UFO crash at Roswell : the genesis of a modern myth / Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-192) and index.

Publisher description: An alleged flying saucer crash in 1947 in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, and a purported conspiracy by the federal government to conceal the wreckage form the central case in a fifty-year history of UFO sightings in the United States. Since the so-called Roswell Incident first gained widespread attention in the 1980s, various versions of the original story have surfaced, the government has conducted an exhaustive investigation of the incident, and more than one-quarter of American adults have become convinced that aliens have visited Earth. Transcending the believer-versus-skeptic debate, anthropologists Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler contend that the Roswell story is best understood as modern myth. Similar to traditional myths in transmission, structure, and motif, the story also taps into modern beliefs in the power of technology and the duplicity of a monolithic government. The authors show how the Roswell story, like religious myths, asserts in an "unfalsifiable" narrative the existence of superior beings. Saler and Ziegler also describe the ways in which television and tabloid news- papers keep the story alive as folklore even while presenting it as expose. The book includes the account of scientist Charles B. Moore--who participated in an experiment to launch balloon-borne radar reflectors that occasionally crashed in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947--that relates the probable historical core of the myth. The first book to analyze the incident as a cultural phenomenon, UFO Crash at Roswell shows how this story of a flying saucer crash provides not only a window on American values and beliefs but also a detailed account of the evolution of a myth.