One of the current WordPress writing prompts asks “what historical event fascinates you the most ?”
Where to begin?
When I was young I was a huge science fiction fan. I read all manner of books by the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and consumed a steady diet of whatever movies happened to be shown on television.
In the days before everybody had video recorders, I remember the BBC showing a series of classic science fiction movies on Thursday evenings – and it coinciding with the night we would typically visit my grandparents. I remember sitting on the hearth rug in front of the television – which had already been turned down so the grown-ups could talk – straining to listen to The Day The Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, Earth vs the Flying Saucers, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and more.
As I grew older, I became interested in astronomy and space travel – borrowing all manner of books from the library that told the stories of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Newton. It’s only just occurred to me that this period probably coincided with me realising that everything I had been taught at school – I went to a Church of England school – might have been wrong.
Fast forward another few years – into my early 20s – and I became aware of a book in the paranormal section of the local public library by a physicist called Stanton Friedman – called “Crash at Corona”. It told the story of a rancher in New Mexico finding wreckage strewn across his land, and reporting it to the local sheriff’s office – who reported it to the local army air force base – who reported it to the world.
We know it now as “The Roswell Incident”.
It captured my imagination, and has done ever since.
There are so many questions…
Why were pieces of the crashed weather balloon – which went up every day from the air base – confiscated from anybody who had them? Why did the first army air force officer on the scene decide to tell his family decades later – when he was terminally ill – that the weather balloon had been a cover up? Why had the mortician in the nearby town been called with questions about the availability of child sized coffins, and advice for embalming recent remains? Why was the rancher that called the sheriff’s office held in custody and questioned for several days? Why did he then change his story?
Why in the late 1980s did a man called Robert Lazar go to the press after losing his job working on an engineering contract – after taking friends to watch “the nightly light show” on the edge of Groom Lake outside of Las Vegas ?
He claimed he had been hired to help reverse engineer the engine of something much more exotic than the Stealth Fighter that the public found out about later that year – he claimed to have been working on the remains of something perhaps more similar to the craft that had come to ground years earlier in New Mexico. He knew when and where the test flights were. Unfortunately Groom Lake security knew where he and his friends were too.
Over the years my opinions of what might or might not have happened have swung in different directions. I remember talking to a friend of the family late one night, and pulling out some of the books I had amassed. While flicking through them, he volunteered that he had once been as enthusiastic as me about the possibilities of “what might be out there” – but as he had grown older, he had become jaded – cynical about it all.
You known the strangest thing? Every time I have started to wonder if any of it really happened, another piece of the historic puzzle has come to light that has proven a small part of the larger story from the past – be that through a first hand account, or the uncovering of evidence that has disproven something else.
In recent years we’ve seen hearings in the US Congress about “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”, secret programmes such as “Immaculate Constellation”, and hither-to unknown departments of the US military complex such as AATIP – the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme.
Aerospace experts have spoken on the record about a “credible threat” to national airspaces – which always makes me smile. If somebody or something has the ability to cross either vast distance, time, or dimensions to visit us, I very much doubt they are a threat to us – if they were, we wouldn’t still be here.
If there’s one thing we can say, it’s that humans have a history of thinking an awful lot of themselves.
Anyway.
There we are. The Roswell Incident. The “incident” that started it all.
Only it really didn’t because there are numerous prior incidents in history – including perhaps most famously the “Book of Enoch” – one of the apocrypha – the books that were removed from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible when it was canonised. Enoch tells of angels falling to earth from the heavens and siring children that were giants (of intellect?). It tells of magical tablets, and knowledge of the mechanics of the universe. It tells of them leaving in a blaze of light, and making everybody present sick. Or perhaps it doesn’t – because it very much depends what you believe, and how you choose to interpret the story.
While me might never know – or be allowed to know – what happened in 1947, it’s fun to speculate.