Roswell's Liars?

Scientific American used this in an article about Liars in America:

Mark Twain wrote more than a century ago: "Everybody lies ... every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception. Deceit is fundamental to the human condition."

What spurred me to look for material on liars and lying was a reference to Eli Benjamin (a pseudonym) at Kevin Randle’s blog.

The citation was a YouTube video of Eli Benjamin claiming to Richard Dolan that he (Benjamin) had transported alien bodies from the alleged 1947 Roswell flying disk crash.

Here’s the video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWsJvc1f7I

Does Mr. Benjamin seem credible? Yes, he does, in a way. (His response to Mr. Dolan is hesitant, but that is to be expected, as what he alleges he saw would still provide a traumatic aftermath, even sixty years later.)

While we have always, like Gilles Fernandez and CDA,  had caveats about Roswell witness memory, we have to ask, Were and are such witnesses sociopathic liars, one and all?

Is or was there a confluence of deceit endemic to Roswell residents?

Could there be so many liars (or mentally confused) concentrated in that one area of the United States?

Mark Twain would have  thought so, but is such a concentration of memory-challenged or outright liars possible, for the Roswell vicinity?

That so many persons would be memory corrupt or out-and-out liars seems statistically outlandish.

Is their a psychological mechanism that could account for overwhelming deception or confabulation?

Yes, mass hysteria, which we’ve addressed a number of times, earlier here and elsewhere.

But even such an etiology for a massive memory flaw or outright deception, despite Twain’s observation, strikes us as improbable, unlikely, if one accepts the general decency of people.

Looking at Roswell witness testimony through the lens of ufology skews our acceptance of that testimony.

Ufologists, by and large, alter Roswell or UFO witness testimony by virtue (or vice) of their biases and ineptitude.

Ufologists are not professional interviewers or even have journalistic acumen, generally. They have corrupted witness testimony with leading questions and stupidly considered preferences that they’ve brought to the table when interviewing Roswell or UFO witnesses.

Kevin Randle’s book about his early years as a UFO researcher or investigator provides ample evidence, first-hand acknowledgement of the botched vicissitudes of UFO interviewing.

CDA has often noted how Stanton Friedman seems to have corrupted the early Marcel story.

And even in the Benjamin YouTube video, you can see how Richard Dolan leads Benjamin to a story of extraterrestrial alien bodies on medical gurneys.

So, objective observation of Roswell or UFO testimony is warped by the messy interviewing of incompetent ufologists.

But that aside, is it possible that all of the Roswell stories are faked or were/are conceived by influences of a hysterical kind?

It seems unlikely but isn’t impossible.

The matter needs a thorough examination or a total dismissal if one is satisfied that the whole Roswell story stems from a relatively minor incident that has mushroomed into a mythos that is so ingrained in the American psyche that it matters not what the reality or truth is.

For us, the UFO mystery transcends Roswell. It, the UFO enigma, is akin to, but much more than, what Carl Jung saw it as.

Jung was on the right track, but didn’t go into the matter quite as much as it required.

After all, Jung, like all sensible persons, knew that UFOs were and are peripheral to life, in the practical, meaningful sense.

RR