So far all the stories we've heard from former military personnel at Roswell, New Mexico, tell of crashed spaceships, frenzied covert activities, and alien cover-ups. But now another voice is heard from the Army Air Corps in Roswell in 1947, and this one tells a very different story from the one we've been hearing on the TV shows. Herbert H. Summer of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now seventy-five, was a strapping youngster of nineteen when he was an Army Air Corps Weather Observer stationed in Roswell from 1946 to August 1947. When I spoke with him, he told me his duties were to make hourly weather observations during an eight-hour shift, record the data, and use it to make up weather maps. Sometimes they sent up weather balloons, occasionally even lighted balloons, although nothing of the scale of the huge Mogul balloon train that is now believed to be responsible for the celebrated Roswell debris (see "The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul" by Dave Thomas, SI July/August 1995). Weather observations were being made around the clock every day at Roswell, but the weather observers reported no saucers--flying, crashing, or otherwise.

The non-sighting of saucers is even more remarkable when you consider the case of the air traffic controllers, who shared a barracks with the weather observers. They manned a small air traffic control tower twenty-four hours a day, although there was very little air traffic going in or out. Thus they had plenty of time to be on the lookout for strange objects--as they and the weather observers had been warned to be. Summers says that well before the famous "incident," they had been instructed by an officer whose name he believes to have been Capt. Hill, to be on the lookout for "something" strange. They were never told exactly what they were supposed to look for, but they were told if they saw it, they must report it. Perhaps this may have been some officer's over-reaction to the excitement over Kenneth Arnold's first report of "flying disks" on June 24 of that year. Vigilant they were, but neither the weather observers nor the flight controllers ever saw anything to report.

As for the famous "incident" on July 7 (although perhaps "fiasco" would be a better term), while Summer was not involved in the recovery of the so-called "debris," he is confident that it was a balloon. The first he heard about it was when he learned that Major Jesse Marcel "flew off to Ft. Worth carrying a spaceship under his arm," as he now satirically describes it. This agrees well with the statement that Mac Brazel, who first found the debris, made to newspapers: it resembled "tinfoil and sticks," and weighed about five pounds. Summer says that there was no unusual activity at the base immediately following the "incident," and that the stories about the recovery of a spaceship with alien bodies are "all fabrications." In fact, he says that he had hardly thought about the so-called "incident" at all for about thirty years until he heard the stories being told by Marcel and trumpeted by UFOlogists, turning a minor "incident" into a major "event" and "cover-up."

Summer, who is the father of the composer and Prometheus author Joseph Summer, knew the late Major Marcel quite well, and didn't have good things to say about him. When Marcel picked up the famous "debris," he took it home and attempted to burn it with a march--both of which, as which Summer points out, Marcel had no business doing. If debris of unknown origin is found, it becomes military property and should not be left in a civilian location but immediately brought in for analysis. It should be presumed to have potential intelligence value, and also to be potentially hazardous. It should not be toyed with, which is what Marcel appears to have done, bringing it home and letting his young son handle it.

In fact, Summer goes so far as to describe Marcel as inclined towards "fantasy." When a hoaxer sent a message about a supposed "Russian invasion" across a weather teletype network that was shared by a number of military and university sites, Marcel interrogated Summer for four days over the incident, asking the same questions and receiving the same reply literally hundreds of times. Marcel seemed disappointed, according to Summer, when a student confessed at one of the university sites. Marcel seemed determined to distinguish himself by finding the originator of the offending message right there in Roswell, whether it originated there or not.

The recent extra-close approach of Mars (in reality, just a few percent closer than the planet's typical close approach) has provided plenty of fodder for the cranks and mystery mongers. Chief among them is Richard C. Hoagland, who claims that NASA probes have revealed all kinds of artifacts on that planet (and elsewhere; see www.enterprisemission.com). Referring to his claim that our ancestors originally lived on Mars, he informed a nationwide audience on Coast to Coast AM (Art Bell's old show, now hosted by George Noory), "Mars is now almost blinding, it's absolutely breathtaking.... Tonight, it's closer than it's been since maybe we were there." But apparently our ancestors on Mars were as careless as some of us have been here on Earth, and somehow destroyed that planet: "When you look at Mars," said Hoagland, "you're seeing a planet where something has gone terribly wrong. I think that going to Mars and finding out that our ancient ancestors somehow blew it, that whatever there is now is in ruins, will have a stunning dramatic effect on the psyche of people here on this planet."

Perhaps that effect has already begun: a story in the Sydney Morning Herald of August 28 proclaims "Mars Movements Spark Huge Rise In German 'UFO Sightings" (see www.smh.com.au/articles/ 2003/08/27/1061663855310.htm). Werner Walter, the head of CENAP, a group of German UFO skeptics, said 'I'm hearing some of the most outrageous claims at the moment." People have reported "close encounters" with a brilliant orange UFO, one that reportedly maneuvers around following them.

And the research of Hoagland and his colleagues continues to turn up amazing, literally unbelievable facts about Mars. A new analysis of Mars Odyssey frames of the so-called "Mars face" on Cydonia has revealed that that feature is "incredibly reflective" when the Sun comes up. From this, Hoagland concludes that this feature is made of mirror-like "artificial surface materials." Kind of like the Luxor Casino pyramid in Las Vegas, perhaps?

Speaking of Mars, the conspiracy-oriented "Mind Control" Web site www.raven1.net reveals that yet another Face has recently been discovered. This one seems to be wearing a "crown"--apparently revealing that our ancient Martian ancestors had kings. You can see it at www.raven1.net/crownedface.jpe.

Even though the major media haven't been reporting much about crop circles lately, the circles keep getting more complex, and the purported messages more elaborate. According to Marshall Masters, a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM, a complex crop circle pattern near the Chilbolton Radio Telescope in England appears to be a response to the SETI message sent out by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake in 1974 (see www.yowusa.com/Archive/May2003/cr abwood4/crabwood4.htm), even though those researchers used the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, thousands of miles away. Another researcher, Maurice Osborne, claims to have deciphered the ET's message, encoded in binary patterns of broken grain. Encoded using the ASCII code set in widespread use in personal computers, it supposedly reads, "Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEVE. There is GOOD out there. We oppose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING."

The Web site www.cropcircle connector.com notes that there were just three circle formations each found during the months of April and May 2003. That number suddenly jumped to twenty-one in June, as if the extraterrestrial circle makers suddenly had much more time on their hands. In July it rose to twenty-five. The August numbers (not yet complete as this is written) continue at a good clip. It will be interesting to see if the numbers drop off significantly when the school session on Alpha Centauri begins again in September.

Closer to home, thousands of tourists began flocking to the Sacramento Valley in July when a string of six crop circles was discovered near Fairfield. However, soon four teenagers confessed that they had made the circles using boards connected to a rope. According to a story in the Vallejo Times-Herald, they had seen a television documentary about crop circles, and decided to try to make some themselves (see http://timeshetaldonline.com/articles/2003/07/11/news/news03.txt). Apparently the first-time circle-makers were not very skillful, because the pilot who discovered the circles said that it looked like "drunk aliens" had created them.