Roswell, NM--50 Years Later

Who hasn't heard of Roswell, NM? It is perhaps the greatest non-story, or nonsense story, of the century. It has been 50 years since the birth of Roswell's fame and everyone is writing about it (even me).

Who knows why the story still lives? Who knows why people are so insistent that intelligent life visited us they are willing to ignore all the evidence and attribute the "crash site" at Roswell to extraterrestrial beings? (These are questions are for the head shrinkers.)

Most folks have little feel for the emptiness of space. Consider our immediate neighborhood--our solar system. We have all seen the book illustrations with the sun huge in the center and the nine tiny planets arranged in orderly orbits. The problem is this picture is not to scale. The Fib Finder has constructed here a scale model of our solar system.

The sun is located at the center; the nine planets are in their respective orbits. Can you find them? (Hint: You may have scroll them into view.) It is difficult to locate the planets. Earth, for instance is nearly 100 inches away from the sun. Do you see it now? Probably not. Jupiter, our biggest planet by a wide margin. would be about as big as the period at the end of this sentence.

Pluto is so far away that it wasn't even discovered until 1930. It would be about 100 yards away on this scale. Clyde Tombough discovered it. Despite being one of only four humans ever credited with the discovery of a planet, his passing to that Great Observatory in the Sky in early 1997 received much less attention than the Roswell non-Anniversary.

Now consider the nearest star to our sun. It would be about 1500 miles away. That is the minimum trip our "visitors" at Roswell would have had to make.

Even Carl Sagan, the most prominent non-astronomer of our time, who "knew" that there were "billions and billions" of intelligent societies out there, never argued that every star system harbored a planet capable of supporting life. Chances are our "visitors" would have had to come from much farther away than the nearest star to the sun.

So far, human efforts at manned spaceflight have allowed us to reach the moon. On the scale of our model here, that is the first quarter inch. Our current technology would allow us to reach the nearest star in about 10,000 years. That estimate considers only the speed at which we are capable of propelling a craft toward another star. It ignores the mass that would be needed to provide a passenger with food, water, air and energy for 10,000 years. Actually, we could probably not expect the passenger to survive the journey under any conditions. Even the legendary Methuselah would have expired after only a tenth of the journey was completed.

Naturally, we would argue that our visitors would possess technology vastly superior to our own. Of course, Einstein tells us that as velocity increases, so does mass. If we endow them with an engine that can accelerate a ship to one-tenth the speed of light, the length of the trip would be pared to a mere thousand years. At this velocity, their mass would increase a billion, billion times--in round figures. We would need to assume that they can harness sufficient energy to accelerate this enormous mass and that they are capable of surviving this incredible acceleration. We are giving them a break this time--they need only survive a thousand years.

Now we have to imagine a technology that allowed them to find Earth. Of the billions of stars, most of which probably have no life supporting planets, we either have to put them in deep space for much longer than 1000 years as they hop from star to star, or grant them the ability to pick the needle Earth out of the celestial haystack from a distance of at least several trillion miles.

No doubt any number of people are willing to grant another society these unfathomable abilities in detection and locomotion. As these believers continue to question the official story of what happened at Roswell, it seems that the most interesting question is one they don't ask.

If a race of beings possessed the technology to find us and get here, why were they incapable of keeping themselves hidden from us? How could all this technology allow them to cross interstellar space--only to get shot down by our puny weapons? If they crashed, why did they just happen to land essentially on a top secret military base?