Trump had a long and varied life before he started entering public life as a presidential candidate. Did he have any run-ins with the law when he was growing up? Has he ever been charged with a crime? In business or otherwise? What do his years doing business tell us about him and the law?
I'll offer a "Joe Amateur" answer to the question, taking info from USA Today, Wash Post, radio news, my own impressions. There could be mistakes. (actually I just did what Pres. Trump can't seem to do in public). If I go on doing blogs or otherwise investigating this subject, I reserve the right to correct some of my generalizations and claims in this early round.
Trump mainly through business has been involved in thousands of legal cases. I believe the same article pointed out that for Hillary Clinton the figure was something like 900. I feel fairly safe in saying that Trump says, in general, things about these lawsuits that are frequently contradicted by reports from other sources.
When he was a kid, how was Trump at following the rules?
According to Valerie Strauss, education reporter at the Washington Post (July 17, 2015) "Behavior problems led to Donald’s exit from the [junior high] school, at which point
he was sent to the New York Military Academy at age 13 by his parents,
who, according to Biography.com, hoped 'the discipline of the school would channel his energy in a positive manner.' It sounds like they were really worried he might become a flatout "spit in your face rebel," a term I think I invented here and now. I guess, then, that even at age 13 he had a hard time following rules made by others, so they sent him to a military school that would slap him around if he didn't obey. Strauss' article is titled, "Yes, Donald Trump really went to an Ivy League school"--Univ of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was like George Bush, Jr, who had decent grades but made it into Yale because his family was one of the richest in Texas. The person who interviewed Trump at U Penn, to decide whether to let him in, is said to have been a friend of Trump's older brother.
Later I may read to learn the real answer, but let's do a thought experiment on what happened when Trump at military school, based in part on what I was like at that age.
There seem to be two basic options: Either Trump liked going there and took up gladly the role of playing military school, or he resisted it. If he liked it, he dove in and did a lot of swimming others told him to do because it was more fun than splashing in the shallow pool of his previous life. Also, he may have liked it because it got him away from his parents. When I was at home around age 16, my dad or mom would lay down the law and I'd go in my bedroom and say without making sound, "I HATE YOU!" Just scream it in a whisper at the walls. And I was a rule-obeying kid; Trump hadn't been.
If Trump resisted it, he had two choices: fight or surrender. My example just given was surrendering but wanting to tell the adults to go ---- themselves. If Trump chose to fight, he soon learned the military school officials were bigger than he was and united against him.
Either way the whole episode could easily have been one factor leading to a man who didn't have much regard for rules imposed on him by others.
What can we tell about his personality that gives hints at how he would relate to the law?
Trump is obviously a huge success in business and making money, and in many related parts of life. Huge success in being charming and being liked, and a huge success with women. He had a headstart with the family he was born into, but he has worked super-hard and has scratched his way to the top. He's lost big and fought hard and come roaring back. He's a real big winner in those parts of the game of life.
I don't know how else to put this, so let's imagine that there are 202 "basic important facets" to life on Earth. Donald Trump is one of the 100 most successful people in the US, or say the world if you wish, in maybe 20 of those 202 areas. If I'm one of the 1000 most successful persons in even one category, what would it be? Winning high school cross country races? I won the state in cross country, and it was a little state. Letting go of negative feelings? because I've been trained in that for 30 years and done it a lot. These are areas that sound like they might not even be on the first 202 areas of human endeavor, right?
Trump is about as successful as any human seems to be able to be, even before his political success. Now he's the most famous person on Earth and the most powerful. Yet when he talks about areas where he isn't in the very top group, what does he do? He exaggerates his own level of achievement, time after time. I've never been told of his admitting a mistake. His inaugural crowd is the biggest, even though photos showed it was not. He was voted against by more illegal voters--3 million--than anyone ever, even though there's no evidence that maybe more than 100 or 1000 people voted who shouldn't have, and got their votes through. Children under 10 stop reading here. He has the biggest dick and doesn't have good enough judgment to keep from talking about it in public. That kind of talk, all by itself, would have killed any number of previous presidential candidates. He says he graduated first in his college class, even though the program for his graduation doesn't say he received any level of honors. He graduated average. I graduated average from paralegal school--no honors. I don't put that on a banner people can read on my bumper sticker, but if the subject comes up, what I say can be verified by the records kept at the time by people other than me. People who had no particular reason to be biased against me and falsify records, people whose jobs depended on their keeping fair and honest records.
This is hard for Trump because he's used to making a huge effort and muscling his way to the top, financially, socially. He's used to putting the full-court press on women and having a solid percentage of them lean back on the couch and lift open their thighs for him. Very intoxicating for most men who succeed a lot with that. He's used to dating and marrying models. He's used to declaring a sort of holy war on those who end up opposed to him. A perfect example of this is his campaign slogan "I'll put her in jail!" about Clinton. Oddly, within days of being president-elect, he mysteriously learned there was nothing to put her in jail over, or the FBI would have already been working on it for him.
Tell me if I'm oversimplifying, as if anybody reads this stuff (no comments, I think, by anybody but me so far--32 posts or so), but he kinda has to be right all the time. Here's an example: Trump believes torture works to produce good information, so he checks with people in the field and reports back that he has been told that torture works. Recent studies show that he could have easily stumbled into someone in the field who thinks torture produces myth-making, because there are lots of those people. But Trump finds someone who proves him right. We're all like this to a point, but only President Trump and candidate Trump, among people on that level, says awful things about judges who rule against his side. He can't stand to have anybody make him wrong. Goes bonkers. His own Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, tells the press that Trump's saying things like that is a horrible thing for a public official to do in a democracy relying on an independent judiciary.
Tentative conclusion: Mr Trump looks like a person, a candidate, and now a president whose Achilles heel could be his relationship with the generally agreed-upon rules of society. Perhaps the most formal and organized of such sets of societal rules is the rule of law. To some extent he can skate above these rules in some areas because of his level of success, because he has always been, since he was about 30, the boss, the rulemaker in his realm. He is not that now. Unless he figures that out fast, he's got a long row to how ahead of him. The country does, too. Maybe a billion rule-minded people are watching him. Before, we didn't care what he did, much.
He also seems quite willing to speak up and disagree with things that can readily be determined to be facts, from election results to science to previous news reporting. Wants to make up his version and have everybody think it's real.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Donald Trump And The Law
I've been up to my ears in little green, er, grey men/women and nonexistent flying saucers, so this is a break. Whatever color they were, one witness said, "They sure weren't from Texas."
Seems like the single thing I took away from watching President Trump, before he was Pres--well, I get two. First he's very successful in business. He learned from his dad how to do a deal and he does 'em. Might not always pay his contractors, but . . . . . . We'll get back to how this fits in later.
Another way to say this would be that he lives large. Large business success, large self-confidence, large "hands." One way he "lives large" seems to be how he's his own guy. Runs his own operation and calls the shots. He lives by a set of rules he makes up, and I think he often makes them up as he goes along. He's creative, he's spontaneous, gets ideas on the way. Doesn't need to check with a bunch of people before he takes the idea and runs with it, or tweets about it.
In the campaign he was so appealing that he could get away with all kinds of things that have sunk unnumbered campaigns before him. He's rude--insulted his way through the campaign. He had about 16 Republican rivals and 3 Democrats, and it seems safe to say that if any of them had been half as rude as Trump--well, if Rick Perry had acted that way, bye, bye Rick. Course, given the lack of success in Perry's White House run, might it have helped had he abandoned civility and manners?
President Trump, at least before taking office, was attracted to every good-looking woman who walked in front of him. That's not rare, in case you don't know. Reminds me of the joke where a guy with a big smirk on his face walks up to another guy at a party and says, How is your wife like Will Rogers? I don't know. Actually I haven't seen her for an hour. Mr Smirk say, She's like him socially. How do you mean? I mean with people. She never met a man she didn't like. This is more common in men but it's present in more people overall than most of us think, because those of us who are this way tend to keep it hidden. "So what do you think of that woman you were talking to?" "She's very nice." "What about the next woman walking this way? She's too tall for me." "I like them tall." "What about this next speaker? Thinks she's smarter than everybody." "I like them smart, if they're not arrogant." "What about that old blonde over there looking at us?" "I'm old. I used to be blonde." A whole lot of the population was party-happy at college. They don't hide it. Naked in the front yard at one a.m., no problem. Just good fun.
That's how Trump thinks, and we've learned he's not as different as we thought. Trump doesn't bother with hiding, although now as President he is either hiding the womanizing or laying off--for four years. There once was a pres. candidate named Gary Hart who really looked like he could be the Dems' candidate for president, and then the reporters found him and some nice lady in a motel room, while Hart's wife was far away. This very issue sunk him like a rock. Straight to the bottom. Boom, gone.
Now why did the self-righteous souls in the Republican Party vote for this hedonist Mr. Trump when last time their guy Romney was the opposite? Kinda blows the Moral Majority's claim that we "only vote for upright souls" to run the country and give examples to our children. President Bush the second was a hedonist who had presumably reformed. McCain is no hedonist, though I guess there are some hints that his wife Cindy may be, uh, restless. Hedonists weren't allowed to run for president with any degree of success until now--Clinton doesn't seem like a hedonist in general, but a very sexually eager man, but he was elected by liberals. In every campaign I remember, the Baptists and the Moral Majority abandoned ship on these kinds of candidates--the indulgent lifestyle type--like rats leaving the ship. Think Ted Kennedy, Clinton, that Republican senator from Oregon who kept a diary of his 92 sexual partners in Washington--Packwood. Only wicked Dems could put up with that, and not all of them.
But the God moralists this time are all behind Trump. Mitt Romney at least had the guts to take a stand. What was it he said? Trump has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. When Trump said there were 3 million illegal votes and offered no proof, it was one piece of evidence for the "bad judgment" argument and for the "not interested in the truth unless it makes him look good" argument. As to temperament, he seems like a bully. To Romney's list of "temperament and judgment" I'd add a question mark behind character. Does he have the character to be president? What kind of good example do we have for president? Anyway we've finally got somebody "going Rogue" who could get elected.
All this got me wondering what we can say about the new President and the law, or the rules in general. In an interview a Trump company rep said they stopped paying certain contractors because the company felt they had "been paid enough." So they agreed to one thing, via a contract binding under law, and then made up their own rules.
DONALD TRUMP AND THE LAW. Let's do some teasers.
Item: In the campaign he said something like, hell, yes, I believe in water boarding and more. Sounds indifferent not only to US and international law but indifferent to human dignity and suffering. The main disadvantage of torture, other than it's being evil, is practical: if a people's laws and standards don't protect everyone from torture, then no human right is safe. No civil right can be counted on. If you can torture Mohammed, you can torture me next if it comes to that. If I can be tortured, why do I think I possess some right like the right to assemble, to speak or to bear arms? If the torturing group decides to put me away without charges, what hope do I have?
Item: The Newsweek editorial board claimed Trump seemed "indifferent" to the Constitution, less interested in it than anybody else who ran.
Item: His history: Has he ever interacted with the law as a kid or as a career man? 1000s of times.
Item: Some claim Trump treated the other Republican presidential candidates like a bully. A bully may be tempted to make up rules as he goes along, to get away with whatever he can.
All for now. This is a subject that could be left at the teasers, could be one more post, or it could be a book. In fact, after I wrote this post I left it alone for three weeks.
P.S. I was working on this before yesterday, when somebody sued Trump for violating the Constitution with his immigration order. The President didn't bother to check with his legal eagles (a lady named Yates, turns out) on the order, and then fired her for interpreting the law differently than he wanted her to and making her opinion known. The troubling thing is that we hired her just to read the law as best she could and act accordingly. She was doing just that and she got fired. Does that sound a little like a bully? Does it sound like Archibald Cox?
Seems like the single thing I took away from watching President Trump, before he was Pres--well, I get two. First he's very successful in business. He learned from his dad how to do a deal and he does 'em. Might not always pay his contractors, but . . . . . . We'll get back to how this fits in later.
Another way to say this would be that he lives large. Large business success, large self-confidence, large "hands." One way he "lives large" seems to be how he's his own guy. Runs his own operation and calls the shots. He lives by a set of rules he makes up, and I think he often makes them up as he goes along. He's creative, he's spontaneous, gets ideas on the way. Doesn't need to check with a bunch of people before he takes the idea and runs with it, or tweets about it.
In the campaign he was so appealing that he could get away with all kinds of things that have sunk unnumbered campaigns before him. He's rude--insulted his way through the campaign. He had about 16 Republican rivals and 3 Democrats, and it seems safe to say that if any of them had been half as rude as Trump--well, if Rick Perry had acted that way, bye, bye Rick. Course, given the lack of success in Perry's White House run, might it have helped had he abandoned civility and manners?
President Trump, at least before taking office, was attracted to every good-looking woman who walked in front of him. That's not rare, in case you don't know. Reminds me of the joke where a guy with a big smirk on his face walks up to another guy at a party and says, How is your wife like Will Rogers? I don't know. Actually I haven't seen her for an hour. Mr Smirk say, She's like him socially. How do you mean? I mean with people. She never met a man she didn't like. This is more common in men but it's present in more people overall than most of us think, because those of us who are this way tend to keep it hidden. "So what do you think of that woman you were talking to?" "She's very nice." "What about the next woman walking this way? She's too tall for me." "I like them tall." "What about this next speaker? Thinks she's smarter than everybody." "I like them smart, if they're not arrogant." "What about that old blonde over there looking at us?" "I'm old. I used to be blonde." A whole lot of the population was party-happy at college. They don't hide it. Naked in the front yard at one a.m., no problem. Just good fun.
That's how Trump thinks, and we've learned he's not as different as we thought. Trump doesn't bother with hiding, although now as President he is either hiding the womanizing or laying off--for four years. There once was a pres. candidate named Gary Hart who really looked like he could be the Dems' candidate for president, and then the reporters found him and some nice lady in a motel room, while Hart's wife was far away. This very issue sunk him like a rock. Straight to the bottom. Boom, gone.
Now why did the self-righteous souls in the Republican Party vote for this hedonist Mr. Trump when last time their guy Romney was the opposite? Kinda blows the Moral Majority's claim that we "only vote for upright souls" to run the country and give examples to our children. President Bush the second was a hedonist who had presumably reformed. McCain is no hedonist, though I guess there are some hints that his wife Cindy may be, uh, restless. Hedonists weren't allowed to run for president with any degree of success until now--Clinton doesn't seem like a hedonist in general, but a very sexually eager man, but he was elected by liberals. In every campaign I remember, the Baptists and the Moral Majority abandoned ship on these kinds of candidates--the indulgent lifestyle type--like rats leaving the ship. Think Ted Kennedy, Clinton, that Republican senator from Oregon who kept a diary of his 92 sexual partners in Washington--Packwood. Only wicked Dems could put up with that, and not all of them.
