Roswell article in latest Popular Mechanics

From: Bill Swearingen 
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 09:33:35 -0600
Subject: Roswell article in latest Popular Mechanics


** Low Priority **

I got my Popular Mechanics in the mail
yesterday.  Overall the description given of
the crashed Roswell craft is consistent with other
discriptions given of the craft except for the
zigzag grooves to foil radar.

Several questions need to be asked:

First and foremost -- What was a hypersonic
(greater than Mach 5 speed) designed craft
doing here and crashing 3 months before Chuck
Yeager broke Mach 1 on October 14,1947?

Number Two -- We tried lifting body designs in
the 60's and 70's with disasterous results where
we lost some of our best pilots because human
response wasn't sufficient enough to keep a
lifting body under control without stabilators
(remember the opening scene to the Six Million
Dollar Man and why he had to have bionics?)  It
wasn't until the advent of modern, high speed
computers that control over a lifting body could
be maintained, hence the X-33 program (which,
I might add, is still a prototype and the full
version has not yet been manufactured).

Number Three -- Stealth technology wasn't
utilized until 1960 with the rollout of the SR-71
Blackbird and that only utlilized an under-skin
wedge baffle that would partially absorb the
radar emission as the wave bounced back and
forth between the walls of the baffle similar to a
sound proof room.

The so called "string" or "fishing line" found at
the site had the unusual property of having light
come out the opposite end of where you shown
a light into it.  Fiber Optics in 1947?  The laser
wasn't even invented until 1960 and was called
"A solution in search of a problem".  The first
glass clad fiber optics was made in 1956, almost
a decade after the Roswell incident, and that
was only to be used in an endoscope.

Another big question is the unusual properties of
the metal found in the debris field many miles
from the final impact site.  The thinner
"aluminum foil" type pieces had the unusual
ability to flatten themselves out without a wrinkle
after being crumpled up in the hand.  We have
metal coated plastic now that will straighten out
after being crumpled but it will still have the
wrinkles and creases in it.  The thicker metal
was etremely light and so tough that the metal
couldn't be dented or bent with a sledgehammer
because they tried it.

The bodies found were 4 feet to 4 and a half feet
tall.  The heads were disproportionately large for
the body and the eyes were also
disproportionately large. The only thing oriental
about the eyes is that they angled upward on the
outside.  Now you can't tell me that people who
had been fighting our then hated enemy, the
Japanese, during World War Two (which had
just ended two years previous) couldn't tell a
Japanese from something else that they had no
frame of reference for.  They described the
eyes as slightly oriental, they didn't say they had
dead Japanese on their hands.  The Japanese
back then were great imitators not innovators.
Their best airplane, the Japanese Zero, was an
exact copy of the Howard Hughes fighter design
that was passed over by our own Government
and the Japanese didn't make any
advancements on it while we went from Spitfires
to Corsairs.  This guy is trying to make a play
for a Japanese hypersonic infiltration machine
(before America could even break Mach 1) two
years after a war they lost while America was
over there rebuilding their industry that had been
totally smashed by the end of the war.  Total
B.S.!!!

Now comes the interesting part.  What was seen
in the desert in 1947?  It was a lifting body airfoil
with steath technology, fiber optics and evidently
polymer alloy advanced materials.  It was
something that we only now have the technology
to build.  Was it extraterrestrial?  A craft in
space has no need for streamlining.  It only
needs streamlining if it is only to be used in an
atmosphere.  If extraterrestrial then it could only
have been a craft designed to be deployed from
a mother ship once a planet was encountered.
If deployed from a mothership, how come no
rescue operation? (assuming they feel the same
way we do about something like this.)  The
beings had been there for several days before
being found.  If one of ours, then again, how
come no rescue operation until it was found by
civilians?  Could our current technological
advances be partly the result of materials found
in this craft and pumped through our
manufacturing processes like the Admiral says?
Possibly, look at our advancements compared to
the rest of the world.  The Communist Russian
"command" economy couldn't keep pace with
our technology despite all the commands to do
so.  At this point and time, there is not a military
presence in the entire world that could take on
the U.S. military in a full scale war and even
have a hope of coming out on top.

Let's go from the sublime to the totally
unrealistic.  What if the craft is from our own
future?  An X-33 accidentally hits some sort of
time warp (e.g. the movie "Final Countdown")
and gets sent back into the past.  That would
explain the craft but not the bodies.  But let's
face the facts -- that craft in 1947 is as out of
place as an automobile would be crossing the
plains with the Mormon Pioneers in 1847.

The facts are that there are dozens of people
who handled and saw this material and craft and
bodies enough to stand up in a court of law.
The material described had no equal in the
technological capability of that time.  The
materials described then would not have been
considered of any use in an aircraft of that
period (except the light alloy) though now, those
materials are an integral part of our own space
program.  Some of the things we do we couldn't
do without them.

Altogether, another inconclusive article that
raises more questions than it answers.