The Governer of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, has called for a reopening of the Roswell UFO investigation.

San Francisco Chronicle Article

__________________
0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

And we need to be investigating this because..... #-o

Why do I get the feeling the Sci-Fi channel will show up...

Maybe they'll do it right and find that it was not a UFO. There's a chance, right?





Ah, nuts!

__________________
Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

they will, but don't bet on the fervent believers actually being convinced.

this is Bad Publicity, this is...

this remark suggests the US government hasn't provided full disclosure before (which AFAIK they did). it's highly suggestive and frankly not a bit silly from someone who should know better. [-X

__________________
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? -- Groucho Marx

I saw a show, on Discovery Channel I think, where they dug up the supposed area of the crash. One guess about what they found.

__________________
You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

Dirt? Rocks? Sand? Clay?

__________________
Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Sorry but the attitudes shown here are just as bad as those shown by blind believers.

Any investigation which sets out to "prove" or "disprove" anything is biased. Conduct the investigation period.

Just like the Russian scientists setting out to prove an alien hypothesis in the Tunguska thread, ridiculing the investigation a priori is just as bad.

__________________
______________________________________________
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

I disagree. The Roswell ET Hypothesis deserves nothing but ridicule. For close to 25 years, the proponents have deliberately ignored evidence that directly refute their claims while the evidence they have presented in favor of the crash theory had been riddled with bad invesigative techniques, absolute trust in witnessess that were spinning falsehoods, and misleading and outright false statements made in favor of their pet theories, and forged documents. Why then in the face of all this atrocious "investigation" should we believe that there is still to learn about what happend in 1947 concerning this incident?

[quote="Waarthog"][quote="gzhpcu"]Sorry but the attitudes shown here are just as bad as those shown by blind believers.We agree to disagree. The air force explanation is unsatisfactory, the investigators have not been professional. We need an investigation (and not by the air force) to resolve the issue once and for all.

__________________
______________________________________________
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

Who should conduct an investigation whose negative outcome "was not an UFO" would be accepted by the "was an UFO" community?

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

The New Mexico government of course! :wink:

Should the government sponsor an in-depth study into whether or not the Earth is actually flat as is claimed by some? After all, there hasn't been one done, we're only taking NASA's word for it today. And all those people claiming it was round centuries ago, they didn't have computers then so how could they do such calculations!?

And as has been pointed out, would the 'yes there was a crash' camp ever believe any study that said no? Or would they claim it was rigged and yammer for another?

Where does it end?

And as for the gov'ner calling for it, my spidysense says election year politics.

I think this is a case of a very polarized debate.

On the one hand you have the air force changing it's story from UFO->Weather Balloon->nuclear detonation detector.

On the other hand you have the true believers who stuck with the first version of the story and ran with it.

I would love it to be a downed ET. However I would also love to go out with Mila Jovovich. Both are possible but very unlikey.

Speaking as a Brit I do not know the in's and outs of the American Political system. But here normaly investigations can be carried out by a panal of elected reprisentatives from a mixture of parties to ensure no political bias.

It's not helpfull to dismiss either side in a debate like this as "Evil Goverment" or "Woo Woo's". I know these words have not been used in this thread but this is the attitude that these debates often throw up.

__________________
http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...630/prj:6/.png

Extremely unlikely - since I want to go out with Mila Jovovich as well.

What I find amazing is that Roswell is now considered one of the major UFO incidents by the believers. But back in the 70's, when I was in my UFO phase, it was hardly even mentioned.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Like calls for "investigating" UFOs in general, most calls for an investigation of Roswell are not well thought out. Sounds good but how can an "independent" investigation of Roswell be conducted? Obviously, those that buy into this nonsense wouldn't believe the government/military anyway and it's the government/military that holds the key to the debris. Isn't it sort of convenient that even though some civilians claim to have possessed pieces of this "alien" debris, it all seems to have been confiscated? Not one person kept a little memento? There goes your "evidence" ladies and gentlemen. This seems to be a constant theme in ufology .. the "proof" goes poof. So, what's left? More interviews with Roswell "eyewitnesses" that are still alive or their younger relatives? That's already been done down through the years and, like Kecksburg here in Pennsylvania, has produced a variety of conflicting claims.

One of the things a lot of people overlook regarding Roswell is the perfectly reasonable explanation as to why the military changed their story a couple times and, while the alien advocates would point to this as "proof" something was so strange the military fumbled the ball several times, it overlooks another option, the cold war mindset of the late '40s. We had the bomb, the Soviets didn't but were working on one. Lacking today's surveillance tools, Project Mogul was designed to detect Soviet nuclear detonations and it shouldn't have to be spelled out why the US government/military would rather have people think the thing was a crashed disc than what it really was. I think their disc-weather balloon dance was meant to throw snoops (whether domestic or Soviet) off the trail and it worked. In fact it worked so well that when they finally came clean about Project Mogul years later some people still don't believe! The military, despite what the UFO proponents claim, aren't concerned about "flying saucers" per se and could care less if some members of the population believe that aliens cruise our skies (remember the Phoenix Lights?) In fact, this actually works in their favor when their black project craft are spotted.