But the God moralists this time are all behind Trump. Mitt Romney at least had the guts to take a stand. What was it he said? Trump has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. When Trump said there were 3 million illegal votes and offered no proof, it was one piece of evidence for the "bad judgment" argument and for the "not interested in the truth unless it makes him look good" argument. As to temperament, he seems like a bully. To Romney's list of "temperament and judgment" I'd add a question mark behind character. Does he have the character to be president? What kind of good example do we have for president? Anyway we've finally got somebody "going Rogue" who could get elected.
All this got me wondering what we can say about the new President and the law, or the rules in general. In an interview a Trump company rep said they stopped paying certain contractors because the company felt they had "been paid enough." So they agreed to one thing, via a contract binding under law, and then made up their own rules.
DONALD TRUMP AND THE LAW. Let's do some teasers.
Item: In the campaign he said something like, hell, yes, I believe in water boarding and more. Sounds indifferent not only to US and international law but indifferent to human dignity and suffering. The main disadvantage of torture, other than it's being evil, is practical: if a people's laws and standards don't protect everyone from torture, then no human right is safe. No civil right can be counted on. If you can torture Mohammed, you can torture me next if it comes to that. If I can be tortured, why do I think I possess some right like the right to assemble, to speak or to bear arms? If the torturing group decides to put me away without charges, what hope do I have?
Item: The Newsweek editorial board claimed Trump seemed "indifferent" to the Constitution, less interested in it than anybody else who ran.
Item: His history: Has he ever interacted with the law as a kid or as a career man? 1000s of times.
Item: Some claim Trump treated the other Republican presidential candidates like a bully. A bully may be tempted to make up rules as he goes along, to get away with whatever he can.
All for now. This is a subject that could be left at the teasers, could be one more post, or it could be a book. In fact, after I wrote this post I left it alone for three weeks.
P.S. I was working on this before yesterday, when somebody sued Trump for violating the Constitution with his immigration order. The President didn't bother to check with his legal eagles (a lady named Yates, turns out) on the order, and then fired her for interpreting the law differently than he wanted her to and making her opinion known. The troubling thing is that we hired her just to read the law as best she could and act accordingly. She was doing just that and she got fired. Does that sound a little like a bully? Does it sound like Archibald Cox?
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Roswell #9: After The Standoff
The first 8 Roswell posts this month tell me:
a) No conclusive proof has come out. Time after time claims of possessing "unearthly material" evaporate when nobody can produce the goods. That leaves us with the "fallback position" as the government's explanation
b) The gov didn't offer good evidence to support the conclusion that what fell in the field was a Project Mogul balloon. The evidence was 40 years old or more when Mogul was announced as the answer, so it may not have been very available. Yet some records exist of Mogul from July, 1947. It would be nice to have come forth with a letter or such saying, Well, we told them it was a weather balloon to cover up Mogul.
c) Instead it made a conclusory statement and seems to just expect people to believe it. Despite my great interest in journalistic objectivity, in the facts, I'll say that I don't believe it. I think the Mogul story is full of shit. It rings slightly more true than does Pres. Trump's promise that Mexico will pay for the border wall.
d) The conclusion fails to make sense of something like 100 pieces of circumstantial evidence. Instead it has to brush them aside. Some of these are testimony from real "pillar of the community" types.
e) One of these was a commanding field officer, Jesse Marcel, who, three decades later, went public with detailed claims that it was an alien crash and was covered up. Those who don't agree with his allegations have found numerous issues with his testimony, including that he was old when he gave it so his memory was likely to be faulty.
To that I would ask: Can you tell me where you were when you heard the Twin Towers had been hit? When Pres. Kennedy was shot? I know exactly where I was. Of course you can if you were old enough to remember it. That sort of thing isn't stored in the brain's "ordinary memory" section. It makes sense that Jesse Marcel recalled vividly and accurately much of what he experienced in what he claimed was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, even decades later. My dad could tell you the precise details of combat experiences he had in the 1940s, decades later. They were extraordinary memories.
f) We do know there was a coverup at Roswell that involved 20-100 instances of press censorship, shakedowns of civilians, and at least two cases of false imprisonment by Roswell military personnel
f) The cover-up seems very disproportionate--about 50 times overdone-- if it truly was just to hide a nuclear monitoring program that, had it been found out by a few people in New Mexico, doesn't seem likely to have leaked to the Russians. Civilians seeing Mogul balloon and equipment would hardly have been able to put two and two together and figure what the program was doing, anyway. Yes, they wanted to keep Mogul under wraps, but having one set of equipment go down in a field just doesn't seem to spill the beans on the whole program. Why do, then, many voices tell us the Roswell Army base went into emergency mode for the next week or so? Doesn't add up.
g) It appears that at least a dozen locals, and maybe 3 or 4 dozen, did see either what lay in the desert or was gathered up from it. There's no record of even one of them wondering out loud if what they stumbled across involving spying on the Russians, even when it would be safe to admit that 40 years later. Why doesn't at least one of them say, "Well, yes, I could tell it was equipment for tracking nuclear explosions?
h) Instead, at least 15 of these assert they saw something--or someone--clearly not originating on Earth.
To wind up, I note that the US federal government lies to the people all the time about anything and everything. Sometimes this is done in prudence and sometimes it is done with the most craven and awful of intentions--and results.
So maybe, if the new feds of the Trump administration were to tell us there really were aliens at Roswell, it would have to also announce that we've been on the edge of interstellar war all this time, and now it's finally breaking out and Earth will be overrun in a couple of years. Better to let us be happy eating our beer nuts in ignorance for a while more.
a) No conclusive proof has come out. Time after time claims of possessing "unearthly material" evaporate when nobody can produce the goods. That leaves us with the "fallback position" as the government's explanation
b) The gov didn't offer good evidence to support the conclusion that what fell in the field was a Project Mogul balloon. The evidence was 40 years old or more when Mogul was announced as the answer, so it may not have been very available. Yet some records exist of Mogul from July, 1947. It would be nice to have come forth with a letter or such saying, Well, we told them it was a weather balloon to cover up Mogul.
c) Instead it made a conclusory statement and seems to just expect people to believe it. Despite my great interest in journalistic objectivity, in the facts, I'll say that I don't believe it. I think the Mogul story is full of shit. It rings slightly more true than does Pres. Trump's promise that Mexico will pay for the border wall.
d) The conclusion fails to make sense of something like 100 pieces of circumstantial evidence. Instead it has to brush them aside. Some of these are testimony from real "pillar of the community" types.
e) One of these was a commanding field officer, Jesse Marcel, who, three decades later, went public with detailed claims that it was an alien crash and was covered up. Those who don't agree with his allegations have found numerous issues with his testimony, including that he was old when he gave it so his memory was likely to be faulty.
To that I would ask: Can you tell me where you were when you heard the Twin Towers had been hit? When Pres. Kennedy was shot? I know exactly where I was. Of course you can if you were old enough to remember it. That sort of thing isn't stored in the brain's "ordinary memory" section. It makes sense that Jesse Marcel recalled vividly and accurately much of what he experienced in what he claimed was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, even decades later. My dad could tell you the precise details of combat experiences he had in the 1940s, decades later. They were extraordinary memories.
f) We do know there was a coverup at Roswell that involved 20-100 instances of press censorship, shakedowns of civilians, and at least two cases of false imprisonment by Roswell military personnel
f) The cover-up seems very disproportionate--about 50 times overdone-- if it truly was just to hide a nuclear monitoring program that, had it been found out by a few people in New Mexico, doesn't seem likely to have leaked to the Russians. Civilians seeing Mogul balloon and equipment would hardly have been able to put two and two together and figure what the program was doing, anyway. Yes, they wanted to keep Mogul under wraps, but having one set of equipment go down in a field just doesn't seem to spill the beans on the whole program. Why do, then, many voices tell us the Roswell Army base went into emergency mode for the next week or so? Doesn't add up.
g) It appears that at least a dozen locals, and maybe 3 or 4 dozen, did see either what lay in the desert or was gathered up from it. There's no record of even one of them wondering out loud if what they stumbled across involving spying on the Russians, even when it would be safe to admit that 40 years later. Why doesn't at least one of them say, "Well, yes, I could tell it was equipment for tracking nuclear explosions?
h) Instead, at least 15 of these assert they saw something--or someone--clearly not originating on Earth.
To wind up, I note that the US federal government lies to the people all the time about anything and everything. Sometimes this is done in prudence and sometimes it is done with the most craven and awful of intentions--and results.
So maybe, if the new feds of the Trump administration were to tell us there really were aliens at Roswell, it would have to also announce that we've been on the edge of interstellar war all this time, and now it's finally breaking out and Earth will be overrun in a couple of years. Better to let us be happy eating our beer nuts in ignorance for a while more.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
1000s Will Die If Obamacare Repealed: Duuuhh
I got tired of being in Roswell and came back to Tucson for a few days.
Lots of people, say 100 or 1000 in every state this year, will die if they take down Obamacare. What I'm bothered by is treating this as news. We all knew this already. No, I hadn't actually thought of it myself, but I knew it. You knew it, too. So did Pres. Trump and Paul Ryan. I don't know how much commonsense either of them has, but they have this much.
Here's how it works: If you throw really large chunks of money at any one problem, lots of people will benefit, in big ways, no matter if it's an inefficient government deal that's only half effective. And if you don't have the program and leave it to private industry and nonprofits and good-hearted people at churches, they'll nibble around the edges, but, in 92 cases in 100, it won't get done. Now: does knowing 1000s will die automatically tell us whether to keep or kill the program? No, it does not. This is a value judgment.
Suppose John McCain finagles an extra billion, spread over the next five years, for more police hiring and training and new equipment in Arizona. What will happen? We all know the answer. Whether it's a super program or half-baked, that kind of money will mean a bunch of people won't be killed that would have been, a bunch of citizens won't be mugged that would have been, cops will have more help and feel better about how they're able to do their jobs. What is it worth to a community to have its cops feel like they've got a handle on things? A lot, but another value judgment.
Hungry children. Push it the other way. State of Arizona takes gizillons off of the food stamp and other free food programs, which they did. Guess what happens? Helps the state budget and a boatload, and I do mean a boatload, of kids go to bed hungry at night that would have had more food if the program hadn't been cut. Do any of those little kids become drug runners or terrorists because of it? That's like asking if more surprise pregnancies will happen in poor families, and the welfare need will rise, if you cut birth control services.
This is what it means to have a bleeding heart. Nobody has to remind you that if you yank away a lot of people's health insurance because the country can't afford it, my dad or your dad or Joe Schmoe down the street's dad will die next month because of it.
Here's one close to home: my son Eric, absolutely brilliant mind, quit college at age 25 because his loans ran out and he couldn't see how to work full time and go to school. A year or two after he started full time work, he asked his boss if he could go to part time so he could go back to school. The company, Comcast, a model of business expansion, told him to take his hope for self-betterment and stick it where the sun didn't shine. Five years later Eric told Comcast the same thing back and changed jobs. He quit school 8 or 9 years ago. Had the durned wicked government been handing out better grants and loans, he could have been doing particle physics by now., improving the world and paying a lot of taxes. Instead he's in his early 30s with a $15-20/hr job helping a big computer company plan its installations of new sales. He's got the brain to cure cancer, but he needed some help getting there, and our system nudged him into scheduling. His clock is ticking and he may have missed his chance for particle physics.
Why did you say India with its millions of high-tekkies, who speak passable English and are hungry, are stealing jobs from us? Just because we signed a bad trade deal, huh?
Repeat Eric's story a million times and you have a country with less competitive innovation, less competitive medical and technical research, and less competitive education. And people scratching their heads why the good jobs are slipping away. In places like Rustbelt, Ohio, those people voted for our new president in droves even though it was the other candidate talking about making sure kids could afford to go to college and not owe $100,000 when they got through. But that was socialism, so we flushed it down the toilet. I guess they're very farsighted in the Rust Belt, because they can see better jobs with less support for education, research, and innovation, and I can't. Did you notice who Silicon Valley voted for?
Of course 1000s are going to die. Commonsense. Please, Mr Newsman, tell us something we didn't know. Where was that headline when we could use it, in the campaign?
Lots of people, say 100 or 1000 in every state this year, will die if they take down Obamacare. What I'm bothered by is treating this as news. We all knew this already. No, I hadn't actually thought of it myself, but I knew it. You knew it, too. So did Pres. Trump and Paul Ryan. I don't know how much commonsense either of them has, but they have this much.
Here's how it works: If you throw really large chunks of money at any one problem, lots of people will benefit, in big ways, no matter if it's an inefficient government deal that's only half effective. And if you don't have the program and leave it to private industry and nonprofits and good-hearted people at churches, they'll nibble around the edges, but, in 92 cases in 100, it won't get done. Now: does knowing 1000s will die automatically tell us whether to keep or kill the program? No, it does not. This is a value judgment.
Suppose John McCain finagles an extra billion, spread over the next five years, for more police hiring and training and new equipment in Arizona. What will happen? We all know the answer. Whether it's a super program or half-baked, that kind of money will mean a bunch of people won't be killed that would have been, a bunch of citizens won't be mugged that would have been, cops will have more help and feel better about how they're able to do their jobs. What is it worth to a community to have its cops feel like they've got a handle on things? A lot, but another value judgment.
Hungry children. Push it the other way. State of Arizona takes gizillons off of the food stamp and other free food programs, which they did. Guess what happens? Helps the state budget and a boatload, and I do mean a boatload, of kids go to bed hungry at night that would have had more food if the program hadn't been cut. Do any of those little kids become drug runners or terrorists because of it? That's like asking if more surprise pregnancies will happen in poor families, and the welfare need will rise, if you cut birth control services.
This is what it means to have a bleeding heart. Nobody has to remind you that if you yank away a lot of people's health insurance because the country can't afford it, my dad or your dad or Joe Schmoe down the street's dad will die next month because of it.
Here's one close to home: my son Eric, absolutely brilliant mind, quit college at age 25 because his loans ran out and he couldn't see how to work full time and go to school. A year or two after he started full time work, he asked his boss if he could go to part time so he could go back to school. The company, Comcast, a model of business expansion, told him to take his hope for self-betterment and stick it where the sun didn't shine. Five years later Eric told Comcast the same thing back and changed jobs. He quit school 8 or 9 years ago. Had the durned wicked government been handing out better grants and loans, he could have been doing particle physics by now., improving the world and paying a lot of taxes. Instead he's in his early 30s with a $15-20/hr job helping a big computer company plan its installations of new sales. He's got the brain to cure cancer, but he needed some help getting there, and our system nudged him into scheduling. His clock is ticking and he may have missed his chance for particle physics.
Why did you say India with its millions of high-tekkies, who speak passable English and are hungry, are stealing jobs from us? Just because we signed a bad trade deal, huh?
Repeat Eric's story a million times and you have a country with less competitive innovation, less competitive medical and technical research, and less competitive education. And people scratching their heads why the good jobs are slipping away. In places like Rustbelt, Ohio, those people voted for our new president in droves even though it was the other candidate talking about making sure kids could afford to go to college and not owe $100,000 when they got through. But that was socialism, so we flushed it down the toilet. I guess they're very farsighted in the Rust Belt, because they can see better jobs with less support for education, research, and innovation, and I can't. Did you notice who Silicon Valley voted for?
