Roswell: Inconvenient facts and the will to believe by Karl T. Pflock with
foreword by Jerry Pournelle, Prometheus, $25, ISBN 1573928941
SOME stories just won鈥檛 die. One of them is the claim that aliens crashed in
the desert in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico, and that the US government has been
running a cover-up ever since.
In Roswell: Inconvenient facts and the will to believe, Karl Pflock
traces the story鈥檚 path from rumour to mainstream urban legend. His conclusion:
the Army wasn鈥檛 telling everything when it released the story about the weather
balloon, but it wasn鈥檛 covering up alien bodies either.
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Pflock is a UFOlogist and was as surprised as anyone that he reached this
conclusion. At the beginning of his investigation, he believed he was an
鈥渁gnostic鈥�, but by the end he realised that he had become convinced he would
find a crashed flying saucer. It鈥檚 that personal journey that makes the book
interesting, as does its careful and thorough re-examination of the
evidence.