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On an achingly hot New Mexican evening in 1947, the sky cooled when an approaching thunderstorm crowded the horizon west of Roswell. What happened next is the subject of sixty years of heated debate. According to the United States Government, a top-secret research balloon - complete with anthropomorphic dummies - fell from the sky onto a rancher's scrub brush lands. But a growing list of witnesses continues to cast serious doubt on the "official" explanation of events. The signed affidavits swear that a chevron-shaped craft skidded across the Foster Ranch, wounding or perhaps killing a small crew of unusual hominoids, people from a far-away land separated from our world by time, perhaps, or great distances of space.
The Roswell event witnesses, as any local news affiliate explained this week, seem like a credible group, with military officers, doctors, and well-respected society members among them:
Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., Roswell eyewitness, said, "It's the degree of strangeness of the material and my dad's excitement that really made an impression upon me. It would be pretty difficult to forget what I saw."
Jesse Marcel is a Montana surgeon. In 1947, his father, Major Jesse Marcel, was the intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Wing stationed at Roswell's Army air base, the only atomic bomb wing in the world.
"He was the intelligence officer for the group, which meant he wasn't a fly-by-nighter. Members of the 509th were handpicked for their credibility, their intelligence. It was his job to brief the crews that dropped the bombs on Japan," Marcel explained.
This past week marked the 60th anniversary of the Crash at Roswell. Even though the event has been labeled as belonging to Roswell, the actual event took place some many miles from the small city, but because Roswell was home to the nearest military post, it has borne the brunt of six decades of speculation and wonder. This anniversary brought some exciting news for those following Roswell research:
Last week came an astonishing new twist to the Roswell mystery.
Lieutenant Walter Haut was the public relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard.
Haut died last year but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death.
Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar.
He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.
You may think that the world of UFOs belongs to pocket-protectored geeks in black plastic-rimmed glasses, but the truth is that recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe in life outside our home planet.
What are women bloggers saying about the infamous UFO event? As I surf the BlogHer blogrolls, and then move on to a Technorati and Google blog search, I am surprised to find that nearly every post on the Roswell anniversary (aside from brief mentions of the date) has been written by men, by a margin of at least a couple hundred to one. I know that I wonder about the sky, about my place in the universe, yet I didn't ponder on Roswell, either. Do UFOs reside in the minds, and then typing fingers, of men? I like to think that a healthy interest in the unknown is one of the great gender equalizers.
It took me some time, but I did find some interesting mentions of Roswell by women bloggers:
For many Americans, Roswell is such a part of the mythos of our culture, our country. And the way most of us digest and process the unusual is to make it as normal as possible, as integrated into our regular life as we can. As Pam Spaulding mentions on her 44th birthday this week at Pandagon:
...fun fact: folks in New Mexico and UFO buffs are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the infamous Roswell incident — the Roswell Daily Record newspaper story on it appeared on my birthday.
Some of us want to understand, to open the skin of the event, to pierce the heart of the mystery itself, to know what's "out there." Like Mulder, they Want To Believe. Lesley, a resident of Albuquerque, New Mexico, blogs at The Debris Field, a blog dedicated to the paranormal and UFOs. Leslie has posted a few links to Roswell stories and other UFO news, but she hasn't (yet)