Of course 1000s are going to die. Commonsense. Please, Mr Newsman, tell us something we didn't know. Where was that headline when we could use it, in the campaign?
Sunday, January 22, 2017
#8: A Tiff About Roswell: The Argument Somehow Avoids Fisticuffs
Skep: I'm the sensible skeptical one here. What's more likely, based on all we know, that Life born and raised Elsewhere in the Universe has flown here and remains undiscovered, unproven, or that it hasn't done that?
Glow: Answer your own damn question.
Skep: That's 'cause you don't like the answer.
Glow: Make your own points. My first point is that I, with Carl Sagan, believe it overwhelmingly likely that life exists elsewhere besides Earth, because otherwise he wouldn't have gone to Senator Proxmire to beg him for money for SETI to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Skep: That's heartwarming, just like your name, Glow. Beliefs are important in human life, but not so important in fact-based evidence gathering. Okay, it is vastly more likely that sentient aliens have Not Landed On Earth, or flown above it. I'd place the odds at 10,000 to 1, and maybe I should have said 1/2 in 10,000 or less. Wanna know why?
Glow: I'm sure you'll tell us. My second point is: Howard Blum's history of UFO investigation showed that a group of Air Force investigators agreed with me, not you. In 1948 an Air Force Technical Intel Estimate concluded that UFOs came from somewhere besides Earth.
Skep: We basically know aliens haven't landed here because there have been 20,000 or 100,000 sightings, and no proof. There have been maybe 1000 people claiming to have been abducted or visited in person by extraterrestrials, and no proof. There are 10,000 psychics claiming contact with either dead people or extraterrestrial protectors named Ashtar, and zero proof. Starting to notice a pattern here?
Glow: I admit you have a good point there. Yet in that vast number of sightings are at least 1000 reported by highly reliable military and civilian witnesses--clear-headed non-UFO-believers who saw things not explainable using the regular information we have about Earth civilization and technology. Howard Blum lays this out in grand detail. Ronald Reagan would rank somewhere in the middle of this reliable witnesses group, not at the top. Among these are two Roswell firefighters, including a crew chief, who say they saw extraterrestrial craft and beings and were threatened with their lives if they ever spoke of it. These are not flaky guys. You skeptics just tell the Roswell firefighters they're full of shit. You tell the fire department crew chief he's about ready for the psych ward. Know what? You're wrong.
Skep: A high percentage of humans are gullible, unreliable sources of information. There's a sucker born every minute, and you want to believe them. No thanks. It's more likely they were wrong about what they saw, or are lying, than it is that aliens crashed at Roswell and were found on the Brazel ranch.
Glow: We know beyond doubt that there was an ugly, illegal military coverup at Roswell. It was psychologically brutal and in at least two cases (Brazel and a broadcaster) involved the physical brutally of taking an innocent civilian into custody and keeping him for an illegal period of time. On No Charges! It's more likely that the government panicked and covered up than that a sizeable number of people in the vicinity of Roswell, with little or no knowledge of each other and their stories, hallucinated about nonEarth materials and beings. Why would a healthy seven-year-old girl lie about being shaken down by a soldier? Why would she lie about handling a material the like of which no Earthling had ever seen? Why would another girl lie that her dad told her, where they were all alone, that he saw alien wreckage and was threatened because of it? "Your father was threatened by the government."
Skep: We've uncovered countless government coverups. Why is this one different? Why hasn't its cover been blown?
Glow: The short answer is that too many people want to keep the lid on. Longer answer is that many coverups--it would probably be accurate to say too many to count--are successful. There are myriads of things the public never learns. Take Snowden for example. Had he not been willing to give up his career--and really his way of life--for his conscience, we still wouldn't know much of what he revealed. You can't contest that. The Roswell cover was in fact blown in 1978 when Jesse Marcel, a lead officer handling the debris cleanup at Roswell, said what he gathered was not made on Earth, and he did it, 30 years after the fact, in defiance of orders. Also, the lid on the story stays in place partly because the basic story is soooo far from our experience, and because the government doubles down on denying.
Skep: That it took 30 years after something happened for it to come out into public debate is one more strike against its credibility. In court cases, the sooner after the problem arises that you file your case, the more weight it's presumed to have.
Glow: Most court cases don't have sheriffs and soldiers threatening to kill everybody involved. Explain this one: Mack Brazel later said he wished he had gone to the press first and blown the government off. Why would he wish that, unless he was shaken down? Here's a guy who found either a basic weather balloon, the original story, or a bigger, fancier balloon carrying nucleaar monitoring equipment. If that's what he found, he doesn't go running for help. Yet he did. My gov has expected me to believe for 50 years that he really found one of two types of balloon. You're a bloke rancher and you find either basic or elaborate balloon stuff crashed in your field. What good could it do to bring the press in first? Why would he suppose it would have turned out better? Your side has no rational answer for these sorts of questions.
Skep: True. Humans have many motives, not all clear or sensible. The bottom line is that an ordinary crash is what the law calls a rebuttable presumption. In other words, the burden of proof lies in the UFO believers' court, and you just don't have the proof. You've got hints and wishes and suggestions and wide-eyed deathbed interviews.
Glow: You have no explanation for 100 facts learned by researchers. Why was Brazel taken into custody for a week if it was a Project Mogul balloon, and never accused of a crime? Why was he treated like he might be a threat to national security? Why was the radio station threatened with loss of its license by a US Senator if it was some fairly minor thing?
Last word.l It's good to hear your case made. I just wish I felt like it was a good case. It is absurd to call Roswell the best-debunked UFO case. I feel good about the points I made, too. Final thought: the gov has never offered evidence to back up the Project Mogul theory, just announced it as a conclusion.
Skep: I would say there must 1000 UFO cases far more completely debunked. It's just unproven. It's all guesses and wishes and theories, and this year it will be 60 years of guesses and wishes and theories..
Glow: Answer your own damn question.
Skep: That's 'cause you don't like the answer.
Glow: Make your own points. My first point is that I, with Carl Sagan, believe it overwhelmingly likely that life exists elsewhere besides Earth, because otherwise he wouldn't have gone to Senator Proxmire to beg him for money for SETI to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Skep: That's heartwarming, just like your name, Glow. Beliefs are important in human life, but not so important in fact-based evidence gathering. Okay, it is vastly more likely that sentient aliens have Not Landed On Earth, or flown above it. I'd place the odds at 10,000 to 1, and maybe I should have said 1/2 in 10,000 or less. Wanna know why?
Glow: I'm sure you'll tell us. My second point is: Howard Blum's history of UFO investigation showed that a group of Air Force investigators agreed with me, not you. In 1948 an Air Force Technical Intel Estimate concluded that UFOs came from somewhere besides Earth.
Skep: We basically know aliens haven't landed here because there have been 20,000 or 100,000 sightings, and no proof. There have been maybe 1000 people claiming to have been abducted or visited in person by extraterrestrials, and no proof. There are 10,000 psychics claiming contact with either dead people or extraterrestrial protectors named Ashtar, and zero proof. Starting to notice a pattern here?
Glow: I admit you have a good point there. Yet in that vast number of sightings are at least 1000 reported by highly reliable military and civilian witnesses--clear-headed non-UFO-believers who saw things not explainable using the regular information we have about Earth civilization and technology. Howard Blum lays this out in grand detail. Ronald Reagan would rank somewhere in the middle of this reliable witnesses group, not at the top. Among these are two Roswell firefighters, including a crew chief, who say they saw extraterrestrial craft and beings and were threatened with their lives if they ever spoke of it. These are not flaky guys. You skeptics just tell the Roswell firefighters they're full of shit. You tell the fire department crew chief he's about ready for the psych ward. Know what? You're wrong.
Skep: A high percentage of humans are gullible, unreliable sources of information. There's a sucker born every minute, and you want to believe them. No thanks. It's more likely they were wrong about what they saw, or are lying, than it is that aliens crashed at Roswell and were found on the Brazel ranch.
Glow: We know beyond doubt that there was an ugly, illegal military coverup at Roswell. It was psychologically brutal and in at least two cases (Brazel and a broadcaster) involved the physical brutally of taking an innocent civilian into custody and keeping him for an illegal period of time. On No Charges! It's more likely that the government panicked and covered up than that a sizeable number of people in the vicinity of Roswell, with little or no knowledge of each other and their stories, hallucinated about nonEarth materials and beings. Why would a healthy seven-year-old girl lie about being shaken down by a soldier? Why would she lie about handling a material the like of which no Earthling had ever seen? Why would another girl lie that her dad told her, where they were all alone, that he saw alien wreckage and was threatened because of it? "Your father was threatened by the government."
Skep: We've uncovered countless government coverups. Why is this one different? Why hasn't its cover been blown?
Glow: The short answer is that too many people want to keep the lid on. Longer answer is that many coverups--it would probably be accurate to say too many to count--are successful. There are myriads of things the public never learns. Take Snowden for example. Had he not been willing to give up his career--and really his way of life--for his conscience, we still wouldn't know much of what he revealed. You can't contest that. The Roswell cover was in fact blown in 1978 when Jesse Marcel, a lead officer handling the debris cleanup at Roswell, said what he gathered was not made on Earth, and he did it, 30 years after the fact, in defiance of orders. Also, the lid on the story stays in place partly because the basic story is soooo far from our experience, and because the government doubles down on denying.
Skep: That it took 30 years after something happened for it to come out into public debate is one more strike against its credibility. In court cases, the sooner after the problem arises that you file your case, the more weight it's presumed to have.
Glow: Most court cases don't have sheriffs and soldiers threatening to kill everybody involved. Explain this one: Mack Brazel later said he wished he had gone to the press first and blown the government off. Why would he wish that, unless he was shaken down? Here's a guy who found either a basic weather balloon, the original story, or a bigger, fancier balloon carrying nucleaar monitoring equipment. If that's what he found, he doesn't go running for help. Yet he did. My gov has expected me to believe for 50 years that he really found one of two types of balloon. You're a bloke rancher and you find either basic or elaborate balloon stuff crashed in your field. What good could it do to bring the press in first? Why would he suppose it would have turned out better? Your side has no rational answer for these sorts of questions.
Skep: True. Humans have many motives, not all clear or sensible. The bottom line is that an ordinary crash is what the law calls a rebuttable presumption. In other words, the burden of proof lies in the UFO believers' court, and you just don't have the proof. You've got hints and wishes and suggestions and wide-eyed deathbed interviews.
Glow: You have no explanation for 100 facts learned by researchers. Why was Brazel taken into custody for a week if it was a Project Mogul balloon, and never accused of a crime? Why was he treated like he might be a threat to national security? Why was the radio station threatened with loss of its license by a US Senator if it was some fairly minor thing?
Last word.l It's good to hear your case made. I just wish I felt like it was a good case. It is absurd to call Roswell the best-debunked UFO case. I feel good about the points I made, too. Final thought: the gov has never offered evidence to back up the Project Mogul theory, just announced it as a conclusion.
Skep: I would say there must 1000 UFO cases far more completely debunked. It's just unproven. It's all guesses and wishes and theories, and this year it will be 60 years of guesses and wishes and theories..
Sunday, January 15, 2017
#7: Was There A Cover-Up At Roswell? Answer Seems To Be Yes
If I keep this up, I might have to move to New Mexico.
I remind myself of my friend Gene, a very original spirit who came to Utah on a vacation, went back to the Bay Area, and was doing an hour-a-week radio show. He got into studying Mormonism because his vacation had accidentally exposed him to them in Utah, and he drove his listeners crazy because they weren't as interested in the subject as he was. I don't have any audience here, but I surely wasn't planning to specialize in UFOs, or even one UFO, for a while. A couple of times in recent summers, as I've driven around, I've found Roswell, NM in my path. So I stopped and did some reading, and these last eight or so blogs are the result. The Devil seems to be in the Details, and so each blog is a few details that prompts me to search out more.
The first type of coverup "covered" in the previous blog was censorship of the press. Now the second type has nothing to do with journalism.
Coverup Type Two: Intimidation of Three Groups of Witnesses Who Tell A Consistent Story
The Anaya Brothers. In early July, later-to-be New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya, then Lt Governor, was on the Roswell Army Base for reasons not related to crashes when he called two of his Roswell supporters, Pete and Ruben Anaya. "Get me the hell out of here!" They drove him to Pete's house, where Montoya proceeded to drink himself into oblivion because his mind had just been blown. The Anaya brothers agreed afterward that Montoya told them he saw a spaceship and little bodies with big heads. Pete and his wife Mary later told Carey in an interview that soon Sheriff Wilcox of Roswell came and told the brothers they would be killed, and their families, too, if they talked about what Montoya had told them. See what a heart-warming story this is? Carey and Schmidt, p. 63-4.
So far we've been talking about people making wild claims about seeing things--nonEarth-made material or flying discs or radar blips showing impossible movements that defied our known laws of inertia. Here our trail stumbles for the first time across someone, later a US Senator--Senators always tell the truth. Ask Orrin Hatch. Across someone claiming to see bodies associated with the crash. I think it might have been nicer if the advanced aliens had just sent a drone. Less creepy.
Sue and Arthur Farnsworth. Sue was seven when she heard rumors and asked her dad Arthur what was wrong. He took her, the two of them on one horse, out to a spot where no one was around. "Your father was threatened by the military a few days ago." It's the kind of short declaration an impressionable child might recall word-for-word for the rest of her life. He went on to say that a flying saucer crashed on another ranch and he and other ranchers went out and saw more than they were supposed to see. They were told they'd be killed if they ever told anyone, and then Sue's dad told her never to talk. She waited until 2008--61 years--to come forward. I conclude the alleged threat worked. Carey and Schmidt, p 65-6 Did the threat cover up something? How plausible is the whole story? It seems a whole lot more likely these people are lying or deceiving themselves than that we were visited by crashing aliens.
On the other hand, suppose the claims of threats (we're going to tally more of them) were true. Here we are in the land of the free, where we can say Anything that's true without fear of consequence. Isn't America great?
Frankie Dwyer was 12 years old in 1947 and her dad was in the Roswell fire department. She recalls going to the dentist and then coming to the fire station to wait for her dad. Before he arrived, a cop named Robert Scroggins came in and showed what looked like a thin piece of tin foil. He crumpled it and dropped it on a table, where it landed without a sound. Then it magically spread out like quicksilver into a perfectly smooth piece of paper-thin material. All present handled it including Frankie. It couldn't be cut with a knife, scratched, burned with a cigarette lighter. Scroggins said he got it from someone up in Corona, the tiny town closer to the crash than Roswell.
A day or two later Frankie was at home with her mother when a tall man in an MP uniform came looking for "your daughter." "I have two daughters," her mom said. "Named Frankie." Two other MPs escorted mom into another room and the first man questioned Frankie about the incident. Then he drew out his billy club and smacked his open palm with it. "You did not see anything, understand? If you say anything, you will be killed and your family, too. There's a big desert out there and no one will find you."
