From: mcgrew@dropout.rutgers.edu (Charles Mcgrew)
Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors
Subject: Re: UFO EVIDENCE VS. Carl Sagan
Date: 16 Oct 92 00:56:53 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


	alopez-o@neumann.uwaterloo.ca (Alex Lopez-Ortiz) writes:
	According to Unsolved Mysteries, witnesses identify the
	materials as plastics. At the time they didn't know they were
	such, but when the plastic era arrived they recognized some of
	them.

... at least one witness did not say this -- Jesse Marcel,
Intelligence officer at Roswell.  He said 1978 (well into the 'age of
plastics', I think you'll agree) that the material was like nothing
he'd ever seen.  Marcel not only saw the material, he handled large
bunches of it, while piling it into his car (a 1942 Buick, BTW) to
take back to Roswell.  

    As I recall, plastics predate WWII (including in generally
available items, such as "barcalite"); plastics were a big part of the
DuPont exposition at the world's fair of 1939, for instance, which
received large play in newspapers, magazines, and newsreels.  They
didn't drop on the public from the sky (if you'll pardon the
expression) sometime after 1947, so postulating a "later plastics era"
just doesn't wash... (a quick check of our local library catalog shows
books on plastics at least as far back as 1933.)


	Furthermore, from the accounts the bodies could have been
	severely charred human carcases. And the "alien spacecrat" an
	experimental aircraft.

... I suggest, then, that you identify what experimental aircraft it
was.  Surely the US Air Force would not keep a failed experimental
aircraft secret for 45 years -- so could you please tell me which one
was it?  Why hasn't it been identified as such in that time?  (For
instance, the Northrop "flying wing" project, including all prototypes
and working versions, are accounted for elsewhere, including the
crashed ones -- so the Roswell crash ain't one of those.)  

	There was a military installation nearby, and what better than
	the desert to try new planes.

... except the military installation was not an aircraft test center.
The main test center was in California, which is quite a ways away
from Roswell, the home of a regular Air Force unit (509th Bomb Group--
the only nuclear bombing unit in the USAF at the time.)  (If you think
its not that far, I suggest you try and drive it.)  Contrary to the
the implication of your statement, there is a lot of open "desert"
land in the southwestern US -- there would be no reason to test out
experimental planes in areas of NM when the perfectly good other
testing center existed in CA.

   If you wish to handwave further, I suggest you look into the
history of the postwar aircraft testing programs (look up Muroc Dry
Lake, later named Edwards Air Force Base -- its where the "flying
wings" were developed, the "X" series, etc.)  White Sands Missile
Range was relatively close to the crash site, but as far as I can find
the only missiles being tested at that time were V-2's, and they're
accounted for (the nearest launch attempt to the Roswell crash, for
instance, was July 3d, but never left the pad due to a fuel accident.
There were a total of 47 US V-2 launches, up through 1952, by the way.
After a rocket left the test range in May 1947 (headed for Mexico, in
fact it crashed a half-mile south of Juarez, Mexico), they were all
fitted with self-destruct mechanisms, so they wouldn't leave the test
range; and Roswell is over 100 miles from White Sands; the actual
crash site nearer to Corona than Roswell, and so even further from
White Sands.)

   Further, if the crashed object was an experimental US aircraft, why
collect the pieces and send parts of them to Fort Worth TX, Wright
Field OH, and Los Alamos NM?  Wouldn't the crash be studied in place
(the area could simply be cordoned off) to determine what went wrong,
and then just taken back to wherever it was being worked on?  (If it
was a crashed V-2, wouldn't they just take it back to White Sands?)

   Why, if it was an experimental aircraft, would the military issue
not one but two cover stories (the "Flying Saucer" story, July 8th,
and then the "Balloon" story later the same day)?  Why wouldn't they
just say it was an experimental aircraft, and leave it at that?  (No
details, just "an experimental, classified aircraft crashed" would
have been enough.)  Why all this effort (moving the stuff to various
bases far away, hastily clearing the crash site, the elaborate press
conference, telling the cleanup crew to forget what they had seen and
done, etc.)?  Why would the military (in the person of a Captain
Armstrong) confiscate -- *two years* later -- bits of the craft Bill
Brazel had found after the cleanup?

Charles

PS - sources: "UFO Crash at Roswell", by Randl and Schmitt, "The
Roswell Report", edited by George Eberhart, "Winged Wonders" by E.T.
Wolldridge, "The Wing will Fly" - documentary recently shown on the
Discovery Channel, "The Rocket Pilots" - documentary by NBC News,
recently shown on DC, an episode of (and the book of) "Connections",
by James Burke, recently shown on The Learning Channel.