The Roswell Incident

[The Veteran]

Input input input! What was it all about? Who was where doing what and when? What are the conspiracies and what is the truth? Come and have your say, let everyone know what you believe in return for what they think...

[Accounting Troll]

Okay, this is my conspiracy theory:

 

It really was a weather balloon, and the American government actually has been telling the truth all along. All the stuff about people seeing alien bodies was made up by the locals who realised that they stood to make a big pile of cash out of the whole thing. Some other people have cashed in on it by writing books in which they pretended to have been involved in the coverup. The locals don't mind other people cashing in, because it means more gullible tourists pumping money into the economy.

 

In 1997, I saw an advert in a paranormal magazine which showed how people are cashing in on Roswell. Some bloke was prepared to sell people dirt from the crash site (or possibly his back garden) for $30 per bag. The idea was that people would sift through it and look for particles of the UFO that the government had missed in the clean-up operations :mad:

 

This is similar to my conspiracy theory about corn circles. They centre on Wiltshire because it's a group of local farmers doing it at night. All the people who claim to have seen UFOs either got confused by the farmers flashlights or they were fibbing to make some cash out of human gullibility. Several Wiltshire farmers have admitted creating the crop circles, and they even demonstrated how it can be done with a legnth of rope and two wooden stakes. Yet people prefer the extra-terrestrial explanation.

 

I think of corn circles as the revenge of the rural community on the spivs who try to sell us Waterloo Bridge when we visit London.

[FullAuto]

Perhaps the crash of some experimental craft they nicked off the Nazis?

[Blehm 98]

Actually, one of the German special under development jet planes is in fact very confusable with alien ships, in fact, i remember someone reported seeing UFOs and they had almost the exact same shape as the german jet.

Accounting troll, i go with you on your Crop Circles and roswell idea, it is all a bunch of bull crap, i mean, it is so possible that they just made it up for money and publicity that it is very possible. I think it is all just made up

 

And area 51 is just an experimental weapons and aircraft test facility, all the stuff about aliens is also publicity stunts

[Strong Bob]

I don't think it was a weather balloon. In fact, I have a theory that fits rather well in a way...

 

It was an experemental craft. And the bodies inside were not aliens, but rather human beings in flight suits. Likely wearing helmets with dark shields instead of the transparent or yellow tinted ones we see more often. That's why it was mistaken as an alien craft with bodies inside. I can easily see a farmer that's scientifically ignorant mistaking such a circumstance...

[The Veteran]

I prefer the UFO theory... It takes a bit of reading into but I haven't seen a single piece of pro-weatherballon evidence in my hunt yet I've seen a hundred against...

 

To list the pros and cons of each theory here would take forever but I think its important to remember that the first person to report the crash site in the US military said it was a UFO... This person was then promoted to a four star general, the highest peace time rank available...

[Blehm 98]

publicity stunts, and money

Also, it keeps the people happy if they want to know what really happened

[Accounting Troll]

I prefer the UFO theory... It takes a bit of reading into but I haven't seen a single piece of pro-weatherballon evidence in my hunt yet I've seen a hundred against...

 

To list the pros and cons of each theory here would take forever but I think its important to remember that the first person to report the crash site in the US military said it was a UFO... This person was then promoted to a four star general, the highest peace time rank available...

Don't forget that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. It doesn't actually mean alien spaceship, even though the terms have become synonymous as far as the public is concerned. An aircraft of unknown design or nationality is classified as a UFO by the military, even if it is obviously terrestrial in origin.

[The Veteran]

touche, I was having a similar coversation yesterday in which alien can mean as little as foreign!

 

But they never actually said UFO, that's just me stereotyping it! Back in the pre-50s they were called flying disks and that's what he said. Not sure if he ever said it was extraterrestrial though..

[Blehm 98]

Yeah, some people get this, then you'll have others who go (when you explain that UFOs do exist, i have proof) "What, no way, you're lying"

Then you say that UFO does not me alien spaceship

 

of course todays "UFO" sightings are all believed to be alien ships. And at area 51, people claim to see alien ships leaving it. Aliens? Did you see the pilots of the ships to confirm they were aliens, or do you just think the are alien because of what you think they look like from a distance?

[The Veteran]

Too true, this is why we should just be told the truth... What harm can it do to tell us if they exist or not? Only problem is, if the Yanks don't in fact have any proof that they do and it's all been blown way outof proportion noone will ever believe them unless they say yes... Oops!

