Roswell

Updated Friday 2 May, 2008 9:30 PM | Headlines | Discussion Forum | International Edition

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Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe

Karl T Pflock

I used to believe in Roswell – the rumoured UFO crash in New Mexico – until I started to think through the implications. If Roswell had been real, I calculated, the world needed to start preparing a major defence effort, at once. A UFO wouldn’t have come out of nowhere, any more than the carrier planes that bombed Iraq came out of nowhere; the mere presence of the UFO would have implied the existence of an entire alien civilisation. Had Roswell been real, it would have changed everything; there would be no grounds whatsoever for concealing the overall truth. If the aliens had the advantage of surprise, they had just lost it…so where are they? Could anyone have reasonably expected the aliens to choose to absent themselves for 60odd years? The decision would be grossly irresponsible at best, treasonous at worst.

(Jerry Pournelle, who actually introduced me to this book through mentioning it on Chaos Manor and wrote the foreword, supports this view. There was no evidence in his work, where they were trying desperately to win the Cold War, of any science from an alien craft.)

In this groundbreaking piece of work, Pflock, a person who is convinced that there is an ET explanation behind some UFO sightings, finally breaks through the haze of myth, second-hand stories and downright lies surrounding Roswell to conclude that the Roswell crash was actually a test balloon, rather than a UFO. A New Mexico resident and former believer, Pflock offers exhaustive research, spanning eight years, a fascinating probe that has transformed him into a sceptic. With photos, drawings and interviews, Pflock focuses on secret high-altitude balloon research conducted for the U.S. Army Air Force by New York University in 1947. Pflock attempts to refute past "witness" tales, expose claims made by other books on this subject and prove the U.S. government has no physical evidence. I believe, as I read through the outlines of research and rigorous investigation into the various claims made by people trying to jump on the bandwagon, that Pflock has successfully laid the ghosts of Roswell to rest.

Pflock does not mince words; at times, he writes like a former religious person or cultist who has since seen the light and departed from orthodoxy to start questioning the generally accepted view of events. The cast of the book – insofar as such terms can be used – include conmen, dubious witnesses, embellishers and desperate believers, a term that might have been applied to Pflock himself, years ago. While the book does plod in places, Pflock handles it with all the skill of a prosecutor slowly building up his case, moving from ‘a’ to ‘b’ and allowing us to follow his thought processes. There are times when he is sympathetic to witnesses, and times when he doesn’t hesitate to share his opinion of them with them; one witness, in particular, gets blasted to his face as a liar. Philip Corso, who wrote the acclaimed The Day After Roswell, comes in for particular bashing; his story simply does not add up, if only for the reasons I have outlined in the first paragraph. He also claims to be personally responsible for everything from fibre optics to stealth technology.

(He also forged (?) a foreword by a US Senator that was later rigorously denied by the Senator.)

This book is well worth a read. It may shatter many people’s faith in Roswell, or maybe in UFO studies as a general ‘science,’ but it is a worthwhile contribution to the Roswell litriture. I doubt, however, that it will be the last.

Oh, and read some of the reviews of this book on Amazon. It’s good for a smile.

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