Slashdot Log In
Deathbed Confession Says Aliens Were at Roswell
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jul 01, 2007 08:01 PM
from the here-comes-the-super-copter-here-comes-the-noise-it-makes dept.
from the here-comes-the-super-copter-here-comes-the-noise-it-makes dept.
xnuandax writes "The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, it may be that the visitors have a limited budget, just like anything we do does. One allocates the risk based on this budget. Even though we may have the money to make or buy the Ultimate Safest Volvo, it does not mean we will.
As far as appearence, here are some possibilities:
1. They are interested in us *because* we look like them.
2. They are us from the future.
3. We are a degerate form of them.
4. The human-like form is somewhat universal after all.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only universal among the uncreative minds of most scifi authors. Even on earth the diversity is so great that you wouldn't consider birds/insects/slugs to be "human-like forms" but even they have most of the parts (eye, head, nose, ears) in approximately the same relative locations. The chances of this occurring on another planet seem remote.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Interesting)
As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.
So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?
To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.
Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe that's why the crashed.
"Turn the egg! Turn the egg!"
"I can't, I don't have any hands!!!"
"AHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry but this is just not a conversation that makes any sense. We haven't even got the vaguest idea of what the boundaries are for the conversation "What is Life?". The idea that a species evolving in a different environment, I mean really different, is going to in any way resemble human beings, is simply ludicrous. You gotta cut back on the Star Trek, the numerous humanoid aliens there are simply a function of make-up vs. CGI budget.
We (human beings) are running around with DNA from an ancient ancestor that had 5 fold symmetry, 4 limbs + head, 5 fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and five primary orifices in the skull (think inverted appendage.) Before that we inherited DNA from a worm... if you look at a human body morphologically we're worms that evolved better means of locomotion, and the ability to manipulate our local environment. Any alien you see owning a head with a face you can recognize, a spine, and limbs would have had to evolve on this planet. There are trillions of evolutionary paths that could have made life on earth wildly different, and to assume the path that produced us is the only path that could have produced sentient life with the ability to manipulate it's environment is not only myopic, it's homocentric to a fault.
I won't argue that certain structures would prove useful on earth and evolve repeatedly given our enviornment. Even on earh, however there are vastly different organism operating in wildly different circumstances, no light, crushing pressure and heat, sulphur as an energy cycle, even organisms that exist in ultracold and environments lacking oxygen. That's just on this planet, using precisely the same DNA, and carbon based biology.
I could easily imagine life based on completely different chemistry... carbon will usually be the most likely chemical backbone, though at higher temperatures sillicon and metals might combine in very interesting ways. Sensing is a vital characteristic of life, but organs of sense might be tremendously different for another species. They might sense any or all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and do so with organs very different from ours. How and what they consume and excrete might be very different than what we understand... even on earth what animals breath out, plants breath in... what might setient beings who move as slowly as plants occur to us like? Plants have powerful sensory capabilities, but they are very unlike humanoids.
On earth the octopus is a prime example of a mollusk well on it's way to becoming a technological intelligence. Here's an animal with much in common with human beings but also very alien... communication through melenophores... that's way ourside our normal thinking, and this is an intelligent terrestrial species. How much more different might a being be that evolved in a cold methane lake, or whose fundamental chemisty is composed of complex sugars instead of proteins.
You're going to have to stretch your head a whole lot more if you're goin to imagine life elsewhere. The chances of it being a lot like us is slim at best. Anyway you're going to have to sift through a lot of microoganisms before you find any larger than unicellular life out there. Of course, there's nothing preventing unicellular communities from becoming sentient. That's a kind of life we should be very careful not to miss, simply because it doesn't look like us.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm thinking it's us from the past. Considering that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 50,000 years old, and recorded history about 5,000, there's been plenty of time for us to develop a few spacefaring civilizations. If you allow for some alternate branches of the homonid family you have a lot more time than that. You'd expect them to swing past the old farm from time to time to see what, if anything, has changed.
