Re: Roswell article in latest Popular Mechanics

From: Dan Zinngrabe 
Date: Sun, 8 Jun 1997 18:48:57 -0700
Subject: Re: 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?

Actually, mach one had been broken by unmanned vehicles such as the German
A-4b many times prior to 1947. Hypersonic manned aircraft had been designed
by German and American teams during WWII and prior to it, and not long
after WWII the design of the X-15 began.

>
>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).

Model rocket hobbyists are doing fairly complex lifting bodies with no
fly-by-wire systems, and radio-controlled lifting bodies have been in and
out of circulation since the 1970s- the control issues mentioned were
really due to the maturity of the early lifting body designs. Refine the
concept a little and it becomes much more practical.

>
>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.

Actually, several stealth aircraft (like the White Elephant U-2) had been
flown prior to 1960, and in WWII the German air force had experimented with
radar absorbant coatings.

>
>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.

And monofilament fishing line has much the same optical properties as some
types of fiber optics. Shine a flashlight down a piece of decent fishing
line- voila! it becomes a fiber optic line.

>
>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.
>

<snip>
The author of the article also seems to forget that no "bad guy" recce
aircraft have penetrated US airspace since the early days of WWII- because
of the nature of our society. Anybody can practically walk up to a military
base and count troops, so why bother with overflights?

<snip>

Dan


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