We See What We Believe We See

The title of the Air Force’s publication, “The Roswell Incident: Case Closed,” reflects the agency’s naivete about the power of belief systems. “Case Reopened” is how UFOlogists will use the new 231-page report. The report, among other things, attributes eyewitness memories of alien bodies to crash dummies used from 1954 to 1959 to test high-altitude pilot bailouts. But the so-called Roswell Incident--attributed by the Air Force in a 1994 report to a crashed surveillance balloon that was part of a project to monitor Soviet upper-atmosphere nuclear testing--occurred years earlier, in 1947. To muddy the waters further, the initial report was that the Air Force had recovered a “flying saucer,” followed by yet another deceptive explanation that it was actually a weather balloon. Now we are to believe that these eyewitnesses have confused memories of dates nearly a decade apart. Is this plausible?

Yes, it is. The Roswell Incident itself is a confused jumble of anecdotes, stories and “eyewitnesses” who actually never saw anything but know someone who knows someone who saw something. Fifty years is a long time and memories are notoriously unreliable. Does that eyewitness really remember seeing a body in 1947 that looks like an alien, or does he remember 50 years later a crash dummy from 1954 conflated with the memories of books, films and television shows about aliens? Who can tell at this point? The problem is that memory, however it works, does not work like a video. You cannot rewind, push the play button and watch your memories unfold. Our memories are constantly edited, deleted, added to and combined with other memories and experiences. Add an emotional component to the experience and there is no telling what really happened.

Example: In 1983 I was abducted by aliens. It was late at night and I was traveling along a lonely rural highway when a large craft with bright lights hovered alongside me and forced me to stop. Alien creatures got out and cajoled me into their vehicle. I do not remember what happened inside, but when I found myself traveling back down the road I had lost 90 minutes of time.

In reality, I was competing in the 3,000-mile, nonstop, transcontinental bicycle Race Across America. I had ridden 1,200 miles and 83 straight hours without sleep. I was falling asleep on the bike so my support crew stopped me and forced me into the motorhome (with bright lights) for a 90-minute sleep break. I was hallucinating that my support crew members were aliens who looked, dressed and spoke just like my crew members. I knew they were aliens because they had stiff little fingers. The social context of this hallucination was the 1960s television program “The Invaders” in which the aliens looked exactly like humans with the exception of a stiff little finger. I had not thought about that program for nearly 20 years, but for some reason that memory was incorporated into that experience.

Now consider the cultural context of Roswell. By the late 1940s and into the 1950s and ‘60s, the Cold War, the rise of science fictions as a legitimate literary genre, films and television programs about space, aliens and UFOs, the scientific exploration of the solar system and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence were all underway. Given these conditions, it is not surprising that the Air Force was sensitive about disclosing details on this top-secret balloon, giving rise to decades of speculation by UFO believers with a conspiratorial bent. Nor is it surprising that people are seeing UFOs and aliens. We see what we are conditioned to see. In the 15th and 16th centuries, at the height of the European witch craze and demon panic, people saw flying witches and told of being abducted and molested by demons in their beds at night. In the 19th century--about the time that the spiritualism movement took off in England and America--many people reported encounters with ghosts and spirits. In the 1890s, a boon of airship sightings occurred about the time that people were experimenting with gliders and balloons. “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it” is an appropriate twist on an old aphorism.

So, we may ask, what is more likely: that demons, spirits, ghosts and aliens have been and continue to appear to humans, or that humans are experiencing fantasies, misinterpreting natural phenomena and misremembering experiences in the social context of the age and culture? I think it can reasonably be argued that such experiences represent a very earthly phenomenon with a perfectly natural explanation. To me, the fact that humans have such experiences and can be so influenced by culture is at least as fascinating and mysterious as the possibility of aliens landing on Earth. And that is the true meaning of the Roswell Incident.