Well,
here is something that is interesting. It seems that an off-hand comment I made
about the lack of skepticism in some avenues of UFO research has blown up into
a debate on what I said about the Roswell case. It began with Robert Sheaffer
making a few comments on his blog, Bad
UFOs, which was based on the very nice review that Jerome Clark had
published in Fortean Times about my
book Roswell in the 21st
Century. From that interview, Robert extrapolated a point of view that
might not be exactly what I had do say… though the headline in the Fortean Times suggests a recanting of
the Roswell case.
On
the positive side, for me, it seems to have sparked a debate online and drove a
few people to Amazon and other ebook sites which helped sales. I certainly
don’t want to do anything to stop the traffic because it is good for me.
But
the question being asked about me, but never actually put to me, is if I have
abandoned the alien model for the Roswell crash. The short, flip answer is,
“Read the book.”
The
more lengthy answer is, “Well, sort of.”
The
book was meant to be a “cold case” look at the Roswell crash, starting at the
beginning and shifting through the mountains of evidence that has been gathered
by a number of researchers… all of whom seemed to have a biased opinion from
“Yes, it was alien” to “No, it was a Mogul balloon.”
To
all of them (which at one time included me with some of them), I say, “I don’t
know.”
To
quote Jerry Clark, “So what did happen? Here Randle, in conceding a truth so
many avoid speaking, will infuriate believers on both sides. There is ‘no real
answer,’ he says.”
And
there you have it… I go through the whole story, document it as best I can, and
in the end, I have to say that the case is built on testimony gathered decades
after the fact and that everything we know about memory is that it really is no
good when it comes to something like this.
I
was going to point out some of the interesting things that I learned by going
through all this material, but whatever I say will not be heard by one side or
the other because they will be too busy formulating their counter arguments to
listen. I did find mistakes such as the Lee Reeves tale of accompanying Dan
Dwyer to the crash site that is contradicted by so much testimony and
documentation that it shouldn’t even be discussed… and if we want to challenge
testimony, Charles Moore provides many examples in his ever shifting tale about
Mogul.
To
understand my conclusions, however, it is necessary to read the evidence as has
been gathered and the mistakes that have been made. This is a mystery that
seems to have no solid conclusion except the skeptics will say that it can’t be
alien because interstellar flight is impossible to believers who say there are
so many witnesses that something alien must have happened.
And
to give away just one thing that I learned in the reexamination of all the
material was that the Air Force was not originally investigating the case in
the 1990s… they were searching for documentation about the crash from all the
various agencies that might have had some involvement in the original story.
As
I say, it is interesting that much of this has blown up around me without
anyone actually asking me anything. I have seen some of the Internet discussion
but certainly not all of it. Before it goes much further, I would merely say,
“Why not read the book and then we can talk about what it all means.”
