Before and After Roswell: The Flying Saucer in America, 1947-1999

Copyright © 2000 by David A. Clary.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE

1. THE NEWS FROM ROSWELL (ROSWELL, 1947)

II. OVERTURE TO THE FLYING SAUCER (AMERICA, 1947-1952)

III. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE FLYING SAUCER (AMERICA, 1952-1962)

IV. FLYING SAUCER RHAPSODY (AMERICA, 1962-1979)

PART TWO

V. INCIDENT (ROSWELL, 1980)

VI. FLYING SAUCER FANTASIA (AMERICA, 1980-1999)

VII. THE BATTLE OF ROSWELL (ROSWELL, 1980-1999)

VIII. FLYING SAUCER RECESSIONAL (AMERICA, INTO THE MILLENNIUM)

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A: SLEEP SAFE TONIGHT, YOUR AIR FORCE IS AWAKE

APPENDIX B: SAUCER MOVIES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The flying saucer, born along with the Atomic Age and the breaking of the sound barrier, is the most vivid and persistent image in American life of the last half century. It has also generated more controversy and rancor than anything else that might be characterized as a fantasy. It is malleable, suiting a wide variety of beliefs and outlooks, touching nearly every public concern. It arrived as a mysterious threat from above, a metaphor for the terrifying specter of The Bomb. It transformed swiftly into a hope from above, promising to save us from ourselves. It also became a symbol for those who distrusted the intentions of government. Along its way through the postwar skies, it acquired a cargo that included every conceivable species of hoax, craziness, lunacy, and even sexual fantasy, along with a fair amount of scientific and political baggage. The flying saucer is a uniquely American phenomenon, an expression of our hopes and our fears, even our psychiatric disorders and public frenzies—our common response, in other words, to the unexpected. Above all, the flying saucer promises that there will be a future. It is also fun.

Where did it come from, this exciting visitor from the skies? It seems unlikely that it really arrived from another world. Given the time and expense that must be involved in interstellar travel—if such voyaging is even feasible—it strains belief to suggest that someone would make such a trip merely to blink a few lights in the backwoods. Despite the appeal of the alien idea, no one has yet presented credible evidence, particularly physical evidence, to suggest that the flying saucer is extraterrestrial. The flying saucer may not even be real in the objective sense, but it nevertheless has been a part of American life for more than half a century.

I am older than the flying saucer and younger than The Bomb. We grew up together, along with millions of victory babies born between 1943 and 1948—the demographic pop that preceded the Baby Boom. One of the things we did growing up was go to the movies. That is where we met the flying saucer, and learned everything we know about it and its crew. When we see the flying saucer, we are watching the movies, because virtually everything about the flying saucer, including its shape, appeared first on screen.

The flying saucer does not belong to the victory babies alone. It touches all Americans, those older than we, and those younger, urging us not to fear the future. When we learned to stop worrying and love The Bomb, it remained an important symbol of our evolving national outlook. When the boomers grew older, the flying saucer supported them, and sought to draw their gaze upward. When millions of Americans became disenchanted with the government and its presumed bad intentions, the flying saucer was there to make the case. Finally, when the Sesame Street generation was old enough, the flying saucer flashed its light and transmitted the grandest message of all. At century’s end, the saucer was high in the sky, a beacon of hope for the nation.

Something strange almost happened to the flying saucer in the 1990s. It was tarnished as a crashed saucer, becoming the centerpiece of dreadful tales of conspiracy and criminal abuse of the people. The focus of this story was Roswell, New Mexico. Its origins, however, were not to be found there, but rather in the movies’ alter ego—television. There America heard accounts of a vast governmental plot to cover up the existence of the saucer and hide the truth from us all. For a while it appeared that the flying saucer might disappear into this dismal fantasy, but that did not happen. As America headed into the new millennium, the conspiracism receded into darkness, and the flying saucer flew over the nation, lighting the way to the future.

