originally published in Beyond Roswell copyright 1997 by Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle

Belfast, Ireland, 1 December 1995. For the first time a president of the United States of America commented on Roswell. And what he said was as trivial and unsatisfying as everything else that the government of the U.S.A. had till then revealed about the greatest mystery of the twentieth century. President Clinton's official visit to Ireland was a gesture of goodwill and American appreciation of the emerging accord in the conflict in Northern Ireland. The reference to Roswell was perhaps meant only to lend a popular note to his speech in connection with the illumination of a Christmas tree. He had recently received a letter from a thirteen-year-old Belfast boy, Clinton said, before addressing himself directly to the boy, "Ryan, in case you are out there, here is your answer: No! As far as I know, no extra-terrestrial spaceship crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947." The crowd laughed. "If the Air Force really recovered any extra-terrestrial bodies, they did not tell me," added the president with a broad grin, "and I want to know!"

Apparently the Air Force could tell him nothing more about Roswell, because "someone" had removed and destroyed all reports connected with the incident in the files of 1947, without any orders or official notes in any files to justify the action. At least, that was the outcome of an official inquiry into the Roswell case, conducted during 1994/1995 by the General Accounting Office, the investigating arm of the U.S. Congress, at the instigation of a congressman from New Mexico. Could this have been an attempt to hush something up? (2)

Derision and suppression of facts have played a big role in the story of Roswell right from the beginning. On the very next day after the press officer of the Roswell Army Air Fields announced the salvaging of a "flying saucer" by the 509th Bomb Group, General Roger Ramey, Commanding Officer of the U.S. 8th Air Force, declared that the object retrieved was only a weather balloon.(3)

At the time the American public swallowed this explanation, but the mightiest man of the other superpower, namely the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, did not. He was informed about the incident by the KGB, the Soviet Secret Service, and the KGB was convinced that the "weather balloon" declaration was a political feint. The Bomb Group 509 was considered the best trained unit of the U.S. Air Force and had repeatedly been employed in secret missions. Members of this unit had discharged the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flew the most recent aircraft and certainly would have been capable of distinguishing a weather balloon from a "flying saucer." In order to clarify the situation, Stalin ordered three of his best scientists to investigate if the object in question could be a threat to the security of the Soviet Union.

The three specialists were the prominent mathematician Mstislav Keldysh, the chemist Alexander Topchiev and the physicist Sergei Korlyov, who, as a Soviet counterpart of Wernher von Braun, was to construct the rocket in which the first Sputnik and finally Yuri Gagarin were transported into space. All three men were top scientists of the U.S.S.R., and, during the following years, each one of them occupied the office of president or vice president of the Academy of Sciences. When Stalin received them personally a few days later, they all had come to the conclusion that the "flying saucers" were not foreign secret weapons and did not represent a serious threat to the Soviet Union, but were, nevertheless, real phenomena. They therefore recommended that Stalin initiate a scientific study in order to gather more information about them. (4)

This resulted in a whole series of official UFO studies by the Soviets, of which the West has learned only recently, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The last of these studies was not only intended to discover the origin and intentions of the mysterious interlopers, but also had an ulterior motive. The Russians suspected--not without reason--that most of the "stealth technology" of the "invisible" bombers of the USA had been developed from research on crashed UFOs. They now hoped to locate a crashed UFO, so as to analyze it and catch up with the Americans' advanced technology. "If we discover the secrets of the UFOs we shall be in a position to win the race against the potential enemy, using the extra-terrestrial know-how regarding speed, materials and camouflage", said Colonel Boris Sokolov to the American journalist George Knapp. And Sokolov must have known what he was talking about: he was head of the UFO Office of the Defense Department in Moscow.(5)

President Clinton too may soon learn the truth about the Roswell incident. No lesser person than Laurance Rockefeller, multimillionaire and philanthropist, is determined to do everything possible to make the public aware, during his lifetime, of what the government has long known about UFOs. At his behest leading UFO investigators compiled a 150-page study. A thousand copies were made with the intention of sending a copy to every congressman, senator, and scientific adviser in the U.S.

In this "Rockefeller Report," which also deals with testimonies from ex-officers and astronauts "who contradict the statement of the Air Force denying the landing of extra-terrestrials," the Roswell incident marks the central theme. Leading Roswell investigators Stanton Friedman, William Moore, Kevin Randle, and Don Schmitt so far have interviewed over three hundred eyewitnesses.(6)

Or perhaps we shall learn the truth through another channel. In the summer of 1995 the British film producer Ray Santilli created a worldwide sensation with his statement that he had acquired film material from a former photographer of the U.S. Army Air Force, showing the salvaging of the Roswell wreck and the autopsy performed on two extraterrestrials. (Click here for an Alien Autopsy Film Q and A with Ray Santilli.) The discussion about the authenticity of these films is still going on, but meanwhile preparations have begun to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell occurrence on July 4, 1997. According to inside rumors Steven Spielberg is making a big movie for that date, which would also include original material.

"Spielberg to Expose UFO cover-ups," said the headlines above the first announcement regarding this project in the British newspaper Daily Mirror, which goes on to report that the world-famous director and producer of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind is working on an eighty-million-dollar movie dealing with "the UFO crash and the political intrigue that followed." Known to insiders only as Project "X," the film will apparently include "previously unseen film footage of the flying saucer crash scene taken by a military officer," which have been passed on to Spielberg.(7)

When six weeks later another newspaper, the Daily Star, repeated this announcement in its movie section(8), British UFO researcher Philip Mantle asked the paper's acting editor in chief, Michael Hellicar, where he had got this information. The answer was:

"Our story about Steven Spielberg acquiring footage of the UFO crash in Roswell is one hundred per cent accurate. It comes from a source who is involved in the projected movie about the crash. The working title, the meaning of which will be known to you, is Majestic-12. I know little more than that, except that Spielberg's production company, Amblin, is trying to keep the movie secret, because they fear another studio will beat them to it. However, a rival version will be lacking in one sensational detail: the official crash pictures.
One aspect of the story which I tried to check, but couldn't confirm, is that the U.S. government may have deliberately leaked the film to Spielberg.
The theory is that by letting him include it in a glossy Hollywood movie, the awesome truth--that We Are Not Alone--will be watered down. . . .
Thus, you can either believe a Spielberg movie as fact, or treat it as a bit of Hollywood hype which makes you think, like Close Encounters."(9)

We can only wait and see what comes out of all these rumors about impending revelations. Perhaps the powers that be, which were behind the hushing up of the Roswell occurrence, will prevent the truth from ever getting out. But it is also possible that "someone" is permitting the truth to leak out piece by piece. Santilli's film, The Roswell Autopsy, genuine or otherwise, could be the first step in this direction, and the Spielberg film, if it is not prematurely blocked by restrictions, could be the next. But no matter when the truth about the happenings at Roswell comes to light, it will bring about a change in all of us.

Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle.