Slow Down, Roswell, You're Movin' Too Fast #14

The History Channel did a program on Roswell (2002?) that makes a couple of Pretttty Solid Points hinting it could be good to slow down on these alien conclusions.  Karl Pflock wrote a book called Roswell:  Inconvenient Facts.   He says: if the Air Force had found alien bodies or technology at Roswell, there would have been a response in the national security apparatus.  It might have been covered up at the time, but now we would be able to look over all the documents we have from that period and see signs of that.  There would have been an attempt to develop defenses.  There would have been the sense that we could indeed be vulnerable, and we damned well better do something about it.  There's no sign of that kind of large response in the system after 1947.
I'm not sure, but that just might be the single best anti-alien argument I've heard since I got genuinely curious about Roswell when I stumbled through there by accident on my way from Sedona, Az to Dallas, Tx in May, 2015.  Here are three rivals, other sound anti-alien points, and a counterpoint at the end.

1)  No documented surge of base activity.  Jim Wilson, an editor, reviewed daily personnel records at the Roswell base.  Walter Haug and a number of others report a great surge in activity after Brazel's report.  The debris cleanup itself is claimed to have taken many days, and the increased activity went on for some time after.  This is not reflected in the daily personnel logs of July, 1947.
Two months after I wrote this note, I read an interview with Tom Brookshier, a pro football player who grew up in Roswell and was a teenager at the time.  He said, I worked at my dad's filling station and lots of guys from the base stopped in.  "When the UFO incident happened in '47, the base was closed to outsiders for about a week as if a curtain had been dropped around it.  After it was lifted, the guys from the base became very distant" and didn't want to talk to me.
The Project Mogul explanation has simply No Way of accounting for a memory like that coming from an innocent local teenager.  1) The base hadn't even been told about Project Mogul.  Project Mogul would look like an odd variant of a weather balloon.  You wouldn't do a big drastic closure to outsiders for finding some new sort of Air Force equipment.  It would be overkill.  You almost certainly wouldn't call out the Commander on the 4th of July weekend.  2) Why did the soldiers clam up?  The only rationale making sense to me is there was Some Big Secret to keep.  Again, it's too big of a shoe for Project Mogul to fit.

2)  Think about reliability needed to build interstellar craft.  The common cars built in, say, 2010, seem to be about five times as reliable as those my parents drove when I was a kid.  Now multiply that sort of progress by 1000 and you might be able to get to Mars, which is the next world over.  Tell me somebody comes from Orion or the galactic central bulge or from the nearby satellite galaxy of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.  To do that you multiply the reliability of the technology by 1000 again.  Then that kind of vehicle crashes in a lightening storm in New Mexico?   Give me a break.

Any answer to "an interstellar ship WOULD NOT crash?  Two quick ones:  1- Maybe the ship came from a world without lightening.   Lightening is kind of fast and kind of powerful.  2-Are we, by this argument, positing a technology that cannot crash on a planetary surface?  Are our visitors presumed to be mortals?  Were the gods astronauts?

3)  I watch a few minutes of a pro-alien Roswell movie.  When the officer looking at the debris field says to his colleague, "No one is out hunting for this.  This isn't one of ours," my chest starts to tingle.  So I want to believe the big interesting story.  This urge to believe seems suspicious.  It feels like a built-in bias in favor of nonEarth explanations. 

Therefore maybe we need to quote Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song, "I'm come to watch your flowers growin', feelin' groovy, slow down, you're movin' too fast, all is groovy."  And I thought the 59th St Bridge Song was by some one-hit wonder.  Quite the opposite.  I first saw Paul Simon in Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall.  Simon invites Annie to come work with him in California.  On the verge of losing his girlfriend to the Surfer State, and to Paul Simon of all people, Woody's character Alfie, says, "Why would you want to live in a state where the chief cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light?"  I've always just about fallen off of my chair from that line.  I'd say it was more true for Idaho, and that California's chief cultural advantage is that you can surf year round.

Now the counterpoint.  Jesse Marcel Jr is an MD.  His dad brought home some odd things that first night from the crash site.  He was gone for a day or two.  When he came back, the young son looked expectantly at his dad for something interesting to hear.  What else had he learned after piquing the boy's curiosity?  What does dad do?  Shrugs it off.  More.  "We're never going to talk about that again.  That's all I can say about it."

Let me try to recall when I was 10 and my Dad had something unusual that caught my attention.   What do you know when you're the dad of most conscientious ten-year-olds?  That parents are the source of many of the interesting things that come into the kids' lives.  My dad brings home some odd stuff from work and wakes us up in the night and says, "You kids have got to see this stuff."  First of all, he never did that once, so Dad Marcel must think he really has something different.  Then my Dad Paul, imagine, leaves for two days and comes back.  I've been waiting for this moment for 48 hours.  I turn and walk over to talk to him as he sits at the kitchen table.  "Hey, Dad, what was it?"  He's in a position to say something that's the highlight of my week.  That was easy when I was 6, and in a few years I won't care about almost anything he says.  So he would really like to give me some nice piece of info.  Paul turns slowly and looks me in the eye and says in his serious voice, "I was wrong, son.  It really wasn't anything to get worked up about.  In fact, I can't tell you anything more about it.  I can't talk about it."
"Why not?"
"That's the way things are at work sometimes, son, and I know it doesn't make sense to you, but it's all I can say."

What would make my Dad treat me that way?  Fear is the only explanation that comes to mind.  I have to conclude that Jesse Marcel Sr. was afraid of something, of talking, of saying any more about what he thought he knew, or he wouldn't have treated his children this way.  Doesn't it smell six ways to Sunday like, right there in the Marcel house in July, 1947, something was being covered up?  The odd, funny type of balloon used by Project Mogul just can't explain Marcel's response.

I've said before the problem with Roswell is that the official explanation is the sensible one, but its weakness is that it can't satisfy me on 27 or 127 fishy loose ends.  Major Marcel clamming up to his son is one more of those loose ends.  Does that prove an alien "Grey" died at Roswell?  No, but it hints at it.