Does it start with Kenneth Arnold, and Ray Palmer? I suspect it starts with H. G. Wells, and Orson Welles. The latter's radio production of the former's War of the Worlds genuinely shook up the public -- War of the Worlds was the original Independence Day, the prototypical alien invasion story -- and Jesse Marcel was of the generation that was shaken by Wells and Welles...And Marcel grew up to become a Major at an Air Force base in Roswell, New Mexico...

But before there was Marcel in that debris field, in Roswell, there was Kenneth Arnold flying over the Cascades. Not so very long before the Roswell incident, Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen a fleet of strange, otherworldly craft, sort of saucerlike (actually more like giant flying horseshoe crabs, really, from his more detailed descriptions), as he flew his small plane through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest...

The newspapers picked up the Arnold story, and called the objects he'd seen Flying Saucers. Some skeptics think he saw an optical illusion, some think he saw boloid meteors -- which can fragment and, for a time, fly along more or less horizontally. And his imagination, they suggest, supplied the rest.

But Arnold, it should be noted, was an acquaintance of one Ray Palmer, the guy who created the Shaver Mysteries, one of the world's most elaborate journalistic hoaxes; and Palmer was the recipient of mysterious messages about strange beings from another world hidden within our hollow Earth...

Now it's true that Kenneth Arnold claimed to have met Palmer only after his famous UFO sighting. And it's true that Arnold had a rep as a Really Straight and Reputable Guy; a former Eagle Scout. But both this claim and this view of Arnold came...from Arnold. (UFO researchers rarely dig very deeply - as for example with the, shall we say "questionable", backgrounds of Travis Walton or Ed Walters and Derrel Sims...)

And just coincidentally, not long after Palmer had communicated with someone about strange beings from beneath the Earth, Kenneth Arnold -- later, to be Palmer's collaborator -- saw strange beings flying through the sky. Are hoaxes infectious?

Whatever Arnold saw, the media picked up on the story, and splashed it across the papers, seeding the soil of a public imagination already fertilized by the War of the Worlds and fallacious reports of "canals" sighted on Mars.

Meanwhile, military intelligence was involved in a top secret project code-named "Mogul". New, high-tech (for the time) spying devices were being hoisted into the upper atmosphere on balsa wood structures attached to balloons; balloons very like weather balloons, but somewhat distinct. The balloons were made -- some say -- of a shiny metallic material, like mylar. The balsa wood was covered, perhaps to protect it from moisture, by a household shelf-covering material or decorative tape, decorated with odd little abstract flower-petal designs -- highly stylized, the flowers were almost like some kind of hieroglyph, if you sort of squinted. The stuff had been handy when they were putting the framework for the listening devices together. And this is exactly the description of the debris given by one of the Brazels -- a lady, in fact -- from the ranch where the debris field was.

The Cold War had already gotten underway; we were paranoid of the Soviets and they were paranoid of us. We chewed our nails and wondered: How much atomic weaponry did they have? How much of a threat were they? How could we find out? Maybe -- via Project Mogul.

But because the Russians were so paranoid, and because we were so paranoid, Project Mogul was Top Secret. Theoretically, if the Soviets knew we were spying on them -- or trying to spy on them, even from a distance -- the cold war could turn hot.

It was imperative that Mogul be kept secret.

When a Mogul balloon-train crashed on the ranch of a fellow named Brazel, scattering shiny, odd-looking debris all over the place - and perhaps metallic bits of a new kind of spy technology -- the lid had to be clamped down fast. A cover story was needed...

Before the cover could be properly organized, a frustrated, somewhat over imaginative would-be hero named Jessie Marcel (that is how some of the evaluations of Marcel describe him), apparently not briefed on the highly secret Mogul project (almost no one was briefed on it), went out to the Brazel ranch to see what had crashed there. He vividly remembered the stories from the newspaper, of not long before. What was that guy's name?

Kenneth Arnold! The "Flying Saucers"! The whole subject, probably, had fascinated Marcel. And at the time pulp science fiction magazines, with aliens bug-eyeing at everyone from their lurid covers, could be found in every drugstore...including those in Roswell, New Mexico. Perhaps Marcel was a fan of Amazing Stories.

He was, anyway, primed to identify the strange, shiny fragments on the debris field as something from one of Arnold's Flying Saucers...the beginning of a War of the Worlds: and perhaps Marcel's opportunity to be a kind of war hero, at last.

He announced the find of a crashed flying disc to the local papers. The local cops called the FBI who didn't know, yet, about the Mogul crash - and likely the FBI didn't know about Mogul at all. So the FBI was interested in this "crashed disk"...

Marcel brought some of the shiny new balloon material home to show his son. He also brought small pieces of balsa wood, from the framework, with the covering material on it -- the odd material with the abstract flower print. Marcel told his young son he believed this was a piece of one of those flying disks that Arnold had seen. A craft from outer space!

His son was not about to question his father, who was, in his eyes, always a hero. It was more fun to think the stuff was from outer space than to wonder why the little stick things were so much like balsa wood...and that print did look like some sort of otherworldly writing...If you squinted.

Marcel was hauled before the military authorities at the base and Those Who Knew Better informed him he had mis-identified a weather balloon. Weather Balloon? Nonsense! He knew what a weather balloon looked like. Why would a weather balloon have strange fragments of machinery attached, and this odd material...

