Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you’ve probably heard something about UFOs, aliens and Roswell at least once in your lifetime. The year was 1947, some 21 years before I entered this earth and would not hear about Roswell for a good 10 more years or so.

The facts 

In years since I knew something happened, there was some kind of crash, on a farm Northwest of Roswell. A rancher by the name of "Mac" Brazel stumbled upon the wreckage and was worried about having it on his property because his sheep would not cross past it.

He gathered samples and took them into town to the sheriff. His story in the beginning was that he didn’t know what the material was and took it into town, wondering if it might be the wreckage of a flying saucer.

The sheriff phoned the local 509th bomber group and was routed to military intelligence officer Jesse Marcel Sr. who went out to the sheriff’s office to review the strange material. Marcel wanted to see where it came from and Brazel led him out to the spot where the wreckage was on his property.

Marcel took more samples of the material in his car. He stopped home and after swearing them to secrecy, showed his wife and his son what was discovered. He told his son — according to his son, Jesse Marcel Jr. — that it wasn’t anything he’d ever seen before. They touched the material which was like aluminum foil, only lighter and without one side being paper-like. They handled it carefully, not wanting to damage it.

Marcel took the material back to the base and after showing his superior, General Ramsey, the general checked  around with other military bases to see if it might be part of an experiment, a sensational press release was made that was retracted later. What was described as debris from a flying saucer was quickly amended to a misunderstanding: it was just a weather balloon.

This is where the story twists, depending on who or what you want — or are willing — to believe.

Common sense and Hollywood

It’s important to note that neither Marcel or son has ever claimed to have seen any aliens. They both only claimed to have seen material they hadn’t ever seen before. I was unclear on this until I read Marcel Jr.’s book, The Roswell Legacy, pictured above. This is the only book I’ve ever read on the subject, but I believe almost everything happened as Marcel’s son described.

The book isn’t laid out in story format. Instead it’s told in first person with little narrative and mostly descriptions of what Marcel’s son had witnessed firsthand and/or been told by his father of what really happened in 1947. It isn’t filled with a bunch of grandiose hypothesis about what might have happened, as I’ve seen to be the case with the Roswell incident over the years. It’s a mere 174 pages, including appendix.

The book also goes into a little bit of who his father was, his military credentials and what happened to him after Roswell. There was a TV movie in 1994 called Roswell starring Martin Sheen which takes some poetic license with the story, but remains somewhat faithful to what Marcel Jr. says really happened to him.

There are other stories portrayed in that TV movie which get much more difficult to believe — like there was a second crash site Marcel didn’t see that had the aliens, one of which was still alive. Don’t get derailed there though yet, let’s stay with Marcel who only said he saw material not of this world, later rebuffed by the government to be common material he should have been able to identify.

Marcel Jr. a surgeon has also been a career military man like his father and the only reasons he claims (and I believe) he wrote this story were:

1. to keep a promise to his father over getting the truth out about what really happened in 1947
2. to defend his father’s honor that was besmirched over mis-indentifying the Roswell crash debris as something other worldly instead of a weather balloon.

Marcel Jr. has served in Iraq as recently as 2005. He a credible source to me.

Marcel being part of the elite 509th bomber group, the unit behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been able to easily identify the wreckage if it came from some known material. That only makes sense. Especially if it was a weather balloon, which was the government’s official story shortly after the first report put out by the 509th.

A weather balloon.  They’ve stuck by that story for the most part. Amending it later after reopening the investigation to a mogul balloon.

In the book, Marcel Jr. provides a scan of his father’s diploma from radar school dated September 8, 1945. He also lists his various military awards and despite his alleged gaffe identifying the debris, he was later promoted to lieutenant colonel in the reserves.

This doesn’t sound like the type of guy who would go out to a local ranch, bring back some material, show his boss the general the material, and then be part of putting out a press release that said it could be from a "flying saucer."

I did some internet fact checking to see if a copy of the original press release could be found online. Wikipedia, in fact, has a scan of the story in the Roswell Daily Record dated Tuesday July 8, 1943

 
Source: Wikipedia

So was there really a UFO crash in 1947 or not?

