Beyond The Pale
by Robert Irving
BEYOND ROSWELL: THE
ALIEN AUTOPSY FILM, AREA 51, & THE US GOVERNMENT COVERUP OF UFOS.
By Michael Hesemnann & Philip Mantle
I find it very difficult to channel my contempt for poor research into valuable criticism. A point-by-point rebuttal easily generates twice the original text and require three times the research, all because of some unscrupulous author with a mind on the marketplace. Freedom to express new ideas is one thing but, oh my giddy aunt, all that paper, all those trees! Helped by attitudes like mine, of course, this shortfall to the sum of human knowledge equates to a windfall for peddlers of fiction paraded as fact.
Beyond Roswell recounts the mythic tale that an alien flying saucer crashed in the summer of 1947. Secret bodies lie sprawled across its pages - dead, dying and captured aliens, MJ-12, the Aviary - all clocked, as Hesemann implies, in a letter to President Clinton, by the secret body that really runs the world.
As if establishing the truth behind the Roswell story isn’t complicated enough, given the many varied opinions of those who have scrutinized it, Hesemann enters the fray claiming that a sperate crash occurred in the vicinity prior to the littering of Mac Brazel’s ranch. Thus he confirms the date attributed to Sanity’s alien autopsy footage.
In fact, it was Hesemann’s belief in the literality of the alien autopsy footage yarn that initiated his quest for evidence of the crash, and with Michael there’s no turning back. Readers untroubled by his tendency to fit facts to a favored underlying theory - the truth of our past, present, and future is to be found in ancient Sumerian scriptures, since Sumer was the first colony of the Anunnaki, a word which translates as "those who came from Heaven to Earth"; hence, ET is God - will be satisfied that differences of opinion are about as relevant here as a freak’s cries to an army grunt’s rifle-butt.
Curiously, just as little attention is paid to the opinions of the book’s contributors. Despite being written long after fellow International Research Teamster Bob Shell retracted his much-heralded assertion that the autopsy footage was dateable to 1947, Hesemann presents Shell’s original statement with no mention of his change of mind.
Similarly, Hesemann continues to assure us that the opening frames to the autopsy footage - added later to satisfy calls for testing - "showed the entrance to the autopsy room; even the table was seen", an observation he has, but less publicly, agreed to be false. Any inconsistency with the authors preconceived conclusions is derided or simple ignored, giving a fresh nuance to the term "uncorrected proof", as my copy is marked. To Hesemann & Mantle, anecdote and hearsay are proof enough.
This bias is mesmerizing in its regularity: An erroneous tabloid story about Steven Spielberg’s "Project X" is referenced without any note that the primary source turned out to be none other than Mantle’s one-time literary colleague, Carl Nagatis; the authors neglect to notice the glaring discrepancy between the autopsy cameraman’s account of his travels to the still-smoking crash-site and the actual time it must have taken him to get there from Washington; Stanton Friedman, acknowledged throughout as a heavyweight proponent of the saucer crash scenario, as well as MJ-12 (whose documents are presented here with little question of their authenticity) becomes suddenly, conspicuously, anonymous as the ufologist who spoiled the London screening of the autopsy footage with cried of: "Hoax!"; as evidence that these 50th-year celebrations of Roswell couldn’t have more prosaic origins - "A weather balloon? Impossible" - Hesemann even speculates that rancher Brazel’s sheep were "obviously…afraid to cross the debris field." Baa!
The authors are so anxious to challenge the official USAF Mogul story - in a chapter of its own - that, by comparison, this explanation begins to sound almost plausible.
Fortean will regard this book more frivolously, as entertaining as the type given to children on long train journeys: I-spyers can play spot-the-difference between photos of the Be-- & Howell film camera, or spend hours searching the extensive list of acknowledgements for the likes of James Easton and Paul Fuller (whose detailed research applied some constraint on the authors, even if they are loathe to admit it), little injuns will be engrossed by the dreamy adventures of Native American fabulist Robert Morning Sky, and there are fun drawing of aliens to colour.