Ok, a pretty lame rant… but somebody was surely gonna start it.
If you missed it, sci-fi channel has been promoting their Roswell investigation show. 2 hours, it was. It has been hyped as providing “startling new evidence”.
What a crock.
It spent an hour and a half covering the the same old ground that has been out there for years.
It spent 15 minutes telling us that a great deal of the accounts have been seriously discredited by even the UFOlogist own investigators. Why didn’t they just skipped all the parts there were based on discredited accounts? (I will answer this in a bit…)
Then, they spent 15 minutes showing that they dug a couple trenches in the ground. One of the trenches crosses a “disturbance in the soil”. It could be anything still, but hey… at least there is a disturbance. They bagged up a bunch of dirt, and locked it away for microscopic analysis. It supposedly has “unidentified artifacts” in the dirt. Appearently none of them are suggestive enough to bother showing on TV during a 2 FUCKING hour long special.
And concerning that document “enhancement” that was supposed to be so convincing. I never got to look at the thing long enough or in enough detail. If that is so damn convincing, how bout posting that scan in the same resolution as the research has. I want to see the scan unretouched and in each step of his analysis. Even if they are 20 MB, so what? That is easily reproduced evidence, let us all take a good long look. While your at it, provide someone that doubts your translation to certify that the posted files are genuine scans from the original photo.
So, thats it. 2 hours later, and we have a trench dug and some dirt put in bags in a bank vault, and part of letter in a newspaper photo possibly figured out.
Now, to answer my own question… The only way you could possibly get alot of people to sit in front of a TV for two hours with the absolutely trivial amount of new information presented, was to do a big dramatic build up, the deflate it, and then present next to nothing.
I have a theory that fits their evidence even better than their theory. I don’t believe it, but it fits at least as well and I think better. They had a secret project balloon land out there. Something that they didn’t want other countries to know we were messing with. Probably relating to some type of spying. It has since been revealed that we were up to stuff like that at the time. When the intelligence officer went out there and saw something he knew was highly classified laying out in view, he decided that it needed a cover story. He knew he needed something quick and panicked a bit, and out popped the UFO story. When he got back to base, and people had time to think about it… The UFO cover story was a bad idea. Who knows what kind of shit he might have gotten into for dumping that load of crap without consulting his superiors first. So now, they have the UFO story out, and a real secret thing that still needs a cover story. Out comes the balloon story, which might be very close to being accurate. But, instead of the posed-with radar refectors, the real payload was camera equipment floated over Russia or something. You don’t want take pictures with that. It was vitally important we not tip our hand to Russia. But, they can’t really punish the guy for the UFO story… if it was a simple mistake, no need to punish, right? The only way to make the radar balloon story work is to let the guy slide for doing something incredibly stupid with the UFO idea. He gets punished in his own way by being required to pose with a weather balloon and pretend to be stupid enough to not be able to recognize one. (An intelligence office from a nuclear base would have to be pretty dumb to make that kind of mistake… of course, he could be that stupid, but I would like to think not). He doesn’t get shitcanned, and the Airforce gets to keep their recon secrets.
Why didn’t they just do a 15 or maybe even 30 minute show on what they had. Just say, "hey, the evidence is pretty thin, but we think it should be checked. We are getting started. Haven’t found anything real exciting yet… but we just thought you would like to know we are working on it and will keep you posted as we go.
I would have happily watched that. I think it is great someone is out investigating if they have any real doubt. If I had the time and money, I would love to go spend some time working on it myself. I doubt I would find anything, but the payoff would be so huge… and it would be fun. Not finding anything would be great too. We would no a little more about the state of the evidence. Surely something would be ruled out or some detail confirmed.
Their doing it like an archeology dig more or less. I would be happy to see a half hour update every month. I am sure it would be interesting to see what they were looking at. When you look real close at anything, you usually find something surprising. It may have nothing to do with what you were looking for. They might find interesting indian, or “old west” relics.
But damn… don’t fucking promote a show like that… “startling new evidence” my ass.
Reviewing their factual presentation:
The good part is they were pretty factual. For that type of show, the evidence had suprisingly little exageration.
The bad part is that they presented what they did have (mostly the same old stories) in a pretty suggestive way, you have to pay pretty close attention to always catch where they drew the line between the hard evidence and speculation. But they did draw it, and in the right place as far as I could tell. I fully expect someone on this board that hears mainly what they want to hear, or doesn’t have enough background in certain areas to read alot more into their statements than was really there will post a thread on this board touting how well this show proved the case. It clearly didn’t, but this is gonna happen.