At least for this post I’m going to steer away from the hard to believe claims about seeing actual aliens at the second site, that one of them might have been kept alive for five years. Or that the government actually had an exchange program called Project Serpo from 1965-1978 where military personnel visited the planet Zeta Reticuli (and later allegedly died from "excess radiation"). You can visit YouTube, type in "Roswell" as the query and be treated to a bunch of clearly fake alien autopsy videos or use your favorite search engine for any of these terms to learn more if so inclined.

(But hey, if you want a good laugh then check out Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs — lol! Don’t you dig it when people try to be serious and it’s funny instead?)

Mea culpa: I wrote back in August 2006 that I believe aliens have visited earth and that the U.S government has proof of it. I’m not sure if this first happening was Roswell in 1947 and the book being reviewed here doesn’t try to answer that (and if it does, then it fails to be very compelling in that regard). What it does try to answer was if there was a crash of something not from earth. If you can’t go as far as me and believe in E.T then at least see if you can go as far as believing something crashed here not of this earth.

I am ready to believe the wreckage Marcel and his son touched wasn’t from earth. There are simply too many holes in the government’s response to believe otherwise. Weather balloon? Come on.

Where it came from, I don’t know, but if we knew it came from somewhere on earth what would be the harm in the government declassifying this information 60+ years later? Since the declassification hasn’t happened, one of the following possibilities must be true (pick your poison):

1. the government knows where it came from and doesn’t want to tell us
2. the government does not know where it came from and doesn’t want to admit this to us
3. the government knows where it came from on earth, and doesn’t want to tell us
4. the government does not know where it came from on earth and doesn’t want to admit this to us (yeah, similar to #2)

I was glad to be able to solve the lingering riddle in my mind about what happened in 1947 just outside Roswell. For that reason I give this book the highest Hmm Reviews grade possible. The book doesn’t get all "tinfoil-hat" to use the author’s own description of the fringe UFO crowd — and don’t worry readers, I’m not joining that crowd either. In fact, until the last chapter it doesn’t get too far afield of what the author and his father witnessed. That type of non-fiction works great for me.

In the last chapter the author explains why he thinks we’re not alone in the universe. I agree with much of his thinking there too. We can’t be alone and it’s arrogant to think we are. The universe is much too big and there are too many parts we know absolutely nothing about.

He thinks the aliens that have contacted us have been benign and that they might have some Star Trek like prime directive. That would make some sense as to why we don’t see aliens everywhere but they might have been in contact with the government.

The Russians have acknowledged crashed debris as being not of this earth while the U.S government has done so to date. I think before my death, assuming living out a ripe old age, I’ll see this happen.

I think it’s well past time for the government to declassify the material in 1947 that’s sitting on a base somewhere, waiting for further critical study and research. Why not?

Conspiracy theorist or realist

Now if I’m to be labeled conspiracy theorist for believing the government has botched up the Roswell cover-up, so be it. I put this one with the JFK assassination as far as believing the government lied to us. I’d also add in the more recent Bush administration lying about the whole weapons of mass destructions.

I think it’s harder to believe that the government has never lied to us, don’t you?

Conspiracy theorist or realist? I’ll take the latter. If you are looking for a story about what really happened in 1947 in Roswell, run, don’t walk, to the bookstore and get The Roswell Legacy. It feels about as close to the truth as we can get until the government declassifies what they are secreting away from us for our own [snicker] protection. Grade: A+

Think I’m going to get my own 800 psychic line going. Call me and pay me several dollars a minute so I can predict what happens 1/10th of a second into the future.

Bummer that I’m not special, a study says you have this not so mystical power too:

Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.

Next time you’re complaining about lag on your game du jour, remember even you have lag. How about that? Somebody get Madam Mortuus The Misfortunate Teller on the line.

I’ll be 82 years old in 2050 and, good health willing, able to see if artificial intelligence researcher David Levy’s prediction about robot marriages comes true or putters to the earth like my Simpsons movie prediction.

Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.”

Levy’s prediction isn’t nearly as juicy as Henrik Christensen, founder of European Robotics Research Network who says people will be having sex with robots by 2011. If by now you’re not saying Bicentennial Man aloud you lose sci-fi geek points.

