The following is an article from the July '97 (Vol. 5, #6) issue of The
REALL News.  It may be reprinted by other skeptics organizations as long as
proper credit is given. REALL also requests that you please send a copy of 
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also be cross-posted onto other appropriate conferences.
This article represents the opinions of its author, and does not necessarily
represent the opinions of REALL or its officers.
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                   A Few Words on Roswell
                       David Bloomberg
     As the Chairman of REALL, I am asked a number of
questions. Recently, most of these have revolved around
Roswell, the Air Force report, etc. It's time for me to
state exactly what my views are on Roswell:
     I don't care.
     That's right. I just don't care. I can't bring myself
to care about a 50-year-old military SNAFU that has been
conclusively shown to be meaningless--except to a few
ufological conspiracy theorists who ignore any evidence that
contradicts their worldview. Frankly, I think the Air Force
report did nothing to help, but rather only confused the
situation more.
     Now I know that I should care, at least a little bit,
because I have taken it upon myself to be our media
watchdog, and the media has taken up the 50th anniversary of
the non-event at Roswell as a great way to reel in
readers/watchers. But even so, how many times can we say the
same thing?
     Art Levine, writing for U.S. News & World Report, has
written the only article I've seen which seems to mirror my
viewpoint. In the July 14 issue, he talks about the
disservice done to the public by the media, who has failed
to make it plain that "one side of [the Roswell] debate
consists of sheer hooey." He notes (and I agree) that the
Roswell non-event's 50th anniversary probably shouldn't have
rated "much coverage at all, given that the UFO event in
question never happened."
     He points out that the witnesses who keep telling their
tales can't keep them straight: "many of Roswell's key
witnesses have changed their stories several times and have
been caught telling falsehoods." This is something that I've
known for quite a while, as have other skeptics who keep up
with UFO stories. Unfortunately, the media has done a less
than stellar job of getting the information out to the
public -- probably because telling the tale of an alien
spacecraft crashing and our military covering it up seems a
lot more interesting than talking about a few people in the
middle of nowhere who are telling tall tales to get some
attention.
     But the Air Force played right into the hands of the
believers. For whatever reason, it seems they didn't want to
come out and say, "These people are lying," even though that
much is obvious and has been proven. Instead, they came up
with a cockamamie story about dropping dummies several years
after the non-crash in Roswell. Now all the believers are
hooting and hollering about the Air Force report, and I have
to agree with them, at least as far as being skeptical that
the dummies caused the alien body reports! As the caption
under a photo in the Levine article says, "The Roswell
`mystery' is simple to explain: Many witnesses are telling
false stories."
     Even some former true believers have been forced to
admit that there is nothing here. Kent Jeffrey, the main
force behind getting more than 20,000 signatures on a
petition asking President Clinton to make public all
information about Roswell, has come out and said that the
evidence shows that nothing otherwordly crashed at Roswell.
He is already being attacked as a debunker-in-disguise by
some believers and has responded, in part, by stating, "With
regard to reversing my stance, it is important to remember
that the objective of the Roswell Initiative has been to
find the truth, not define it. Unfortunately, the truth
turned out to be different from what I thought it might be,
or hoped it would be. However, now that I am absolutely
certain that the debris recovered from Roswell was not that
from an extraterrestrial craft, I feel an obligation to get
that information out as well. Not to do so would be less
than forthright and less than honest."
     So when even the biggest promoter of Roswell concludes
that nothing happened, why should I care about it? I have
too much other REALL-related work to do.  Which is more
important, the State Board of Education passing science
standards without mentioning evolution, or a 50-year-old
thoroughly debunked UFO case?
     A famous skeptic (don't recall which one) once noted,
"For ufology, it will always be 1947." Indeed, if this
continues to be true -- and I certainly haven't seen a
change -- the entire fringe of believers in alien visits to
Earth can be virtually written off. In other words, call me
when they come up with something interesting.
[Side note: Some of you may be wondering how I can say that I
don't care about Roswell, a 50-year-old case, while we are
featuring part 2 of a discussion of Kenneth Arnold's 50-year-
old sighting in this very same newsletter issue. First, let
me say that the cases are somewhat different in that the
Arnold case has not been definitively solved, while Roswell
has. Second, Arnold's sighting is the one that started the
whole frenzy of "flying saucer" sightings, and that alone
makes it more interesting (at least to me). Third, and
perhaps most important, even if I didn't find the Arnold
case of interest, we don't just publish articles here based
on what I like; if somebody submits a good article and it's
relevant to REALL, we'll probably publish it!]
--- msgedsq 2.0.5
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