The truth is out there, but is it worth the trip?

If you hear a tremendous thud tonight around 8, don’t be overly alarmed. It’s just the career of Bryant Gumbel making a rather pointless landing on Planet Geraldo, a strange place where dubious investigative projects are king, and from which few former newsmen have ever returned with their credibility intact.

Gumbel, the longtime host of NBC’s “Today” franchise and more recently “The Morning Show” on CBS, is at the helm of a two-hour Sci Fi Channel special, “The Roswell Crash: Startling New Evidence.” Like Geraldo Rivera’s unforgettable 1986 foray into Al Capone’s vault, tonight’s program purports to blow the lid off the 1947 crash of something or other in the New Mexico desert.

Why now? Well, after more than half a century of government-sworn silence by military personnel, during which time local townspeople were allegedly threatened with prison or worse if they told what they knew, lips are loosening. One resident reveals that he actually saw “an object” at the crash site. “It was gray,” he explains. “But a weird gray.”

As earth-shattering as that and other revelations tonight might be, the reason for the show’s timing appears to lie more in the realm of TV programming than scientific discovery. The Sci Fi Channel follows the “Roswell” special with more UFO fodder in “Abduction Diaries” at 10 p.m., and both shows are an attempt to generate buzz for the channel’s Dec. 2 launch of “Steven Spielberg’s Taken,” a miniseries the cable channel is counting on to churn up some out-of-this-world ratings.

But “The Roswell Crash” gets the publicity push off to a weak start despite the Sci Fi Channel’s claims about “smoking gun” evidence revealed in the final 20 minutes. These folks are shooting blanks.