Indeed the movie with Robin Williams playing a robot who’s 200 year journey to become a human belongs in this story. While we think about what humans want to do with robots, when will robots want to become humans? I’m not expecting that question to be answered in my lifetime, but it’s conceivable happening in one or two generations of my survivors. With the massive amount of storage space continuing to come down in price, it won’t be too long before we can carry around enough storage to record our entire life.

As for robots becoming more human-like in not only appearance but desire? It’s not a question of “could” to me but when? And if they become more like us as in the movie with Robin Williams, will they also want to face our mortality? On its face the robot sex and robot marriage thing seems a bit weird, but it’s the underlying social questions that are more intriguing.

Would you want to live forever if you could? It’s a fascinating subject whether or not we might want to be immortal I covered a bit back in June 2006.

Robot sex or robot marriage seem weird? Nah, those topics aren’t that futuristic, let’s talk about robot sentience. AI still has a long, long way to go.

Forget 4GB or 8GB flash drives, forget polyethylenedioxythiophene, forget 30GB, 80GB or 160GB hard drive based players, in a few years it will be possible to put a terabyte (TB) in a very small package. Goodbye to messages like this:

Although no 1TB iPods, Zunes or other portable music/video devices exist yet, you can safely wager they are coming. Even if PMC turns out to be a bust.

I was somewhat surprised our CD collection wouldn’t fit on the Zune 30GB. It took nearly a month of time here and there ripping the CDs to MP3 at 320kbps/44 for a total of 4,927 songs, 42.3 GB. The collection does fit easily on our 80GB iPod, so maybe it’s time for me to update to the Zune 80 (if I can find one somewhere, I hear they are hot sellers at the moment).

PMC plans to put an end to these kind of concerns in a few years. PMC might even allow me to re-rip our collection in FLAC or some other lossless format. PMC will slow aging.

Ok, joking on the last one.

PMC stands for programmable metallization cell and was created by scientists at Arizona State University. In April 2009 the first PMC memory chip is going into production via tech.co.uk:

The new memory uses nano tech to charge copper particles on the molecular scale, making it 1,000 times more energy efficient as current flash memory.

Managing a music collection larger than fits on a Zune
Running out of space did yield one side benefit, to look at the situation positively: I was able to pick and choose exactly what music would be synced. It’s been awhile since I’ve run into space issues with a portable music player.

Choosing what music to sync on the Zune is a matter of dragging individual songs, albums or artists down to the icon in the lower left corner. The Zune will update while you work. It didn’t lag far behind how fast I chose the music from the total collection. I’m not sure about you, friendly reader, but I found a significant amount of music in our family’s collection that I didn’t care to have on the Zune.

I asked our youngest teenager to help me pick a few of his favorite artists. Syncing playlists works similarly. Just click and drag the created playlist to the icon to the Zune device graphic.

It’s too bad these small TB devices aren’t here already, but since I’ve been getting more into HD quality video, I can see the out of space messages appearing for video content. Word to the scientists, hurry up and get us a petabyte storage in small packages for video. I’m positively that, health willing, I’ll be around to see the day that we can comfortably pack around our entire entertainment collection: music, videos, books, magazine.

Looking forward to it. You?

Must admit I’ve never thought of the problems presented by having sex in space, but thankfully the brains at NASA have already done the calculations. We can’t figure out world peace, but we can figure out how let astronauts make love in space.

photo credit (CC): computerhotline

NASA studied sex in space over 11 years ago according to an article in the guardian.co.uk:

Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. “Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even NASA was only given a censored version.”

Doesn’t sound like we’ll be seeing the instructional Astronauts Do It On The Moon hitting store shelves any time soon. Now if only Paris Hilton had been on the moon, we’d know all about this stuff. Forget the mile high club, that’s for amateurs.

Seriously, I wonder if in my lifetime I’ll have the opportunity to travel into space? Sex would be one of the last things on my mind up there but I can understand how astronauts having to be up there for weeks and months would think about these things.

Where am I going with this post? I’m ejecting now, Houston.

Ever heard of the amazing product aerogel? It’s the lowest density product currently known to man, 50-99.5% air and yet theoretically can hold 50-4,000 times its weight in applied force.

Maybe you’ve heard aerogel’s nickname ‘Frozen Smoke’? Perhaps I missed this one in science class — never my best subject — but this sounds extremely useful.