Carey concluded it was likely Lt Philbin who talked to Frankie. He was 6'4" and handled security for the base whenever base activities extended into town. In 2005 he found a yearbook for the Roswell unit with 17 pictures of officers on it, including Philbin. He photocopied the page and sent it to Frankie, now age 70, asking if she felt any of those pictured was the man who interrogated and threatened her. A few weeks later Carey got Dwyer's answer--no letter but the photocopied page returned with a lone circle drawn around Philbin's picture. Children of Roswell, pp 86-89.
Dan Dwyer and Lee Reeves. Frankie's father Dan was a fire dept crew chief. A call came to the fire station that an aircraft was downed, but, before they could respond, a colonel from the base walked in, told them "an unknown object from someplace else" had crashed. Dan Dwyer took Lee Reeves in Dwyer's car and made a run out there. They found an egg-shaped vessel of a sort they didn't recognize. They saw a couple of bodies lying there, not human and about the size of a ten-year-old child. Then, even more startlingly, they saw "a live one" staggering off to the side. It seemed unhurt but dazed. Within minutes MPs drove up and came toward the fire fighters with rifles drawn and sent them away. Rifles drawn? Hundreds of miles from the border in peacetime US, to protect a military balloon? Rifles drawn? Back in town, CM Woodbury, a close friend of the Base commander, confronted Reeves and Dwyer, saying they were not to say a word. Apparently he was polite enough not to threaten killing the whole family.
In 1959 Ken Letcher (with that last name would you want him to marry your daughter?) married Frankie's sister Suzie. In 2012 Letcher confirmed the following by interview with Carey: Dan Dwyer sat him down and gave him the standard father-in-law chat for a future son-in-law. Dan then asked if his daughter had said anything to him about 1947. Ken didn't know what he was talking about. Dan told Ken that those of them who had been "out there" saw the alien wreckage and bodies which "weren't from here."
I guess I'm predisposed to believe the alien story, because the above doesn't prove the alien story, but I find these people credible. I doubt that my careful-thinking son Eric Rasmussen would be as impressed, or my very rational cousin Steve Rasmussen. We have statements by half a dozen people, in three groups that seem quite unrelated to each other, all saying about the same thing. Their statements were gathered many years after the fact, are backed up by no physical evidence, and are contradicted by the government. I haven't talked to any of these people myself, if they're still alive in 2017, but I'm certain there was a cover-up, a very nasty one.
As Kevin Randle said, we can prove the cover-up beyond a shadow of a doubt. Maybe there's a good reason why we can't prove extraterrestrial life beyond a shadow of a doubt? Pick your reason: a) because it doesn't exist b) even if it does, it hasn't visited Earth c) humanity at large is too likely to panic or have some other unfortunate reaction if the info got out d) the US and maybe other governments would hate to confess they've been hiding, for more than my entire 67 years of life, the single most incredible discovery of, say, the last several hundred years.
What are recent examples of the US government lying to us, covering things up? The NSA collecting data on everyone who used the Internet, including all of us in the US, and lying about it. Torturing of terrorist suspects or turning them over to other nations that would torture them and lying about it.
Off-subject: Torture. The problem with "enhanced interrogation" is if we can do it to one guy today, whether he wears a turban or not, we can sure as hell do it to you or me tomorrow. No one is safe and no one has guaranteed rights from that kind of government. If it's true that I can be tortured before I am tried, which at least has a spiritual kinship with cruel and unusual punishment outlawed by the Constitution, then why should I think I have some fluffy right like speech or assembly or religion or anything else American democracy declares sacred? Nobody is safe from an organization that is willing to torture. Maybe I'll see it differently later, but for now I'm sure that anyone advocating or performing torture has morally lost his way. So far as I read, we won World War II without using torture on our hell-spreading enemies. If we can get through that kind of a peril without it, we certainly can get through now without it, Donald Trump.
When we torture, we have less right to divine help.
I remind myself of my friend Gene, a very original spirit who came to Utah on a vacation, went back to the Bay Area, and was doing an hour-a-week radio show. He got into studying Mormonism because his vacation had accidentally exposed him to them in Utah, and he drove his listeners crazy because they weren't as interested in the subject as he was. I don't have any audience here, but I surely wasn't planning to specialize in UFOs, or even one UFO, for a while. A couple of times in recent summers, as I've driven around, I've found Roswell, NM in my path. So I stopped and did some reading, and these last eight or so blogs are the result. The Devil seems to be in the Details, and so each blog is a few details that prompts me to search out more.
The first type of coverup "covered" in the previous blog was censorship of the press. Now the second type has nothing to do with journalism.
Coverup Type Two: Intimidation of Three Groups of Witnesses Who Tell A Consistent Story
The Anaya Brothers. In early July, later-to-be New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya, then Lt Governor, was on the Roswell Army Base for reasons not related to crashes when he called two of his Roswell supporters, Pete and Ruben Anaya. "Get me the hell out of here!" They drove him to Pete's house, where Montoya proceeded to drink himself into oblivion because his mind had just been blown. The Anaya brothers agreed afterward that Montoya told them he saw a spaceship and little bodies with big heads. Pete and his wife Mary later told Carey in an interview that soon Sheriff Wilcox of Roswell came and told the brothers they would be killed, and their families, too, if they talked about what Montoya had told them. See what a heart-warming story this is? Carey and Schmidt, p. 63-4.
So far we've been talking about people making wild claims about seeing things--nonEarth-made material or flying discs or radar blips showing impossible movements that defied our known laws of inertia. Here our trail stumbles for the first time across someone, later a US Senator--Senators always tell the truth. Ask Orrin Hatch. Across someone claiming to see bodies associated with the crash. I think it might have been nicer if the advanced aliens had just sent a drone. Less creepy.
Sue and Arthur Farnsworth. Sue was seven when she heard rumors and asked her dad Arthur what was wrong. He took her, the two of them on one horse, out to a spot where no one was around. "Your father was threatened by the military a few days ago." It's the kind of short declaration an impressionable child might recall word-for-word for the rest of her life. He went on to say that a flying saucer crashed on another ranch and he and other ranchers went out and saw more than they were supposed to see. They were told they'd be killed if they ever told anyone, and then Sue's dad told her never to talk. She waited until 2008--61 years--to come forward. I conclude the alleged threat worked. Carey and Schmidt, p 65-6 Did the threat cover up something? How plausible is the whole story? It seems a whole lot more likely these people are lying or deceiving themselves than that we were visited by crashing aliens.
On the other hand, suppose the claims of threats (we're going to tally more of them) were true. Here we are in the land of the free, where we can say Anything that's true without fear of consequence. Isn't America great?
Frankie Dwyer was 12 years old in 1947 and her dad was in the Roswell fire department. She recalls going to the dentist and then coming to the fire station to wait for her dad. Before he arrived, a cop named Robert Scroggins came in and showed what looked like a thin piece of tin foil. He crumpled it and dropped it on a table, where it landed without a sound. Then it magically spread out like quicksilver into a perfectly smooth piece of paper-thin material. All present handled it including Frankie. It couldn't be cut with a knife, scratched, burned with a cigarette lighter. Scroggins said he got it from someone up in Corona, the tiny town closer to the crash than Roswell.
A day or two later Frankie was at home with her mother when a tall man in an MP uniform came looking for "your daughter." "I have two daughters," her mom said. "Named Frankie." Two other MPs escorted mom into another room and the first man questioned Frankie about the incident. Then he drew out his billy club and smacked his open palm with it. "You did not see anything, understand? If you say anything, you will be killed and your family, too. There's a big desert out there and no one will find you."
Carey concluded it was likely Lt Philbin who talked to Frankie. He was 6'4" and handled security for the base whenever base activities extended into town. In 2005 he found a yearbook for the Roswell unit with 17 pictures of officers on it, including Philbin. He photocopied the page and sent it to Frankie, now age 70, asking if she felt any of those pictured was the man who interrogated and threatened her. A few weeks later Carey got Dwyer's answer--no letter but the photocopied page returned with a lone circle drawn around Philbin's picture. Children of Roswell, pp 86-89.
Dan Dwyer and Lee Reeves. Frankie's father Dan was a fire dept crew chief. A call came to the fire station that an aircraft was downed, but, before they could respond, a colonel from the base walked in, told them "an unknown object from someplace else" had crashed. Dan Dwyer took Lee Reeves in Dwyer's car and made a run out there. They found an egg-shaped vessel of a sort they didn't recognize. They saw a couple of bodies lying there, not human and about the size of a ten-year-old child. Then, even more startlingly, they saw "a live one" staggering off to the side. It seemed unhurt but dazed. Within minutes MPs drove up and came toward the fire fighters with rifles drawn and sent them away. Rifles drawn? Hundreds of miles from the border in peacetime US, to protect a military balloon? Rifles drawn? Back in town, CM Woodbury, a close friend of the Base commander, confronted Reeves and Dwyer, saying they were not to say a word. Apparently he was polite enough not to threaten killing the whole family.
In 1959 Ken Letcher (with that last name would you want him to marry your daughter?) married Frankie's sister Suzie. In 2012 Letcher confirmed the following by interview with Carey: Dan Dwyer sat him down and gave him the standard father-in-law chat for a future son-in-law. Dan then asked if his daughter had said anything to him about 1947. Ken didn't know what he was talking about. Dan told Ken that those of them who had been "out there" saw the alien wreckage and bodies which "weren't from here."
I guess I'm predisposed to believe the alien story, because the above doesn't prove the alien story, but I find these people credible. I doubt that my careful-thinking son Eric Rasmussen would be as impressed, or my very rational cousin Steve Rasmussen. We have statements by half a dozen people, in three groups that seem quite unrelated to each other, all saying about the same thing. Their statements were gathered many years after the fact, are backed up by no physical evidence, and are contradicted by the government. I haven't talked to any of these people myself, if they're still alive in 2017, but I'm certain there was a cover-up, a very nasty one.
As Kevin Randle said, we can prove the cover-up beyond a shadow of a doubt. Maybe there's a good reason why we can't prove extraterrestrial life beyond a shadow of a doubt? Pick your reason: a) because it doesn't exist b) even if it does, it hasn't visited Earth c) humanity at large is too likely to panic or have some other unfortunate reaction if the info got out d) the US and maybe other governments would hate to confess they've been hiding, for more than my entire 67 years of life, the single most incredible discovery of, say, the last several hundred years.
What are recent examples of the US government lying to us, covering things up? The NSA collecting data on everyone who used the Internet, including all of us in the US, and lying about it. Torturing of terrorist suspects or turning them over to other nations that would torture them and lying about it.
Off-subject: Torture. The problem with "enhanced interrogation" is if we can do it to one guy today, whether he wears a turban or not, we can sure as hell do it to you or me tomorrow. No one is safe and no one has guaranteed rights from that kind of government. If it's true that I can be tortured before I am tried, which at least has a spiritual kinship with cruel and unusual punishment outlawed by the Constitution, then why should I think I have some fluffy right like speech or assembly or religion or anything else American democracy declares sacred? Nobody is safe from an organization that is willing to torture. Maybe I'll see it differently later, but for now I'm sure that anyone advocating or performing torture has morally lost his way. So far as I read, we won World War II without using torture on our hell-spreading enemies. If we can get through that kind of a peril without it, we certainly can get through now without it, Donald Trump.
When we torture, we have less right to divine help.
Roswell #6: It Looks Like A Cover-Up: Press Censorship
I was a young adult who voted for President Nixon in 1972. Twelve quick months later I wrote a letter to the editor of my BYU college paper, calling for his resignation. The letter was printed and friends talked to me about it. Why? Because I couldn't trust him any more. Too many scandals, too much dirt. Quickly becoming the biggest piece of that dirt was the Watergate Cover-up. They were hiding the truth. What the truth was, was still guesswork. What was clear was that the Nixon White House was taking great measures to keep the voters from learning what that truth was. The cover-up lasted many more months, but collapsed, and Pres. Nixon resigned 9 months after I wrote my letter to the editor.
Maybe I'm wrong, but at first glance Roswell looks like Watergate--vast efforts being made to hide something. We can't see what it is they're covering up, but some of the efforts to suppress are right out in the open, or have become public knowledge with the passing of time.
One. Censorship of the press. The BBC interviewed Frank Joyce, who worked at Roswell's radio station, KGFL. Joyce made the on-air announcement that the Army said it had a flying disc in its possession. Joyce said that, later that day, he picked up the phone to hear a young woman's voice telling him a Colonel from the Pentagon was ready to talk to him. The man "read me the riot act" in a powerful voice, "of the type that really conveys menace and power." Joyce said. 'You're gonna get in a lot of trouble for this,' something threatening. I said, 'Look, I'm a civilian. You can't tell me what to do in stories I put on the air.' And he says, 'I'll show you what I can do!' Bang, hung up the phone."
Then George Roberts of KGFL told the BBC of a call Walt Whitmore, station owner, got from one of the senators [New Mexico's senator Chavez] from Washington who said, 'Look, if you put out any stories on this, you're gonna lose your license. It's not gonna be over a period of time. It's gonna be the same day that we tell you you're off the air." What the station was about to air was an interview with discoverer Mack Brazel, with details about the debris.
In 1998 Joyce told Thomas Carey that a day or two after the Colonel's call, his boss Walt Whitmore took him out into the country and had him wait "in a shack off the Corona road." A man in an odd uniform sat in the car's back seat for the ride out there, without saying a word. After Joyce waited a few minutes in the shack, wondering what to expect, in walked Mack Brazel, discoverer of the wreckage, who said in a pleading voice, 'You're not going to say what I told you the other day, are you?' "Not if you don't want me to." "Good. Our lives will never be the same." Now the silent man in the back seat had disappeared. Joyce told Carey that not long after that he, Joyce, was picked up and removed by soldiers to a military hospital in Texas for reasons never made clear. He was kept there about a year.
Brazel also was held in military custody after he reported the crash, but released after about six days. Several locals saw soldiers escort him to local media outlets in town. (Sources here are BBC documentary, 1995, and Carey and Schmidt's book, The Children of Roswell, 2016, pp 61-62, 141, 205)
Next: threatening witnesses if they talked: the Anaya brothers, Frankie Rowe, probably 1-2 dozen others. There's a lot to this. It's work.
Maybe I'm wrong, but at first glance Roswell looks like Watergate--vast efforts being made to hide something. We can't see what it is they're covering up, but some of the efforts to suppress are right out in the open, or have become public knowledge with the passing of time.
One. Censorship of the press. The BBC interviewed Frank Joyce, who worked at Roswell's radio station, KGFL. Joyce made the on-air announcement that the Army said it had a flying disc in its possession. Joyce said that, later that day, he picked up the phone to hear a young woman's voice telling him a Colonel from the Pentagon was ready to talk to him. The man "read me the riot act" in a powerful voice, "of the type that really conveys menace and power." Joyce said. 'You're gonna get in a lot of trouble for this,' something threatening. I said, 'Look, I'm a civilian. You can't tell me what to do in stories I put on the air.' And he says, 'I'll show you what I can do!' Bang, hung up the phone."