The flying saucer’s fascinating journey through American life is the subject of this book. It is a story that includes many remarkable characters and dramatic confrontations, and it says much about the best and the worst in us as a nation. It is also the story of how a small city became caught up in the larger drama, and how its people revealed their own best and worst. The flying saucer may be a beacon of the future, but it is also a window into the American past.

A Trip Aboard the Saucer

In late summer 1997, my wife and I set out to find a new home in the Southwest, where the sun shines in the winter. When we happened upon Roswell, we were smitten. Roswell has a lovely climate, nearly constant sunlight, and congenial people. It is a good-natured place, one with many festivals celebrating its heritage. It supports two colleges, a fine library, a symphony orchestra, a little theater, and several excellent museums. One of the latter houses the artifacts of Robert H. Goddard, who pioneered modern rocketry just outside of town. To victory babies who had cheered the race to the moon, Roswell, birthplace of the Space Age, in New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, seemed a fitting place to be.

We were aware of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the so-called Roswell incident before our arrival. Our first impression was that the town showed a good-natured tolerance toward the imposition upon it of a decidedly strange belief. It was not long, however, before it became apparent that Roswell’s good humor did not fully extend to the crashed saucer or to tales about a coverup of an event that few people there believed had happened. I became curious about how this city had become the UFO capital of the world, and why it was not happy about it.

The national publicity over Roswell in 1997 was misleading. The Roswell incident was not what its promoters claimed, nor had the anniversary festival been so great an event as the world seemed to believe. The incident itself, it turned out, did not happen in 1947, but was invented in 1980. That led to the question of where the legend of the incident came from and how it had almost become a metaphor for the flying saucer. That in turn drew me into the larger subject of the flying saucer itself, and the role it has played in American life.

Roswell was the flying saucer’s strangest adventure, and not surprisingly it turned into an odd experience for a historian. It had its high points—reviewing two generations of thrilling movies—and its low points—watching some very dreadful television. Unexpected characters—G. Gordon Liddy, Rambo, even Jimmy Carter and Winston Churchill—presented themselves, and the project became an exercise in weaving the many strands of American culture into a coherent story of how our lives and national outlook have evolved since the birth of both The Bomb and the flying saucer.

The easiest part, perhaps, was dealing with the alleged coverup of UFOs. I spent a long tour as a federal bureaucrat, and since then I have been more or less a historical anthropologist studying bureaucratic cultures. The stories told by UFO conspiracists simply could not be true, because the federal government is neither as efficient nor as ruthless as the coverup legend requires. Besides, it is notoriously inept when it tries to keep secrets. The coverup myth is supported chiefly by a mixture of unsupported allegations and outright fraud, but it does harbor a germ of truth. The idea of a wicked, conspiratorial, and murderous government originated to a great extent in the clumsy behavior of government itself since the birth of The Bomb.

The more difficult part of the project was sorting out how UFO conspiracy ideas acquired widespread currency among the American public during the 1990s. There was no single explanation, rather a combination of developments in politics, entertainment, and national culture that worked together to make many people think the worst of their public institutions. All the while, the flying saucer swooped through our consciousness, moderating our fears and encouraging us to look favorably upon ourselves, our country, and our world. It has remained a beacon of truth, before and after Roswell.

The flying saucer has carried many strange cargoes during its flight through American life, but on the whole it has been good for us. It has indeed been fun.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No author of nonfiction can work without significant support from others, and that has been the case with this project. I offer heartfelt gratitude to the dedicated staffs and volunteers of several organizations whose resources and assistance were vital to the gathering of information. They include the Roswell Public Library, the Historical Society of Southeastern New Mexico, the Paul Horgan Library, the International UFO Museum and Research Center, and the Roswell Museum and Art Center. The Roswell Chamber of Commerce, Roswell Hispano Chamber of Commerce, Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Roswell Police Department also were helpful sources of information.

