88
Popular Culture Review
In December of 1995 on a state visit to Belfast Ireland, President Clinton
was asked if an alien spacecraft really landed in Roswell and he responded “no,
as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell New Mexico, in
1947. (Laughter.) An d . . . if the United States Air Force did recover alien
bodies, they didn’t tell me about it either, and I want to know.” (Time, 1997)
So what did happen? Did the government really cover up the Roswell
Incident? If it did, was it to protect military secrets, or were officials really
covering up an alien landing? Is it even possible for anybody now to be really
sure what happened after years of confusion and obfuscation? It seems certain
that the government took the UFO threat seriously, at least for a while. In the
Sagan book, James E. McDonald writes “What I find scientifically dismaying is
that while a large body of UFO evidence seems to point in no other direction
than the extraterrestrial hypothesis . . . that possibility is going unconsidered by
the scientific community because this entire problem has been imputed to be
little more than a nonsense matter unworthy of serious scientific attention.”
It is har