Then George Roberts of KGFL told the BBC of a call Walt Whitmore, station owner, got from one of the senators [New Mexico's senator Chavez] from Washington who said, 'Look, if you put out any stories on this, you're gonna lose your license. It's not gonna be over a period of time. It's gonna be the same day that we tell you you're off the air." What the station was about to air was an interview with discoverer Mack Brazel, with details about the debris.
In 1998 Joyce told Thomas Carey that a day or two after the Colonel's call, his boss Walt Whitmore took him out into the country and had him wait "in a shack off the Corona road." A man in an odd uniform sat in the car's back seat for the ride out there, without saying a word. After Joyce waited a few minutes in the shack, wondering what to expect, in walked Mack Brazel, discoverer of the wreckage, who said in a pleading voice, 'You're not going to say what I told you the other day, are you?' "Not if you don't want me to." "Good. Our lives will never be the same." Now the silent man in the back seat had disappeared. Joyce told Carey that not long after that he, Joyce, was picked up and removed by soldiers to a military hospital in Texas for reasons never made clear. He was kept there about a year.
Brazel also was held in military custody after he reported the crash, but released after about six days. Several locals saw soldiers escort him to local media outlets in town. (Sources here are BBC documentary, 1995, and Carey and Schmidt's book, The Children of Roswell, 2016, pp 61-62, 141, 205)
Next: threatening witnesses if they talked: the Anaya brothers, Frankie Rowe, probably 1-2 dozen others. There's a lot to this. It's work.
Easing Toward Roswell #5: Only Certain People Are Qualified To Hear The Truth. Howard Blum's Book Out There, Part Two
"In the beginning was the file." p. 62 In summer 1947 the commanding general of Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio got a request from a civilian pilot in Wash. St to explain nine very fast shiny objects flying near Mt. Rainier.
He opened a file on the matter. First it was called Project Sign. Later it became Project Grudge. In March 1952 it turned into Project Blue Book. The gov kept investigating "wierd sightings" under Blue Book for 17 years, until 1969.
Lots of unexplained sightings came in. In February 1949, Sign summarized 243 sightings by saying we haven't solved the mystery and probably won't unless we can examine crashed remains. You might think that, if Roswell had offered exactly that 18 months earlier, Sign would know about it. Maybe they did. Maybe they just didn't tell. Why not? Good Germans. Or it could be that the right hand of the Fed Gov didn't know what the left hand was doing.
A report from Project Grudge looked at over 200 sightings and wrote off the nationwide concern as so much silliness. The official attitude told to the public was firm skepticism. Yet, Blum writes, it was all an act.
In 1948 an Air Force Technical Intel Estimate concluded that UFOs came from somewhere besides Earth. Yet the AF Chief Vandenberg (p. 64) held off on putting the report out because it lacked evidence. Still, to the analysts buried in the details of the report, the 1000 pieces of half-evidence added up to concluding "Yes." They didn't get to say that to the public, even if they admitted they were still guessing. Nobody got to give a speech in public saying, "I've studied hundreds of these cases and I'm telling you I Just Know some of them aren't humans from Earth. I don't have hard proof, but I'm sold!"
National defense required that all these seemingly unexplainable events, and the high-level concern about them, not be shared in detail with the man in the street, until more was known. That was five decades ago. Is no more known now, or have we the people yet to hear what our officials possess? Civilian panic had to be avoided--we can all agree with that goal--remember the radio program of War of the Worlds in the 1930s? It panicked some listeners who took it for a real news broadcast.
So now it became an insider's game. The rule: tell them when we can be sure it is something routine. If we can't explain it, just say we're checking on it. p. 65 Blum writes "There were no lies, just necessary deceptions." Not to worry--the Air Force is on top of the situation and UFOs are its job. This was the situation when Pres. Eisenhower left office in 1960. "Candor was not in the national interest," Blum says.
Air Force rule 11-7: In certain situations info not to be given to Congress "even in confidence." A strict need to know rule applies, and the civilian representatives of the people weren't high enough on the totem pole to hear the truth. Does this hint at how Roswell, also, could have been covered up by similar reasoning? Again, Blum: "A fundamental law of spook behavior, as inviolable as an axion of physics itself . . . For every story shared, there was one buried." So the gov was anxious but did it really know something?
He opened a file on the matter. First it was called Project Sign. Later it became Project Grudge. In March 1952 it turned into Project Blue Book. The gov kept investigating "wierd sightings" under Blue Book for 17 years, until 1969.
Lots of unexplained sightings came in. In February 1949, Sign summarized 243 sightings by saying we haven't solved the mystery and probably won't unless we can examine crashed remains. You might think that, if Roswell had offered exactly that 18 months earlier, Sign would know about it. Maybe they did. Maybe they just didn't tell. Why not? Good Germans. Or it could be that the right hand of the Fed Gov didn't know what the left hand was doing.
A report from Project Grudge looked at over 200 sightings and wrote off the nationwide concern as so much silliness. The official attitude told to the public was firm skepticism. Yet, Blum writes, it was all an act.
In 1948 an Air Force Technical Intel Estimate concluded that UFOs came from somewhere besides Earth. Yet the AF Chief Vandenberg (p. 64) held off on putting the report out because it lacked evidence. Still, to the analysts buried in the details of the report, the 1000 pieces of half-evidence added up to concluding "Yes." They didn't get to say that to the public, even if they admitted they were still guessing. Nobody got to give a speech in public saying, "I've studied hundreds of these cases and I'm telling you I Just Know some of them aren't humans from Earth. I don't have hard proof, but I'm sold!"
National defense required that all these seemingly unexplainable events, and the high-level concern about them, not be shared in detail with the man in the street, until more was known. That was five decades ago. Is no more known now, or have we the people yet to hear what our officials possess? Civilian panic had to be avoided--we can all agree with that goal--remember the radio program of War of the Worlds in the 1930s? It panicked some listeners who took it for a real news broadcast.
So now it became an insider's game. The rule: tell them when we can be sure it is something routine. If we can't explain it, just say we're checking on it. p. 65 Blum writes "There were no lies, just necessary deceptions." Not to worry--the Air Force is on top of the situation and UFOs are its job. This was the situation when Pres. Eisenhower left office in 1960. "Candor was not in the national interest," Blum says.
Air Force rule 11-7: In certain situations info not to be given to Congress "even in confidence." A strict need to know rule applies, and the civilian representatives of the people weren't high enough on the totem pole to hear the truth. Does this hint at how Roswell, also, could have been covered up by similar reasoning? Again, Blum: "A fundamental law of spook behavior, as inviolable as an axion of physics itself . . . For every story shared, there was one buried." So the gov was anxious but did it really know something?
Friday, January 13, 2017
Softly Easing Toward Roswell: Howard Blum and the Government's UFO Working Group
Howard Blum used to write for the NY Times and the Village Voice. Wikipedia claims he is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. He has written about ten books and a few have become best sellers.
In 1987 he was winding up research for a book on the "Walker spy family" when a source he was trying to keep talking said, "Lot of talk around the NSA about outer space, weird stuff, UFOs." Blum decided to find out what was going on. He talked to 212 people and says the story he tells is the truth. Here are tidbits from his book, Out There (1990, Simon and Schuster).
On an icy December eve in 1986, Sheila Mondrian, crew chief at the US Space Surveillance Center, came to work already bored. Her team monitored the southern border of the US going up 15,000 feet into the atmosphere. Then there were 7087 known objects in space around the Earth. On this shift, her crew found #7088. It was like no day ever while Mondian worked there. In the sky above Texas something unknown came across the monitoring "fence." It didn't fit into any of the usual four categories of objects, nor did its orbital characteristics fit any known pattern. No reason for a military "bird" to fly like this one was flying. Looking at the computer screen, Mondrian saw a lazy double-helix-like set of loops, then spiky lines showing crash dives followed by sudden climbs at astonishing speeds . . . rapid changes of inclination at speeds and altitudes that were impossible. The airman at the monitor, pressed by Mondrian for an opinion, said, "Looks like we got someone joyriding up there." Mondrian called an alert for Norad, usually leading to worry over possible war. This time the commanders and orbital analysts had an air of puzzlement. No spacecraft orbits in such a random manner. Then it disappeared, not to be found again. Gone.
Pres. Reagan got a note about this in his daily brief. Seriously he said that he'd been in a plane while seeking the governor's job in Calif and saw a flying saucer right outside his window.
See, even the President can sound kooky when reporting a UFO sighting.
Colonel Harold Phillips of the Defense Intelligence Agency had seen a UFO as a child, probably before 1950, on a clear summer's night in an Iowa cornfield. He and his dad walked along when they saw what seemed a dome-shaped ship as big as a bus and bright as a Broadway marquee. After he got a report about the Dec 1986 sighting, he convened a secret working group to see what they could learn about nonEarth sources coming to Earth, including an Army and three Air Force generals, an Army colonel, three from NSA, DIA scientists, a CIA supervisor and a technical team--17 in all. They met in "the Tank," a supersecure conference facility in the Pentagon. p. 43
"Remote Viewing" by US Gov
Back to fall, 1985. Office of George Keyworth science adviser to Pres Reagan has a meeting on the third floor of the old Exec Office Bldg right across from the White House. It feels like an opening night crowd. Two Stanford Research Inst. scientists said they had a "viewer" sitting at a small table in the front. He smiles as the scientists say they are going to demonstrate a "perceptual channel." Certain people can perceive remote data not using any known sense. It's not remote viewing because that takes concentrating on a given person, while this new method has the "viewer" focus on a place cited by longitude and latitude. They speak out the coordinates and the viewer bows head and minutes pass. He finally says, "I see a house, big, mansion, pillars." He draws what he has seen and it's passed around. One scientist pulls out a photo and passes it around. It shows a house "identical in shape" to the sketch just drawn in front of them. The officer tells the group that it is satellite photo and shows the country dacha of Mikhail Gorbachev. Now the scientists beam and say this is information through what we call "scannate."
Next he's shown several photos of submarines and "scans the globe and seems to find them readily. Then he seems scared and breaks his trance and says he found the last submarine and also something else that that location, something hovering over it, He draws a wingless aircraft and agrees when his questioner asks if it's a flying saucer.
They tabulated his accuracy in answering at 46%.. The DIA got busy scanning like this for Soviet submarines. Over the next 14 months they happened across more than one "flying saucer" per month above the submarines. Aside (not from Blum's book): new-age sources claim the nuclear explosion abilities developed by humanity about 60 years ago are source of grave concern by beings who are not going to let us see them and who may be 'willing and able' in certain circumstances to stop or suppress such detonations. They claim such explosions may destabilize things about Earth that we haven't taken into account. Juicy rumor, eh? National Enquirer stuff.
Back to Blum's history. Colonel Phillips talked the "scan scientists"into getting three "reliable viewers" to look at the location where the "southern fence" had been tripped over, of all places, Lake Kickapoo, Texas, apparently also the source of Kickapoo Joy Juice, since this is the only place named Kickapoo I've run into. Good combo: somebody drinks the joy juice and then takes the "craft" out joyriding and Officer Mondrian's radar spots it? The three "scanners" worked separately to respond to question: Can you sense anything there in the last 48 hours? Phillips got faxes that day of three rounded wingless aircraft drawn by different hands. p. 40 and before, Out There.
Army Intelligence in the 1980s contracted with the Monroe Institute to study relieving stress through "advanced states of consciousness," apparently most of them out of the body, since that is the Monroe Institute's pet project and the one it writes most of its books about.
Let me say there's no reason to believe, in Blum's first 80 pages, that these investigators have heard much about Roswell, on the inside. Blum finds the Gov running down a lot of inconclusive leads. Something is seen or otherwise detected, but clear evidence for what causes it is not found.
In 1987 he was winding up research for a book on the "Walker spy family" when a source he was trying to keep talking said, "Lot of talk around the NSA about outer space, weird stuff, UFOs." Blum decided to find out what was going on. He talked to 212 people and says the story he tells is the truth. Here are tidbits from his book, Out There (1990, Simon and Schuster).
On an icy December eve in 1986, Sheila Mondrian, crew chief at the US Space Surveillance Center, came to work already bored. Her team monitored the southern border of the US going up 15,000 feet into the atmosphere. Then there were 7087 known objects in space around the Earth. On this shift, her crew found #7088. It was like no day ever while Mondian worked there. In the sky above Texas something unknown came across the monitoring "fence." It didn't fit into any of the usual four categories of objects, nor did its orbital characteristics fit any known pattern. No reason for a military "bird" to fly like this one was flying. Looking at the computer screen, Mondrian saw a lazy double-helix-like set of loops, then spiky lines showing crash dives followed by sudden climbs at astonishing speeds . . . rapid changes of inclination at speeds and altitudes that were impossible. The airman at the monitor, pressed by Mondrian for an opinion, said, "Looks like we got someone joyriding up there." Mondrian called an alert for Norad, usually leading to worry over possible war. This time the commanders and orbital analysts had an air of puzzlement. No spacecraft orbits in such a random manner. Then it disappeared, not to be found again. Gone.
Pres. Reagan got a note about this in his daily brief. Seriously he said that he'd been in a plane while seeking the governor's job in Calif and saw a flying saucer right outside his window.
See, even the President can sound kooky when reporting a UFO sighting.
Colonel Harold Phillips of the Defense Intelligence Agency had seen a UFO as a child, probably before 1950, on a clear summer's night in an Iowa cornfield. He and his dad walked along when they saw what seemed a dome-shaped ship as big as a bus and bright as a Broadway marquee. After he got a report about the Dec 1986 sighting, he convened a secret working group to see what they could learn about nonEarth sources coming to Earth, including an Army and three Air Force generals, an Army colonel, three from NSA, DIA scientists, a CIA supervisor and a technical team--17 in all. They met in "the Tank," a supersecure conference facility in the Pentagon. p. 43
"Remote Viewing" by US Gov
Back to fall, 1985. Office of George Keyworth science adviser to Pres Reagan has a meeting on the third floor of the old Exec Office Bldg right across from the White House. It feels like an opening night crowd. Two Stanford Research Inst. scientists said they had a "viewer" sitting at a small table in the front. He smiles as the scientists say they are going to demonstrate a "perceptual channel." Certain people can perceive remote data not using any known sense. It's not remote viewing because that takes concentrating on a given person, while this new method has the "viewer" focus on a place cited by longitude and latitude. They speak out the coordinates and the viewer bows head and minutes pass. He finally says, "I see a house, big, mansion, pillars." He draws what he has seen and it's passed around. One scientist pulls out a photo and passes it around. It shows a house "identical in shape" to the sketch just drawn in front of them. The officer tells the group that it is satellite photo and shows the country dacha of Mikhail Gorbachev. Now the scientists beam and say this is information through what we call "scannate."
Next he's shown several photos of submarines and "scans the globe and seems to find them readily. Then he seems scared and breaks his trance and says he found the last submarine and also something else that that location, something hovering over it, He draws a wingless aircraft and agrees when his questioner asks if it's a flying saucer.
