An Introduction to Modern
Skepticism
By Eric McMillan
IV: Alien cover-ups
There's a key difference between the skeptical/scientific outlook and the paranormal/pseudoscientific approach: practitioners of the latter tend to persist in their cherished beliefs regardless of all evidence casting doubt on them. Let's look at two cases in which supposed mysteries have been solved, yet continue to be promoted as if ordinary solutions were unknown.
The most famous of all UFO and alien stories is that of Roswell, made legend in movies, television shows and hundreds of books. According to the story, the U.S. government and armed forces have tried to hide the crash of an extraterrestrial spaceship outside Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. Some versions of the tale claim alien bodies were recovered and the crashed alien craft was secretly "reverse-engineered" by government scientists to give us such technological advances as the integrated circuits used by today's computers.
Well, there actually was a cover-up of what transpired in the American desert back then. But it's not what the conspiracy theorists would have you think.
At left is the debris retrieved
from the site of the "crashed flying saucer" near Roswell, shown with
U.S. Brigadier General Roger Ramsey in a photo taken shortly after the incident.
Note the rather flimsy material — hardly what you would expect an interstellar
spacecraft to be made of, nor what you may have seen in films such as Independence
Day.
At right is a photo of soldiers
preparing to launch a weather balloon in the same period. Note the similarity
with the structure that trails below the balloon? For many years the U.S.
military said that it was in fact the same material, that the incident at
Roswell was the crash of a weather balloon.
However a few years ago the military finally revealed it was not exactly a weather balloon that had crashed but part of what was called Project Mogul. Mogul was a secret project using high-altitude air-borne devices for espionage. The devices were carried aloft by trains of balloons trailing radar-reflecting structures quite like those hanging from weather balloons.
This recent photo shows
physicist Charles Moore, who worked on Project Mogul in the 1940s, posing
recently with part of his old experimental apparatus.
This prosaic explanation of the Roswell mystery was reported by skeptical author Kal Korff. Other skeptics, including the world's top UFO debunker Philip J. Klass, have been investigating the stories that have been spun around the Roswell incident for years. They have exposed forged documents that purported to show U.S. presidents acknowledging the UFO visitation and have interviewed alleged witnesses who claimed to have seen alien bodies but turned out not even to have been present at the military camp on the day in question!
Never has a credible witness — out of the thousands who must have been involved over the years in keeping the secret of the United States holding and researching extraterrestrial bodies and spacecraft — ever come forward. Never in five decades has a piece of hard evidence been found to support the ET claims. And meanwhile a very reasonable explanation has been offered to cover all the facts. Yet the hype about Roswell persists.
Sometimes an "unsolved" mystery was never a mystery in the first place. Such a case is that of the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle, of course, is
that ocean area between the southern tip of Florida and the islands of Bermuda
and Puerto Rico, in which airplanes, ships and ship's crews are said to have
mysteriously disappeared.
The cause of these disappearances is supposed to be a big mystery, and has been variously theorized to be UFO activity, a space-time warp, gases released from the ocean, death-rays from Atlantis, strange energy sources, unique weather patterns, and a portal into another dimension.
However, James
Randi in his book Flim-Flam plotted on a map the most famous cases of
lost crafts that have been attributed to the Bermuda Triangle curse and found
that most did not even occur in the triangle! At right, the red dots represent
locations of craft that supposedly crashed, capsized, disappeared or were found
abandoned "in the Bermuda Triangle". It seems that whenever an
incident has occurred somewhere in this part of the world (but even as far away
as the Pacific Ocean and off the coast of Newfoundland), mystery enthusiasts
have added it to the Bermuda Triangle story. In fact, the Bermuda Triangle is
not the site of any more instances of disasters than any other well-travelled
part of the world — on land or sea.
Other skeptical investigators, notably Larry Kusche, author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved, have found a similar situation. They have also discovered that some of the supposedly missing craft never existed outside the imaginations of writers, while others existed but never suffered any such disasters. Moreover, the accidents that did occur in the area have prosaic explanations, as do accidents that occur elsewhere in the world every week.
In short, there is no mystery to be solved here. Nonetheless books and television shows continue to hype the "Bermuda Triangle Mystery".
