The Roswell Conspiracy Theorists:
The Roswell Conspiracy movement isn’t a part of Globalization 4.0, but it is a good illustration of the role of conspiracies and conspiracy theorists in society.
First, let’s talk a little about my own background in conspiracies. I work in theatre, remember? Theatre turns conspiracy into a fine art. First, psychological thrillers are a major style of storytelling, in movies, plays, and novels. And that’s my favorite thing to write. Then there’s acting, which is the manipulation of people’s perceptions through the presentation style of the information you give them. And that’s what all these books have been about. Then there’s technical theatre, which is not merely the art of creating what the audience sees, but also the art of creating what the audience believes they see. And that’s what I do for a living right now. So let’s just say that I’ve got a certain perspective on conspiracies that most people don’t share.
Then there’s my scientific background and, more importantly, my basic ability to understand how science works, which means my ability to separate myself from a situation and look at the information that actually exists. Basically, my ability to look at the sun and at the stars but then, upon learning that they’re the same thing, to realize that the fact that they look different to me doesn’t prove anything, and neither does the fact that we use two different words to refer to them.
You remember what I said back in the Methodology chapter, how I grew up believing that anything could be real, but trying to figure out how to prove that anything was real? What the f*ck do you think science is? Well, that was about how my parents saw the world while I was growing up, and one way or another it’s probably how they grew up, and that’s basically the net result of how my grandparents on my dad’s side lived, when my artist grandmother and my engineer grandfather would get into the discussions about the nature of reality.
I’ve told you all about how child development shapes people’s perceptions of the world. Now a lot of people, including Tom Friedman, are wondering why American kids are growing up with cotton candy for brains, and what to do about it. Well it’s not simply a matter of what you teach kids, or even how badly they want to learn it, but also of when you teach it to them and how.
One night when I was about four, I was outside with my dad and we were looking up at the stars. He said something like, “You see all those stars up there? They’re all just like the sun.”
To which I said something like, “No, the sun is a lot bigger and brighter.” (Or however I would’ve said that when I was four years old.)
And he said something like, “Ah! No, that’s just how the sun looks to us. The sun is a lot closer to us than the other stars, which is why it looks so big and bright.” Then I think he pointed over to the house and said, “You know how big the house really is. From here it looks smaller than it does when you’re standing on the front porch.”
I’ve known a lot of people who would’ve told their four-year-olds that stars are the spirits of all the people who have gone up to Heaven, and their god put them there so everyone will remember he’s watching over them so they won’t feel afraid in the dark of the night, or something like that. Rather than try to explain to their kids what stars really are, these parents would fill their kids’ brains up misinformation. Then when the kids finally learned about stars in third or fourth or fifth or sixth grade or whenever, they’d have strong emotional attachments to what their parents told them, and now they’d be learning something completely different from their teachers, so their heads would be filled with all kinds of conflicting information, with the end result that they’d never really understand what stars were. But what difference does it really make anyway, right? Stars are really far away. It doesn’t really matter what stars are, does it?
But now you’ve taught your kid that when life gets too confusing he can just make something up and act as if it was real. Now he’s discovered—or at least, thinks he’s discovered—that all reality is subjective.
I’ve known a lot of other people who wouldn’t’ve told their kids anything about stars. They would’ve just told them they were stars and then said something about, “Look how pretty they are.” These people say that children should just be allowed to enjoy being children while they have the chance. What these people don’t realize is that learning how the world works is a critical part of childhood development. The moment that your child first becomes aware of stars and asks what they are is the moment of his life that he’s most receptive to learning about them—or one of a few moments, maybe. If you make him wait four or five more years for someone else to teach him about them by showing him pictures of them in a book during the daytime—which is how children learn about stars in school—then all they’re going to be to him are pretty things up in the sky that are kind of like the sun but really far away. His teacher will never be able to make stars as personally meaningful to him as you could’ve on the night he first asked you about them.
