I'VE said before that I really want to be a UFO conspiracy nut but that the dopiness of our military and space agencies makes it really hard. Crash dummies?
Yeah, rightNow, the Air Force's revelation that so-called extraterrestrials found at Roswell actually were crash dummies has pushed me closer to the conspiracy theorists' camp.
Crash dummies? After all these years this is the best that the Air Force can come up with to explain one of the most persistent alien-encounter incidents in history?
In case you've been on another planet, a lot of people think that an alien spacecraft crashed in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. They think that mainly because the Roswell police at the time actually called whatever it was that crashed a flying saucer.
But the military dummied it up, so to speak, claiming that it only was a weather balloon that crashed. That was good enough for a lot of people. Why would the government lie to us? See, this was before Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination and all the other little incidents that have created a credibility gap between the government and the people the size of Tranquility Base.
But some hardheads continued to think that there actually had been an alien crash and set out to either prove it, or at least make a lot of money yapping about it. Since then, profiting from UFO hysteria has become the third largest industry in the country behind Bill Gates' Microsoft and Ron Popeil's pasta makers, food dehydrators and pocket fisherman gadgets.
The Air Force finally got tired of being bugged about the Roswell incident and decided to do a full-blown investigation. So they brought in a totally disinterested, objective person -- a former Air Force colonel -- to oversee the probe.
He titled his report: "The Case Closed, Shut Your Mouth, No Bodda Us No More, Ain't No Aliens 'Round Here Roswell Report."
It was in this report that the Air Force disclosed that in 1947, it was conducting top secret, national security tests that consisted of taking crash dummies way up in the air in balloons and dropping them to the ground to see what happened.
Well, a few of these crash dummies accidentally landed in Roswell and apparently spooked the local citizenry not used to seeing sophisticated military equipment like mannequins (Roswell apparently didn't have a Sears at the time) and so there you have it. Case closed.
Why didn't they just say they were dropping dummies out of balloons at the time and nip this conspiracy juggernaut in the bud?
Well, you see, the Cold War was just starting and the United States wanted to come up with a secret weapon to use against Russia and, who knows, maybe dropping nuclear-tipped tuxedo mannequins on Moscow was the ticket. So they had to keep it secret until the clamor about aliens finally got so bad that the Air Force said, "All right, for crying out loud! They were crash dummies. We were wasting your tax money playing around with a bunch of crash dummies. Are you happy now?"
I've been the government's biggest supporter against the alien-conspiracy wackos. After all, if we snagged a space saucer and de-engineered it to learn great new technology, why can't we keep a space shuttle aloft long enough to grow bean sprouts? Why is the Soviet space station held together with duct tape?
But even I am having a hard time swallowing this crash-dummy story. Everyone knows that crash dummies were invented by the U.S. Department of Seat Belt Testing in 1982. We've seen in it on television. Wait. Maybe those crash dummies in the commercials really can walk and talk? Maybe they're not dummies at all. Where's Carl Sagan when you need him?