Roswell and Close Encounters

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

— H. G. Wells (1898), The War of the Worlds

We fear the unknown.

And what’s more ‘unknown’ than whatever lurks in the dark reaches of space?

Is it benevolent? Evil? Heartless? We may not find out until it’s too late.

Around this time of year, much is made of haunted houses, spectres and other earthly phenomena, but aliens get a bit of a short shrift. My hubby and I even visited Roswell, New Mexico a few years ago, so what better way to wrap up the month with a post about aliens?

Roswell has ‘little green men’ all over the place, literally: shop fronts, gas stations, holding up signs. We’re going to take a look at the Roswell incident and the resulting seven-stage classification system for alien encounters, how the colour green came to represent all things alien, and pay homage to all those wonderful 1950s alien sci-fi flicks.

So buckle up (or whatever you think would work inside your own personal spaceship) and get ready for a wild outer space ride.

Green: the colour of nature on our planet. We associate it with serenity, safety, health. How on ‘earth’  (snicker) did it become the colour of most things alien?

Centuries ago traditional tales of goblins and fae creatures gave them a greenish colour. A genuine 12^th century English legend tells that two children with greenish skin, apparently brother and sister, suddenly showed up near the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. They spoke a language no one understood, and didn’t know how they’d arrived in the village – just that they heard a loud noise like the sound of church bells while they were out herding cattle and suddenly found themselves by the spot where they were found. Although the boy died not much later, seemingly unable to eat the new food he was given, the girl survived, learned English and said that she and her brother had come from a land where everything was green but the sun never shone, and the light was like twilight. She called it Saint Martin’s Land.

Was it another dimension? A faerie land? The chiming of bells as the children crossed some kind of boundary is intriguing.

When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Barsoom series in the early 1900s, he gave his four-armed Martian warriors green skin.

One evening in August, 1955, a group of adults and children came to the police station in Hopkinsville, Kentucky claiming that small silvery aliens from a spaceship had been attacking their farmhouse for four hours; they’d been holding them off with gunfire. A reporter at The Evansville Courier used embellished the tale with  “little green men”, and the phrase has stuck ever since. Since there’s no shade of green in natural human skin tones, it denotes “other-worldliness” in stories, television and movies. It’s also the shade of many eerie-looking reptiles. It’s a paradox that even though green is all over nature, green shades have also come to represent the opposite: eerie, frightening, alien.

In 1947, an incident took place near Roswell, New Mexico that seemed to step right out of the pages of a science-fiction novel.

Ranch manager W. W. “Mac” Brazel discovered assorted debris – tinfoil, rubber, tape, thin wooden beams – scattered across several acres of a ranch near Corona, New Mexico, about 106 miles from Roswell.

That year, in June and July there’d been a rash in the United States of reported sightings of what came to be called ‘unidentified flying objects’. Media nationwide reported the story on June 24 of a civilian pilot, Kenneth Arnold, who witnessed a number of disc-shaped objects. Headline writers gave them a catchy name: “Flying Saucers”. Similar reports spread throughout the United States – apparently at least 800 “copycat” reports came in during the subsequent weeks.

Many believed that the reports were prompted by mis-identification of new technology, or by mass hysteria, but others thought that the discs came either from other planets or other dimensions, OR were some kind of occult manifestation. The end of the world was nigh!

Rancher Brazel was apparently unaware of this saucer craze, but it seems his uncle Hollis Wilson wasn’t. When he saw the debris, he suggested it could be from a “flying disk”. Brazel drove to Roswell, New Mexico, and informed the Sheriff of what he’d found. The Sheriff called Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). The base assigned Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt to return with Brazel and gather up the materials in question.

On July 8, the RAAF’s own public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that the military had recovered a “flying disc” near Roswell.

After the story made headlines, General Roger Ramey and other staff came forward to say that the debris was just pieces of a weather balloon. The United States had launched thousands of top-secret balloons to listen for Soviet atomic tests, many from Alamogordo Army Air Field. Apparently they lost contact with the balloons within 17 miles of the Brazel ranch, where one of the balloon arrays crashed.