So if all you teach your children about is how to be children, just because you wish you could be a child again, or because you want to protect them from the emotional stress of growing up, then when they grow up to be adults, all they’re going to know how to do is how to be children. And then they’re going to kick and scream and say that life ain’t fair when hard-working Chinese come to America and take all the good jobs.
Anyway, my dad taught me the importance of perspective in observation by giving me this introduction to basic astrophysics at the age of four. Many years later I was engaged to my fiancée the wealthy heiress convicted felon, who grew up surrounded by people who wanted to manipulate everyone else’s perception of reality and had tons of material resources available to help them do it. And I’ve had a few friends who’ve worked in military intelligence who’ve told me what they think about it. So here’s all of that applied to the Roswell incident…
The first problem with figuring out what happened in Roswell is that there are no reliable reference sources. There’s a whole bunch of civilians who say one thing, and there’s a whole bunch of government officials who say the complete opposite, and there’s no physical proof to back up anything anyone says. So let’s all put our on deerstalker caps and use the Sherlock Holmes approach on the stories themselves.
I’ve been to the UFO Museum in Roswell, where they have a very detailed account of the civilian version of the story. That was years ago, and I can’t remember all of details, but I can remember the basic outline of the story, anyway.
One night in the summer of 1947, a rancher saw something that looked like a bright shooting star. It was awfully low though—so low that it looked like it landed somewhere out on his ranch. He thought it might’ve been a plane crash. So he saddled up a horse and rode out to where he saw it go down.
There, he found a crashed flying saucer made of some strange metal he’d never seen before, and five dead aliens.
So he went back to the house and called the sheriff. The sheriff came and looked at it, and then he called someone on the nearby air force base.
The air force officials sent a salvage team out to the site. They closed it off, wouldn’t let anyone near it, and carted everything off, leaving not a scrap of wreckage.
They also ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets from the local mortuary.
Over the next week, they flew nine cargo planes into the airforce base, loaded them up with debris, and flew them out again.
They brought the five dead aliens into the town coroner. Air force doctors and nurses performed autopsies on them, trying to figure out what exactly they were.
Everyone in the military was sworn to secrecy. But two or three of the nurses told some friends or family anyway. They all died in accidents soon afterwards.
Later, the rancher retracted his story, and said he was just imagining it.
The official military report said it was a weather balloon.
About 30 years after the event, the town coroner said that he’d helped with the autopsies on the aliens.
Around that same time, a bunch of physicists who’d worked in top-secret government labs started coming forward and saying they’d examined the wreckage of an alien spacecraft that had been recovered.
I think that pretty well covers the basic Roswell story.
I have one friend who served in the Navy long after the Roswell incident. He’d recently abandoned Christianity. Now he felt like there was something missing from his life. So he went looking around for something else to think about now, and he came upon the general UFO mystery—the Roswell incident and other UFO sightings. He was stationed in San Diego at the time. He found out about a UFO group in the area, where a bunch of people would get together and go out at night with their telescopes looking for UFOs, and get together to talk about UFOs, and stuff like that.
As it turned out, a lot of people in the UFO group were ex-Christians like him. They all felt that leaving Christianity had left them with an empty feeling, and that looking for UFOs filled it up again.
One night in 1997, a really weird flying-saucer-looking thing covered in lights came swooping out of the sky and hovered over Phoenix for several minutes, hovering around in circles and side to side, before it flew off again. It didn’t move like any kind of aircraft that exists on Earth. Air force spokespersons later said that they’d been testing some new kinds of flares. But the thing moved as a solid unit. And it although it didn’t look like an aircraft, it looked even less like flares. Some of my friends here saw it, and so did thousands of other people.
All the pieces fit together to make a tidy little story. We keep having these encounters with UFOs, the government keeps trying to cover them up, they keep coming up with absurd explanations for what people saw, they keep leaving a lot of loose ends, and people keep tugging on those loose ends trying to piece together an explanation for what’s going on. When you look at all the clues people have discovered by now, it looks pretty convincing that the government is trying to keep us from finding out about something.
So the questions are: Is there alien life out there in the universe somewhere? Are they studying us? Are they trying to contact us? And to what end?