Fair enough.

What portions do you find unsatisfactory?

Though the ufo stuff must be also some annoyance to the military, I think basically they are quite happy with it. They could do all kinds of interesting experiments with new aircraft etc and people were alwyas happy with the ufo explanation and didn't ask further what was going on. If I would have to keep flight tests secret, I would do them in an area where people already reported ufos.

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

I think this is more an evolution based on the data at hand. The AF never said they had a flying saucer, that was attributed to them by the Roswell newspaper. The AF called it a "flying disc" the terminology of which came from Mac Brazel who found the debris on his ranch. At the time flying disc did not equate to flying saucer.

Not quite though they did run amok with it. This too evolved due to changing data. First was the debris found by Brazel at the ranch, which evolved over time to a full on crashed ship with bodies some 40-100 (depending on who tells the tale) miles away.

As would I but can't see it from the data.

Too skinny

Its supposed to happen that way here too but it doesn't always work that way. In this case it would be irrelevant as all points of the political compass are represented by both sides.

When you have examined the data presented by all sides and find that the Crash Proponents case is far more lacking than the one presented by the Air Force, what about that is dismissal?

You aren't too far from wrong. The CIA was rumored to have covered some flights of the U2 and SR-71 with false UFO sightings, or if UFO's were sighted along the flightpaths of these aircraft during the flights, nothign was said to show it was only airplanes. So the aliens :roll: got to be the patsies for our aerial intelligence gathering.

First the airforce right after the incident occured, called it a weather ballon.

In 1994, the airforce changed their story and said it was not a weather ballon, it was a top secret Mogul ballon.

Three years later, the airforce issued an additional "Case Closed" report on the stories of bodies being recovered. It stated that the reports of bodies were nothing more than highly distorted memories of "crash dummies" used in ejection tests carried out in New Mexico during the 1950's. (no dummies were yet used in 1947)

__________________
______________________________________________
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

Makes you wonder what they have flying now. This is my real interest in ufo siteings. Basicly I too think that they are new aircraft.

As a cover story its brilliant. It writes itself and you don't need to employ anyone to start rumours because people see bright lights in the sky they don't think "oh thats the new stealth fighter" They think "Oh my god it's aliens!"

__________________
http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...630/prj:6/.png

What is unsatisfactory about those things? Wasn't Mogul a secret project designed to help us keep an eye on the Russians? As for the crash test dummies, there weren't reports of bodies until after 1950 I believe, so those tests could have inudced the belief in alien body recovery. It seems like normal urban legend building could account for a lot of the "theories" about Roswell.

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

When was Mogul declassified? What's wrong when a cover story is admitted after the real event is declassified?

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Saying "it could have induced the belief" is an assumption. If you are biased against an investigation you will make assumptions. I say investigate it without either a pro or con bias.

__________________
______________________________________________
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

Mogul, itself, was declassified within days after Roswell when the Pentagon conducted a demonstration for the press at White Sands. A photo of a Mogul array was even published in the Alamogordo paper July10, 1947.

edited for typo

__________________
______________________________________________
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.

I don't think it is an assumption. If I would have said, "The crash test dummies are the only possible cause of the reports of alien bodies," that would be an assumption. What I said could be interpreted as, "The crash test dummies cannot be ruled out as a cause for the reports if the reports can be shwn to have started appearing after 1950 (or whenever the test dummies started being used)." Unless you want to lump "it could be aliens" into the category of assumptions and if so, all possibilities become assumptions and we might as well stop investigating anything.

I do not see a need for the investigation. If that makes me biased against, so be it. It seems to me, with admitedly superficial investigation, that the data fits the claims already. Here is what I predict will happen. The investigation will conclude that there is no evidence to suggest alien craft or bodies. This will not satisfy those who think aliens landed at Roswell. So in another 10 years, we will have another investigation that will conclude that there is no evidence to support the claims of alien landings; wash, rinse, repeat as deisred.

Now, if someone wants to investigate something, I say, go for it. When someone wants other people to pay for the investigation of something that has already been investigated solely becau6se the previous investigation's result do not match up with their beliefs and assumptions of what the results should have been... I think that is not such a good idea. I wonder, how much is this investigation going to cost? What is the likelihood that, even if aliens did actually crash in Roswell that the investigation will dicover that? Doesn't New Mexico have anything more pressing to allocate resources to?

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

It has the same effect as an assumption, since you dismiss the necessity of an investigation since you think it highly probable that the test dummies issue covers the question. I am making absolutely no assumptions, pro or con. Find it dangerous to do so.

You see no need for an investigation. Fine, but others, such as I do. I make no predictions as to the outcome. Wait much longer and all alleged witnesses will be dead.


When a congressman asked the General Accounting Office for declassified Roswell airforce base documents, their report stated:

__________________
______________________________________________
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”
Chinese proverb
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - and then success is sure." - Mark Twain.