Roswell

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edit on 13/8/17 by mirageman because: tidy up



The 1980s – a decade when the seeds of the 21st century were still being planted. Global politics, economics, technology and, yes, ufology changed rapidly. Not necessarily for the better either.This is a look back with hindsight at how many things almost ‘taken as read’ today in ufology came to be.The 1980s saw the emergence of the UFO lore with a much darker and conceivably, more sinister commentary than we’d seen in years before. The decade also opened the way for Roswell to become the number one ‘UFO and alien story’ on the planet.There were also some major contemporary UFO cases to chew over. In Britain there was the strange abduction of policeman Alan Godfrey and the Zigmund Adamski UFO murder mystery. Soon after followed the ‘Rendlesham Forest Incident’. This was rapidly succeeded by the Cash- Landrum case and 1980 had not even ended. Other notable UFO events were the Hudson Valley sightings, the JAL 1628 case and the notorious Gulf Breeze sightings in the USA. Whilst the old Soviet Union had the 1986 supposed UFO crash in Dalnegorsk and the Voronezh UFO incident of 1989. The mysterious Belgian Triangles provided a final global UFO mystery for the decade as the Cold War came to an end in 1989.There will be no analysis of those cases here. The main theme of this post is to explore how the ufological memes of the 1980s modelled and shaped those of today. Although this post will do little more than scratch the surface.So let us begin in the New Mexico desert........Some of you may be unaware that for 31 years the Roswell case was considered to have been an embarrassing error by the Roswell Army Air Force. It was dismissed completely by the mainstream media as a premature issuing of a press release about capturing a flying disk that had to be recanted because their officers had failed to identify a weather balloon. Project Bluebook barely mentions it and the UFO community paid little attention. Of those who did no one mentioned aliens at all.There are no photos of the debris field or of any recovery operation. The only pictures related to the event seem to be the ones taken by the press at Fort Worth Texas.Then, in 1978 Stanton Friedman heard about Jesse Marcel telling stories about a military cover up of something not of this Earth that crashed in New Mexico. His story spread on the UFO grapevine, with Marcel being featured in some documentaries at the time (below are clips from “In Search Of” TV show both featuring Jesse Marcel)In February 1980, the National Enquirer ran its own interview with Marcel, focusing national and international attention on what came to be known as the Roswell UFO incident. As the 1980s progressed additional ‘witnesses’ added significant new details, including claims of a large-scale military operation dedicated to recovering alien craft and aliens themselves, from multiple crash sites. There were even stories of alleged intimidation of civilians by military personnel. Jesse Marcel’s claims were becoming rather dull in comparison.By 1989, former Roswell mortician, Glenn Dennis, had put forth a detailed personal account claiming a young nurse, Naomi Selff, that he was friendly with had told him alien autopsies were carried out at the Roswell base. Dennis’s story has since been discredited. The nurse never existed and other details of his story were shown to be fabrication.At the end of the 1980s the TV show Unsolved Mysteries produced a recreation of the Roswell incident by absorbing all of the new themes and memes that had grown over the decade. It had a lasting impact and Roswell cemented its position as the number one UFO legend in large parts of the world during the 1990s. It even led to an alien autopsy (faked) video in the 1990s being produced.