Now let’s look at the story in relation to the rest of the world.
First of all, I’ve heard a lot of Christians talk about how the conditions of the Earth make the evolution of life here so improbable that it must prove their god created the Earth specifically for us to live on. If the Earth was a few miles closer or further away from the sun, life as we know it could never have existed here. There’s a bunch of other characteristics they point to that I won’t bother going into here but that you can Google search for easily enough. The point is, they’re trying to use science to prove divine intervention in the lifecycles of our planet.
There are just two problems with that argument. First of all, supernatural powers are unobservable, by definition. That means their existence or non-existence is impossible to prove scientifically, by definition.
The other problem is that they’re trying to use circumstantial evidence to prove a pre-conceived belief, and they’re rejecting the possibility that the circumstantial evidence could indicate anything else. The Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Evolution were both discovered using circumstantial evidence, and for the sake of argument let’s say that Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin both had ideas ahead of time of what all the evidence was going to prove. But even if that is true, I think it’s rather self-evident that Albert Einstein believed in Relativity a lot less than Christians believe in their god, for the simple reason that belief in the Christian god is a pre-requisite for being a Christian; his existence or non-existence is not open to debate or question among Christians.
Charles Darwin didn’t believe in evolution before he discovered the Theory of Evolution; he believed there had to be a connection between the way children inherit characteristics from their parents, and the way closely related species of animals who have lived in different environments for long periods of time have different characteristics. So he looked around for all the circumstantial evidence he could find, and then figured out how all the pieces fit together to explain how the parts of the world people could observe directly worked. If anyone else could fit the circumstantial evidence together to explain more accurately how the world worked, they were welcome to try. And that’s exactly what people have been doing ever since. But no one has ever disproven the connection between children inheriting their characteristics from their parents and species of animals who have lived in different conditions for many, many generations having different characteristics. Instead, the continuing search for evidence has only resulted in the continuing refinement of our understanding of how that basic process works.
Anyway, since Christians were trying to use science to prove the existence of their god, some scientists accepted the challenge and started looking for more evidence, trying to find other ways the circumstantial evidence could fit together, and seeing what it indicated. And doing all of that took them probably, oh, about thirty seconds.
The body of evidence the Christians had compiled about the relationship between the characteristics of the Earth and our dependence on them was extensive and it was accurate. They just left out one thing: They didn’t compare it to the number of planets in the universe. There are hundreds of billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies. Astronomers have discovered they can detect planets orbiting stars according to the motion of the star—whether or not the star moves like it’s being affected by the gravity pull of something nearby. So even though they can’t count how many planets there are in the universe exactly, they can get a rough idea. Even if we assume that each of the hundreds of billions of stars in each of the billions of galaxies has one planet orbiting it on the average, that means there are hundreds of billions of billions of planets in the galaxy.
So the scientists took the Christians’ astronomically small probability of life evolving on Earth and compared it to the even more astronomically large number of planets in the universe, and came up with something on the order of 10,000 planets where life had evolved.
Now we have to ask some more questions. How many of those planets have life living on them right now? Eventually our planet is going to be destroyed when our sun/star/whatever starts to burn out and turns into a red giant. And on how many of that statistical number of planets has life yet to evolve?
On how many of those planets has intelligent life evolved? And on how many of those planets is there intelligent life living right now? And on how many of those planets has the intelligent life reached a level of technological development that allows them to travel into space? Our own species has been able to travel into space for about 50 of the 7,000,000 years of our history.
How many intelligent species have even developed to a technological level that let them discover radio waves? We could at least communicate with intelligent life on other planets, even if we couldn’t travel to the other planets. But radio waves only travel at the speed of light. If we had discovered radio waves, built a radio, and sent a message into space immediately, we couldn’t possibly get a response from another planet more than about 50 light years away, because you have to account for the time it would take the radio waves to cover that distance. And we are still talking about 10,000 possible species that could answer us, spread out over billions of galaxies.
