Is 2023 going to be 1947 all over again?
Are we about to witness a return to extraterrestrial frenzy, official denial and coverup?
Might Dawson City become the Roswell of the 21st century?
Roswell is the small New Mexico town where, it was claimed, visitors from outer space made their North American landfall – or, more correctly, crash landing – in June, 1947. When the unusual wreckage – tinfoil, rubber strips, and bits of wood – was examined at the Roswell Army Air Field, it was, unaccountably, declared to be the remains of a “flying disc.” In those early, paranoid days of the Cold War, tales of strange flying objects had already begun to sweep the United States. When the town newspaper appeared on July 8 with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region,” the rush to Roswell began.
They came by the tens of thousands, the curious, scientists, ufologists, fantasists and conspiracy theorists who feasted on suspicions that the U.S. government was in cahoots with aliens bent on taking control of the world. Rumors spread like wildfire. That the bodies of “little green men” had been found at the crash scene; that some, still alive, were hidden in a secret government bunker, while the remains of others were being preserved in gel in glass tanks.
Before long, a different sort of alien was reportedly seen strolling the streets of Roswell; they were friendly; some spoke English and would stop to chat. They were extremely tall, Nordic-looking, with a distinguishing feature – they had two heads. Before long, Roswell (pop. 25,000) was attracting 100,000 tourists a year.
The “Roswell Incident” was a fraud, a fiction built on a tissue of deceptions. It was a fraud that launched decades of official coverups of reports – some seemingly credible, most not – of extraterrestrial sightings and contacts. In the case of Roswell, the army “corrected” itself: the wreckage, it said, was actually from one of its own weather balloons. But that wasn’t correct, either. It was not until 1997, when the Pentagon released top-secret reports on Roswell, that the truth (so far as we know) came out: it was the wreckage of a top-secret U.S. government spy-in-the-sky balloon, launched in an off-the-books program to surveil Russian nuclear tests.
None of that mattered. The crowds kept coming. Today, signs on roads into town – “Welcome to Roswell, N.M., the UFO capital of the World” – direct visitors to the 1947 “crash scene.” It is home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center. There’s an annual festival to celebrate the “arrival” of the visitors from space. A pair of large green aliens welcomes customers to the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru; down the street, silver E.T. sculptures sit outside a flying saucer-shaped McDonald’s.
A couple of things. A sensible person would not accept at face value “official” explanations for unknown objects – balloons, cylinders, or things the size of small cars. At the time of writing, four UFOs – or UAPs, as they are now known, the American government having classified unidentified flying objects as “unexplained aerial phenomena”– had been shot down this month. The first, a balloon the size of three school buses, blown up off South Carolina on Feb. 4, was surely Chinese. It may have been spying on military installations – or maybe not. Three additional objects were shot down the next week: off the north coast of Alaska; over Yukon, northeast of Dawson City, at the order of Prime Minister Trudeau; and over the U.S. side of Lake Huron. All three were said to be the size of a small car and to be floating at an altitude low enough to endanger civilian aircraft.
All three remain unidentified and unexplained. At the weekend, the U.S. military called off its searches in the Arctic Ocean and Lake Huron. Then the RCMP called off its search of the vast and dangerous area of Yukon where that object, described by Defence Minister Anita Anand as cylindrical in shape – probably crashed. Known locally as an aircraft graveyard, the terrain is mountainous, prone to avalanches, and in winter is buried in snow deep enough to swallow the wreckage of a plane – or a flying saucer.
But there are no such things as flying saucers, are there? Or inter-galactic spaceships, with or without little green men or tall chaps with two heads?
Who’s to say? One of the more intriguing aspects of this sight’em-destroy’em affair has been the unwillingness of insiders to dismiss the possibility of extraterrestrial activity.
When U.S. Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of NORAD was asked, his reply was: “I haven’t ruled out anything.” And this tangled response from former CIA director John Brennan left the door more than ajar: “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
Got that?
Let’s consider opportunities. The Yukon UAP is the only one of the recent three that came down over land, and it looks as though it’s the only wreckage with a chance of recovery. A summer search could turn it up.
Dawson City needs a helping hand, something like the Klondike Gold Rush, which brought 100,000 prospectors to the region and inflated Dawson’s population from 500 in 1896 to 30,000 by the summer of 1898. Its population today is estimated (generously) at 2,500, one-tenth that of Roswell in 1947.
If a non-existent flying saucer could turn Roswell into a tourist mecca, what might a real one do for Dawson City? It would put the town on every map. I can almost see it. The saucer, restored, in the rotunda of the new National Centre for Space Studies, Alien Research and Galaxy Exploration. Tours of uaplogists from around the world. Conferences at Dawson City Interstellar University of Yukon. Best-selling books. A Netflix series.
And, for sure, a video presentation of Justin Trudeau describing the historic day when he brought the saucer down.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com