Invented over 75 years ago by an American it has been used more by NASA than anybody else to date, but is growing in practical uses like strengthening tennis rackets and even cleaning up pollutants. Somebody ring up Al Gore, aerogel is green!

Check out this detailed article from maltaStar:

In the laboratory, a metal plate coated in 6mm of aerogel was left almost unscathed by a direct dynamite blast. … Aerogel is described by scientists as the “ultimate sponge”, with millions of tiny pores on its surface making it ideal for absorbing pollutants in water.

In 2018 the first manned mission planned for Mars is including spacesuits lined with aerogel. Have aerogel, will travel.

When chemistry professors are labeling something an “amazing material” it’s time to renew faith that if man can create this, he (or she, no sexism here) can and will find cures for diseases. Now if only some super IQ brain could figure out how to make human beings not go to war and kill each other needlessly. Don’t laugh, aerogel is already being used in the military.

How long before aerogel could be used as an aphrodisiac and complete the cycle of real world uses? Too crude suggesting aerogel has viagra properties? How long before Mashable creates a ‘god’ list of 300+ aerogel uses? You got me, I’m joking on the last two three.

Aerogel? Right on.

About to post something online and have a powerful thought wash across you that says don’t? Scientists have found where that is coming from. Just think Run DMC, no, actually it’s called dFMC. Say it aloud a few times right now just so you get it straight: dFMC, dFMC, dFMC. Feel better? Don’t mind the strange looks of co-workers, family or friends. They have dFMCs too. Location pictured above, explanation below:

Brass and Haggard find that a brain region just above and between your eyes — the dorsal fronto-median cortex or dFMC — is specifically designed to let you pull back from doing something you were just about to do.

The next time you see your favorite blogger (or insert here ____) make an ill-advised move — or maybe you just didn’t listen your self — just point to this post and say: “you should have listened to the dFMC.” It’s like the Force, only it’s in every one of our brains. Luke, I am your fathhhhheerrrrr.

No dFMC was avoided during the creation and publishing of this post.

Fascinating look up close at the sun.

Watch it jiggle and pulsate and feel a tan coming on from the comfort of your PC. The link mouseover sounds are a nuisance, but the sights are pure eye candy. See sunspots, a solar tsunami and be glad you’re sitting far, far away.

A study finds that men are almost as talkative as women. This doesn’t surprise me as I never believed the stereotype. Did you?

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day. The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

What would be interesting is to be able to map the context of conversations with men versus women. Would women talk more about relationships than men? Would men talk more about sports than women? Would men be more geek prone than women? All the blog related conferences I’ve attended have been predominantly male, so who’s talking about gadgets and devices more in daily, regular conversation? Who would talk about sex more?

I’m not curious about these because of redefining or defining sterotypes but I’d love to see more studies that shatter them. Guess we’ll need to keep waiting for the context study.

Earlier today I mentioned AT&T’s DNA being faulty and it seems a four year study on DNA published in Nature has scientists challenging the notion that “junk” DNA is valueless.

In a departure from traditional thinking, the four-year study says that genes can no longer be considered the only active parts of DNA and that huge segments thought to be “junk” may play a significant role in such individual traits as susceptibility to diseases.

This makes me wonder about the true possibility of the whole Jurassic Park thing when here we are still learning new things about DNA. There are lots of ethical concerns over cloning and it disturbs me that we’re cloning when we are learning new things about what our greatest scientific minds believed to be junk. Sure, this is human DNA, not an animal, but if it was believe this DNA is junk then what else wouldn’t we know?

I’m sure someday full human being cloning will occur. It’s inevitable. Ever see the movie The 6th Day? Perhaps not one of Arnold’s best movies, but it makes you stop and think about the ethical challenges with human cloning. You could see some cases where people cannot let go of loved ones due to tragic loss, so they are compelled to have a clone made. The slippery slope starts with pets which isn’t as offensive a prospect as cloning humans. Rent the DVD if you haven’t seen it.

The blueprint of our DNA shows that there is a limited cycle and our time is short on Earth. If scientists find a way to stop the cell breakdown and growth we better have another planet to inhabit because overpopulation will become a very real problem.

One thing we can conclude: this is further proof that the human body still remains a huge mystery.