The next problem is that discovering radio waves was a major step along the road to discovering the Theory of Relativity. That means that any species that developed a technological level to let them discover radio waves would discover how to annihilate themselves with nuclear weapons soon afterwards. So you can bet that at least a few of them made that mistake.
The next thing you have to consider is the size of the universe, which is incomprehensibly large compared to the way we naturally perceive the world. Obviously, there is nothing here on Earth we can compare to the size of the entire universe. It’s about ten trillion light years in diameter. Understanding what that means would require you to understand how big a trillion was, and how big a light year was. Mathematicians and astronomers can figure it out easily enough, but it’s just one of those things that is never going to become personally meaningful to people over the course of their everyday lives.
Basically, ten thousand species of intelligent life spread out throughout the universe would be the equivalent of ten thousand single celled organisms swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Like, there’s one microscopic organism swimming off the coast of Alaska, another off the coast of California, another over by Japan, another down by Australia, and so on. What do you think the odds are any of them are ever going to find each other?
The next thing you have to consider is that we’ve basically exhausted the energy resources of our planet and we still haven’t figured out how to break the light barrier. And not only that, we haven’t even figured out any conceivable way anyone else could break the light barrier. So now we’re talking about 10,000 microscopic organisms swimming in the Pacific Ocean, none of which will swim more than 10 feet from the place of their birth ever in their lives. If some aliens could figure out a way to do it, they would have to live on a planet that for some reason had vastly greater energy resources than our own does. I’m pretty sure that no physicists or geologists have ever figured out what that form of energy could be, or how that much of it could be concentrated on one planet. The Second Law of Thermodynamics affects them the same way it affects us, and I’ve already told you enough about that. A star has an infinite supply of energy, as far as we’re concerned, and if we could find a way to extract it directly from the star/sun/whatever, we wouldn’t have to wait for it to shine on the Earth in the form of sunlight. But the temperature of a star/sun/whatever is, like, 2 million degrees or something, which is hot enough to vaporize anything in the solar system. So you can’t just land a bunch of mining equipment on the sun and dig up some sunlight to put in your spaceship’s fuel tank.
So to summarize to this point, if we assume there are 10,000 Earth-like planets in the universe, and we assume that life on those planets evolved pretty much the same way it did here, which is not a bad guess (for reasons I’ll explain more about in the next chapter), in order for us to be able to contact alien life:
An intelligent species would’ve had to evolve,
And live on that planet now,
And have developed to a space-age technological level,
At the same time we did,
Without wiping themselves out in a nuclear war,
And live on a planet that orbited one of the nearest few dozen of the hundreds of billions of billions of stars in the universe.
Basically, our chances of discovering intelligent alien life are worse than the chances of everyone on Earth winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning at the exact same instant.
So why do so many people feel like we must be able to find intelligent life in the universe anyway?
Do the words sensory illusion ring a bell?
Let’s go back to my friend the ex-Christian UFO watcher and all his ex-Christian UFO watcher friends. What psychological effect does religion have on people that the idea of contacting space-traveling aliens would also give them? How about the feeling of being connected to someone else out there in the universe somewhere? And the feeling of being connected to someone more powerful than themselves?
Next, how has the prospects of finding alien life shaped American’s cultural background over the course of the 20th century?
The first story about intelligent alien life, or at least, the first well-known story, was The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. From the moment people discovered other planets and discovered aviation, it was inevitable that someone was going to imagine intelligent life on another planet and imagine a way for one or the other to travel to the other planet. And a new genre of science fiction was born.
Then, during the Kennedy administration, we landed a manned spacecraft on the moon. Now the possibility that we could travel into space became personally meaningful to a hell of a lot of people. So a lot more people began imagining a lot more possibilities. You can just imagine what that did to the science fiction industry. Within a few years, Gene Roddenberry was filming the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy were beaming up to the starship Enterprise every week. And a lot of anonymous crewmembers in red shirts were getting their faces eaten by aliens.
