I find the mentality of the UFO nuts quite strange. Just last night, there was a nother psuedo-dcumentary about the “non-event” in Roswell, NM (in 1949?). There was another UFO “expert” solemnly talking about a mysterious “colonel X” who “saw” the aliens corpse, or some such rubbish. My question: is there so much money in this that the story stays alive? As far as I can see, some weather ballons carrying some electronic equipment landed near a highway near Roswell, NM. The remains were found to be quite ordinary stuff. End of story.
Now, 50+ years later, we are subjected to endless amounts of crap about alien spacecraft, bodies, cover up, and mysterious air force people who never seem to exist.
Is this like the kennedy assasination, generating a good living for hordes of conspiracists?
I know what you mean, when you try and refute it, they come back with ‘well, erm, 60% of Americans believe we are not alone, and there are Aliens’ blind to the fact that this doesn’t back up their claim.
Dumbasses.
It’s much more exciting than that. The balloons were carrying not weather equipment, but Top Secret equipment to detect nuclear detonations from far away. The weather balloon bit was a cover story. And yes, like the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, there are enough people who are not very knowledgeable about the subject and continue to believe it might be true.
That’s the linchpin. The government WAS covering up information about the Roswell wreckage… people just came to the wrong conclusion about what they were covering up.
And, now, after years of saying “weather balloon” when there were facts that didn’t match “weather balloon”*, the government doesn’t quite have the credibility to persuade people committed to the alien story.
We see this play out fairly commonly. Somebody says, “This is the whole story.” Then later, “Well here is some more information, but now you have the whole story.” And later more information and more affirmation that the whole story has been told. It is a human reaction to think “If they were covering up before, they must still be covering up now.”
*For example, the quick response, ranking officials and stiff security at the cleanup of the “weather balloon”. Since all these are consistent with a spy balloon, I’ll believe that before I believe in little green men, but some folks…
What is easier and more “fun” to beleive that there are Aliens or that you have to think things out and be skeptic ? 
Medieval europeans beleived in gnomes and elves... people now beleive in Aliens...Of course, then you have to ask them, “How many of that 60% truly believe that aliens have arrived here, and how many simply believe there are likely other life forms on other planets.” I’m part of the group that believes it’s very likely we aren’t the only planet with life forms, even intelligent life forms, but I am willing to concede that our planet might have just been a statistical fluke. I just don’t think aliens bothered to travel millions of light years only to crash to earth.
Hey man, they can show you the actual hill where the stuff landed! It’s not like it was made up, or something, you can see the hill yourself, and it costs only six ninety five.
Tris
“Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.” ~ Anonymous ~
Its like 1920s Death Rays—
Once it gets started, NOTHING can stop it.
Beware…
Get Ready…
There’s another one coming…
And sooner than you think…
If only the world was like these boards…with a moderator , to close down the stupidity before it gets too widespread
In the absence of light, darkness prevails. Something crashed, we don’t know what. I know the government has floated a couple of plausible stories over the years, but I don’t believe them any more than the UFO version. To those inclined to believe in UFOs, this is a perfect example of what they believe in. Why they all seem to believe that aliens can travel the stars but not dodge large, slow moving planets is beyond me, but it seems to be a recurring theme.
The core problem is that the incident has taken on a mythological stature. In order to dispel the UFO theory, human nature is going to require something at least as grandiose. In all likelihood, it was nothing of any great importance. So you can’t really interject the truth, because it just won’t satisfy people. Even if you told everyone exactly what happened, it would just be dismissed.
Go to a Sasquatch hunt and tell them it’s a myth. Tell the religious kooks that they aren’t really seeing the Virgin Mary in the soap residue on those windows. It doesn’t matter that it’s the truth, it wouldn’t even matter if you could prove it. It’s not what they want to hear.
Well, to be fair, we know no technology is perfect. Our airplanes and spaceships sometimes crash, so why wouldn’t theirs?