They tabulated his accuracy in answering at 46%.. The DIA got busy scanning like this for Soviet submarines. Over the next 14 months they happened across more than one "flying saucer" per month above the submarines. Aside (not from Blum's book): new-age sources claim the nuclear explosion abilities developed by humanity about 60 years ago are source of grave concern by beings who are not going to let us see them and who may be 'willing and able' in certain circumstances to stop or suppress such detonations. They claim such explosions may destabilize things about Earth that we haven't taken into account. Juicy rumor, eh? National Enquirer stuff.
Back to Blum's history. Colonel Phillips talked the "scan scientists"into getting three "reliable viewers" to look at the location where the "southern fence" had been tripped over, of all places, Lake Kickapoo, Texas, apparently also the source of Kickapoo Joy Juice, since this is the only place named Kickapoo I've run into. Good combo: somebody drinks the joy juice and then takes the "craft" out joyriding and Officer Mondrian's radar spots it? The three "scanners" worked separately to respond to question: Can you sense anything there in the last 48 hours? Phillips got faxes that day of three rounded wingless aircraft drawn by different hands. p. 40 and before, Out There.
Army Intelligence in the 1980s contracted with the Monroe Institute to study relieving stress through "advanced states of consciousness," apparently most of them out of the body, since that is the Monroe Institute's pet project and the one it writes most of its books about.
Let me say there's no reason to believe, in Blum's first 80 pages, that these investigators have heard much about Roswell, on the inside. Blum finds the Gov running down a lot of inconclusive leads. Something is seen or otherwise detected, but clear evidence for what causes it is not found.
Liberals' Millon Woman March Not A March Against Trump. And It's Okay To Have A Beer.
A more personal post. I guess all these posts are fully personal. Nobody but me reviews them or even comments on them. Yet I, though never a working journalist, try to take some kind of fairly objective stance on the subject under discussion, with some opinions stuck in here and there. I'm not afraid to come to a conclusion along the way, but I hope I'm afraid to rush to one, or to very many, anyway.
I was glad to hear that the upcoming women's march, scheduled the day after Pres-elect Trump is inaugurated, is "not a march against Trump," as such, according to the organizer of the piece of the march in Tucson, Arizona, my winter home.
I was further glad to hear an "black elder statesman" say, paraphrasing, that "lots of older African-Americans are sanguine, as opposed to all worked up," as they look toward the Trump administration. They've been through a lot, and they're in it for the long haul.
Breath of fresh air to have a short post instead a long one. We're taking a break from Roswell and the nature of life in the universe and going to play tennis with old people on a mild Friday morning in the southern Arizona mid-winter. Can't that still tell us something about the nature of life in at least this part of the universe? My friend Alan Tschetter once said, "So-and-so (citing some guru with a name nobody in the Western Hemisphere could remember without practicing it) says not that many individuals reach full spiritual attainment in a given century, so I've decided that means it's okay to have a beer."
I was glad to hear that the upcoming women's march, scheduled the day after Pres-elect Trump is inaugurated, is "not a march against Trump," as such, according to the organizer of the piece of the march in Tucson, Arizona, my winter home.
I was further glad to hear an "black elder statesman" say, paraphrasing, that "lots of older African-Americans are sanguine, as opposed to all worked up," as they look toward the Trump administration. They've been through a lot, and they're in it for the long haul.
Breath of fresh air to have a short post instead a long one. We're taking a break from Roswell and the nature of life in the universe and going to play tennis with old people on a mild Friday morning in the southern Arizona mid-winter. Can't that still tell us something about the nature of life in at least this part of the universe? My friend Alan Tschetter once said, "So-and-so (citing some guru with a name nobody in the Western Hemisphere could remember without practicing it) says not that many individuals reach full spiritual attainment in a given century, so I've decided that means it's okay to have a beer."
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Going Crazy Over Roswell #3: Its Unprovability
Roswell Post Three.
In 1978 I had an urgent crush on a woman named Liz Shaw, and I got her to go with me on a date to the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City. I think she dumped me after that date, and I would have probably married her. While we sat in the Planetarium waiting for the star show to start, the subject of UFOs came up. "Do you believe in them?" I asked her, knowing that she was very intellectual (later she went to law school). "Yes." "I do, too." Liz and I didn't have a shred of evidence to back up our belief. Why did we feel that way?
I don't know about her, but I was scientifically minded. By then I'd taken a good enough range of science courses that I could later teach about six kinds of science courses in college--algebra, physics, chemistry, human anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Based on the number of galaxies, I took it for granted we were not alone in the universe, and it just seemed common sense to think that some of the countless sightings were genuine. I really didn't think Every One who saw something was either a bullshitter or seeing things that others wouldn't have seen had they been present. Now you know my bias.
Sixty-nine years after July, 1947, no one has been able to publicly prove that the Roswell crash was an alien craft. (6 years later: see note 1 at the end of this post) That's the short version of this story. Beyond Roswell, no UFO has ever landed on the White House or Kremlin lawn in plain daylight for all to see, and disgorged sentient beings who walked in to talk to our leaders.(see note two at the end) If we're visited regularly by advanced races from the Pleiades or Canus Major and they may possess knowledge that might help poor beleaguered humanity, it's hard to see why not. Why fly your ships where lots of sharp-eyed Earthlings can see that you don't seem to behave like our airborne creations, and then dodge away and refuse to come out and shake hands?
It is more likely that some people in southern New Mexico were deluded than it is that extraterrestrials came to visit us. It is also likely that UFO believers have the tendency to get all excited over scraps of information that, when properly evaluated, do not tell a story of anything out of the ordinary. Let's present the rational skeptic's understanding of the case. Here's the voice of the sensible observer.
1. Project Mogul was a program kept secret because it sought to put sensors up in the atmosphere where they might be able to detect rumblings from Soviet nuclear tests/explosions.
2. It was active in New Mexico in 1947. Apparently Project Mogul used more elaborate versions of air balloons than some atmospheric studies did, but it still relied on balloons to put its sensing equipment in the air. One of these crashed on the ranch Mack Brazel ran in either late June or early July of that year.
3. Brazel came to the sheriff in Roswell with boxes of debris, possibly seeking help cleaning it up. He went to the radio station at the same time.
4. The sheriff decided the local Army Air base ought to hear about this and called them. Even thought this was the 4th of July weekend, he sent a couple of deputies out to look at things.
5. When the Army got to the scene, they realized it was classified material and cordoned it off. They released a report that a flying disc had been found. This back then didn't have the extraterrestrial meaning that flying saucer later acquired.
6. A few hours later they amended the first release by clarifying that it was only a weather balloon found out on the ranch near Corona. In retrospect, there is a preponderance of evidence that this was not true. It was a cover story motivated by national security or related concerns.
7. The material was gathered up and shipped off to another military site for holding.
8. There had been a flare of interest at the possibility of the recovery of a flying disk, but now public interest waned. Virtually no one talked about Roswell for 30 years.
9. In the 1970s Jesse Marcel jumped ship. He had been the inteliigence officer who first looked at the crash. Now he said he and others had seen things that could not have been from Earth. UFOlogists did research and several books came out about what was now, for the first time, called the Roswell Incident. None of these efforts had access to protected government information sources.
10. In response to this and a renewed flurry of UFO sightings in the 1970s and 1980s, the US government reinvestigated the matter and put out a report about 1995. The report admitted it could not prove what fell from the sky at Roswell, but drew the most probable conclusion that it was actually a Project Mogul weather balloon found in that field.
11. Over the years many have claimed to see something unearthly all those years ago in Roswell. Since their accounts conflict with official reports, they can probably be accounted for by aging memories, overactive imaginations or direct fabrication.
12. For example, probably dozens of people claim to have handled a material coming from the crash site that was too light and pliable and impervious to damage to have been from an Earthly source. Yet not a single piece of this supposed material ever surfaced to the light of day where it could be evaluated by objective methods. You can't find this stuff in the Smithsonian.
13. One writer called Roswell the most famous and the best debunked UFO story ever. There's really nothing there. Another writer used the title, Roswell: Case Closed.
The sensible thing is to stop imagining little green men, stop arguing over Roswell and things like colonic irrigation and go back to see if we can improve our daily lives.
That's the rational summary. I consider myself a pretty rational, scientific guy. I believe the rational explanation of evolution as accounting for life on Earth. I don't see that it disproves God, but it happened--and is happening. I believe in geology and biochemistry and biotechnology and thoughtful study of history and literature and philosophy. I believe the rational, evidence-based explanation that there is virtually no widespread voter fraud in US elections. If there is, bring out the evidence, not the suppositions or the worries. Same goes for Roswell. I believe the rational evidence-based approach to medicine, since I trained in it, as a respiratory therapist, and then practiced it for many years, and taught it to others.
I also believe that the cosmos contains mysteries humans haven't solved and events we haven't explained. I believe human knowledge gets turned upside down and inside out every so often. I believe in intuition and life after death. Next post we'll delve into the irrational side of Roswell, since it's a lot sexier, though more wobbly.
End Notes Later
1 "No one has been able to publicly prove Roswell." The exception would be Mack Brazel, the original discoverer of crash debris. He took debris that couldn't be cut and couldn't be burned to the next-door Proctor ranch. He also told the radio station he had found alien bodies, but the Army made him change his story. The feds also threatened the station with losing its license if I ran the interview Brazel had already given them. Sounds like destruction of evidence to me. Brazel insisted he found something that the government has only explained as one type or another of weather balloon. Brazel said and the newspaper did print, I know what I found was no weather observation balloon.
2 Instead of coming in to talk, they could also just kill everyone within a five-miles radius.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Roswell Incident 2: An Attempt to List a Dozen Agreed-Upon Facts
Roswell Post Two.
Here I confess that I have read, in the last two years, two books on Roswell, plus Out There by Howard Blum, which dealt with it peripherally and analytically. Whether the other two books dealt with it analytically--some say yes, some say no. The willingness to spend, say, 50 hours, reading these things, all by itself, places me, if not in the Nutcase Camp, somewhere a little bit off the grid.
Or does it? Blum is a real hard-evidence kind of guy, and he spent two years or so on related stuff.
The two Roswell books were both written by people (guys, probably white) convinced that a NonEarthly event happened. They're the Nutcase Camp to the skeptics. It seems humans can convince ourselves of virtually anything we earnestly wish to believe. Blum, a really good-looking guy at least in 1990 when his book came out (no, I'm not gay or bi. I just think he's tall, handsome, well dressed, well posed, probably Jewish, and a good thinker), is an author and journalist, who spent three years running down leads about a government panel called the UFO Working Group. It was formed to evaluate UFO reports and find out if they posed a security risk to we the people.
Let's see if I can tell you six or eight things about Roswell that everybody agrees on. Are there that many? I may not need to remind you that those holding opposing conclusions about Roswell have called each other some fairly nasty names. "Cultists" will do for a first example. I myself in a later post wonder whether a reporter used bad judgment in what to report. Those folks are in the "use good judgment" business. Insults worthy of some from Donald Trump, the man who got busy building buildings, screwing women, insulting politicians and ended up president, in other words, ended up as a politician very capable of being insulted himself.
Let's see if we can start with easy-to-agree-upon things about Roswell.
1) Other than for locals who know and love it and UFO rah-rah people who find it very dreamy, Roswell is a boring place. This is my first dramatic finding, and I set it out as self-evident. Roswell is 50,000 people in the middle of lots of fairly ugly desert. For 100 or so miles in any direction, there's rabbits and lizards and a few small town.
2) I came to conclusion #1 by seeing the most exciting local features. They're things like a museum about little grey men, a Walmart, a military college with an impressive parade ground, and a senior citizen's center that serves tasty food I did not find boring. I said ugly desert because where I came from, around Moab, Utah, the desert is beautiful. Southern Utah has five national parks. This is NOT the scene at Roswell. If any small town ever needed a UFO convention to spruce it up . . . Nature abhors a vacuum, eh?
3) I'll try to make up with you Roswell lovers by noting that, other than UFOs, this almost city has serious claims to fame. First, 50,000 people in that part of the world is almost a "big city." Myself, I grew up in a town of 4,000 people. Who am I to look down my nose? Next, Roswell has Penny's in addition to Wally's, which was what my girlfriend Joan called W-mart and she worked there 12 years. Another Roswell high point is that, through sheer good luck, it is close to both Carlsbad Caverns and El Paso, Texas. That's thrilling, at least if you're thrilled by really pretty caves or really ugly places in west Texas. Demi Moore and John Denver were both born there. I don't see how one town this size could have snagged them both. I don't think of New Mexico when I sing "Rocky Mountain High." Do you? Roger Staubach (don't ask who he was if you don't know; you won't care) and Sam Donaldson (same) both went to the military academy, so heavy on celebrities.
3) Just everybody agrees there had been a flurry of UFO reports in the summer of 1947. New Mexico seems to have had more than its share.
4) About the beginning of summer, 1947, something crashed out of the sky during a storm onto a ranch in the desert, miles northwest of Roswell, closer to the tiny town of Corona. Even the government agrees to this. I've checked. So in only four facts I've proved that there was no Roswell Incident, because it was a Corona Incident. Case closed.
5) There was plenty of debris from the crash and a ranch foreman named Mack Brazel and a boy who rode along helping him found it.
6) History.com, which should be striving for objectivity, calls the debris "unidentifiable." Seems safe to say it mystified the first few locals to see it. Far as I can tell, this puzzlement is historical. We're trying to be careful here. I wanna keep all 8 readers of this blog happy for the time being, no matter what their Roswell Religion dogma states. Fair?
7) Loretta Proctor, on the nearest neighboring ranch, says Brazel was befuddled by what to do about the debris and brought them a sample right before the 4th of July weekend. The 4th was Friday. The sides disagree on what the debris was, but the only account we have of that meeting comes from Loretta, interviews much later, starting in 1989, 42 years after. She said it was a round piece 4 inches long and light like balsa wood. It looked like plastic but wasn't. Her husband Floyd tried to whittle on it with his knife, but could not. No mark. Good sharp knife. Brazel held a match up to it and it didn't even turn black. They hadn't seen anything like it.
8) Brazel said the debris was in the way of his grazing sheep out in the pasture and that his sheep were afraid of the debris.
Let's lay aside the consensus statements and do a) a thought experiment on the sheep b) Q&A about Loretta Proctor's story. Don't know if you've buddied around with sheep. I might be luckier than you because I have. I am the proud grandson of an accomplished sheep rancher and profanity-user, a broad-shouldered son of Scotland named Tom McKeachnie. Damned good man. Sheep are basic. They're like my bunny Knuffle, only maybe not as cute or as smart. Sheep mostly just want a) to find things to chew and b) to stay with the other sheep. Sheep will ignore almost anything that isn't big or loud or moving and put their heads down and nibble, or move to where they can graze. There tends to be piles of trash and debris out around sheep corrals and fields, and those sheep couldn't care less. So it's a little odd that even one sheep would be spooked by debris. Typically, sheep don't give, as Grandpa would say, a shit about debris. Yet here's the limit on the sheep thought experiment. They can be dear, but they don't know their heads from a hole in the ground. We can't prove much by the sheep, but we can wonder.