Carl Brandt, John Camp, Harold Weiss, and John P Wilson reviewed earlier drafts of the manuscript and provided critical comments and ideas that helped transform chaos into something readable. So did Mr. Peabody, the Desk Pilot, Picture Maker, and the Feeb, who because of the nature of their employment asked that their names not be publicized. Robert M. Utley was a tower of wise counsel in this as in many previous contexts over many decades; thanks, Bob. Thanks also to retired Special Agent Joseph R. Blaise, who for a quarter century has been my guide to federal investigative procedures and realities. And last, without my long-suffering but eternally patient Celestial Navigator, my wife Beatriz Clary, I should be hopelessly lost. She keeps my feet on the ground whenever my eyes stray to the stars.

For whatever is of merit in this work, all of the foregoing deserve credit. Any shortcomings are entirely my own.

PART ONE

BEFORE

1. THE NEWS FROM ROSWELL (ROSWELL, 1947)

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.—Lewis Carroll

Readers of newspapers around the country were fascinated with stories about the mysterious airship, which appeared seemingly everywhere. Editors speculated about who had devised the strange craft, but without result. Reports nevertheless circulated, conjectures mounted, and then sightings of the airship dwindled and ultimately ceased altogether. Nobody ever figured out what really started the fuss.

The mysterious airship made its rounds in 1896 and 1897.¹ Decades later, when there was a UFO phenomenon, as sightings of unidentified flying objects became known, ufologists—students of UFOs—were fascinated with this earlier manifestation of their interest. Few of them, however, took sufficient notice of the source of their information—the newspapers of the 1890s. That was the golden age of the yellow press, when sensationalism was rampant.

Journalism feeds mostly on politics, so when politicians are inactive journalists must write about something. It is worth noting that the majority of the mysterious airship stories appeared between the election of William McKinley in November 1896 and his inauguration as president in March 1897. With elected officials back at work, newsmen turned to something that politicians could react to: thumping stories about alleged Spanish atrocities in Cuba that ended in a war with Spain in 1898.

A half-century later, in the summer of 1947, the press faced another period of slow news. In April an oil tanker exploded at Texas City, Texas, setting off other blasts and fires that claimed 500 lives. Thereafter the news was dull, even in politics. In June Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed economic aid to Europe, and wartime sugar rationing ended. The Nuremburg trials of leading Nazis were over, and the trials of lesser German malefactors were old hat. Pan-American Airways launched the first round-the-world airline service, but that was worth only so much copy. The same was true when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over the president’s veto. Really lurid stories lay yet in the future, with the 1948 elections.

The press needed a story in June 1947, just as it had 50 years earlier. Now, thanks to the teletype and the wire services, when it found a story it could flash the details nationwide in an instant. It was in that climate, on 24 June 1947, that news erupted about flying saucers, a new mystery in the skies. For two weeks front pages carried astonishing tales appearing from everywhere. The press, like the mysterious airship of old, cruised the national landscape, shining its bright light wherever a flying saucer appeared, then moving on to the next scene of excitement. Ever so briefly, that spotlight illuminated a small city in New Mexico.

Where Never Is Heard a Discouraging Word

Roswell is located on the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, in the center of Chaves County. The environment is semi-arid high-plains grassland, receiving about a foot of precipitation a year, most of it in the monsoon season of July and August. Summer storms can be spectacular, but truly violent weather is rare. At an elevation of 3600 feet, Roswell’s climate is moderate, with January and July mean temperatures of 40 and 79 degrees, respectively. The area is an important agricultural region, drawing on abundant groundwater for irrigation.²

The community was founded in 1869, and acquired its present name with a post office in 1873. It was part of Lincoln County until 1889, but played only a small part in the infamous Lincoln County war of 1877-1879, although John Chisum, one of the war’s principal characters, headquartered his operations at Roswell. He was not the last of its famous residents, who over the years included Hall of Famers such as Bob Crosby (rodeo) and Nancy Lopez (golf), the artists Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth, singer Roy Rogers, rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, and such celebrities as actress Demi Moore.