[Accounting Troll]

I suspect that if the US government was to admit that they had been in contact with extraterrestrials for decades, the conspiracy theorists would argue that it was an obvious attempt to distract the media from Iraq or the economy

 

Every day the news carries stories of wars, terrorist attacks, racially motivated crime, somebody killing his neighbour because of a dispute over two inches of land, etc. As people seem to be so fond of using violence to settle even the smallest differences, I would like to know why any alien race would want to have anything to do with us.

[The Veteran]

Very true. I certainly wouldn't if I was them

 

But it begs again the question why not just be told the truth. Maybe if people knew how insignificant we all were in the grand scheme of things we could finally begin to settle things down a little...

 

Unfortunately I don't believe a scenario like that could ever exist but it would make a good book...

[Blehm 98]

If they admitted that we had been seeing aliens for a long time, and people believed them, there would be mass riots and the world would descend into anarchy. I mean, there are so many people who would do that if they found out that there were aliens... people are stupid, but that is what would happen

[The Veteran]

Out of all the people I know I can't think of a single one who would react that way. It's something that's put on films because it makes better viewing than oh that's nice...

 

Besides if we were told what would have changed? It's not like we're being invaded... Any trublemakers would be rounded up soon enough

[Strong Bob]

Every day the news carries stories of wars, terrorist attacks, racially motivated crime, somebody killing his neighbour because of a dispute over two inches of land, etc. As people seem to be so fond of using violence to settle even the smallest differences, I would like to know why any alien race would want to have anything to do with us.

 

And then people say it's unrealistic to have mass alien invasions in science fiction movies. Logic like that dictates they would think us too much of a threat to consider befriending. >_<

[The Veteran]

Or that we're too insignificant an adversary to bother communicating with...

 

That was a fun 24 hours I'm going home now but feel free to carry on and give me something to read when I'm online next

 

Later guys

[FullAuto]

Or that we're too insignificant an adversary to bother communicating with...

 

Well, we've already taken the 'divide' out of 'divide and conquer'.

[sir-roosio]

Saw a program once where they interviewed a grunt who claimed to have been involved in the clean up and he drew a picture of what the 'ship' looked like. it had a long thin main fuselage, with a tapered nose. About half way down this fuselage delta wings started that covered the other half length of the craft and came out to make the craft about 1/2 - 3/4 as wide as it was long. On each wing, about half way out was mounted a long cylindrical engine, and on top of each engine was a tailfin that tapered in toward the centre at an angle of about 70-80 degrees.

 

This he claimed was what the alien craft looked like. which to me, looked rather like This

 

Now, take from that what you will.

 

The non believer would say it was probably a very early prototype of this advanced high altitude jet and that the 'alien bodies' were indeed humans in pressurized suits.

 

The conspiracy theorist would telll you that it was obviously an alien craft the the airforce 'reverse engineered' to gain the advanced avionics and shape that allowed this craft to become the fastest jet ever.

[Accounting Troll]

I don't like to dissapoint the conspiracy theorists, but jet engines were invented in the 1930s. It wasn't until the mid 1940s that the designer could persuade somebody to build a jet powered aircraft though. British military thinking has a tradition of being slow to adopt new technology. There would not have been this delay if jet engines had been reverse engineered from captured extra-terrestrial technology.

 

People have also mistaken both American stealth bombers and the International Space Station as alien spacecraft.

[FullAuto]

British military thinking has a tradition of being slow to adopt new technology

 

That's ALL military thinking, not just British. Didn't the Germans field a jet engine aircraft? The Me-262 (codenamed Meteor or something) I think it was.

[Accounting Troll]

If they did, it was too late in the war to make any difference.

 

When it comes to being hidebound and resistant to change, I can assure you that the British military is the world leader! Let's get the highlights reel out:

 

Our fondess for longbows (a Welsh weapon that the English took 600 years to make use of) was looking seriously old fashioned in the 16th century. This is despite the French technological advances in gunpowder that won them the Hundred Years War.

 

The Admiralty resisted the notion of ironclads (that were first designed in the Napoleonic Wars) because it was obvious that wood floats and iron sinks! We only had a rethink when the French launched an ironclad that failed to sink.

