Wright-Patterson AFB is known among UFO researchers as the home of the infamous Project Blue Book, and because of its connection with the Roswell UFO incident. Some believe that the enigmatic Hangar 18, assigned to the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division located at Wright-Patterson contains, or once contained, wreckage of a crashed UFO. In March 1952, the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) established an Aerial Phenomena Group to study UFO sightings, and a new disinformation program was hatched by the Pentagon: Project Blue Book. This was essentially a public relations ploy by the Air Force to quash continued public interest in the subject, headed by the famous astronomer J. Allen Hynek. The project was shut down by the Air Force in 1969.

What was not known by the general public at the time is that the 509th Bomb Group was the only squadron equipped to deliver atomic bombs in 1947. Already, there was a good reason for the government to keep this incident out of the news. The Cold War was just beginning; the Soviets had not yet exploded their first atomic weapon. That would happen the following year, in 1948. Captured Nazi rocket scientists from the Third Reich based in Fort Worth, Texas, would soon be relocated to Alamogordo, New Mexico to continue their efforts to build a stable platform to deliver nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union using intercontinental ballistic missiles instead of aircraft.

Crucially, within twenty-four hours of the original press release, The Roswell Daily Record was forced to refute its own report from the previous day with denials with a fallacy, an appeal to authority.

“Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer – Ramey Says Excitement is Not Justified – General Ramey Says Disk is Weather Balloon” 

The repetition of General Ramey’s name in each byline is an example of epimone: rhetorical term for the frequent repetition of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point. The front page story continues:

“An examination by the army revealed last night that mysterious objects found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was a harmless high-altitude weather balloon — not a grounded flying disk. Excitement was high until Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commander of the Eighth air forces with headquarters here cleared up the mystery.”

The article was accompanied by the now famous photo of Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel holding up what looked like shiny pieces of a child’s kite. A bundle of “tinfoil, broken wood beams and rubber remnants of a balloon” were presented to the gathered press in order to prove the government’s case. But now the story has changed. This and later reports specifically refer to the object as a weather balloon. This would seem to settle the matter, however The Roswell Daily Record printed a follow up story in the afternoon edition: “Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It.”

“W.W. Brazel, 48, Lincoln county rancher living 30 miles south east of Corona, today told his story of finding what the army at first described as a flying disk, but the publicity which attended his find caused him to add that if he ever found anything short of a bomb he sure wasn’t going to say anything about it.”

Here is the first hint of government intimidation used on a witness. Mac Brazel was seen being escorted away by military personnel and spent some time in military custody. He later told close friends that he was intimidated into not talking about what he saw. Another witness named Frank Joyce accused Brazel of changing his story after his incarceration at Roswell Army Air Force base. Brazel implied he had been threatened, along with his entire family. Brazel’s son Bill and other witnesses said later that Brazel complained bitterly about his treatment by the Military.

This news report specifically refers to the object as a weather balloon. Later in the report it states directly that what Brazel found was “the wreckage of the balloon, which he had placed under some brush.” If indeed the wreckage is a weather balloon, this seems perfectly reasonable. If it’s not, however, this is further evidence of an effective spin being put on the story. Finally, the matter is authoritatively put to rest in the Las Vegas Review-Journal from July 9, 1947:

“Flying Disc Tales Decline as Army, Navy crack-down.”

“Reports of flying saucers whizzing through the sky fell off sharply today as the army and navy began a concentrated campaign to stop the rumors. One by one, persons who thought they had their hands on the $3,000 offered for a genuine flying saucer found their hands full of nothing. Headquarters of the 8th army at Fort Worth, Texas, announced that the wreckage of a tin-foil covered object found on a New Mexico ranch was nothing more than the remnants (sic) of a weather balloon. AAF headquarters in Washington reportedly delivered a “blistering” rebuke to officers at the Roswell, New Mexico, base for suggesting that it was a ‘flying disc.’”

Now the authorities are “cracking down.” This is an effective use of metaphor. Another good example is the “blistering” rebuke, and of course, the “flying disk.” The best example of metaphor in this paragraph is perhaps the image of those poor people with their “hands full of nothing.” Reports are falling off sharply (more metaphor) because the ultimate agenda of shutting down the conversation before it becomes unmanageable is finally playing itself out. The army and navy freely admit to a “concentrated campaign” in this regard.

