This episode centers around the Roswell Incident, similar reported UFO crashes, and their effect on the socio-political and technological landscape of the modern day.
The show starts with an overview of the Roswell Incident. For those who are not familiar, here’s the short, short version:
On 7 July 1947, Rancher Mac Brazel recovers material on his land from a crash of he knows not what and takes it to the Roswell Army Air Field. A team is dispatched to investigate and recover wreckage, including a man who will become central to the Roswell story: Major Jesse Marcel. Someone at the Air Field issued a press release which resulted in the famous front page of the Roswell Daily Record.
According to his son, Marcel thought the material to be like nothing he’d seen before, and so he took some of it home to show his family. The story of his laying the pieces out on the family’s kitchen floor and his son’s memory of how the metal was able to reshape itself even when crushed into a ball has been an important part of the evidence presented in favor of the event being a UFO crash. Roswell advocates will tell you that while Marcel was showing his family this strange metal, a secret alien autopsy was going on in a back room at the Air Field.[1] The next day, a retraction to the “flying saucer” claim is printed, with an explanation that the crashed vehicle is actually a weather balloon (now believed to have been an observation balloon for nuclear testing). Marcel is pictured with materials that are pretty obviously balsa wood and foil, and this is essentially where the story stood until the late 1970s, when people began taking an interest again.
Roswell is seen by many as the beginning of the modern government coverups about UFOs and aliens. The story goes that the material recovered from this craft, and others later, was crucial to the technological advances of the last half of the twentieth century (more on this later).
The viewer then is shown footage from 2013 of Georgio Tsoukalos touring the hangar in Roswell where the debris was supposedly taken, with none other than the mayor of Roswell, Del Journey, as guide. They peek into a back-room storage area where the autopsy supposedly occurred. Now, far be it for me to cast aspersions on the good mayor, but it is clearly in his (and his city’s) interest to maintain the idea that Roswell is a center of UFO and government cover-up activity because it must be one of the bases of the local economy.
The show then moves to discussion of similar crashes that occurred prior to Roswell, focusing on one known as “The Bombshell before Roswell” in 1941. This is a crash near Cape Girardo, Missouri for which the main account comes from Reverend William Hoffman, who was called as a spiritual aid for those at the crash site. He claimed to have seen an alien craft and bodies of aliens killed in the crash. His account was told by his wife in 1984, long after his death and soon before her own. The story was then corroborated by others who were themselves at the site, or who had family members who were. This is considered by many UFO researchers to be the first collection and cover-up by the US government in the modern era.
The idea is then presented that the Second World War acted as a catalyst for an increased interested by aliens, because of our technological advancement during that time, specifically the production and use of atomic weaponry. The technology issue takes an interesting turn at this point: as later in the episode it is claimed that much of the technological advancements since the end of World War II have come from reverse engineered alien tech taken from crash sites like Roswell. So, it seems that we humans were able to muddle along to the point of the Manhattan Project, then we stopped being able to innovate. Of course, some of the AATs claim that earlier technology, like however we built the pyramids and the invention of calculus and maybe even the atomic bomb itself, came from aliens, too. It might be the last thing we humans invented on our own was the ability to stand upright…or maybe not even that. The evidence presented for this alien-influenced technological revolution comes primarily from supposed witness accounts, such as Bob Lazar who claimed to work with alien tech at Area 51 and Phillip Corso, who published his memoir about similar work, The Day after Roswell, in 1997. Corso claimed that he acted as a liaison between the government and technology companies. IBM is particularly mentioned: Tsoukous claims “only after the Roswell crash did companies like IBM flourish.” This is simply false, one only need to know the basics of the association between IBM and the German government during World War II to know that they made a great deal of money systematizing the Final Solution.[2]
Perhaps the most outrageous claim to come out of this episode, and definitely in the top ten for the whole series, is the idea that was next presented: that the Cold War itself was merely a ruse for governments worldwide to funnel money into research and development of alien technology. While this idea ought to be disproven by simple common sense, it does put people like myself in the position of having to prove a negative: I cannot actually show incontrovertibly that this is not the case. It does seem the perfect cover, as the Cold War era and the coincident Space Race did cause a massive upswing in the production of new technologies. We will here allow logic to dictate the answer for us by employing Occam’s Razor: it is a much simpler explanation that the technologies were developed to fight the Cold War, not through the use of alien technology.
The rest of the episode discusses supposed evidence of crashes and bases studying the recovered materials across the world and creating new technologies from them. These include Russia, with its infamous Kapustin Yar base, a collection of odd buildings and runways in the Gobi Desert, and sites in Australia and England. Following the (lack of) logic above, one must assume these aren’t simply run-of-the-mill military installations.
As for Roswell, we all know what really happened there.[3]
[1] The footage of this autopsy was supposedly unearthed in the early 1990s and in 1995 got its own special on Fox (not Fox News, FYI – that didn’t exist yet), hosted by Johnathan Frakes, none other than Star Trek’s Commander William T. Riker, to add credibility. It’s also wonderfully satirized in the X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’.”
[2] See Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust, Crown Books, 2001.
[3] See Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Little Green Men”
History with the Szilagyis 