While living at Jester Dormitory on the University of Texas campus in 1972-1973, I roomed with John Collins. He was born in Roswell, New Mexico, although he grew up primarily in Dallas. I mention John’s birthplace because Roswell is where the most famous—or should we say infamous—UFO (unidentified flying object) sighting took place, in the summer of 1947.

John was a smart guy who became an architect and traveled a good bit. If not the most flamboyant of individuals, he nonetheless had a fairly rational outlook on life. But after touring the UFO Museum in Roswell, he became a true believer. I remember well the time he began talking about it and I gently brought him to a halt. “I don’t believe any of that stuff,” I said. John gave me a look that conveyed not just surprise but genuine concern, rather like a missionary speaking to a heathen. Not only was it true, he insisted, but there were profound consequences of which I should be aware. Alas, we had to agree to disagree.

Here is a summary of what happened in Roswell more than 60 years ago. Indeed, some kind of crash took place on a ranch north of the city in early July. When the debris was collected, Walter Haut, the public information officer at nearby Roswell Army Air Field, called it a “flying disk,” although the term was quickly rescinded. Why Haut made that initial statement is anyone’s guess, but the Air Force claimed it was actually a high-tech radar-tracking balloon. Modern UFOlogists scoff, saying that was only the start of a vast and nefarious cover-up, that the government had chosen to suppress the astounding fact that planet Earth had been visited by extraterrestrial beings.

The matter was largely ignored and forgotten for more than three decades until a man named Stanton F. Friedman got involved. He began doing interviews with the surviving people who had handled the crash debris, and some of them had new and wilder tales to tell—especially about short, big-eyed aliens who had died in the accident. Tabloid journals were all too happy to run with that story, and people who wanted to believe in UFOs had all the “proof” and “evidence” they needed. Now, it’s true that the U.S. government could have saved itself a lot of grief by just putting the accident debris on display and admitting it was a top-secret balloon intended to get information about Russian military activity early in the Cold War.

I do not believe there is a supernatural basis to the Roswell incident or any of the other purported UFO sightings—if they may be so called. Every case, in my opinion, can be rationally explained. Some people witness astronomical phenomena such as stars, planets or meteors, human creations such as satellites or aircraft, or even flocks of birds and extrapolate that, coming to mistaken conclusions about visitors from outer space. Several out-and-out hoaxes have been discovered. I think persons who claim to have been abducted and taken for a spin in flying saucers are either lying, duped or otherwise deranged.

Lacking a doctorate in astrophysics, I cannot pretend to be an expert but what I have read indicates that the chance of Earth having such visitors from other planets or galaxies is exceedingly remote. I admit that, given the huge size of the universe, life probably exists elsewhere. “Life,” though, can mean anything from the humblest amoeba to civilizations far superior to ours. Ideas about the latter tend to excite the more gullible among us. Rather than indulge in pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, I say it is far better to take a clear-eyed and intellectually honest look at our world and accept that for all intents and purposes we are alone.
 

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