Yeah, but then I’ve got to drive something like 4 hours just to go to Roswell. Man, if I’m gonna get that far south out of Albuquerque, I’m gonna go to Alamogordo and spend some time at White Sands and maybe see a museum that actually has something to do with real world space travel. (I got dragged to the UFO museum on the way back from a family trip to Carlsbad and hated every minute of it.) Heck, for that amount of time I could practically be in Mexico.
What can I say? I’m starting to get sick of the responses to my being from Albuquerque all being along the lines of “Wow, you speak English so well”, any reference to Looney Tunes, “So, if I were to go there, can I drink the water?”, and “Ever been to Roswell?” I’m especially sick of hearing about Roswell.
My response to the OP: People are idiots.
The thing about the Roswell stories, at least with the Kennedy Assasination, there are tons of photographs, the Zapruder film, etc. Even some of the people are still alive!
But with Roswell, you have a few yellowing newspaper clippings, and mysterious people who never seem to be found! That is what is so fascinating to me, that such a poorly described event, with almost NO surviving evidenc, can be spun into a huge myth. I guess the Air Force DID (unintentionally) feed this mythos, when they threw up their hands and just stopped investigating UFOs back in the 1970’s.By the way, did the weather-ballon launched microphones actually detect the Soviet atomic bomb blasts?
ralph124c there are a lot of reasons that people believe in UFO’s. That doesn’t necessarily make them all nuts.
First and in no certain order: is the fact that governments have repeatedly lied to the public about things throughout man’s history. The people are suspicious of the spin doctors.
There have been reports of “visitors” or "supernatural beings throughout the millenia.
There are just too many reports for some people to believe them all to be false, natural phenomenon, or simple mistakes. “The numbers don’t lie, kinda approach.” My old logic prof used to say that out of the millions of sightings…suppose all but one was false. It only takes one to make it true. This idea is hard to shake. Especially when combined with the previous reasons I’ve proposed.
Then you have testimony from supposed credible witnesses. The “Why would they lie?” excuse.
OF course there are actual unexplained sightings which only gives people more “proof”.
Now with the video technology that is available to the general population, there are numerous videos out there that people see as real evidence. Whether these videos are debunked or not is irrelevent with the levels of mistrust found in todays society.
Add to that, the fact that people in general want to believe that there is some mystery left in the world.
There are still tons of reasons why…
But let’s not forget this one. A significant percentage of the general population suffer from some type of mental disorder. Some figures (my DSMIV for one) claim as many as 1% of the pop. are Sx.
Do the math. :eek:
It’s actually a wonder there’s not more folks at Roswell than there are.
BTW These damned sci-fi movies don’t help either. They condition people to see things that they want to see. Similar to the masses of religious zealots seeing the Madonna. Now I’m not gonna say what if anything some of these people see or don’t see. That’s not my place or business. I’m only providing some answers in response to your OP. Just a little food for thought. 
Oh, I almost forgot…the internet.
Because aliens never die.
No, they didn’t. Mogul was reviewed in December 1948, with the conclusion that, while the physics was technically sound, the method was impractical. The project was thus cancelled. Meanwhile, the first Soviet test wasn’t until August 1949 and the US detected them by flying filters in aircraft, then looking at the isotopes in the samples.
Mogul did apparently hear a couple of the US tests in the Pacific, in the course of the testing to see whether the technique would work.
Ah, they’re 1940s-style “Death Crashes.”
d&r
One reasons stories like this persist is that critical thinking has no crushing rejoinder to the view that “Well, you can’t prove me wrong”.
As long as one is expect to disprove goofiness, as opposed to the conspiracy theorists being required to prove allegations through use of fact, claims about Roswell, political machinations, plots to suppress cancer cures etc. will survive.
Face it, UFOlogy is a religion, with it’s own holy sites (Roswell), relics (Alien Autoposy), dogma (the evil government is lying), texts (walk into any bookstore), and followers. You can’t possibly argue with them on any rational basis, nor will they look critically at any element of their faith, because it would shake their entire worldview.
And, before anyone flames me, it is perfectly possible for people to “belive in” UFOs without buying into the whole mythology, but for all too many of these people, it is as integral to their worldview as any fundamentalist.