Of White Elephants And Silver Saucers ~ Ovni News

Thanks to Google, everybody & their mother remembered the 66th anniversary of Roswell. And even though I have my personal caveats with the so-called 'father of all UFO events,' which apparently is still considered so important it deserves to be marked in our calendars as aninternational festivity, I guess this week is as good as any to share with you some of my personal thoughts surrounding the alleged crash of... "SOMETHING" on the New Mexico desert in 1947. But before we begin, I should warn you: I do not profess to be an authority on this archaic case, although I'm sufficiently well versed in what one could call 'the Roswell lore' -Mac Brazel, Jesse Marcel, the Mogul controversy & all that jazz. I've also never had the chance to even set foot on Roswell, toured the site of the former Roswell Army Air Field, or spoken to any 1st, 2nd or 3rd-hand witness who have gone on record with stories about recovered craft and/or alien bodies. Bottomline, this is nothing more than a little thought experiment, the likes of which the late Mac Tonnies used to enjoy so much. With that in mind, let us proceed... Speaking of Tonnies, he used to say that the only book he bothered to read twice was Whitley Strieber's "Majestic", which I too happened to read & enjoy. Unlike"Communion", which is undoubtedly the publication Strieber is most famous for, Majestic is a work of fiction -though I'm sure skeptics would claim the same about ALL of his books- which was allegedly influenced by the testimony of a family relative of his, Col. Edward Strieber, who claimed to have had first-hand information about the delivery of the debris & bodies recovered on New Mexico, to the Wright Patterson Air Force base in Ohio -the legendary Hangar 18. I can't recall the year I managed to get a Spanish copy of Majestic, but looking back I suppose it was before I watched the TV movie starring Kyle MacLachlan & Charlie Sheen, or the OMNI magazine article of 1995, back when they launched an effort to try to explain the UFO phenomenon -the one that put both Kevin Randle & Don Schmidt in a very bad light, for failing to find one of the so-called 'missing nurses'. But I'm sure the book came into my hands after I watched theUnsolved Mysteries episode about Roswell, which was first aired in the United States in 1989, and arguably managed to propel the case into the attention of mainstream pop culture. But the thing that in my mind managed to make Majestic stand out from the rest of the books, articles & TV shows dealing with the subject, was that it was the 1st time I'd found the suggestion that the whole event was deliberately staged. In other words, that the so-called crash hadn't been accidental, but intentional. My guess is this was the same reason Mac Tonnies found the book so fascinating, and might have influenced him later to write his posthumous work "The Cryptoterrestrials." Later the concept that Roswell had been staged was retaken by Nick Redfern in "Final Events", and even by Annie Jacobsen's in her lengthy study about Area 51, which was ultimately hijacked by the preposterous proposition that the Roswell event had been a maniacal plan, orchestrated by Joseph Stalin & Dr. Mongele with the intention of terrorizing the American public. Thus, for the purposes of our little mental experiment let us consider the fact that in 1947 a craft of unknown origin crashed & was later recovered by the U.S. Army, and that the event was deliberately staged by an advanced non-human intelligence. What could be the purpose of such theatricality? Like many things in the hall of mirrors that is the UFO field, the way the question is answered ultimately reveals more about the psychology of the responder, than about the phenomenon itself. If you are convinced that aliens are benign, then you'll probably be inclined to imagine that these superior beings wanted to reveal themselves in a less non-threatening way by showing themselves as fallible, instead of god-like & invincible, while at the same time nudge us in the right direction with some key technological advances -where would we now be without "Velcro", right? On the other hand, if you are a strong believer that those pesky bug-eyed interlopers are up to no good, then perhaps you'd give more credence to the theories proposed by Nick on Final Events: namely, that the Grays are Satan's minions who used a bit of demonic alchemy to fabricate the debris & corpses scattered on the desert, in order to deceive mankind into thinking we were being visited by a bunch of careless interplanetary explorers -BTW it should be once again stressed that Nick doesn't "really" believe that aliens ARE demons in the literal sense of the word, but he knew that the story would make for good reading material, which it certainly does. "So", you may be asking yourself, "what about you, RPJ?". Well, personally while I can't discount the trickery nature of the UFO phenomenon, I not necessarily ascribe to it a particularly benign or malicious intentionality. Yes, maybe the Roswell event was staged, but perhaps -and this is what I propose as the basis of my mental experiment- THE ROSWELL EVENT WAS MEANT AS A