by Pamela Grundy

Created on: March 14, 2008   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

On July 8, 1947, the US government announced the "capture of a flying saucer" in the Roswell, New Mexico newspaper,then promptly retracted that announcement by saying something like, "Did we say flying saucer? We meant, um, weather balloon." Ever since that day, ufologists have been convinced that the US government's stance on UFOs is "hiding something." They're right. The US government is using the one of the oldest con-artist tricks in the book: hiding in plain sight by creating a diversion. It's just that what the US government is hiding is not UFOs.

The Roswell incident happened at the height of the Cold War and the beginning of the nuclear arms race. The devastating US nuclear attack on Hiroshima was still fresh on the minds of a war-weary populace. Americans were anxious to put down warfare and get back to normal daily life. Nuclear build-up was going to be a hard sell, and the US government knew it. At the same time, pulp fiction magazines, along with the Orson Welles broadcast of "War of the Worlds" and the enormously popular works of French author Jules Verne, had created a public fascination with intelligent life on other planets and the possibility of an alien invasion of Earth. Sociologists tended to see this media fascination as a displacement of the pervasive fear of foreign invasion Americans had developed over the course of the war. In other words, worrying about imaginary Martians in your backyard was safer and more entertaining than the very real fear that the Germans or Japanese would bomb your house.

Why would the US government, in this emotional atmosphere, announce the recovery of a flying saucer and then say it was, oops, a weather balloon? Is it really that hard to tell the difference? The answer can be found by examining the results of this announcement. Almost instantly, people who had been worried about the bomb and nuclear proliferation started looking for bug-eyed aliens instead. They found them too. Everywhere. First came a rash of sightings of strange lights in the night sky, often near military bases. Then, a rash of sightings of actual craft. Again, often near military bases.

Amazingly, most people interpreted the proximity of the sitings to military bases as evidence that the aliens were concerned about our weapons capabilities, either because they were peace-loving aliens who wanted to teach us their advanced ways, or because they were hostile aliens planning to attack us. Few saw the proximity factor as evidence that the sightings

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