Interest died down after that, only to be revived in 1978 when ufologist Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel. In the interview, Marcel stated that the “weather balloon” explanation from the press conference was a cover story, and that he believed the debris was extraterrestrial. Other people involved came forward to say that they’d been intimidated by the government into keeping their mouths shut. Conspiracy/cover-up theories exploded after that, and persist to this day. You can read more about the entire episode in UFO history at Roswell UFO incident facts and history.

Roswell has embraced the whole ‘alien’ ambience, and the UFO Museum there is fascinating to visit. Displays cover the original incident with timelines as well as many other alien-related material from around the world, including the most famous ‘abduction’ to date, the Travis Walton story.  When we visited, the fellow who’d been running tours to the various related crash sites had just retired, unfortunately, but someone else has since taken up the mantel.

By the 1950s, the golden age of science fiction cinema, was permeated by the UFO craze, Cold War paranoia and nuclear anxiety. Filmmakers chose to denote dangerous or unnatural things with an eerie greenish tinge, and they began to explore whether creatures from, or on, another planet, would feel like making pals with us humans.

The 1951 movie classic The Day the Earth Stood Still imagined that an alien named Klaatu arrives in Washington, D.C., to warn humanity to abandon its destructive use of atom bombs, something that was only too real after the horrendous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. No greenish effects, just a powerful, silver-skinned robot named Gort who could take down our planet. It was a relevant commentary on the dangers of the nuclear age. My hubby and I visited the Trinity site in New Mexico, where the first atomic test took place, and it’s a sobering reminder of what was birthed by the Manhattan project.

In 1953 Hollywood released The War of the Worlds, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ famous novel about an apocalyptic Martian invasion of Earth.

The novel is the first-person account by an unnamed man and his younger brother who escape to Essex as London and Southern England are invaded by Martians. The Martians have depleted their own planet, and, with their superior weaponry, decide to destroy humankind and take over the Earth. Well’s story was one of many invasion stories popular in the late 1800s up to World War I, but his vision has inspired many iterations – most notoriously Orson Welles’ infamous 1933 radio play, which transplanted the action to rural New Jersey extremely effectively.

In the novel, the Martians were described as having an enormous head with two large eyes and a beak mouth, atop an octopus-like body with long, whip-shaped tentacles for moving around. They incinerated any targets with a heat ray. Hollywood decided to give the Martians a techno upgrade that Wells couldn’t have imagined: the creatures moved about inside large glowing green metallic craft with ‘eyes’ with three colour sensors on them, and devastating fiery reddish blasts of power.

So, definitely landing on the not-friendly side of things. One of my favourite movies, and a film that’s considered one of the great science-fiction films of the 1950s, is 1956’s Forbidden Planet. It was a precursor of contemporary science-fiction cinema and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Special Effects. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you watch it in time for Halloween.

In the tale, written by Allen Adler and Irving Block, humankind has been exploring space and far-distant planets for years. A landing party on Altair Four hadn’t been heard from for some time, and a crew from Earth has been dispatched to check on them. When they arrive, they find a rather hostile sole survivor, a language specialist, and his lovely daughter. Dr. Morbius warns them against landing, but they must complete their mission, and it doesn’t take them long to find out the true story of the original scientific party. No green aliens in this one, but the planet has a rather beautiful sky in shades of green. The aliens on the planet are unique in the annals of sci-fi films, but I’ll let you have the pleasure of discovering them yourself!

In a terrific movie from 1967, Hammer Films – yes, the studio that gave us many Dracula movies – came out with a gem of a sci-fi movie. Quatermass and the Pit (released as Five Million Years to Earth in the U.S.) was based on a popular BBC Television serial, and combines the hallmarks of Hammer’s vivid sets with an intriguing tale of very ancient aliens.

