Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 91

Roswell 87 Astronomer Carl Sagan believes that there is a strong probability that there are about a million other stars with planets housing advanced civilizations, even though he thinks the odds that extraterrestrials are currently visiting our planet are fairly slim. Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and others have reportedly seen UFOs while in space, and Aldrin even photographed one on the center rim of a moon crater, according to the Roswell Incident, but NASA would not release the photos. Conservative Senator Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, who was also an Air Force General, reportedly went to Wright-Patterson Air Base to see his friend General Curtis Le May, asking to view the “Blue Room” where UFO artifacts were kept. Gen. Le May’s response, according to Goldwater’s statements in The Roswell Incident, was “hell no, I can’t go, you can’t go, and don’t ever ask me again.” President Eisenhower was rumored to have visited Muroc to examine the alien bodies on February 20, 1954, but this story is unsubstantiated and may be incorrect. The Majestic 12 document pertaining to Eisenhower has been exposed as a fake. But apparently Eisenhower did disappear from his press corps and entourage on that date. Press Secretary James Haggerty was hastily summoned to make a statement. Merriman Smith of the United Press reported that the President had been taken for “medical treatment,” and the Associated Press even flashed on their wire that President Eisenhower was dead, only to retract it moments later. When Haggerty showed up he denounced it as “a demonstration of journalistic mob hysteria,” and announced he’d merely knocked a cap off of his tooth. But did he really sneak off to view alien bodies? President Carter announced he had once seen a UFO, and promised to release all government documents pertaining to UFOs, only to renege on his pledge once he took office. In April 1977 the U.S. News and World Report said before the year was out “the government—perhaps the President—is expected to make what are described as ‘unsettling disclosures’ about UFOs. Such revelations, based on information from the CIA would be a reversal of official policy that in the past has downgraded UFO incidents.” The Day After Roswell, a book written by Philip J. Corso, a retired Army-intelligence officer, and former member of Strom Thurmond’s staff, claims that Ronald Reagan’s whole “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative was not really concerned with the Soviets, but really designed to protect us from alien space invaders. This certainly sounds far-fetched, but there may be more substance to Corso’s claim than one would think. Reagan’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, included in his memoirs (Fitzwater, 2000) the astonishing (but almost completely ignored) comment that in speaking on SDI, Reagan had wanted to refer to the “prospect of an alien force threatening earth from space.” On two separate occasions, Fitzwater revealed, Reagan’s staff had to excise such references from the president’s written speeches. Fitzwater noted that Reagan had a vision of all countries on earth joining together to defeat alien invaders. President Reagan was thus either less grounded in reality than even his critics thought, or more visionary and perceptive than even his most ardent adherents knew!