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What Really Happened In Roswell, New Mexico

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What Really Happened in Roswell

Introduction

When people hear the name Roswell, they do not think of a desert town known for livestock, cotton, petroleum, and natural gas. Instead, they immediately think of UFOs and government cover-ups. When I first heard about the Roswell UFO incident I remember feeling both frightened by the idea of space aliens and at the same time excited that there could be other intelligent life in the universe. I wanted to explore and come to my own conclusions about the event that happened in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Did aliens truly visit Roswell and was there a massive government cover-up of this visitation?
The search

At the beginning of this project, being my first major research paper, I had no …show more content…

In fact, many of the accounts contradict each other and rely on memories of people from over thirty years before. Because of this, I found it difficult to believe most of the stories. "For example, Friedman used secondhand stories of a government engineer Barney Barnett and some unidentified archeology students from an unknown university to back up another startling discovery" (Sobel). According to these sources, dead extraterrestrial aliens were also found in the desert of Roswell. Marcel never mentioned any alien bodies lying near the wreckage and neither did the Brazel family. He also added that the rest of the saucer landed at a crash site in a town called Corona, ninety miles northwest of Roswell and that a second saucer crashed 150 miles away in San Augustin, New Mexico. He believed two saucers crashed in midair, scattering debris and bodies over a wide area. Soon, a supposed eyewitness, Gerald F. Anderson, contacted Friedman to support his claim. According to him, he came upon the craft with its alien corpses scattered in the sand when he was rock climbing with his family: “There was a big gouge mark where it had cut a furrow across the arroyo....That’s when my brother said, ‘That’s a goddamn spaceship! Them’s Martians! (Sobel 96).” Friedman published Anderson’s account, though no eyewitnesses ever backed up this story. Friedman’s work sparked the interest of other …show more content…

The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), two major UFO societies, disagreed on views of the various scenarios, theories, explanations that were presented by Randle and Schmitt and were presented by Friedman and Berliner. "Hundreds of people were interviewed by the various researchers, but people point out that only a few of the people who were interviewed claimed to have seen debris or aliens. Most witnesses were repeating the claims and stories of others" (Wikipedia 2.3.1). Of the 90 people who were interviewed for the book The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz, the testimony of only 25 people appears in the book, and only seven people saw the debris and five handled the debris. Pflock, in the book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, makes a similar point about Randle and Schmitt's book UFO Crash at Roswell. Approximately 271 people are listed in the book who were interviewed and this number does not include those who chose to remain anonymous. Overall more than 300 witnesses were interviewed. Of these 300 individuals, only 41 can be considered first or second hand witnesses to the events at Roswell or at the Fort Worth Army Air Field, and only 23 can be thought to have seen debris recovered from Ranch. Of these, only seven have asserted anything

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