Roswell: Communicating Fact and Fiction in Popular Culture

In recent decades the American people have become more cynical about, and more skeptical of, official government statements, and the elected officials' honorable intentions.Thanks to Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, former President Clinton's various scandals, the Bush administration's assertions of "weapons of mass destruction" as a justification for pre-emptive war, and general comments from officials regarding the outcome in Iraq the public may have good reason to be suspicious-and even a little paranoid-of the government and the military.Scandals, cover-ups, and even conspiracies, no longer shock the jaded American public.This brings us to what some conspiracy buffs allege, and much of popular culture assumes, to be the greatest conspiracy and cover-up in American history: the Roswell Incident.According to Time Magazine, the Roswell Incident is the only time that the U.S. government has (intentionally) gone on record as saying UFOs really exist (Time, 1997).Author Charles B. Moore notes that UFO was not always synonymous for extraterrestrial.At one time it simply referred to something observed in the sky that was not a known phenomenon or conventional aircraft.But by the time the Roswell Incident hit the papers, UFO was a common "buzz-word" for flying disc (containing alien visitors).Roswell, New Mexico is a small city of about 49,000.It once housed a military air base, is the birthplace of Demi Moore, and also boasts the world's largest Mozzarella plant.A nearby town is somewhat famous for its lizard races.But Roswell has them beaten, hands down.Tourists come from all over the world to visit the UFO Museum, and the site of the famous 1947 "crash landing."Any researcher attempting a sober study of the UFO phenomenon faces a daunting task.The difficulty arises not only from the incredible amount of material pertaining to UFOs, but also that it is all incredibly one-sidedespecially when it pertains to the Roswell Incident.Most of those who have written about this have done so with a very clear agenda: either to prove that the aliens crash-landed on US soil, or to disprove this, dispelling all notions of extraterrestrial visitors, and pooh-poohing all reports of UFOs as ludicrous and wacko.The vast majority of this material seems to be written either by dyed-inthe-wool true believers who will go to any great length to argue their point and make converts, or by narrow-minded skeptical scientists and others determined to debunk the "UFO myth."Some of the latter may be guilty of harboring ulterior motives.Everybody seems to agree on one thing: something plummeted to Earth near Roswell, New Mexico in June of 1947.Cattle rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel stumbled onto the strange debris at the Foster Ranch (85 miles northwest of

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