Conclusion

The Roswell incident was forgotten and almost completely ignored by the media for more than 30 years, even by UFO researchers. Acting on a tip while researching a book in 1978, physicist Stanton Friedman interviewed Major Jesse Marcel, the man pictured in the Roswell Daily Record from July 9, 1947 holding up pieces of the ‘wreckage.” He was involved with the original recovery of the debris in Roswell, and by then a very old man. Marcel expressed his belief that the military had covered up the recovery of an alien spacecraft. His account subsequently spread through UFO circles, featured in the National Enquirer in 1980, and a couple of UFO documentaries prior to his death 1983. Since the story finally broke in the early 1980’s, the incident has been the subject of intense controversy, and many conspiracy theories. The government maintains that the debris was from an experimental high-altitude surveillance balloon belonging to a classified program named “Mogul.”

Many UFO proponents maintain that an alien craft was found and its occupants were captured, and that the military then engaged in a cover-up. The incident has turned into a widely known pop culture phenomenon, forever making the name Roswell synonymous with UFOs. It is now the most widely-known and controversial of all alleged UFO incidents.

That was not the case in 1947, however. The Cold War was just heating up and the nation was on high alert. If there was a scientific advantage to be gained from any extraterrestrial technology, the government would certainly not want to publicize this fact. Additionally, if this case truly represented contact with alien intelligence, the argument could be made that the still war-weary public was not ready for such a disclosure in 1947. People were more than willing to cooperate with the government at the time. Still, many witnesses later claimed their lives were threatened by military officials after the event, and they decided it was best to keep quiet under the circumstances.

When an objective observer examines the obvious ‘management from above’ strategy employed by major media outlets, it is clear there is very little of a serious nature relating to UFOs. This is because the mainstream media historically have obliged a relatively narrow range of acceptable views.

The first requirement for sustaining a successful oligarchy is that it share important foundational assumptions about its society and interests. If you are a member of the elite classes (such as the media), certain assumptions become second-nature, such as believing that corporate American-style capitalism is the only solution to humanity’s problems, or in the inherent goodness of our intentions around the world. Members of this class must share its belief system, or they become marginalized from real power. When it comes to UFOs, all one has to do is study today’s media to understand that believing in the existence of unexplained, highly advanced technology navigating the skies and oceans of the world is simply not acceptable – unless it is presented as entertainment.

This narrative follows that full disclosure could be unsettling to the stability of those who actually rule our planet. How can they admit that UFOs are real after almost 60 years of incessant denial without compromising the very political structure which they have relied upon for so long to keep things working smoothly and profitably? Especially if members of your group with connections to the Military-Industrial Complex reap enormous profits from ground-floor investments in technologies adapted from sources that aren’t supposed to exist? A 1949 FBI memo stated that: “Army intelligence has recently said that the matter of ‘unidentified aircraft’ or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ is considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and the Air Forces…”

And in 1950, Robert Sarbacher, a physicist with the DOD Research & Development Board, privately told Canadian official Wilbert Smith that UFOs were, “…the most highly classified subject in the U.S. government.”

From the perspective of media control, it doesn’t really matter what the bottom 99 percent think. If they want to believe in aliens, or Bigfoot, or conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination – another forbidden subject – then by all means they can. Even better, turn all that stuff into cheesy entertainment, keeping the masses happily distracted with bread and circuses while at the same time these topics are prevented from entering the realm of “serious” discussion.

Some of the media coverage discussing UFOs is rational and intelligent. But the trickle of pro-UFO information that makes it into the mainstream consumer culture doesn’t present any sort of threat to the global power structures – as long as the media refuses to take the subject seriously. Longtime publisher of The Washington Post, Katherine Graham said in 1988:

“There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

That’s an interesting take on the idea of freedom of the press, to say the least. It is also a sentiment that the major media has taken to heart. This was especially true in 1947.

Another salient point to briefly mention is that contrary to popular belief, the US government is indeed capable of keeping secrets for a very long time. It is a myth that a bureaucracy as huge as the US government cannot keep its secrets.

The government spends trillions of dollars of black-budget money – unaccountable even to Congress – on all kinds of security, including cyber-security. Further, as historian Richard Dolan points out: an often over-looked aspect of this issue of government secrecy is that much of the highly classified research is now being done by private corporations where there is an additional layer of secrecy involving proprietary rights, where even fewer people have a “need to know.”

In a book review by Amanda Carson Banks from The Journal of American Folklore entitled UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth, I found these comments noteworthy regarding the media’s treatment of the UFO subject:

“The U.S. major media was silent on these issues. Indeed, our major media is a crucial part of the problem. It has become the watchdog that doesn’t bark…Talk about this long enough and you begin to feel as though you’re howling into a vacuum.”

That pretty much sums it up. The “Roswell Incident” is a classic example of media censorship. This pattern continues in the interests of ‘national security’ up to the present day.