small motel and other such conveniences. All speculation on Klass’ part.

The major problem with the theory is that the mayor didn’t own the land and the idea for the tourist attraction didn’t occur to anyone until a year after the landing. Then the idea originated in the city council and not the mayor. And, of course, no tourist attraction was ever built.

The second theory fails because there is no way that high school students could have devised such an elaborate hoax. They would have needed to create some sort of object that could land and take off. Zamora saw two beings near the craft or object, but he didn’t see them flee the area, which students would have had to do, unless they took off in that craft. They ran to the rear of the craft, it lifted off with a roar, and they were never seen again. Did they ride off in that UFO? To begin with, just how did they get it out there without being seen by someone? Wouldn’t it have involved more than the two people Zamora saw? Wouldn’t there have been some evidence of these others found on the site? The logistics simply do not work out.

The UFO Landing Site, photo by the Air Force.

This is not to mention that Sergeant Sam Chavez, who responded almost immediately, who arrived while the object might still have been visible high in the sky, saw nothing. And there were those people in Socorro who called the police to mention what they had seen and heard the thing in the air before Zamora made his report.

High school students just couldn’t have pulled it off without a lot of help, it would have involved more than the two beings that Zamora saw and probably vehicles to move the participants around the site.

The point here is that we have this rather slick magazine that provides nothing in the way of evidence, giving an explanation, or explanations, for sightings without actually doing much in the way of real research. Sure, I get they couldn’t have taken up pages, but when the Air Force investigator doesn’t have an explanation that works, it would seem that the magazine would be aware of that. You would think that they would be a little less biased in their presentations.

Anyway, I’m tired of having to make the same explanations over and other. As I say, Project Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled and did not fly, so it is not responsible for the Roswell crash. The cluster of balloons launched later in the day would not have made it up toward the Brazel ranch to leave the recognizable debris of weather balloons and rawin targets. How do I know this? Because Charles Moore, who is the author of this nonsense, had to change the launch time of Flight No. 4 claiming it was three hours earlier than the time the launch that was canceled. He had to do this because the winds aloft data did not support the path of the balloons later in the morning drifting to the Brazel ranch.

And we’ve dealt with the tired explanations of the Socorro landing. It is clear, from the information that has been developed by various researchers including Ray Stanford, Ben Moss and Tony Angiola (not to mention my own work on the case), that there was no plan for a tourist attraction and high school students didn’t pull off a prank.

I wish those who create these things would put a little more research into the articles. It doesn’t really do any good if they fill the pages with the first thing they find on the Internet. It just seems that very few, whose job it is to do proper journalism, take the time to do it. Kind of explains where we are today.