That was about 20 years after the Roswell incident, but you can see how the progression of scientific developments contributed to people’s ever-expanding imagination of what those scientific developments could lead to. You remember what I said in the last book, about movie directors using establishing shots to plant an idea in your consciousness that they’re going to build upon later on? If the heroine in a movie walks past a blender in a horror movie, the villain is probably about to cut her face off with it. But if you’re watching a romantic comedy, it probably means her cute little four-year-old is about to splatter tomatoes all over the kitchen with it.
In 1947, even a rancher in New Mexico would’ve heard of the idea of intelligent space-traveling aliens. His cultural background had already planted the original idea in his consciousness, or at least, not far down into his subconsciousness. All there was left was for someone to build upon that original idea.
Have you ever noticed that all the UFOs in America are always sighted near top-secret military bases? Does that seem at all strange to anyone?
So who do you suppose would want to build upon the ideas that had already been planted in people’s minds?
But why the f*ck would the military want to go to all this hassle to fool one rancher?
Let’s go back to the civilian version of the story now…
The next thing we can look at is how information flowed among the people in the story. Who told what to who when? And what did each of those people do with the information they got?
In the entire story, there are only two people who got anywhere near the aliens who didn’t work directly for the government: The rancher and the coroner. The rancher had a wife and two children, and there might’ve been a few other people working at the coroner’s office who saw something. So we’re talking about maybe 8 people in all.
It’s virtually inevitable that air force engineers could manufacture some materials that a rancher had never seen before, and use them to build a type of aircraft he’d never seen before—even if they put a lot of research and development into these things specifically for this purpose. Working as a theatrical set carpenter I make stuff no one has ever seen before every day of the week, so I’m sure air force engineers could figure out that trick too. I also make simple things look like much more complicated things—like, making a water pump and some styrofoam look like a lovely waterfall trickling down over some rocks. So again, I’m sure that air force engineers working on a top-secret base could figure out how to do my job.
Fooling one rancher who discovered a crash site in the middle of the night should not have been difficult. Fooling him and his family and the town sheriff when they went back the next morning shouldn’t even have been terribly difficult. But the people who staged this ruse couldn’t keep it up forever. But they didn’t have to. They convinced a few people they’d seen something—that is, built upon the pre-existing ideas in the people’s minds, showed them something tangible to reinforce those ideas, and got them to make strong emotional connections to them. Then they disposed of all the evidence. But they kept up the act of trying to hide something extremely important. They gave everyone a lot of circumstantial evidence to go with the ideas that were being spread from a few people who had made strong emotional attachments to the idea that they’d seen a certain thing, and then they stood back and let the public try to fit the pieces together.
The fact that the air force doctors ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets from the town mortuary doesn’t indicate anything. It seems to indicate that the military doctors wanted to preserve the bodies of five child-sized dead people, because those are the first ideas that doctors ordering five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets pulls out of people’s subconsciousness. In the same way, if you see a gray rock-shaped thing, the idea it pulls out of your subconsciousness is “a rock”, not “a carved piece of styrofoam”. “Someone ordered five child-sized hermetically sealed caskets” pulls the “five dead child-sized people that he wants to preserve” idea out of your subconsciousness. So you combine that with the “mysterious crash site nearby” idea that you already have in your consciousness, and the “they don’t want us to know what’s going on” idea. That creates a “must be important” idea, followed by a “I wonder what it is” idea. And then you try to fit all those ideas together to create an understanding of the situation. At no point does the “he’s going to stick them in his basement and let them gather dust for the rest of his life” idea ever enter your consciousness.
Likewise for nine cargo planes landing in the airforce base, being loaded with cargo no one was allowed to see, and then taking off again. That doesn’t prove anything either. All they did was to give you some more circumstantial evidence to try to combine with everything else you thought you’d seen.
Did all of those air force nurses who said they’d conducted autopsies on aliens really get killed in suspicious accidents soon afterwards? Or did they just spread some more information that suspicious people believed and gobbled up and then got put in some kind of witness protection program? For that matter, were they really nurses at all, or were they CIA agents?
