Roswell

Brian Balogh: Hey, Nathan, do you read anything except the Sacramento Bee?

Nathan C.: It’s a fine paper, Brian. This is a quote from article that was published in July 1947. “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the Intelligence Officer of the 309th Atomic Bomb Group of 8th Air Force was fortunate to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.” This is actually a quote from Lieutenant Warren Haught who was the Public Information Officer at the nearby Roswell Air Force Base. That’s right Roswell. This is Roswell, New Mexico.

Ed Ayers: Okay. The plot thickens.

Brian Balogh: And I see why you use the past tense, was a Public Relations Officer, Nathan.

Ed Ayers: So Nathan, do we know what they actually found there?

Nathan C.: Well, according to the military the very next day, they released a contrary report that they found a weather balloon instead of a flying saucer. There were later reports that came out about a project called Project Mogul that where the military was using the official line on this that it was a balloon used in nuclear testing, but the cat was already out of the bag in terms of the rumor mill that had been stoked by the initial report and then the retraction because it’s the retraction that caused many to believe that this was the beginning of a government cover up, and for decades after this finding, there would be concern that the military’s principal relationship to UFOs was to conceal their existence and conceal the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Brian Balogh: Well, Nathan. What makes your story even more dramatic is you talking about perhaps the high point of American faith in government. We just won World War II. We developed this super weapon, the atomic bomb, that was done by a $2 billion government project, but here’s the thing, that government project, The Manhattan Project, was top secret, even the Vice President didn’t know about it while it was happening, so the government which did have a lot of credibility with the people was kind of setting itself up for a big fall just because it had to keep so much secret, so why not this?

Ed Ayers: Do we think that all of that stuff about atomic bomb and stuff might have made people more willing to believe that there is all kinds of stuff about space and science?

Brian Balogh: Who knew that you could incapacitate an entire city with one bomb before that atomic bomb was revealed? All of a sudden, the idea that anything was possible was very much on the table.

Nathan C.: But here’s the thing, Brian, I, like a good historian, like to fashion myself as an appropriate cynic when it comes to not just conspiracy theories but general information. However, the military itself begins to take concerns about UFOs quite seriously. In 1947 at the end of the year, they opened up a new project where community members begin to report formally that flying saucers are indeed real. There’s actually cases that are open by the army, in the air force that get opened and then closed when findings don’t actually advance the notion that this is simply a conspiracy, so there’s a conflict among military officials about whether or not UFOs are indeed a real thing.

Nathan C.: Fast forward into and through 1948, a series of sightings not by ranchers or farmers but by Air Force pilots who are seeing unidentified flying objects. Again that term entering the kind of formal [parlant 00:20:17] at this time.

Brian Balogh: [inaudible 00:20:20] there’s not an acronym for that.

Nathan C.: Right, they’re seeing UFOs over Fort Knox in Kentucky. They’re seeing it in Montgomery, Alabama, over Fargo, North Dakota and there are even multiple sightings over Washington, DC itself. All these to say that by the time you get to the early 1950s and into the 1960s, there’s a formal investigation called Project Blue Book that’s initiated to make sure that they are documenting and keeping track of all of these various sightings coming from everyday citizens but also from military officials themselves.

Brian Balogh: Well, Nathan. There are a lot of Americans who do believe this stuff. That’s not to say that the military believes there are UFOs. They simply are doing their due diligence and carrying out their committee work to demonstrate that UFOs are not real.

Nathan C.: Well, the problem with that –

Ed Ayers: This is some tough debate going on here, I’ll tell you.

Nathan C.: Well, the problem with that theory is that the military, not only has to go out of its way to police its own officials and try to create a story that it believes will be considered credible by the broader population, it’s that you have to have. By the late 1960s, an entirely new report written by another committee to simply settle this debate. Believe it or not, a 650-page report at least in 1968 by a group called The Condon Committee which is led by a physicist named Edward Condon.

Ed Ayers: You know him well.

Nathan C.: And this is the critical passage that I think leaves it both settled and completely unsettled on the question of UFOs. “Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that had added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

Brian Balogh: Oh, Nathan, my earthling friend. You have just put your finger on the problem of proving a negative which is going to play an incredibly important role in ensuing debates between the public and science about the safety of all kinds of things about whether the SST, the plane broke the sound barrier, is going to fly without creating sonic booms, about whether pesticides can be used and about proper amounts of radiation that might leak out of nuclear power plants. It’s called Doubt Science and I will give you this. I never knew that the origins of Doubt Science lay in the military in the whole UFO story. I know that’s not what you wanted to teach me, but I am impressed.

Ed Ayers: So, it’s kind of like the origin of climate denial?

Brian Balogh: Exactly.

Ed Ayers: Wow!

Brian Balogh: Or tobacco being harmful or not. This is all of these people trying to prove that something might not be dangerous. For instance, all of their arguments turn on, “Well, some form of you can’t prove a negative.”

Ed Ayers: So there’s no evidence that listening to podcast actually increases your IQ?

Brian Balogh: That’s the one exception, Ed, although the podcast you listen to needs to be BackStory.

Nathan C.: Ed, Brian, citizens of the universe, recording angels, we have returned to claim the pyramids, partying on the mother ship.

Ed Ayers: Party on, Nathan.

Brian Balogh: Thank you.