Roswell + People + Comon Sense = Stupidity.

Great Debates
1

Is it just me, or is it real possible that people are remarkably stupid? Stubbornly stupid in some areas?

Roswell. That name should tell it all. The Great American Military Mystery Base which is not so Mysterious, where in lie the Secrets From Outer Space, maybe. The Top Secret Base that the entire world knows about.

I watched another program about it this evening and turned it off because it was just another rambling documentary of nothing new, put together in a different way. All full of the Great Conspiracy Theories, complete with wide eyed, bearded ‘authority figures’ absolutely positive that Something They The People Have A Right To Know lurks there, having landed ages ago from outer space.

Has anyone, aside from myself, ever considered the possibility that the Military is simply using Roswell to occupy the minds of the many snoops and keep them from looking elsewhere for any possible real secret base?

If there ever was anything alien at Roswell, the Military would be absolutely stupid to keep it there with the technology available to the average citizen today and probably moved it out long ago?

That the base is probably a site for minor ‘secret’ projects, most of the real, heavy duty ones having been shipped elsewhere years ago because of the snoops?

That any ‘secret’ technology people catch glimpses of is actually minor stuff tested there because of the potential for high security risks if major classified things were brought in?

I also can’t but wonder what right so many people feel they have to go snooping around a high security military installation anyhow, publicly pointing the way to any hostile nation with spies eager to see what we have?

In the past, a newsman stumbled on the Presidential Bunker and published it’s location for every hostile nation to locate it and aim a few nukes at. This forced the government to build another one in a secret location at tremendous cost to us. What right did the newsman have of publishing a National Secret?

Still, I suspect that Roswell is a red herring. Something being used to keep the snooping masses happy. I’m getting rather weary of hearing about it and all of the nutty speculations that go along with it.

2

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Nope. People have a remarkable ability to choose to be stupid.

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I think you’re getting Roswell and Area 51 mixed up. Roswell was a base in New Mexico where, supposedly, a UFO crashed a yielded bodies in the 40’s or early 50’s. Area 51 is either in Nevada or Utah and is generally thought to be where the US tests new planes.

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I’ve seen a few of 'em over the years. One guy said that he thought some UFO sightings in that area were actually stealth fighers and bombers before the public knew what they were.

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Area 51 one is, well, it is a huge area. It is located out in the middle of nowhere and is a great place to test new plane designs as well as other things. I believe trespassers on Area 51 can be shot on sight and security is suppose to be very tight.

Roswell on the other hand was shut down years ago.

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Area 51 would be a great place to keep alien technology. So far as I know it is a very secure place. What technology do ordinary citizens have to break into such a place? Uh, not that i think they have aliens.

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If you consider the stealth bomber and fighter to be minor. Well, if they were tested there at all.

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Other then the 1st Amendment? None I guess.

Nutty speculations aren’t fun. But Area 51 does have something neato burrito going on there. I don’t think it has anything to do with aliens but the government doesn’t post “will shoot trespasser” signs without meaning it.

Marc

3

Actually, Marc, due to all the publicity surrounding Area 51, and the lawsuits that were filed by some people who were injured on the job there, I believe the Air Force packed up all their top-secret plane research and such, and moved it elsewhere a while ago. For some reason Idaho sticks in my mind, but it very well could have been somewhere else.

4

Well, not to hijack the thread, but I subscribe to the Popular Mechanics view on Roswell, as it’s the only theory that’s ever really made sense to me.

Basically, the gist of it was this:

The US, in WWII, was able to capture a goodly number of Japanese engineers and scientists, many of whom had worked in weapons development and aeronautical research, and had, possibly, come up with a workable flying wing design.

The US brought these people over to the States, and set them to work developing a similar plane for the US. Perhaps we had even actually captured one of their flying wing designs and attempted to reverse engineer it.

Now, sometime around 1948, the war is over, but they’ve just now completed development on the project, and they need test pilots. Who better to test it than the captured engineers who were probably already presumed dead?

They get these guys suited up in flight suits, and get them into the flying wing. They take off from a remote New Mexican airstrip, and fly around for a while. After a little flight time, something goes horribly wrong, and they crash. The first people to stumble across the smoking wreckage, burned bodies, and weird looking plane are a bunch of semi-educated, possibly drunken, farmer type people who have never so much as seen an asian person in their lives, let alone asian people in flight suits, some sort of pressure helmet, and a giant, wingless plane. Also, remember that it’s late at night, and the visibility probably wasn’t that great.

I ask you, compare this drunken, ignorant view of space suit wearing Japanese engineers with the standard drawing of an alien.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

5

Yup, I had heard this, too. Although “Area 51” still exists, it is no longer the site of major plane development.

6

“weird looking plane are a bunch of semi-educated, possibly drunken, farmer type people who have never so much as seen an asian person in their lives,”

Um, two words: NEWSREELS and NEWSPAPERS. What with the whole World War thing, I think most Americans would have seen both photos and moving pictures of Asians (actual Asians, and not just propaganda caricatured cartoons of the Japanese) at some point. Remember that we’re talking about 1948, not 1648.

7

Point taken. But somehow, it still seems a lot more plausible than aliens. And what better reason to lie about a weather balloon than the fact that real human beings had died in the crash? You can’t just admit that to the public.

8

Wow, I must have missed that memo.