Turns out the same for Loretta Proctor. She makes a statement about what happened with a mysterious material when only she, her family, and Brazel were there. Unlikely any other info exists about that meeting. If Mack found a Project Mogul device made of conventional albeit high-qualify materials, could it have the properties here described? Light, nonmetallic, couldn't be burned or cut?
9) I don't think anybody questions that Brazel took some of whatever the debris was to neighbors, asking for help. Some say he wanted help identifying the stuff, and some say he thought he needed help cleaning it up because there was so much of it. Once we get this Roswell jazz played out a ways, I think one side may stumble a bit in accounting for this early Mack Brazel behavior and Proctor family behavior. Even if it stumbles, it won't think any conclusion but its own is sensible.
10) It seems that all people in a position to know say that Brazel went into town (Corona, see I told you there was no Roswell Incident) where he could use a phone, since life hadn't provided him either a cell or a land line out at the ranch. He called his boss in Texas, who then rushed to drive right over, implying something unusual.
Now that I've, so to speak, "achieved" 10 objective facts, a comment. The last thing I want to do is be a sucker for some cockamamie UFO story with no solid evidence. Yet I find that Roswell's story seems to be have things, one after another, that seem slightly odd. 22 hints generally do not prove a murderer guilty. For one thing, what I've read of this Mack Brazel makes him seem like a decent guy, but I imagine him as a redneck, like my cousin Tommy. Regular guy, maybe not real swift on the uptake. He finds something in his sheep field that bothers him. Since when does it give us useful information if a redneck is bothered by something? Me, I'm more the pointy-headed intellectual type. Since when does it tell us much if a pointy-headed intellectual is bothered by something?
Now if we may, back to facts.
11) There are claims that pieces from the crash took a lot of attention at the Fourth of July Rodeo in nearby Capitan, NM. More, it is claimed that no one could cut, burn or identify the material. Nobody recorded these events with their cell phones or cameras. Yet it sounds odd and familiar, like Loretta Proctor.
12) Two hints do not an interstellar expedition prove. No samples of a likely nonEarth material later popped into public view and are displayed in the Smithsonian.
13) On the Fourth of July weekend, Brazel went to the Roswell sheriff with a box of the debris. The sheriff decided to call the Army base. He also sent deputies out to size it up. I.e., the sheriff was fairly impressed with what turned out to be a weather balloon. Ranchers in Roswell knew what weather balloons looked like, but the sheriff didn't, I guess, nor his deputies.
15) Remember it's the holiday weekend when some old rancher has a tale to tell. Somehow it got the attention of not only the lead intel guy at the base, but the commander himself. Odd. The Army is impressed. Before long the crash site or sites were restricted to public access.
16) About three days later, Colonel Blanchard of the Roswell Army Air base called his P.R. guy, officer Walter Haut, and dictated to him a press release that a crashed "flying disc" had been found and was in the unit's possession, and that he should release this to the press.
17) This report went out to the press, fanning wide initial interest.
18) The Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947 said the Army Air Force had found a "flying saucer."
19) Brazel later said he wished he had gone straight to more of the press instead of to the government. Why?
20) Well, one reason could be that he was taken into military custody for about six days and was seen by those who knew him, being taken to different places in Roswell, in the company of soldiers. I don't know if this is denied by the Army, but there are several witnesses to it.
Opinion: maybe he thought that wouldn't have happened had he got the press there first. Opinion: why did they need to take him into custody? I'm fairly sure no one accused him of breaking the law. Wasn't charged with anything. Just a guy who wanted a mess cleaned up and seemed to think he needed official help doing it.
21) Hours after the first report, officials from the local Air Force base said, whoops, they got it straight now. It was a crashed weather balloon, maybe somehow shaped like a disc, which of course they never are.
22) Public interest faded, not to be picked up again until the 1970s. I think that thirty-year lag before any of these UFO yokels went on the rag about Roswell is important. The biggest story on Earth lay quiet and neglected for the entire first half of my life? Does that add up? Well, I certainly didn't go investigate it. Neither did you?
21) Years later the government admitted the weather balloon story was a cover-up. The revised report was that it was a nuclear monitoring program called Project Mogul, knowledge of which Uncle Sam didn't want in civilian hands. So far as I can learn about Mogul, it used more elaborate, larger versions of first traditional weather balloons and later neoprene-made balloons to take its instruments up into the air.
22) Weather balloons landing in New Mexico ranch pastures were common and good numbers of locals did not believe the weather balloon story. Relations between the base and Roswell civilians soured. Why would Brazel have gone showing things to his neighbors or calling his boss over what to do about a weather balloon, even a fancy one? There is no reason.
23) Stories mount into the dozens of locals handling a material unlike any on Earth. I'm not saying they did. I'm saying they talked like they did, and it's not five or six people, either.
24) Also mounting up, in the passing years, are allegations that the Army came around confiscating this material. Again, I'm not proving the allegations; I'm noting them.
25) In quite a number of cases, New Mexicans, among the early ones to be exposed to information about the crash or alleged pieces taken from it, said, years later, they were threatened with their lives if they ever talked about it. And their families' lives.
26) One man of the local radio station said he was taken into custody and held at a Texas military hospital for a year because he told the military to go to hell when they threatened his freedom of the press. I'm not saying everybody assents to his story; I'm saying I don't think anyone disputes that he made this claim.
Of the above 26, I think we could get "Roswell" students of any viewpoint to agree on well over 20.
Dumm-duh-dumm-dumm. Roll the drama drum. Are all these people idiots or liars or was there an overwhelming psychologically brutal coverup? Did Project Mogul threatening to become public warrant that?
27) This was right after World War II, a very scary total war, and if something unknown is noticed in the sky or crashes on the land, it would be natural for officialdom to be hush-hush about it until they knew exactly what they were dealing with.
If it were alien and all they had was debris, they might never be sure what they were dealing with. So keep it classified. Lie to the people about what could be called the most important news story in history, right up there with learning to grow corn.
Source for L. Proctor story in #6,7 above is T. Carey, who interviewed Proctor several times between 1989 and 2010, Children of Roswell, p. 49. See also Wikipedia, Roswell Incident, Project Mogul.
Here I confess that I have read, in the last two years, two books on Roswell, plus Out There by Howard Blum, which dealt with it peripherally and analytically. Whether the other two books dealt with it analytically--some say yes, some say no. The willingness to spend, say, 50 hours, reading these things, all by itself, places me, if not in the Nutcase Camp, somewhere a little bit off the grid.
Or does it? Blum is a real hard-evidence kind of guy, and he spent two years or so on related stuff.
The two Roswell books were both written by people (guys, probably white) convinced that a NonEarthly event happened. They're the Nutcase Camp to the skeptics. It seems humans can convince ourselves of virtually anything we earnestly wish to believe. Blum, a really good-looking guy at least in 1990 when his book came out (no, I'm not gay or bi. I just think he's tall, handsome, well dressed, well posed, probably Jewish, and a good thinker), is an author and journalist, who spent three years running down leads about a government panel called the UFO Working Group. It was formed to evaluate UFO reports and find out if they posed a security risk to we the people.
Let's see if I can tell you six or eight things about Roswell that everybody agrees on. Are there that many? I may not need to remind you that those holding opposing conclusions about Roswell have called each other some fairly nasty names. "Cultists" will do for a first example. I myself in a later post wonder whether a reporter used bad judgment in what to report. Those folks are in the "use good judgment" business. Insults worthy of some from Donald Trump, the man who got busy building buildings, screwing women, insulting politicians and ended up president, in other words, ended up as a politician very capable of being insulted himself.
Let's see if we can start with easy-to-agree-upon things about Roswell.
1) Other than for locals who know and love it and UFO rah-rah people who find it very dreamy, Roswell is a boring place. This is my first dramatic finding, and I set it out as self-evident. Roswell is 50,000 people in the middle of lots of fairly ugly desert. For 100 or so miles in any direction, there's rabbits and lizards and a few small town.
2) I came to conclusion #1 by seeing the most exciting local features. They're things like a museum about little grey men, a Walmart, a military college with an impressive parade ground, and a senior citizen's center that serves tasty food I did not find boring. I said ugly desert because where I came from, around Moab, Utah, the desert is beautiful. Southern Utah has five national parks. This is NOT the scene at Roswell. If any small town ever needed a UFO convention to spruce it up . . . Nature abhors a vacuum, eh?
3) I'll try to make up with you Roswell lovers by noting that, other than UFOs, this almost city has serious claims to fame. First, 50,000 people in that part of the world is almost a "big city." Myself, I grew up in a town of 4,000 people. Who am I to look down my nose? Next, Roswell has Penny's in addition to Wally's, which was what my girlfriend Joan called W-mart and she worked there 12 years. Another Roswell high point is that, through sheer good luck, it is close to both Carlsbad Caverns and El Paso, Texas. That's thrilling, at least if you're thrilled by really pretty caves or really ugly places in west Texas. Demi Moore and John Denver were both born there. I don't see how one town this size could have snagged them both. I don't think of New Mexico when I sing "Rocky Mountain High." Do you? Roger Staubach (don't ask who he was if you don't know; you won't care) and Sam Donaldson (same) both went to the military academy, so heavy on celebrities.
3) Just everybody agrees there had been a flurry of UFO reports in the summer of 1947. New Mexico seems to have had more than its share.
4) About the beginning of summer, 1947, something crashed out of the sky during a storm onto a ranch in the desert, miles northwest of Roswell, closer to the tiny town of Corona. Even the government agrees to this. I've checked. So in only four facts I've proved that there was no Roswell Incident, because it was a Corona Incident. Case closed.
5) There was plenty of debris from the crash and a ranch foreman named Mack Brazel and a boy who rode along helping him found it.
6) History.com, which should be striving for objectivity, calls the debris "unidentifiable." Seems safe to say it mystified the first few locals to see it. Far as I can tell, this puzzlement is historical. We're trying to be careful here. I wanna keep all 8 readers of this blog happy for the time being, no matter what their Roswell Religion dogma states. Fair?
7) Loretta Proctor, on the nearest neighboring ranch, says Brazel was befuddled by what to do about the debris and brought them a sample right before the 4th of July weekend. The 4th was Friday. The sides disagree on what the debris was, but the only account we have of that meeting comes from Loretta, interviews much later, starting in 1989, 42 years after. She said it was a round piece 4 inches long and light like balsa wood. It looked like plastic but wasn't. Her husband Floyd tried to whittle on it with his knife, but could not. No mark. Good sharp knife. Brazel held a match up to it and it didn't even turn black. They hadn't seen anything like it.
8) Brazel said the debris was in the way of his grazing sheep out in the pasture and that his sheep were afraid of the debris.
Let's lay aside the consensus statements and do a) a thought experiment on the sheep b) Q&A about Loretta Proctor's story. Don't know if you've buddied around with sheep. I might be luckier than you because I have. I am the proud grandson of an accomplished sheep rancher and profanity-user, a broad-shouldered son of Scotland named Tom McKeachnie. Damned good man. Sheep are basic. They're like my bunny Knuffle, only maybe not as cute or as smart. Sheep mostly just want a) to find things to chew and b) to stay with the other sheep. Sheep will ignore almost anything that isn't big or loud or moving and put their heads down and nibble, or move to where they can graze. There tends to be piles of trash and debris out around sheep corrals and fields, and those sheep couldn't care less. So it's a little odd that even one sheep would be spooked by debris. Typically, sheep don't give, as Grandpa would say, a shit about debris. Yet here's the limit on the sheep thought experiment. They can be dear, but they don't know their heads from a hole in the ground. We can't prove much by the sheep, but we can wonder.
Turns out the same for Loretta Proctor. She makes a statement about what happened with a mysterious material when only she, her family, and Brazel were there. Unlikely any other info exists about that meeting. If Mack found a Project Mogul device made of conventional albeit high-qualify materials, could it have the properties here described? Light, nonmetallic, couldn't be burned or cut?
9) I don't think anybody questions that Brazel took some of whatever the debris was to neighbors, asking for help. Some say he wanted help identifying the stuff, and some say he thought he needed help cleaning it up because there was so much of it. Once we get this Roswell jazz played out a ways, I think one side may stumble a bit in accounting for this early Mack Brazel behavior and Proctor family behavior. Even if it stumbles, it won't think any conclusion but its own is sensible.
10) It seems that all people in a position to know say that Brazel went into town (Corona, see I told you there was no Roswell Incident) where he could use a phone, since life hadn't provided him either a cell or a land line out at the ranch. He called his boss in Texas, who then rushed to drive right over, implying something unusual.
Now that I've, so to speak, "achieved" 10 objective facts, a comment. The last thing I want to do is be a sucker for some cockamamie UFO story with no solid evidence. Yet I find that Roswell's story seems to be have things, one after another, that seem slightly odd. 22 hints generally do not prove a murderer guilty. For one thing, what I've read of this Mack Brazel makes him seem like a decent guy, but I imagine him as a redneck, like my cousin Tommy. Regular guy, maybe not real swift on the uptake. He finds something in his sheep field that bothers him. Since when does it give us useful information if a redneck is bothered by something? Me, I'm more the pointy-headed intellectual type. Since when does it tell us much if a pointy-headed intellectual is bothered by something?
Now if we may, back to facts.
11) There are claims that pieces from the crash took a lot of attention at the Fourth of July Rodeo in nearby Capitan, NM. More, it is claimed that no one could cut, burn or identify the material. Nobody recorded these events with their cell phones or cameras. Yet it sounds odd and familiar, like Loretta Proctor.
12) Two hints do not an interstellar expedition prove. No samples of a likely nonEarth material later popped into public view and are displayed in the Smithsonian.
13) On the Fourth of July weekend, Brazel went to the Roswell sheriff with a box of the debris. The sheriff decided to call the Army base. He also sent deputies out to size it up. I.e., the sheriff was fairly impressed with what turned out to be a weather balloon. Ranchers in Roswell knew what weather balloons looked like, but the sheriff didn't, I guess, nor his deputies.
15) Remember it's the holiday weekend when some old rancher has a tale to tell. Somehow it got the attention of not only the lead intel guy at the base, but the commander himself. Odd. The Army is impressed. Before long the crash site or sites were restricted to public access.
16) About three days later, Colonel Blanchard of the Roswell Army Air base called his P.R. guy, officer Walter Haut, and dictated to him a press release that a crashed "flying disc" had been found and was in the unit's possession, and that he should release this to the press.
17) This report went out to the press, fanning wide initial interest.
18) The Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947 said the Army Air Force had found a "flying saucer."
19) Brazel later said he wished he had gone straight to more of the press instead of to the government. Why?
20) Well, one reason could be that he was taken into military custody for about six days and was seen by those who knew him, being taken to different places in Roswell, in the company of soldiers. I don't know if this is denied by the Army, but there are several witnesses to it.
Opinion: maybe he thought that wouldn't have happened had he got the press there first. Opinion: why did they need to take him into custody? I'm fairly sure no one accused him of breaking the law. Wasn't charged with anything. Just a guy who wanted a mess cleaned up and seemed to think he needed official help doing it.
21) Hours after the first report, officials from the local Air Force base said, whoops, they got it straight now. It was a crashed weather balloon, maybe somehow shaped like a disc, which of course they never are.