 

By 1900, we were the only sea power without any submarines. After all, they were simply not an English way of fighting.

 

Battlecruisers! A combination of the firepower of a battleship with the speed of a cruiser. It was acheived by cutting back on the armour plating. The result was that HMS Hood never stood a chance against a German battleship.

 

We were first to develop tanks, but we didn't bother to continue developing tanks between the wars. We thought that WWI was in some way unique and the conditions in which tanks would be useful would never occur again. The tanks we had in 1939 were pathetically outclassed by the German tanks, including the Czech made Skoda tanks they had stolen. Skoda tanks, the shame of it!

 

It took about 150 years of bitter experience in colonial wars before we decided that perhaps having a uniform that looked good on the parade ground was less important than a uniform that made a soldier inconspicuous.

[FullAuto]

I don't know, we quit using cavalry before quite a few nations. We led the field in aircraft carriers. Invented and adopted the machine gun fairly quickly. While we didn't technically invent radar, we refined the concept and put it into practice damn quickly, creating Chain Home. Invented special forces in WWII by creating the SAS, upon which almost all other special forces are based on.

 

It took about 150 years of bitter experience in colonial wars before we decided that perhaps having a uniform that looked good on the parade ground was less important than a uniform that made a soldier inconspicuous.

 

This was actually necessary to identify units in battle, as the command and control structure was as primitive as the rest of the organisation, not to mention the nature of warfare at the time. You can only have camouflaging uniforms when you have other reliable means of identifying your troops and their position, and the way battles and wars are fought has also changed drastically.

 

We thought that WWI was in some way unique and the conditions in which tanks would be useful would never occur again. The tanks we had in 1939 were pathetically outclassed by the German tanks, including the Czech made Skoda tanks they had stolen. Skoda tanks, the shame of it!

 

WWI was quite unique, actually. The British Army attempted to evolve, but the wars before that (the Russo-Japanese Conflict and the Boer war for example) offered many contradictory implications. As for our tanks, pretty much every tank in WWII was outclassed by the Germans. They had the best tanks by far. Superior to American, Russian, British, you name it, the Panther and Tiger tanks were only overcome through numbers. German engineering at the time was better than anyone's. They invented an excellent disposabe anti-tank rocket (Panzerfaust) and the world's first assault rifle, to name two great inventions that are still being used today.

 

We are sticklers for tradition, that's true, but we've evolved our military a damn sight quicker than most, hence ending up with the world's largest empire. Then pissing it down the drain through negligence.

[Accounting Troll]

The Russians had some pretty good tanks, including the T34. Trouble was that their tactics were inferior to those of the Germans. The Russians tended to sptread their tanks across the entire front, while the Germans concentrated their tanks in one area to punch through and encircle the enemy lines.

 

The American colonists and the French were way ahead of the British regulars tactically in the American arena of the Seven Years War. We basically won because our colonies were much bigger than those of the French, while our larger navy made sending reinforcements difficult for France.

 

I think what made World War One unusual was that defensive innovations (trenches, barbed wire and mchine guns) were way ahead of attacking innovations. Cavalry and massed infantry charges usually got mown down in the first few seconds by enemy machine guns. The deadlock in the Western Front was only broken by the development of tanks.

[FullAuto]

The Russians had some pretty good tanks, including the T34. Trouble was that their tactics were inferior to those of the Germans. The Russians tended to sptread their tanks across the entire front, while the Germans concentrated their tanks in one area to punch through and encircle the enemy lines.

 

True enough, but no country had a tank that could stand up to a Panther/Tiger one-on-one. German tactics were well in advance, the blitzkrieg (armoured spearheads backed up by infantry) assaults in particular mopped up most of Europe before Chamberlain could scream foul.

 

We basically won because our colonies were much bigger than those of the French, while our larger navy made sending reinforcements difficult for France.

 

Their tactics obviously weren't THAT superior then. Win a battle, lose the war and all that.

 

I think what made World War One unusual was that defensive innovations (trenches, barbed wire and mchine guns) were way ahead of attacking innovations. Cavalry and massed infantry charges usually got mown down in the first few seconds by enemy machine guns. The deadlock in the Western Front was only broken by the development of tanks.

 

It wasn't so much the inventions themselves as the mindset at the time. They didn't imagine the offensive capabilities of machine guns, massed artillery fire etc and when they did, they weren't used.