9

Who better than a captured enemy, one who is still being held, illegally, after the war is over? One who can imagine their family, thousands of miles away in a conquered land, mourning their death (that is unless their family lived in Hiroshima or Nagasaki)? Yeah that’s just the kind of loyal American patriot the government is going to give the keys to multi-million dollar state of the art top secret flying wing to.
The Martians are more plausible.

10

Flymaster said:

Great hypothesis! Except that, of course, we now know that it was indeed a balloon (not a weather balloon, though, but one that was part of a project to detect Russia’s nuclear activity).

The Japanese hypothesis has as much evidence for it as the alien hypothesis.

11

Ok, ok! I admit defeat! Besides, it wasn’t even my theory! Like I said, I ripped it (quite shamelessly, might I add) from the pages of Popular Mechanics, which, to say the least, isn’t the most “skeptical” of magazines.

I actually wasn’t aware of the Russian missle activity explanation. Thanks, David, for pointing that out.

Anyway, this was just a last desperate attempt to save some face. I now return you to your scheduled thread.

12

My apologies!! I meant area 51!!!

MGibson.

I disagree. When it comes to national security, which is designed to keep us and our governing body safe, no news media has the right to print out secrets. The newsman’s desire to get a hot story cost us a couple of billion and jeopardized our governing body for a period of time. It used to be virtually an executing offense to expose national secrets, but it appears that snoopy news people out for a scoop can do as they please. Common sense should have stepped in and said ‘hey, if I print that, I’m violating the safety of the government and it’s not my business. Plus, they’ll build another elsewhere and use up more billions in tax dollars better spent elsewhere.’

Let’s say the news guy had mutual sex with teen girls some years ago and keeps it a secret. He’s not a molester, he was young and horny, he’s not a predator, he’s basically a guy doing a good job. How would he like it if his secret was smeared all over the papers? He’d not go to jail nor even to court, but it would cost him money. (A loose comparison, I know, but that’s the best you get at this hour.)

Flying Wing.

Magnificent theory! (Give that man a hand!) However, I recall somewhere in the dim recesses of my dusty brain that we were developing a flying wing prior to WW2. It was to be a passenger carrier and the designs I saw of it were impressive, to say the least, especially inside. However, very much against FCC regulations today. The safety level was like nothing. The point in the bow was two decks. One held the flight crew, the lower was a great glassed in observation window with a couple of rows of seats there for people to relax and get the crap scared out of them.

The design was abandoned as impractical, but has been resurrected today for future space craft, modified and some guy is suing Bowing, I think, because his father presented the original design ages ago, owns the patent and claims the ‘new’ design is actually a modification of the old one. Bowing, it seems, is designing it for NASA, but the guys pop worked for Bowing and the original tests were done there. (I think it’s Bowing.)

(I just know I’m spelling Bowing wrong.)

Weather balloon

The original UFO explanation. There have been so many documentaries on the subject that I’m confused. The only thing that has surfaced after like 50 or 60 reports over the years and several books, is that the Air Force was using Mylar fabric long before the general public knew about it. That might give it the properties of being crumpled up and returning to normal that everyone talked about and an aluminum coating would make it look like metal.

BTW, enough nuts with enough determination could penetrate some of area 51 security, especially with the availability of night scopes, military camouflage, various professional snooping devices and long range cameras that can just about see the rivets on the Hubbell from Earth. I thought the Black Bird and the new bombers and jets were tested just before being presented to the public.

In other words, the military knows the high visibility of some craft will leak out, so once they get perfected and they suspect too many people already know about them, they release it to the press.

I figure that the military is perfectly happy allowing people to crawl all over area 51, giving the MPs some work outs (probably a good security training ground), testing out new security detectors and all that, knowing that anything from outer space is securely hidden far, far away. It keeps the nuts occupied. It gives the wild eyed, young men with close cropped beards, glasses and laptops growing out of their sides occupied and not looking around for the real base.

13

Three years ago, Popular Mechanics said it was eastern Utah. One of their reasons for believing this is that security in the Nevada location is not as tight as it once was.

I’ve been to eastern Utah. If anything, it’s even MORE isolated than Area 51. And maybe that’s why the Escalante-Staircase National Monument was created? (Hey, I can be a conspiracy-monger too! ;))

14

I’ve never heard of a Boeing flying wing. Northrop was the great champion of those birds–even building two (more or less) functional bombers on the design. When the Air Force decided on the B-2, they went back to Northrop and dug up a few old Northrop engineers to help get the project started. (They wouldn’t have been that old since the B-49 was only 20-23 years old when the B-2 project started.)

Of course, now that Boeing seems to have bought out every large-plane manufacturer in the U.S. other than Lockheed, they are certainly the heirs to any old plans–and their attendant lawsuits. (I haven’t checked, lately, to see whether Northrop has actually been sucked up by Boeing.)

15

The military, for all of it’s inherent faults, is by no means stupid. Area 51 no longer has anything of vital secrecy in it because it would be remarkably imbecilic to leave it in a place where every spy in the known world can find it.

Even the technological advances in war that the public finds out about are declassified, such as the new tanks, bombers, missiles and so on. I have no doubt that we have all sorts of things hidden in deep security. After all, the object of war is to not let the enemy know that you have greater weapons than they.

Besides, Area 51 has managed to produce a burgeoning splinter economy among the civilian populace around it, allows the government to keep track of assorted nuts, and provides a mutual gathering place for UFO-ers, Conspiracy Theorists, and scads of tourists.