22) Public interest faded, not to be picked up again until the 1970s. I think that thirty-year lag before any of these UFO yokels went on the rag about Roswell is important. The biggest story on Earth lay quiet and neglected for the entire first half of my life? Does that add up? Well, I certainly didn't go investigate it. Neither did you?
21) Years later the government admitted the weather balloon story was a cover-up. The revised report was that it was a nuclear monitoring program called Project Mogul, knowledge of which Uncle Sam didn't want in civilian hands. So far as I can learn about Mogul, it used more elaborate, larger versions of first traditional weather balloons and later neoprene-made balloons to take its instruments up into the air.
22) Weather balloons landing in New Mexico ranch pastures were common and good numbers of locals did not believe the weather balloon story. Relations between the base and Roswell civilians soured. Why would Brazel have gone showing things to his neighbors or calling his boss over what to do about a weather balloon, even a fancy one? There is no reason.
23) Stories mount into the dozens of locals handling a material unlike any on Earth. I'm not saying they did. I'm saying they talked like they did, and it's not five or six people, either.
24) Also mounting up, in the passing years, are allegations that the Army came around confiscating this material. Again, I'm not proving the allegations; I'm noting them.
25) In quite a number of cases, New Mexicans, among the early ones to be exposed to information about the crash or alleged pieces taken from it, said, years later, they were threatened with their lives if they ever talked about it. And their families' lives.
26) One man of the local radio station said he was taken into custody and held at a Texas military hospital for a year because he told the military to go to hell when they threatened his freedom of the press. I'm not saying everybody assents to his story; I'm saying I don't think anyone disputes that he made this claim.
Of the above 26, I think we could get "Roswell" students of any viewpoint to agree on well over 20.
Dumm-duh-dumm-dumm. Roll the drama drum. Are all these people idiots or liars or was there an overwhelming psychologically brutal coverup? Did Project Mogul threatening to become public warrant that?
27) This was right after World War II, a very scary total war, and if something unknown is noticed in the sky or crashes on the land, it would be natural for officialdom to be hush-hush about it until they knew exactly what they were dealing with.
If it were alien and all they had was debris, they might never be sure what they were dealing with. So keep it classified. Lie to the people about what could be called the most important news story in history, right up there with learning to grow corn.
Source for L. Proctor story in #6,7 above is T. Carey, who interviewed Proctor several times between 1989 and 2010, Children of Roswell, p. 49. See also Wikipedia, Roswell Incident, Project Mogul.
Monday, January 9, 2017
Alone in the Galaxy? And Roswell?
The Milky Way is the immense cluster of stars that turns out to be the astronomical city we live in--think of it as an overgrown Five Buroughs. It has maybe 200 billion stars--200,000,000,000. That's more stars that either Donald Trump or Bill Gates has dollars, at least for the time being. Also, I wonder whether one of the two is far, far richer than the other. Yet since I have no concept how many they have, other than "a whole lot," referring to billionaires doesn't tell me much.
What could give a better idea? Well, I've been to Santa Barbara, LA, San Diego, and Tijuana. Let's pretend that area has 20 million people. 20,000,000. Takes you about four hours to drive across it if you do it in the middle of the night with no traffic and pretend there's no northbound delay at the border--fat chance. And pretend you're on freeway at 75 mph all the way, which isn't quite true, either. You take the San Diego Freeway, you take the 101, and I don't know what you take to cross Tijuana because I'm so boopdeedoo provincial--I was going to say so "damned provincial)." So the 200 B of the Milky Way, aka The Galaxy, is ten thousand times as big a number as the 20 M of LA-Tijuana. 10,000 -- 1 with 4 zeros after it. So you'd need 10,000 of these areas-I was going to say cities but it's more than a single city--it's a region, maybe 50 miles across in places, 250 miles long? 10,000 of these areas would give the 200 B people. The United States has enough people to populate about 15 such regions. India has enough to populate about 50 of them--not much of a start. Yet the whole crowded human world whole has a decent fraction of 10,000 LA-Tijuanas, maybe 350. Call it 3%. If you have any way of Grasping how many humans are on Earth--and I doubt I do--I certainly don't, you may have aGrasp of the suns in the Galaxy. That's some Grasp.
Here we have a problem we can fittingly say is of astronomical size--we only know much about One Sun, at least by closehand observation, ours, good ole "Sol" we call it. I think it was also called Helios, some other names. Sol has Earth and about as many more planets and big moons as we have fingers on our hands, or twice as many. It seems clear that none of them has produced anybody beside us who fly ships in space, and we don't yet do it very well or very far. That's the objective evidence.
Yet this city of stars we live in, this Island Universe, this grand and beautiful Milky Way, has 200 billion other chances to produce a planet that gives the right conditions to produce races of beings with spaceships. That's a lot of chances. Most of us impressed-with-ourselves "deep thinkers" (another word for Sway-do Intellectuals) on this subject seem to agree that the odds of our being alone in the Galaxy are low. Like realllllllly low.
Another thing for you to ponder is that it seems the world of the stars we see has been around much longer than it took Earth to yield humans. We might say that doubles the chance, already astronomically high. Well, if these other technological beings are probably around, they're way way Out There. Hey, you could read Andrew Blum's book about the US government investigating flying saucers. It's named Out There and it's good, very cautious, very diligent. So if they're out there, then why the h--- don't they come visit us? Stop by for lunch? Not hungry? Have a drink? Don't drink? Maybe they're Mormons or worshippers on the Seventh Day, Saturn's Day. Or maybe we're stuck--they aren't Out There after all. Or maybe they Have Stopped By but they stay hidden because we're not a really reliable bunch and they're waiting until we learn to be nicer to each other before we get to join their club. Or they're actually around but are using us for something already, or they don't want to create a planetary panic or . . . .
So there's speculation and then there's Roswell (New Mexico), whatever that means. Makes a good phrase. We've got speculation and we've got Roswell, or are they the same thing? Is there anything at all to make a sober-headed skeptic think "The Roswell Incident" is anything beyond speculation? I'm personally involved with several sober-headed skeptics and I can't speak for them, but I can list them: my son Eric, my cousin Steve, my cousin Greg, my friend Doc Block, my friend and girlfriend stealer Jason, my friend Seth the investor--you get the idea. The odds that any of them will read this blog are not astronomically low, but they're not high, either. As a group they believe in organic evolution, human-induced climate change, and probably don't believe in Roswell, though I haven't polled them.
This "they believe" line reminds me of possibly my favorite line from the original Harold Ramis masterpiece movie, Ghostbusters. Annie Potts the Ghostbuster secretary is interviewing a job candidate and says, "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, esp, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full-trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster, and the theory of Atlantis?" The sheer length of the list wears her out as she says it, and the absurdity of it got me belly-laughing. The applicant has the correct answer, "I'll believe anything you say as long as there's a steady paycheck in it."
Speaking of believing, those who believe that a non-Earth-built spaceship crashed in the New Mexico desert about July 2, 1947 think some Galactic neighbors did drop by--drop being the important word. A storm, the story goes, blew up one or more of their ships and killed a few little grey men, or grey women, or grey other. Hey, if you're not playing by Earth's rules, there might be lots of choices--grey multi-sexes, grey nonsexes. Whether such creatures exist or could exist is a subject Beyond-----utterly intriguing and utterly frightful, or utterly boring I can hear my son Eric saying, depending on your point of view. UFO nuts say that life crawled out of a swamp somewhere past Neptune, built ships to cross between the stars, and then couldn't keep from crashing in the New Mexico desert. How plausible is that? How plausible is it that such a craft would get hit by a bolt of Earth-born lightening? Those space ships should be fast, but lightening is not slow.
Steve Hawking thinks that if we get visited by heptapods or other creatures from Out There, it might turn out for humanity about like it turned out for American "Indians" when European "aliens" came calling--slavery, decimation, kicked around good, whole way of life ruined. If that scenario came true, it would probably not be good for the economy, and the survivors (assuming there are human survivors) might have depression at an even higher rate than we do now, if that's possible. Oh, it's possible. Have you ever read about how in 1942 when we were losing World War II, people felt like the world was falling apart and began behaving, in some numbers, like there was nothing to count on? Lots of people then stopped believing it was worth it to obey the old rules and started playing it fast and loose. Did things while sober they wouldn't have done in normal times even if drunk. What the hell?
Carl Sagan says that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and saying ET phoned home is about as extraordinary as claims can be. I can think of one other type of claim, or even two, clearly more extraordinary: a) life after death and b) God, some big-hearted Big Brother hiding out behind the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. One guy commented that there isn't "extraordinary evidence, just evidence." Well, then, really clear evidence. Really good evidence, too good for careful, sober minds to disagree about. Sagan's examples were, to paraphrase him, he'd like to see sharp clear closeup photos of UFOs, of such quality we can verify that nobody was dicking around with us, or artifacts that we can all see are not from Earth because they're unlike all we know here.
Okay, good start. This Roswell thing is going to take more than one post. Maybe more than five. All I did here was set the stage; we don't even have any players. Bye.
What could give a better idea? Well, I've been to Santa Barbara, LA, San Diego, and Tijuana. Let's pretend that area has 20 million people. 20,000,000. Takes you about four hours to drive across it if you do it in the middle of the night with no traffic and pretend there's no northbound delay at the border--fat chance. And pretend you're on freeway at 75 mph all the way, which isn't quite true, either. You take the San Diego Freeway, you take the 101, and I don't know what you take to cross Tijuana because I'm so boopdeedoo provincial--I was going to say so "damned provincial)." So the 200 B of the Milky Way, aka The Galaxy, is ten thousand times as big a number as the 20 M of LA-Tijuana. 10,000 -- 1 with 4 zeros after it. So you'd need 10,000 of these areas-I was going to say cities but it's more than a single city--it's a region, maybe 50 miles across in places, 250 miles long? 10,000 of these areas would give the 200 B people. The United States has enough people to populate about 15 such regions. India has enough to populate about 50 of them--not much of a start. Yet the whole crowded human world whole has a decent fraction of 10,000 LA-Tijuanas, maybe 350. Call it 3%. If you have any way of Grasping how many humans are on Earth--and I doubt I do--I certainly don't, you may have aGrasp of the suns in the Galaxy. That's some Grasp.
Here we have a problem we can fittingly say is of astronomical size--we only know much about One Sun, at least by closehand observation, ours, good ole "Sol" we call it. I think it was also called Helios, some other names. Sol has Earth and about as many more planets and big moons as we have fingers on our hands, or twice as many. It seems clear that none of them has produced anybody beside us who fly ships in space, and we don't yet do it very well or very far. That's the objective evidence.
Yet this city of stars we live in, this Island Universe, this grand and beautiful Milky Way, has 200 billion other chances to produce a planet that gives the right conditions to produce races of beings with spaceships. That's a lot of chances. Most of us impressed-with-ourselves "deep thinkers" (another word for Sway-do Intellectuals) on this subject seem to agree that the odds of our being alone in the Galaxy are low. Like realllllllly low.
Another thing for you to ponder is that it seems the world of the stars we see has been around much longer than it took Earth to yield humans. We might say that doubles the chance, already astronomically high. Well, if these other technological beings are probably around, they're way way Out There. Hey, you could read Andrew Blum's book about the US government investigating flying saucers. It's named Out There and it's good, very cautious, very diligent. So if they're out there, then why the h--- don't they come visit us? Stop by for lunch? Not hungry? Have a drink? Don't drink? Maybe they're Mormons or worshippers on the Seventh Day, Saturn's Day. Or maybe we're stuck--they aren't Out There after all. Or maybe they Have Stopped By but they stay hidden because we're not a really reliable bunch and they're waiting until we learn to be nicer to each other before we get to join their club. Or they're actually around but are using us for something already, or they don't want to create a planetary panic or . . . .
So there's speculation and then there's Roswell (New Mexico), whatever that means. Makes a good phrase. We've got speculation and we've got Roswell, or are they the same thing? Is there anything at all to make a sober-headed skeptic think "The Roswell Incident" is anything beyond speculation? I'm personally involved with several sober-headed skeptics and I can't speak for them, but I can list them: my son Eric, my cousin Steve, my cousin Greg, my friend Doc Block, my friend and girlfriend stealer Jason, my friend Seth the investor--you get the idea. The odds that any of them will read this blog are not astronomically low, but they're not high, either. As a group they believe in organic evolution, human-induced climate change, and probably don't believe in Roswell, though I haven't polled them.
This "they believe" line reminds me of possibly my favorite line from the original Harold Ramis masterpiece movie, Ghostbusters. Annie Potts the Ghostbuster secretary is interviewing a job candidate and says, "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, esp, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full-trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster, and the theory of Atlantis?" The sheer length of the list wears her out as she says it, and the absurdity of it got me belly-laughing. The applicant has the correct answer, "I'll believe anything you say as long as there's a steady paycheck in it."
Speaking of believing, those who believe that a non-Earth-built spaceship crashed in the New Mexico desert about July 2, 1947 think some Galactic neighbors did drop by--drop being the important word. A storm, the story goes, blew up one or more of their ships and killed a few little grey men, or grey women, or grey other. Hey, if you're not playing by Earth's rules, there might be lots of choices--grey multi-sexes, grey nonsexes. Whether such creatures exist or could exist is a subject Beyond-----utterly intriguing and utterly frightful, or utterly boring I can hear my son Eric saying, depending on your point of view. UFO nuts say that life crawled out of a swamp somewhere past Neptune, built ships to cross between the stars, and then couldn't keep from crashing in the New Mexico desert. How plausible is that? How plausible is it that such a craft would get hit by a bolt of Earth-born lightening? Those space ships should be fast, but lightening is not slow.
Steve Hawking thinks that if we get visited by heptapods or other creatures from Out There, it might turn out for humanity about like it turned out for American "Indians" when European "aliens" came calling--slavery, decimation, kicked around good, whole way of life ruined. If that scenario came true, it would probably not be good for the economy, and the survivors (assuming there are human survivors) might have depression at an even higher rate than we do now, if that's possible. Oh, it's possible. Have you ever read about how in 1942 when we were losing World War II, people felt like the world was falling apart and began behaving, in some numbers, like there was nothing to count on? Lots of people then stopped believing it was worth it to obey the old rules and started playing it fast and loose. Did things while sober they wouldn't have done in normal times even if drunk. What the hell?
Carl Sagan says that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and saying ET phoned home is about as extraordinary as claims can be. I can think of one other type of claim, or even two, clearly more extraordinary: a) life after death and b) God, some big-hearted Big Brother hiding out behind the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. One guy commented that there isn't "extraordinary evidence, just evidence." Well, then, really clear evidence. Really good evidence, too good for careful, sober minds to disagree about. Sagan's examples were, to paraphrase him, he'd like to see sharp clear closeup photos of UFOs, of such quality we can verify that nobody was dicking around with us, or artifacts that we can all see are not from Earth because they're unlike all we know here.
Okay, good start. This Roswell thing is going to take more than one post. Maybe more than five. All I did here was set the stage; we don't even have any players. Bye.
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