SORT OF TEST. To understand what I'm saying here, let us look at some history: In the ancient kingdom of Siam -what is now modern Thailand- the kings had a rather ingenious method for dealing with rival nobles who could pose a threat to their rule: a gift of awhite elephant, which was seen both as a great honor & a personal curse. Because white elephants were highly regarded due to traditions associating them with the birth of the Buddha, the laws exempted them from any hard labor. Thus, the proud owner of one of these animals could not have any practical profit from it, outside of the social status brought by its ownership in Siamese society. And because color is of no consequence to a pachiderm's enormous appetite, the poor noble could easily fall into ruin, while still trying to keep a fake smile in front of the court. Hence 'white elephant' is still a popular expression to criticize needlessly extravagant projects whose cost far outweighs their use. With that in mind, let us now return to Roswell: Perhaps the high echelons of the U.S. government saw in the crashed saucer a golden opportunity to increase their technological knowledge & secure American superiority over their Russian rivals. But in order to do that, first they had to create a highly compartmentalized bureaucratic apparatus, capable of managing & controlling the flow of information outside any unauthorized prying eyes. Enter Majestic 12! If there's one constant truth in any system of rule, regardless of country or age, it's this: the more bureaucrats you add to your government, the less efficient it becomes. Thus, if every decision taken by Majestic 12 was hampered by committees & 'need-to-know' clearances, it's not far-fetched to presume they suffered a snail pace of advancement. You wouldn't be able to enrol the top scientists in the field to crack the alien egg, but only the has-beens or 2nd-rate contractors who could be easily discredited (even disposed of) if need be -Bob Lazar anyone? Then you have to factor in the SECURITY COSTS. On a few occasions Richard Dolan has discussed his sporadic rendezvous with so-called 'insiders' of the UFO back-engineering program, who have confided in him something that seems pretty reasonable: that most of the black budget devoted to reproduce the alien technology is spent on surveillance systems & security personnel, instead of actual analysis & experimentation. Who watches the Watchmen? MORE WATCHMEN, OF COURSE! But even if MJ-12 -or however you want to call the hypothetical group commissioned to unravel the secrets of alien tech- managed to find an efficient way to do their job free of red tape hassles, something Stan Friedman is fond of illustrating, when he imagines the face of despair in Columbus' face if queen Elizabeth had ordered him to study & duplicate a nuclear sub that slipped through some weird temporal vortex. Even if Columbus had asked Leonardo da Vinci for some help, they still wouldn't have been able to figure out just what powered the metallic leviathan! If you spend enough time in the UFO world, sooner or later you'll come across rumors & claims surrounding the alleged'Nazi saucers' developed by Victor Schauberger & the Horten bros. There's even a story that an alien saucer crashed in Germany in 1937, or if you prefer a more esoteric approach, that the Nazi saucer program was based on channeled information received by beautiful Aryan mediums, who got in contact with beings from Aldebaraan. But what all these outlandish stories need to acknowledge is one unavoidable fact: that in 1944 the 3rd Reich LOST THE WAR. So, if we were to give credence to the possibility that the Nazis obtained the know-how to build a flying saucer, then perhaps their foolish attempt to devote their dwindling resources to the construction of this Wunderwaffe -instead of you know, "fighting"the allies- became the last straw that broke the camel's back -cue the angry Hitler meme. And if I managed to upset the nationalistic pride of any hypothetical reader of this post, by seemingly comparing the 3rd Reich with the United States of America, be at ease for my point is not about condemning politics but about condemning SQUANDERED POTENTIAL: "if" it is true that the United States found the remnants of an alien vessel then instead of choosing the path of Trust & sharing the knowledge with the rest of the world, they ended up choosing the path of Fear & decided to keep it a secret for their own benefit. Now, 66 years later the U.S. space program is in a coma, its economy in shambles by which case the human race, still incapable of mastering their thoughts & inner passions, was clearly not ready of handling such a tremendous power. THE GIFT, TURNED INTO A CURSE. So there you have it: My own personal thought experiment about the Roswell crash. If you managed to keep with me this far, then congratulations: you're nowhere nearer of knowing what really happened on that fateful day of July 1947. This was a purely speculative experiment on my part, and nothing more. Nevertheless I do hope you learned the moral of the story: Be wary of accepting shiny gifts, be that a white elephant or a silver saucer -no matter how "majestic" they seem.