Story by John Sarvay; illustrations by Jonathan Fox
When the government finally opens up and tells the public the truth about visitors from outer space, how will our celebrity-addicted, horoscope-driven nation of generally mindless citizens react? That’s what some people are beginning to wonder. There’s something in the air, they say, and the truth may be too far out there to believe ...
The otherworld rumor mill has kicked into overdrive in the 90s. The 80s were filled with reports of Harmonic Convergences, discoveries of past lives and the healing powers of meditation and acupuncture. This decade before the touted end of the millennium is quickly being filled with a less earthly buzz. A decidedly unearthly buzz.
The aliens are coming. They control our government. They walk among us. They eat our brains.
Popular television, magazines and even one local radio station have picked up on the groundswell of speculation about UFOs. Some say the high level of discussion—largely confined to popular culture, not scholarly discourse—is a sign that our government is seeing if the public is ready to accept the aliens. One Richmonder says he leads support groups for Richmonders who have been abducted. Another scoffs—he was talking about the aliens long before Joe Public jumped on the bandwagon.
Despite the rash of theories, most people will agree that one phrase, made popular by the FOX television show, “The X-Files,” is probably accurate: “The truth is out there.”
Then half of them add that the truth is so far out there you’d be crazy to believe it.
It’s either the biggest marketing ploy since dinosaurs, or it’s a test. Is the public ready for the truth?
In the Beginning
Code names fill the short history of documented UFO sightings and speculation that the government is actively conspiring to hide the truth from an unsuspecting world. Area 51. Project Blue Book. Project Blue Fly. Operation Majestic—known as MJ12. Hanger 18. Roswell.
It was in Roswell, New Mexico, that all the chatter started in July of 1947. It was at Roswell that the government admitted it had in its possession remnants of an alien space vehicle.
The crash actually occurred in nearby Corona, about 70 miles or so away, but rancher Mac Brazel brought pieces of debris into Roswell to show the sheriff. The sheriff, no dumb hick cop, knew alien space debris when he saw it and called officials at the Roswell Army Air Field. An investigation was quickly launched into the crash in Corona and the Army issued a press release on July 8, 1947.
The speculation about flying saucers and little green men was true, the Army’s release said. “The intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc” of unearthly origin, the press release read in part. Calls from all parts of the globe jammed the phone lines of Roswell and Corona—UFOs have landed! Or at least crashed.
Oops, maybe not. Within hours, the Army lured the media to a press conference in Fort Worth, Texas, 600 miles away from Roswell. While the Army cleaned up the Corona crash site and locked down Roswell, the military’s public relations hacks went to work. “Er, the UFO was nothing more than a weather balloon with a radar reflector attached to it. Sorry, no little green men,” was the gist of this second public statement.
No little green men. Or were there? It is with this incident that many UFOlogists and conspiracy buffs say began the biggest cover-up in the history of humankind.
In the days of yore, the argument was that if you can’t trust your own government, you can’t trust anyone. Well, welcome to the trust-free world of modern America. The United States spent 16 years—from 1956 to 1969—investigating unidentified flying objects and they came up empty. They said.
The Book Projects
In their April issue, the editors of the popular science magazine Omni launched an ambitious and potentially controversial effort: Project Open Book. Their primary goal is to expose UFO and close encounter theories “to the hard light of rational scientific and journalistic inquiry.” They ask a simple question. “Is there evidence of alien presence on Earth, and have governments suppressed that evidence?” After fifty years of secrecy and speculation, the editors at Omni realize that the answer may be rather difficult to uncover.
Project Open Book, simply put, is Omni’s attempt to gather and disseminate documented information on UFOs, close encounters and abductions. The April issue began a series of articles on alleged government cover-ups.
Open Book is an obvious play on the official U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, an investigation from 1948 to 1969 that concluded there was no evidence that UFOs existed. Yet, before he died in 1986, J. Allen Hynek, the civilian director of Project Blue Book, said that he could not flatly dismiss the possibility that some UFO sighting reports were not real.
“The Air Force was under orders from the CIA to play it down,” Hynek said. “They didn’t want people to panic.”
Panic was the government’s worst nightmare in the 50s. America was deep in the Cold War, and rampant UFO sightings could only distract the nation from the real enemy: the Pinko Commies.
A then-confidential CIA report stated in 1952 that, “The continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.”
Fancy words meaning: stop accepting UFO sightings. Which is precisely what the Air Force officially did in the 1970s.
Virginia Skyways
In Virginia, UFO sightings are somehow directed to the State Police. But even the troopers say that few calls come in. At least in the last decade or two. The truth of the matter is that there may be nothing out there, according to the state police. Nothing, that is, in the skies of Virginia. A call to the Bureau of Field Operations reveals that it’s been quite a while since they’ve had to look into unidentified flying objects.
“Not in recent years,” says Colonel Robinson, when asked whether they receive many UFO calls in the Central Virginia region,” and I mean years and years. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve looked into any.”
Which doesn’t mean there is nothing out there. Even Blue Book’s Hynek remained curious. He coined the phrase “close encounters of the third kind,” a phrase for encounters between human beings and aliens. After 20 years of hunting for UFOs, the director of the official government investigation remained skeptical enough to found the Center for UFO Studies in 1973.
In spite of all the attention paid to Project Blue Book by UFO fanatics, it probably wasn’t relevant, one historian says. The investigation never fielded more than a handful of personnel at any given time, says David Jacobs, a historian at Temple University. If the Roswell crash was an alien ship, Jacobs contends, the Air Force would have investigated UFOs with more fervor. And many more people.
Which means many more loose lips, Jacobs says. Had the crash been an alien ship, dozens, perhaps hundreds of scientists would have been pulled into military and scientific examinations of the craft. That many people can’t keep a secret.
But Jacobs believes that aliens exist. He reasons that it is foolish to assume otherwise. After all, more than 10 percent of all UFO sightings are completely unsolvable.
Congressional Inquiries
Where Blue Book allegedly failed and Omni’s Open Book has yet to succeed ventures New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff. At Schiff’s request, the U.S. General Accounting Office has opened an inquiry into the Roswell incident and possible government cover-ups.
According to the Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News, Schiff complained that the Defense Department has been “unresponsive” to his requests for information about the Roswell incident.
“Generally, I’m a skeptic on UFOs and alien beings,” the Republican congressman said, “but there are indications from the runaround that I got that whatever it was, it wasn’t a balloon. Apparently, it’s another government cover-up.”
For Schiff, the issue has nothing to do with little green men. It has everything to do with governmental accountability. If there was a cover-up, he reasons, the people deserve to know why.
For UFO devotees, Schiff’s interest in accountability is a slim hope for that one more scrap of information. And one more scrap of information may reveal The Truth.
It’s out there, the reasoning goes. You just have to look hard enough for it. Or hope that someone out there, somewhere, wants you to find it, or them.
