Message posted by Peter Merlin on June 02, 2011 at 9:08:56 PST:

This is the best commentary yet on this awful book. It contains some very good insight, and I am always glad when someone points out that it is not simply the last chapter of the book that is bad. There is a great deal of extraneous material and UFO nonsense throughout the book. More important, the "good" parts are filled with factual errors.

The hypothesis that Jacobsen's source on the Roswell story might have conflated recollections of a science fiction story with his own memories is by no means farfetched. It has happened before.

Historian and author Curtis Peebles wrote an article about a UFO abduction story that had been passed along from one person to another as fact. I recommend reading the article for the details but the basic outline is this:

In 1968, Dr. Robert M. Wood, deputy director for research and development at Douglas Missile and Space Division, told Dr. James M. McDonald that an X-15 pilot on a planned 15-minute flight had disappeared (along with his airplane) for three hours. Wood identified the pilot as Gene May of Douglas.He said the source of the abduction story was a colleague who worked at Vandenberg AFB. Wood considered him to be “very reliable.”

Does this sound familiar? Wild stories from "reliable" sources, with details that can be easily checked with a little research (no X-15 ever went missing, and Gene May never flew the X-15).

Peebles learned that several years before Wood told the tale to McDonald, NASA engineers Kenneth W. Iliff and Lowell Greenfield (both involved with the X-15 project) attended a UFO convention at Giant Rock Airport in the Mojave Desert. One of the speakers claimed to have been involved with the X-15 program for the previous several years, and that he was on active duty with the Air Force at Edwards AFB. He told a story about the X-15 disappearing for several hours during a flight that was only supposed to last a matter of minutes. He claimed that all the participants were sworn to secrecy about what had happened. The speaker said that, despite his security oath, he had to tell the truth about what had happened on the flight. The X-15 and its pilot had been taken aboard a UFO intact, examined for several hours, and then returned to where the aircraft had been flying.

Again, does this sound familiar? A source claims that he must "tell the truth" even if it means violating his security oath. Iliff told Peebles that he was horrified at the speaker's lies but figured he was just trying to promote the book he was selling at the convention.

Frank John Reid, in another article, reveals that on December 24, 1949, the Saturday Evening Post published "Outer Limit" by Graham Doar (reprinted in 1950 for Groff Conklin’s anthology, Big Book of Science Fiction from Crown Publishers). It is a fictional story of a test pilot who is abducted by aliens for 10 hours while flying a high-altitude research aircraft on what was supposed to be a 10-minute flight.

Could this have been the origin of a story that, passed from person to person, eventually came to be considered as truth by anyone not willing to do a little real research? If so, then this is a perfect example of how fiction can morph into "fact" over time, and through the fog of memory.

In Reply to: Were Jacobsen's Area 51/Roswell revelations lifted pulp fiction? posted by Steve Douglass on June 02, 2011 at 6:26:19 PST:

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