STRANGE MACHINE #1
'22 Roswell UFO Fest Fervor: Average Joes are Hungrier Than Ever
For the first time since COVID, I road tripped to Roswell, New Mexico for the 75th anniversary of the controversial 1947 “flying saucer” crash that ignited the modern UFO era. The debate between whether the incident was a recovery of an extraterrestrial craft and its three diminutive inhabitants vs. a high-altitude surveillance balloon meant to spy on the Russians still rages on.
I’ve been coming to Roswell nearly every year since 2008, having the privilege of accompanying my mother, Yvonne Smith, UFO abduction hypnotherapist and veteran in the field, who’s invited as a speaker every year. 2022 felt different than previous years.
The vibe was peculiar, and in a good way.
Since Roswell is an event that’s both a small town festival and a UFO conference, it’s always been unique in that the tourists come through the International UFO Museum and Research Center to gawk at the speakers at their tables, splaying their esoteric books and passionately rapping about their recent case files concerning strange things seen in the sky, government coverups, uplifting messages from our space brothers in the Pleiades, contact with otherwordly visitors, you get the gist. More of a freak show than a participatory exchange—exotic animals at the zoo to be observed but not interacted with. It’s not like other conferences, the choir is rarely preached to at Roswell. Its tourists traditionally have not been true believers, let alone flexibly curious.
I was always accustomed to this. Since age 7, I was exposed to the (often-frightful) alien dimension of UFO contact and alien abduction. I quickly realized the topic wasn’t everyday discussion once I entered elementary school (growing up in the 90s in an upper middleclass suburb of Los Angeles), and kids gave weird looks and awkward smiles at its mention. The other mothers always describing my mother as “a very interesting lady.”
This year, though, in the wake of the AATIP revelations and the U.S. military acknowledging for the first time ever that: UFOs/UAPs exist, they can outmaneuver our aircraft, and we have no idea what they are, the average Joe and Jane (with children in tow) are no longer rubbernecking with morbid yet distant curiosity. They are listening, and they’re curious.
It seems the freaks were right all along—exactly what they were right about is still the big question.
It helped that Luis Elizondo was one of the speakers, a former counterintelligence special agent who worked in the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence—and (though it’s been challenged) ran the clandestine UFO Pentagon program for a decade. He’s also the marquee name in the field of ufology right now. (But as anyone who knows the field can tell you, that always changes on a dime.) I found him to be genuine, or, at the very least, extremely friendly, engaging, and willing to connect.
As high-profile as Elizondo is, he had nothing to promote, no books to sell, nothing to hawk, he was simply there to talk to people and answer any questions (the questions that didn’t pertain to anything Top Secret, anyway). His message during his presentation was simple: Disclosure has happened. We are now looking into a post-Disclosure world. And it’s up to us, the citizens, to decide where to go from here. It was encouraging and empowering to hear that the future of the UFO subject is no longer in the hands of gatekeepers, that we can dictate the trajectory, that—unlike in the 20th century—we have the tools and democratic technology to redefine the conversation.
Elizondo’s 4pm lecture in the Convention Center was packed, and it especially caught my eye to see gaggles of young people sipping beer and whispering to each other and pointing at his slides, awe-struck. There was a group in particular, two couples, likely from the Midwest, likely the boys are Army-bound, likely the girls go to school in Lawrence, KS, who came from salt of the earth families. It was a new, engaged demo I had never seen before, for sure. Not the kind who would openly talk about this stuff in public without mocking it, but there they were, buying the ticket and taking the ride.
It was indicative of the dawn of a new era in the UFO realm—one whose light is now impossible to duck away from.
I may or may not be able to tell you what Elizondo did or didn’t tell me as we spoke about a range of topics from quantum mechanics to acoustic levitation. It floored me though that there are currently 400 UAP incidents involving the military—with explanations for maybe one or two of those 400. There was a story that (may or may not have come up) about a missile test that was conducted in the ocean. When a helicopter team went to recover the missile—which involves a frogman being lowered down on a cable and hooking the floating missile up for extraction—the surrounding water began roiling. Suddenly, an object that appeared the size of a small island was surfacing. The poor frogman still dangling on the cable was screaming and attempting to climb back up. The object didn’t completely surface, it went back down underwater, but it sucked the missile down with it. The missile was never recovered. This is one of several incidents that remains unexplained.
I know the UFO field is replete with claims that the government is sitting on all kinds of “Truths” when it comes to not only the existence of extraterrestrials as the occupants of these strange machines seen in our skies and in our oceans, but that the government is also sitting on all kinds of secret tech that has the capacity to transform our entire socioeconomic landscape. While our military-industrial complex is not above black projects and general clandestine shadiness, I have my doubts that the government (or any secret government therein) is as omniscient as we’ve long given it credit for.
I’m more inclined to think that the government isn’t revealing a smoking gun because there isn’t one, and that UAPs to our military is about as explicable as consciousness is to the scientific community: “We know it’s there…we just don’t know what it is…”
In fact, the military’s position on the phenomenon has not changed whatsoever since the release of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects in 1956. Air Force officer Edward J. Ruppelt was the director of Project Grudge in 1951 until it became Project Bluebook, and he’s generally credited with coining “UFO” (then pronounced “Yoo-Foe”). In his report’s nearly 200 pages, his conclusion can be summed up simply: Something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.
The only semblance of a smoking gun that something of extraordinary origin was recovered from the Roswell desert in 1947 is the testimony of Colonel Philip Corso, who claims he was put in charge of the project to reverse engineer the technology recovered from the Roswell crash, and which led to innovations such as infrared, fiber optics, lasers, kevlar, etc. This is documented in the book The Day After Roswell.
As time has told us, however, whenever there is anything substantial to hold on to, it just as quickly dissipates like smoke.
A week ago, Alejandro Rojas tweeted links to the FBI files on Corso that reportedly have been taken down. According to the FBI, his prowess as an intelligence expert is dubious at best, as he was the one to spread the theory in Washington that Lee Harvey Oswald was an FBI informant in the months leading up to JKF’s assassination. When pressed, Corso’s information was flimsy and his sources relatively nonexistent.
On a 2004 broadcast of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, biochemist Colm Kelleher was asked about Corso and whether or not he could confirm his story. For eight years, Kelleher served as the deputy director of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), an organization that was funded by Robert Bigelow and played a role in the research done at Skinwalker Ranch.
Kelleher noted, “We [NIDS] spent a lot of time interviewing [Corso] too, mostly off the record. I think there’s a really big difference between the kind of information he was talking about in one-on-one interviews versus what actually ended up in the book, The Day After Roswell. I think there’s a lot of stuff in that book that’s very difficult to stand behind.” At the same time, “People at NIDS went to the military and were unable to falsify the reports of technology being back-engineered via industry. In other words, it reached a stage where we can’t confirm nor deny.”
Which pretty much sums up the entire quandary, and keeps us looped in this never-ending debate as it rages on, 75 years later. In this new era, I would encourage us to resist paranoia, and scrutinize the myths gifted to us from the 20th century while opening ourselves to new possibilities and the ever-unfolding of new truths in the 21st century.
What we know for sure is that the deeper go into the Mystery, the stranger it gets.