Workers are opening up new Underground (subway) tunnels at Hobb’s End station in London when they come across a strange skull buried in the mud walls. They call in a paleontologist, Dr. Roney, and his astute female assistant Barbara, and when that and another skull are determined to be five million years old, they end up consulting with Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the British Experimental Rocket Group. Another odd artifact found in the excavation is determined by the officious Colonel Breen to be an unexploded bomb from the war – it turns out to be anything but when it begins having very odd effects on workers. There are green aliens, but I won’t spoil what they mean – you see for yourself in this wonderful Hammer entry in the genre!

There’s a lovely assortment of alien-themed movies for your viewing pleasure this week. They all have strong Horror elements as well, and indeed there’s an entire subgenre called “green horror”. In film analysis, the color green (often a sickly hue of it) is used as a visual cue for physical illness. And if you’ve ever wondered if that’s a genuine phenomenon, on our flight over the Nazca Lines in Peru several years ago I was very close to vomiting as our hot-shot pilot did fast, tight aerial loops. One of my fellow passengers helpfully pointed out that I was looking pretty green, and the pilot must have decided he didn’t want to clean up a mess after me – he landed within minutes.

Green can also signify rot or decay (like the stuff found in the back of our refrigerators), and, again, unnatural or threatening environments. Movies like The Ruins (2008) (a group of American spring breakers vacationing in Mexico become trapped on an unmapped Mayan pyramid deep within the jungle that’s covered in sentient, carnivorous vines which burrow directly into human flesh) would fall in that category.

Returning to our original theme of alien encounters, should you have a Close Encounter for real, did you know there are seven classifications?

They’re rated using a scale of interaction devised by American astronomer, professor and ufologist J. Allen Hynek. He was originally a skeptic, and had been appointed a scientific consultant to Project Sign, an official U.S. government study of UFOs run by the United States Air Force (USAF).

He was expected to debunk the reports, but gradually he felt that “The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility.” In a 1985 interview, when asked what caused his change of opinion, Hynek said he began to resent “the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. They wouldn’t give UFOs the chance of existing, even if they were flying up and down the street in broad daylight”, and the caliber of the witnesses began to impress him. “Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and I knew them to be fairly well-trained, so this is when I first began to think that, well, maybe there was something to all this.”

The resulting J. Allen Hynek classification system, which categorizes sightings occurring within roughly 150 meters (500 feet) of a witness, are:

Close Encounter of the First Kind (CE1): A UFO is sighted at close range, but there is no interaction with the physical environment.

… the Second Kind (CE2): A close-range sighting leaves physical effects on animate or inanimate material (such as burned ground, scorched vegetation, or electromagnetic interference).

… the Third Kind (CE3): A close-range sighting involves animated entities, occupants, or pilots seen in or around the UFO.

Other researchers later expanded the scale:

… the Fourth Kind (CE4): The witness is abducted or taken aboard the UFO.

… the Fifth Kind (CE5): Bilateral, human-initiated, or conscious communication/contact with extraterrestrial entities.

… the Sixth Kind (CE6): An encounter results in the death of a human or an animal.

… the Seventh Kind (CE7): Claims involving interbreeding or hybrid creation.

Personally I’m quite relieved to say that I’ve never experienced any of these. Have you, or do you know anyone who has?

The jury’s still out on whether aliens might be nice or nasty, or some of each for that matter. The movie Contact, based on the speculative novel by scientist Carl Sagan, gave us a very nebulous concept of finding and meeting others in the galaxy.

One of the big scenes was filmed at the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, which is a grouping of 27 enormous radio telescopes that move along a Y-shaped track into different configurations, depending on who’s booked the time to scan the skies with them and the project they’re running.

One of those projects is run by SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, as depicted in the movie, and SETI has now set up a new project called COSMIC. One of COSMIC’s main goals is the search for technosignatures, which are “measurable signals or effects that could indicate the presence of technology developed beyond Earth”.

The VLA is a fascinating place to visit, and we’ll see what the new project turns up regarding confirmable alien contact. How much of all those visions in countless movies and books might actually come true some day? Only the future can tell.

For my version of outer space, enjoy my original Chaos Roads trilogy!