Word: alienate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WASHINGTON, D.C.: The truth, or at least the Air Force's version of it, is now out there in the form of a 231-page report concluding that the "alien bodies" recovered at the Roswell, New Mexico crash site were dummies used in parachute tests. Conspiracy buffs were quick to note that the report didn't solve all, since Air Force records show the dummies were not used until a good decade after the 1947 Roswell incident. Coupled with a 1994 report that said the "flying saucer" found in 1947 was actually an Air Force balloon used to monitor...
With the '80s finally explained, we can return to the question of what really happened at Roswell. According to which experts one chooses to believe: there may have been more than one crash site; the U.S. government may have recovered dead aliens (the number varies) as well as a salvageable spacecraft; the craft may have been a secret government prototype and the dead aliens may have been test chimps with their fur eerily singed off or, as Popular Mechanics hypothesizes this month, imported Japanese pilots who had been flying similar experimental craft during the war; then again, the wreckage...
...alien society is anything like ours in its leanings toward tragicomedy, the most believable explanation may come from Kristin Corn, the daughter of Hub and Sheila Corn, ranchers whose property 30 or so miles outside of Roswell is home to one of the alleged crash sites (Sheila offers pleasantly homespun tours at $15 a head). Kristin's theory: the crash was caused by alien teenagers who slipped away from a mother ship and went for a joyride, little knowing that alleged film of one of their autopsies would one day appear on the same network as World's Scariest Police...
...very murkiness of the Roswell Incident, the sense that it is both knowable and yet never quite confirmable, that the answers are hovering just beyond the horizon, that gives the Incident its enduring appeal; after all, if the government ever really said "jig's up" and produced a preserved alien for our delectation, we would be stunned for a day or two, perturbed for a week longer, and then we would move on to the girl who gave birth at the prom. As the makers of monster movies know, the unseen is always more compelling than the seen. The particular...
...public made cynical by those twin devils, Vietnam and Watergate. By then too, the Federal Government had grown so large and its concerns so cosmic--what with the space program and a nuclear arsenal that could, if push came to shove, wipe out humankind--that covert interactions with an alien culture might very well seem within the realm of possibility (curiously, the supposedly advanced alien race of Independence Day takes days to wipe out Earth's great cities, when everyone knows we could do the job in a matter of minutes...