Roswell became more than a spot on the map in the 1890s, when the railroad arrived and developers discovered its artesian groundwater. By the turn of the century the town was a center of agriculture, as well as host to the New Mexico Military Institute. It became the principal center of southeastern New Mexico, housing a population by 1950 of nearly 26,000, surrounded by irrigated fields, oil and gas wells, and major sheep and cattle ranches. The town itself hosted cotton gins, creameries, oil refineries, and meatpacking industries.

World War II transformed Roswell into a military center. In 1941 the Army established an airfield south of town; it received its first trainees in June 1942. Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) produced over 14,000 graduates of its schools for bombardiers, advanced twin-engine pilots and copilots, and flight engineers for four-engine bombers. Meanwhile, north of town the Army established a camp for German prisoners of war in 1943.³

The end of war in August 1945 required redeployment of military units from overseas to the United States, including Army

Air Forces units flying what were classed as very heavy bombers—B-29s. Not every runway could handle the landing pressures of B-29s or bigger models then in development. RAAF, however, was equipped for very heavies. It thereby acquired its most famous military tenants on 6 November 1945.⁴

The 509th Composite Group was organized at Wendover Field, Utah, in 1944, with one mission—train in modified B-29s to drop an atomic bomb. The men of the 509th and their commander, Col. Paul Tibbets, received front-page notice when they arrived in Roswell, along with his plane Enola Gay, which delivered The Bomb to Hiroshima.⁵

The 509th Composite Group became the 509th Bombardment Group, assigned in April 1946 to the Fifteenth Air Force and in November 1946 to the Eighth Air Force. Tibbets was replaced as commander by Col. William H. Blanchard in August 1946; he held the post for two years. The atomic warriors were active during their time at Roswell, beginning with staging for Operation CROSSROADS—the Bikini Atoll atom-bomb tests—in 1946. In January 1947 the 509th participated in the All-American Maneuvers, which involved simulated bombing of American cities, simulated fighter attacks, and mass formations of B-29s. But the military was winding down, and by the following month the 509th was one of the few flying units designated as combat-ready; in November 1947 it was expanded into the 509th Bombardment Wing, later assigned to the Strategic Air Command. Meanwhile, the 509th’s home base received a trophy for being the best airfield in the Eighth Air Force for the second quarter of 1947. Its complement, including the 509th, numbered 4,678 officers and men at the end of June.⁶

The 509th’s activities meant that the area saw much unusual activity in the skies. That was nothing new, as Roswell had grown accustomed to the unusual by 1947. There are insects in the region, for instance, whose springtime swarms take the form of perfect spheres traveling through the air. The military had many odd comings and goings during the war, and RAAF—in its later incarnations as Walker Air Force Base (AFB) and as a city-operated field after 1967—continued to host unusual aircraft, including the decidedly strange U-2 and SR-71, and military planes from foreign nations. As late as 1998 anyone interested could watch B-1 bombers doing touch-and-go landings at the Roswell Airport. The unusual, however, had begun long before. During the 1930s Robert H. Goddard had made Roswell the base for his experiments with liquid-fuel rockets. On 16 July 1945 the sun rose in the west when the first atomic bomb detonated a hundred miles away. And then, there were the balloons.⁷

Up, Up, and Away

New Mexicans saw many balloons in the air during World War II. So-called weather balloons—single pilot balloons carrying a radiosonde, a small transmitter with meteorological instruments—were launched often in a state where pilots trained for aerial warfare, and other officials required weather information for their projects. The Trinity atom-bomb test was preceded by the release of hundreds of weather balloons over several days, and at least one every fifteen minutes in the day preceding the explosion. After the war, the Weather Bureau inherited thousands of surplus balloons from the military, and continued the floating barrage on a daily basis.⁸ No matter how familiar New Mexicans were with balloons, however, they certainly had never seen anything like what Charlie Moore and his colleagues introduced to their skies in 1947.