They didn't want to answer that question. They didn't want to talk about Project Mogul with a guy who had run to the newspapers with this flying disk story.

Orders were orders and, with an ill grace, Marcel went along with the weather balloon story. Since they never told him about Mogul, he denounced the weather balloon story years later. It was, after all, a lie.

And his son, decades later, remembered his Dad bringing home the strange fragments and telling him they'd come from a crashed flying disk...

Back in late '47, Roswell was still abuzz with the front page news about the crashed disk. First that Arnold thing -- now this! Right in our own backyard! Just like that War of the Worlds story only now for real! Makes a forgotten little desert town feel special...

Every small town has tall-tale tellers and they'll try to outdo one another. One fella thought he'd seen something strange that same night -- another fella, jealous of the attention the first one was getting, topped the first one's story. He'd seen the creatures themselves!

And so it went, the story getting a life of its own, told and retold and revised till some of the tale-tellers believed it themselves.

And the tale of crashed spacecraft was only underscored when mysterious "G-Men" really did start visiting some of the locals, warning them not to talk about anything they might have seen concerning that "crashed saucer" or weather balloon or whatever it was.

The "G-Men" were genuinely associated with Military Intelligence, and from their point of view they were trying to cover up a project so sensitive it could, maybe, lead to an atomic war with the Russians. So they had to make sure the story died...Because if people probed around Roswell too much, the real story will come out: Project Mogul. And there were known to be Soviet agents in New Mexico, since there was atomic testing and other secret projects carried out in the southwest. So yes, it was necessary to keep people away from the debris field, and to haul everything away to another base.

Roswell researchers, years later, pointed out that those who had to clean up the "debris field" were required to take secrecy oaths. Why? Secrecy Oaths for a weather balloon? Unlikely.

But for the remnants of the highly classified Project Mogul, during the uncertain days of the early Cold War...The secrecy oath made sense.

And the secrecy around Mogul was so intense that our original Men in Black, the unnamed G-Men, threatened and cajoled and intimidated people in Roswell - just as that nice, truly sincere lady who is the daughter of a judge involved has said, in television interviews - and they were not specific about what it was they wanted suppressed. Just anything to do with that mess on Brazel's ranch: Don't talk about it!

And of course this sinister activity on the part of mysterious G-Men had the effect of underscoring the whole alien-invasion tale...

Why, people wondered, were the feds being so secretive, after all, if that thing had been just a weather balloon? So the original story about it being an alien spacecraft must have been true! Or so went the local reasoning.

Not too unreasonable a supposition for credulous people -- people who'd never heard of project Mogul.

And some of those people were probably local military men, even officers, who were kept in the dark about Mogul. It was likely to be a need-to-know situation. So of course scuttlebutt abounded, rumors right there on the base that a saucer had crashed, that aliens had been seen. Military men love rumors as much as the next guy. Wild gossip and rumors make a dull routine less dull.

And maybe it had occured to someone in Military Intelligence that the Flying Saucer story, however ludicrous, was better than the truth: Project Mogul. The Soviets would then shrug that whole Roswell UFO tale off as hysteria, fallout from the Kenneth Arnold sighting. So, yes, let the myth grow, maybe even encourage it a little. Perhaps spreading stories of little men seen beside crashed saucers would help: It was a smokescreen in itself. The men who'd launched Mogul now had the weather balloon story and the flying saucer story both to protect them. They were covered.

The story died down -- though sometimes, in the local bars, it was whispered about and embellished.

Nowadays, some investigators feel that Mogul can't explain the crash because the alleged dates of Mogul launches don't properly coincide with the crash. But records of Mogul launches aren't necessarily airtight-correct, or complete -- especially when we're talking about fifty year old military intelligence records. And the vagaries of weather and the upper airs could explain other discrepancies. What, after all, is more likely -- a flying saucer from another star system, crashed in New Mexico, or a slight confusion about the dates of launch for Mogul's balloon train?

Decades after the crash, Mogul was still Top Secret, hence still not talked about, mostly because no one had bothered to declassify it....Barney and Betty Hill published a best selling book about their Interrupted Journey, their supposed abduction by aliens.

A Roswell book or two was published. Forgotten old folks in Roswell suddenly felt important. Here was attention, here were interviewers, maybe a chance for some money down the line...And local visionaries likely foresaw the touristry possibilities -- which have since come to fruition.

The Interrupted Journey was made into a TV movie. Barney and Betty, demonstrably, were making money off this sort of thing. Travis Walton and his cronies saw the TV movie, they wanted to make money too. And Travis wanted to win that National Enquirer reward for best UFO story. (I recently saw Walton on TV -- he said "I took two lie detector tests and passed both of them." They should have given him one when he said that: he was lying, in that television interview because in fact he failed one lie detector test and the other was inconclusive.) Walton sold his story to Hollywood for Fire in the Sky. Then there was Whitley Streiber. Sometimes there's money in this UFO stuff -- though not as much as the UFO Hopeful hope there'll be.

Roswell residents had noted the books about Roswell -- starting, as I recall, about 1980 - and even now they take note of the Walton and Streiber successes. If people like Walton can tell bullshit stories and get paid for it -- why not us? And so Glenn Dennis sticks to his story, despite having been shown its numerous contradictions and the demonstrably wrong information in it.

And so it goes on, in Roswell...And will, as long as there are tourists to be amused, and TV crews to be fed and producers to bring in more tourists and TV crews...

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