You remember what I said about space-travel science fiction taking off in the ‘60s, after John Glenn landed on the moon? By the early ‘80s we were watching Star Trek movies. Then people started coming out with investigative books about the Roswell conspiracy. Then there were TV shows, movies, fictionalized TV shows, fictionalized movies… And all these commercialized media accounts are made for the purpose of making as much money as possible, by appealing emotionally to the people with the most money. We’re no longer talking about science. Now we’re talking about art. The Roswell conspiracy was once a conspiracy, but now it’s just a legend. A demand was created to feel like all the events there fit together somehow, and now lots of people are making lots of money by supplying for that demand. The air force officials gave everyone a little bit of circumstantial evidence to start with, and the public did the rest.
By 1997, a lot of people felt like their must be aliens out there in the universe somewhere. They felt a connection to something greater and more powerful than themselves that lived somewhere far away. Most of these people didn’t understand the vastness of universe, how long it takes to travel through that vastness even at the speed of light, or how thinly intelligent space traveling alien life must be spread. And even if you tried to explain this to them, what do you think they would’ve said? “Well, that’s what you think, but I feel it must be true.” A few people have even told me that.
Basically, by this point the Roswell legend had become a religion.
So what more could anyone add to it? How about something that looked like a spacecraft that thousands of people would see? If you could fly a space-ship-looking thing over a major city without it crashing, you wouldn’t have to dispose of any debris or prevent anyone from visiting the crash site or offer them any explanation at all. At this point, all you have to do is to show them some fake rocks carved out of styrofoam—oops, I mean, something that looks like a spacecraft—and all the beliefs people have built up around the original myth will take care of the rest.
So now that we’ve seen how information has flowed among people and shaped their perceptions of the situation, now let’s look at how people are acting upon that information.
What are people doing now? Looking for UFOs. Putting Roswell aliens on T-shirts and coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers. In short, so many people believe that aliens exist that they react emotionally to the idea that they exist out there somewhere as if they really did exist out there somewhere. We have a whole culture of people who believe in aliens without any physical evidence to prove they exist, who read meaning into circumstantial evidence, and who ignore the physical evidence we do have about the universe in favor of the emotional attachments they’ve made to something they imagine. It’s as if the director of the CIA collaborated with Walt Disney to invent a new religion.
And what else is happening now as a result of the Roswell incident? Every top secret military base in the desert has a psychological wall around it now, where anyone who sees anything strange flying through the air automatically assumes it’s an alien spacecraft and goes spreading disinformation everywhere they go. Either that, or when they start asking what’s going on the military officials make a bunch of flimsy excuses about weather balloons, and lots of other people assume that must prove it was a UFO. Then when people try to fit all the pieces of information together to understand the situation, the understanding they arrive at has nothing at all to do with top secret military experiments, in spite of the fact that all of these UFOs have been sighted above top secret military bases! For all intents and purposes, the military’s top-secret research has been rendered completely invisible.
Admittedly, there are a lot of people who have researched the Roswell incident a lot more thoroughly than I have, and the story of what happened varies according to whose website you visit. But no matter which version of the story you read, they all have the same fundamental things in common: A few people saw something, they didn’t get to keep any physical evidence of it, and a whole lot of people who work for the government gave people various pieces of circumstantial or unverifiable evidence. Just look at how the story stacks up against what we know about the universe, and then compare that to who was involved in the event, how information flowed among them, how that information shaped their perception of the situation, how they acted upon their perceptions, and who benefited as a result. It doesn’t matter what version of the story you read. They’re all just variations on the same theme.
When you assemble all of the evidence—not just the evidence that seems directly related—see how it all fits together, and then look at what it indicates, what it indicates is that a lot of people have gone looking for a Roswell conspiracy, and walked into a trap. They only found the conspiracy the conspirators wanted them to find. The real conspiracy was the military acting like they were conspiring to cover up an event, and letting the public feel like they’d outsmarted the conspirators, so the public would never notice what the conspirators were really trying to keep secret. The conspirators wove some basic elements of psychology together and manufactured an illusion.
I don’t mean to be a drag. I don’t really give a f*ck what happened at Roswell. I was getting you warmed up for the next section…