Charles B. Moore was trained as a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, but soon turned his gaze upward. He was chief weather equipment officer for the Army Air Forces in the China-BurmaIndia theater during World War II, and thereafter joined the balloon program of the General Mills Corporation, then New York University‘s balloon program. He was the first person to pilot a plastic balloon, and set several other records in a long career. A longtime researcher at New Mexico Institute of Mining and

Technology in Socorro, by the time he retired in the 1980s he held several patents and was co-discoverer of water in the atmosphere of Venus.⁹

In November 1946, New York University formed a Constant Level Balloon Group, with Moore as engineer, to implement a contract with the Watson Laboratories of the Army Air Forces’ Air Materiel Command. The object was to develop balloons to fly up to 48 hours at high altitudes, carrying payloads of unspecified purpose. Only decades later did Moore and the others learn that their work was part of the Army’s Project MOGUL, aimed at detecting Soviet nuclear explosions from sound waves high in the atmosphere.¹⁰

Developing a balloon system meeting such requirements was easier said than done. The only balloons available were neoprene meteorological sounding balloons, which were not suitable because of their expansion and contraction due to altitude and solar heating, and a habit of bursting at altitude. The new material polyethelene offered greater promise, so the university ordered a quantity of balloons made of polyethelene, but they could not be delivered before June 1947. The Army pressured the group to show results, so Moore and his colleagues assembled trains of neoprene balloons—fourteen balloons in a train 330 feet long, towed to 30,000 feet by two lifting balloons, which cut loose at altitude. The group launched three of these assemblages in Pennsylvania in the spring of 1947, and all three failed.¹¹

Tinkering continued as the team awaited delivery of the polyethelene models; rigging techniques and Pennsylvania launch sites alike proved unsatisfactory. In June 1947 the NYU group traveled to Alamagordo to continue its work. The latest version of the experiment comprised 25 neoprene balloons rigged along 650 feet of nylon line, using four-inch aluminum tube rings as connectors. The whole gigantic assemblage was towed aloft by three large balloons that cut loose at 45,000 feet. In order to reduce the equipment carried to New Mexico, the group decided to use radar tracking in place of most instrumentation. The fourth NYU flight (the first in New Mexico) therefore carried several ML-307B/AP radar reflectors and a sonobuoy (a radio beeper), but no radiosonde.¹² The ML-307B/AP reflectors were developed during the war, and used until 1951; their function was to reflect radar signals to measure winds aloft. They were kite-like assemblies of tinfoil and paper mounted on sticks, reinforced abundantly with adhesive tape; unlike instrument packages, they were expendable. Those that the NYU group took to New Mexico had another odd attribute. They were wartime leftovers, manufactured in New York’s garment district by a company that used for tape what it had available. The tape, Moore said, had a distinctive pinkish purple pattern of an abstract flowerlike design printed on its backing.¹³

The NYU flights were as big as skyscrapers, and were destined to fly higher and farther than single balloons would, and return to earth in their own peculiar way. The greatest difficulty in perfecting them was in control of altitude, especially because solar heating and atmospheric pressure continually affected buoyancy. Moreover, since these were still made with neoprene, the bursting of balloons separately would make descent irregular. When enough had burst to bring the whole assembly to ground, those remaining would provide buoyancy and wind sail sufficient to drag the reflectors and broken balloons along the ground. The purpose at this point, however, was to work out rigging details and means of altitude control. Perfection, it was hoped, would follow receipt of polyethelene balloons.

The first launch in New Mexico was designated NYU No. 4, and it rose from Alamogordo on 4 June 1947. Although watched by theodolite, radar, and a B-17 chase plane, the balloon train disappeared near Capitan Peak and Arabela, 75 miles northeast of Alamagordo. The NYU group had not made arrangements to recover the equipment, so it carried no reward tags for finders; besides, the remains were usually shredded when found. The tracking failures caused the group leader