The Roswellian Syndrome

Submergence
With the report that the “flying disc” was only a balloon-borne device, the Roswell news story ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. However, the event would linger on in the fading and recreative memories of some of those involved, while in Roswell rumor and speculation continued to simmer just below the surface with UFO reports a part of the culture at large. In time, conspiracy-minded UFOlogists would arrive, asking leading questions and helping to spin a tale of crashed flying saucers and a government cover-up.

Mythologizing
This is the most complex part of the syndrome, beginning when the story goes underground and continuing after it reemerges, developing into an elaborate myth. It involves many factors, including exaggeration, faulty memory, folklore, and deliberate hoaxing.

For example, exaggeration played a large role in the Roswell case. Major Jesse Marcel, who had helped retrieve the wreckage, often made self-contradictory and inflated assertions, giving, for example, grossly exaggerated statements about the amount of debris, its supposed imperviousness to damage, and other matters. It is now known that Marcel made claims about his own background—that he had a college degree, was a World War II pilot who had received five air medals for shooting down enemy planes, and had himself been shot down—that were proved untrue by his own service file (Fitz gerald 2001, 511). Kal Korff (1997, 27), who uncovered many of Marcel’s deceptions, found him “exaggerating things and repeatedly trying to ‘write him-self ’ into the history books.” As he described the debris, Marcel said the sticks resembled balsa but were “not wood at all” and had “some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher” (apparently referring to the floral designs). As well, there were “small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn’t tinfoil” (Berlitz and Moore 1980, 65).

Faulty memory was another problem. For example, Curry Holden, an anthropologist from Texas Tech, claimed a student archaeological expedition he led had actually come upon the crashed flying saucer and the bodies of its extraterrestrial crew. Holden’s wife and daughter, however, insisted that he had never told them of such an event; neither was there any corroboration in his personal papers. Holden was ninety-six when he provided his account to UFOlogist Kevin Randle, at which time his wife told Randle her husband’s memory “wasn’t as sharp as it once had been. He sometimes restructured his life’s events, moving them in time so that they were subtly changed” (Fitz gerald 2001, 514). Roswell mortician W. Glenn Dennis, who provided information on alien “bodies” at the Roswell AAF Hospital, also seriously misremembered and confabulated 1 events. According to James McAndrew’s The Roswell Report: Case Closed (U.S. Air Force 1997, 78–79), Dennis’s account “was compared with official records of the actual events he is believed to have described” and showed “extensive inaccuracies” that included “a likely error in the date by as much as twelve years.”

The processes that create folklore also played a role in shaping the Ros well legend. As reported in Leonard Stringfield’s book Situation Red: The UFO Siege (1977), a great number of tales proliferated about an alleged crash of an extraterrestrial craft and the retrieval of its humanoid occupants. The many versions of the story—what folklorists call variants—are proof of the legend-making, oral-tradition process at work. The aliens were typically described as little, big-eyed, big-headed humanoids, a type that began to be popularly reported after they were described by “abductees” Betty and Barney Hill in 1961 (Nickell 2011, 184–86). The pickled corpses were secretly stored—mostly anonymous sources claimed—at a (nonexistent) hangar-18 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, or some ot