On the other hand, who's to say they're from space at all? Even if the stories are 100% true, there's not a shred of evidence to show that they're from space. We've never seen spacecraft, only aircraft. Is space alien really more plausible than some kind of technologically superior earthling who can live undetected (almost) on the same planet as us?
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding. New Mexico is soooo, yesterday. Kansas is where anybody who's anybody crashes.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Just maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the contract went to the lowest bidder?
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Not that I'm saying... uhm... yeah.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
It was:
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type.
2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent.
3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.
Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space.
If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.
You don't know many people in our military do you?
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, would you disbelieve the guy who on his deathbed said that he actually faked those Loch Ness pictures? How about the guy who after he died had his family expose how exactly he faked those nice big foot pictures and tracks?
Well, I knew this guy and have a signed and sealed affidavit from him that their signed and sealed affidavit was acquired by threatening his family.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
"That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team. ;-)"
Darn it Jim, that WAS our eugenics program!
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Well done.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.
Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.
Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)
It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.
If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it was the flight conditions.
It's far more likely they navigated all those trillions of kilometres, then sent down what to them was a clearly unarmed, unarmored lander that demonstrated they were peaceful types hoping to say hello to the locals. When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker.
The military then covered up the fact that they'd screwed humanity's chances of ever having friendly chats with some people who could solve the problem of interstellar space travel, cure cancer, save the whales and promote world peace.
Let's face it, if the US military had scored any advanced alien tech, they wouldn't have kept it secret. They'd have used against someone by now.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Definitely "unexpected" since sidewinder's had not been invented.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Mork was a moron and he could fly one just fine.
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bombula (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Ah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Highly improbable (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said... the U.S. government is remarkably inept at keeping secrets much less orchestrating a cover up of this size.
Same is true of most conspiracy theories.
Re:Exactly! (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks, mom and dad. I'm doing like you taught me.
Parent
Not a trustworthy source (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a trustworthy source (Score:5, Funny)
Because it's powered by hats?
Parent
follow the money or the little green men .. (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple google search gives one of many such links:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/07-20-95/cover.htm [tucsonweekly.com]
Not to say that's the only reason he did that
It's not that I think aliens are impossible. I just am highly suspicious that they'd sneak about so much. Or that our government could keep anything a secret for so long. And crackpots coming out with books on UFOs does not count as the leaks.
Re:alien tech wouldn't defy laws of physics (Score:5, Insightful)
So for such a claim to NOT be outrageous, you'd have to also claim a vast conspiracy of scientists all over the world through the decades, sitting on most of their findings while publishing just enough to give an incremental step for the next breakthroughs. Or you'd need the aliens to be directing this, handing out tiny little tidbits of information to the scientists, and either swearing them to secrecy or using some sort of mind control on them. So yes, it is quite outrageous.
On the other hand, if next week some scientist produced working plans for a fusion generator that used a grand unified theory totally different than any proposed, now THAT would be what it would take to not be an outrageous claim of getting outside help.
Parent
Re:You think we are aware of all tech military has (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, we could have a NVG as early as 1930 because you could use the early iconoscope to capture IR light below the visible power and amplify it as much as you want. That's what TV does, basically, and it is not a surprise that some camcorders are IR-capable.
But that NVG would weigh 200-300 lbs and wouldn't be exactly portable. To make it portable you need to advance the technology quite a lot. First portable NVGs were still vacuum tube based, but implemented in a very smart way, as a series of long parallel holes in a glass plate. The front edge, facing the field, would receive the picture, produce electrons, those electrons would then be accelerated within all the tubes and when they hit the end, facing you, the light would be both visible and bright. That worked like a "bug eye" - once the picture is focused it is transferred as if through a bunch of fibers, just with amplification.
With semiconductors you can create far fancier, and more efficient NVGs. But we, as a society, made every single step of this path, and it is proven beyond doubt how exactly each step was made, by who (scientists like to publish!) and who stepped on shoulders of those giants and made the next advance, etc. etc.
