I always have a bit of a quandary whenever I showcase an
alien as a “State Cryptid”. For many people the term “cryptid” typically refers
to unknown Earthly animals. But over time this blog has evolved into more of an
overall tour of speculative creatures in American pop culture and folklore
where the lines between “natural animal”, “supernatural entity”, and “extraterrestrial”
become very blurry. I’m also much more interested in the history behind these
sightings than the classification of each creature, or even whether it
plausibly exists at all. Plus I’ve already featured several extraterrestrials
already such as the Pascagoula creatures, the North Dakota Meccano-Mummy, and
the Grays that allegedly abducted Barney and Betty Hill.
June 14, 1947- Rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel and his son were
driving on their property 80 miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico when they
came upon “a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and
rather tough paper, and sticks.” What was it? They had no idea.
Initially unsure
about what to do with the strange find, Brazel collected some of the debris a
few days later and drove it into Roswell to give to Sheriff George Wilcox. The
sheriff, equally perplexed, contacted the nearby Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th
Composite Group. They sent a team out to the desert to collect the remaining
debris and ascertain what it was. A few days later Major Jesse Marcel made a statement
to the local paper about the incident. Though he didn’t explain exactly what
the object was, headlines claimed the army had captured a “flying saucer”.
Flying saucers were in the news a lot that year. On June 24th,
1947 amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing an airborne, disk-shaped vehicle
near Mt. Rainier in Washington. Later, Navy seaman Harold Dahl claimed he had
seen a whole group of the strange objects on June 21st near Puget Sound.
Soon people were sighting flying saucers everywhere. Much of this hysteria was fueled
by fears of the growing power of the Soviet Union and worries about what secret
experiments they might be conducting. Paranoia about unknown Russian flying
vehicles soon turned upwards beyond the boundaries of Earth as people began to
speculate that flying saucers actually came from other worlds. These mysterious
objects were labeled UFOs- Unidentified Flying Objects- by the US military and
the term quickly caught on in popular culture. Though UFO originally just meant
an unknown aerial object, with no indication of origin, it became synonymous
with extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Eventually the army explained that the debris found near
Roswell had come from a downed weather balloon. But such a prosaic explanation
did not stick with the public. The idea that creatures from outer space had
crashed on Earth had firmly taken hold, and a good number of people believed
that this “weather balloon” story was just a flimsy cover-up. It certainly didn’t
help that the government was tight-lipped about many of its programs out of
fear that the Soviets might get wind of them.
It turns out, though,
that the weather balloon story was actually close to the truth. In the late
1940s the government began Project MOGUL, in which massive balloons equipped
with sensitive detection instrument were launched high into the ionosphere to
look for signs that Russia was testing nuclear weapons. One of these balloons
had fallen out of the sky, crashed on Brazel’s ranch. Not wanting to reveal their
secret project, military officials had felt it was better to let the “alien
spacecraft” idea percolate in the popular imagination instead.
A decade later In the 1950s rumors cropped up that people
had seen government agents collecting alien bodies in the New Mexico desert.
These stories were soon conflated with the Roswell crash legend, leading to
conspiracy theories about frozen alien corpses preserved in secret government
hangers. For many years any secretive government sight was rumored to have “aliens
in the freezers”. Eventually accusations settled on Area 51, a classified military
base in the Nevada desert.
These reports too had
a more down-to-Earth explanation, though. Investigations revealed that the “alien
bodies” had actually been special crash dummies fitted with sensors and dropped
from airplanes by the Airforce to test the effects of high-altitude parachute
drops. Like Project MOGUL, these tests had been hidden behind a thick veil of
secrecy which did little to dispel the rumors.
As for Area 51, though the government denied its existence for
decades despite clear evidence that it existed, it was officially confirmed in
2013 as a base for testing experimental aircraft such as the U2 spy plane, the
Archangel-12, the SR-71 Blackbird, and others. No word on frozen alien corpses,
though. By the way, the name “Area 51” is more of a pop culture term. The base
is typically just called “Groom Lake”, “Homey Airport”, or simply the “Nevada
Test and training Range” by the CIA.
The Roswell Aliens story gained a major surge in popularity
in the 90s with shows like “The X-Files” and “Dark Skies”, movies like “The
Arrival” and “Independence Day”, and comic books like “Roswell, Little Green
Man” by Bill Morrison. There was even a 1995 psuedo-documentary called “Alien
Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” produced by the Fox Network and hosted by Star Trek
actor Jonathon Frakes. It allegedly showed vintage footage of the dissection of
an alien corpse from the Roswell crash. This
video was eventually revealed to be a hoax, with the corpse actually a rubber
dummy stuffed with jam and animal organs from a butcher.
For my depiction of the Roswell aliens, I wanted to get away
from the typical images of corpses lying on dissection tables or floating in preservative-filled
tubes. I also wanted to avoid the trope of aliens as malicious, terrifying
invaders like in Independence Day or any number of B horror movies.
Instead, I chose to portray them as normal beings adapting
to a new life on Earth. Here we see one of the aliens recovered from
their crash with the help of a wheelchair and prosthetics. I’ve imagined them
setting up a new life for themselves in New Mexico, just trying to keep to
themselves. They’ve taken a keen interest in their new home, evident in their
collection of local plants like ocotillo and yucca. They’ve also made friends
with many locals, including Indigenous communities, evident here in the
“Singing Mother” figure on the table. These figures were first created in 1964
by artist Helen Cordero of the Pueblo de Cochiti, a community of the Keres Pueblo
peoples.
As immigrants themselves, the Roswell Aliens also feel a
kinship with the many other people that have moved to New Mexico from other
countries. This is reflected in the alebrije they got from a Oaxacan-born
artist.
REFERENCES
The Roswell Report: Case Closed
A Smithsonian article on the crashed MOGUL balloon
An article from History.com about the Roswell incident
A Space.com article about Area 51
An article about the infamous "Alien Autopsy" pseudo-documentary
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