84
Popular Culture Review
They believe the media continue to play an important role reinforcing the
Roswell Incident as a myth. They say a story is shaped by the originator first,
and then by the media. Some segments accept and push the originator’s image;
others do a critical evaluation and present an alternate version. Tabloids reach a
few million people, and television reaches tens of millions. Newspapers only
reach a few hundred thousand. So when the predominate image projected by the
media is the tabloid/TV image people begin to accept the flying saucer crashed
from outer space image as reality.
In the 80s and 90s New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff, physicist
Bruce Maccabee, and various groups interested in UFOs petitioned the US
General Accounting office, the US Air Force, the FBI, and other government
agencies to release all documents pertaining to UFOs and the Roswell Incident
under the Freedom of Information Act. Saler, Ziegler, and Moore state that in
the 1000 pages of documents dredged up and released in 1995, there is no saucer,
there are no bodies, and there is no cover-up. They complain that the ongoing
UFO investigation has wasted hours and hours of government time, costing the
taxpayers thousands and thousands of dollars, producing nothing substantial.
Not so, according to Berlitz and Moore in The Roswell Incident. One of the
notes contained in the 1000 pages of documents, according to the authors, is a
memo from former FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover: “Memorandum for Mr.
Ladd . . . it has been established that the flying discs are not the result of any
Army or Navy experiments, the matter is of interest to the FBI.” Added to the
bottom of the memo, in Hoover’s own handwriting, is: “I would do it but before
agreeing to it we must insist upon full access to discs recovered.. . . the Army
grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination.”
The May 1, 1983 edition of a Midwestern newspaper, the Springfield (MO.)
News-Leader ran a United Press International article, with a Washington byline,
and a headline reading “U.S. had real interest in UFOs, data shows.” The article
went on to say “Declassified government documents indicate that despite public
comments to the contrary, officials took seriously some reports of UFOs and
mysterious lights that danced around the Southwest and elsewhere. The recent
declassified material also includes the revelation that Air Force investigators
reported three ‘so-called’ flying saucers—each of them occupied by three bodies
of human shape but 3 feet tall—were recovered in New Mexico in 1950.” It says
the documents detail encounters with UFOs from the 1947 discovery of a
“flying disc” near Roswell, to the 1980 reports of mysterious objects landing at
Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. The FBI document about the three
crashed “saucers” with humanoid bodies reportedly speculated they might have
crashed because of high-powered government radar. While the Springfield paper
perhaps did not have the highest standards of journalistic integrity in the
country, it attributed this information to the UPI wire service.
More “evidence” about the Roswell Incident has surfaced in recent years. In
1991 science ficti