As other people mentioned, if you show me a working time machine, or a fusion battery of CR2032 size, or an FTL drive, then I may want to consider the idea of external help - just because no human on this planet has a foggiest idea about how to even approach any of those challenges. But the problem is that every known invention on this planet is 100% traceable to its origins, and origins of those origins, recursively.
Parent
Alternate Headline: (Score:5, Insightful)
Speculated Where??? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"
Government and Secrets - An Analysis (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, let me get this reasoning straight.
a) There's no way that the government could keep a secret that long.
b) How do we know that there's no way that the government could keep a secret that long?
c) Because if the government tried to keep a secret that long we would have beard about it.
Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um
(especially if they used secret alien technology to keep it secret!)
I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceship (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceshi (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
400 Government/Military Witnesses - On Record (Score:5, Interesting)
The Disclosure Project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk [youtube.com]
Yeah it's almost 2 hours long, but it will blow your mind!
I wonder how much longer they can keep denying the more than obvious.
Nuff said.
Adeptus
A Lieutenant? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a hoax.. no aliens at Roswell..
The part of the Roswell crash that never added up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.
Parent
anyone curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:anyone curious... (Score:5, Informative)
why the affadavit, which has been "released", is not printed in any of the articles?
How often have you seen a source document in a news article? Almost never. The audience tunes out; you lose readership. It's a waste of column space.
Someone posted the affidavit text on digg:
2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF WALTER G. HAUT
DATE: December 26, 2002
WITNESS: Chris Xxxxxx
NOTARY: Beverlee Morgan
(1) My name is Walter G. Haut
(2) I was born on June 2, 1922
(3) My address is 1405 W. 7th Street, Roswell, NM 88203
(4) I am retired.
(5) In July, 1947, I was stationed at the Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, serving as the base Public Information Officer. I had spent the 4th of July weekend (Saturday, the 5th, and Sunday, the 6th) at my private residence about 10 miles north of the base, which was located south of town.
(6) I was aware that someone had reported the remains of a downed vehicle by midmorning after my return to duty at the base on Monday, July 7. I was aware that Major Jesse A. Marcel, head of intelligence, was sent by the base commander, Col. William Blanchard, to investigate.
(7) By late in the afternoon that same day, I would learn that additional civilian reports came in regarding a second site just north of Roswell. I would spend the better part of the day attending to my regular duties hearing little if anything more.
(8) On Tuesday morning, July 8, I would attend the regularly scheduled staff meeting at 7:30 a.m. Besides Blanchard, Marcel; CIC [Counterintelligence Corp] Capt. Sheridan Cavitt; Col. James I. Hopkins, the operations officer; Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Nero, the supply officer; and from Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas, Blanchard's boss, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey and his chief of staff, Col. Thomas J. Dubose were also in attendance. The main topic of discussion was reported by Marcel and Cavitt regarding an extensive debris field in Lincoln County approx. 75 miles NW of Roswell. A preliminary briefing was provided by Blanchard about the second site approx. 40 miles north of town. Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life. Pieces which resembled metal foil, paper thin yet extremely strong, and pieces with unusual markings along their length were handled from man to man, each voicing their opinion. No one was able to identify the crash debris.
(9) One of the main concerns discussed at the meeting was whether we should go public or not with the discovery. Gen. Ramey proposed a plan, which I believe originated from his bosses at the Pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location. Too many civilians were already involved and the press already was informed. I was not completely informed how this would be accomplished.
(10) At approximately 9:30 a.m. Col. Blanchard phoned my office and dictated the press release of having in our possession a flying disc, coming from a ranch northwest of Roswell, and Marcel flying the material to higher headquarters. I was to deliver the news release to radio stations KGFL and KSWS, and newspapers the Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch.
(11) By the time the news release hit the wire services, my office was inundated with phone calls from around the world. Messages stacked up on my desk, and rather than deal with the media concern, Col Blanchard suggested that I go home and "hide out."
(12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg
Parent
Re:Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor (Score:5, Funny)
And I'd be really creeped out if I were the coroner...
Parent