alien impact
The Roswell incident is one of the pillars of modern science fiction and some of the oddest and most complex conspiracy theories of our time. So many know it so well that a recap would seem redundant. For just one day in 1947 the US military told the nation that it captured a flying saucer which crash landed in a farmers filed before promptly denying it. While the story of Roswell is rich and voluminous with many myths, ideas and misconceptions to address in due time, for now Id like to take a look into alien debris or more specifically, what kind of debris and damage we can expect if a real alien spacecraft were to plow into our planet with the speed of a meteor and match what we know about the Roswell debris to it.
Lets start with the alien craft. To travel between stars you need a lot of energy to generate the initial thrust, keep up your speed, correct your trajectory and then slow down. The spaceship will have to be very big and most of it will be engines and a power source. A realistic size would be something comparable to a skyscraper or an aircraft carrier. It would probably be covered by a massive dust shield to protect itself from tiny meteors and help generate a magnetic field to defend itself from radiation.
The spacecraft is hurdling past the Earth when something goes wrong. Mechanical failure, pilot error, doesn’t matter. The important thing is that its now tearing through the atmosphere on a collision course with the planet below. As it enters the denser layers of gas, air compression creates friction that both heats up the spacecraft and slows it down. If its angle and speed are just right, it will emerge out of a fireball having lost over 96% of its initial velocity. Now comes the big boom.
The most practical way to cross interstellar space is with antimatter catalyzed propulsion. Tiny pellets of antimatter used as an accelerant to nuclear fusion and pumping out enough charged particles to accelerate a spaceship to a notable percentage of the speed of light. When our alien craft smashes into the ground or shatters in the atmosphere if it enters too steep and too fast, the drop of antimatter fuel kept in magnetic containment fields is liberated. Almost instantly, it starts to annihilate matter with 100% efficiency. A burst of light and gamma radiation travels for miles in an instant. Night turns to day.
The force of the blast shakes the earth, shattering windows, grandmas fine china and waking the entire town of Roswell as the sound wave hits ear-shattering decibel levels. William Brazels ranch will be vaporized and so would much of the alien debris which would be launched back into space or for many miles in every direction. It would register as the most powerful nuclear blast on this planet, bigger than USSRs Tsar Bomb which sent shockwaves circling the world three times and shook the island of Novaya Zemlya (New Earth). A steaming crater with a floor of sand melted into green-yellow glass would border Roswell. The army would not need radio reports and eyewitness testimony to know something big happened. They would know almost immediately and assume a nuclear attack. The Pentagon would be on high alert.
Whatever shards of the craft survived or broke off during the atmospheric entry, avoiding the blast would surely be made of metals or plastics so tough no one could ever mistake them for balsa wood or tinfoil. To travel at relativistic speeds, you need tremendous structural integrity. It would make perfect sense for the material to be somewhat flexible to deflect micro-meteor impacts and help the craft release stress on its frame by having some give to its structure. But its more than likely to be very thick to form a shield against radiation. Whatever creatures built it would be counting on its toughness to travel for years and years in the craft.
Speaking of creatures, that brings us to the most interesting part of the Roswell mythos. While in the original tale of the alien crash landing, the subject of alien bodies never came up, in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of ufologists claimed that an army nurse saw alien cadavers being taken to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton OH. Its a vast, imposing complex with plenty of very large hangars constantly buzzing with activity. Its also an important counter-intelligence and reverse-engineering center for the USAF. In other words, it seems to fit the part.
In reality, after a collision and subsequent blast, it would be impossible to find an alien cadaver. It would simply be smashed into a pulp. But that doesnt mean there wouldnt be any survivors. If a spacecraft was built for carrying living things from a certain planet, it’s inevitable that tens of millions of alien bacteria or extremophiles (extremely tough organisms) would’ve landed on Earth in a panspermia-like event, prospering in the crafts internal habitat. They could quickly starve to death, finding no usable food or solvents on our planet, go underground forming a small, shadow ecosystem we would notice decades later or in what would be a stunning turn of events with profound implications, they could merge and interact with our biosphere.
Looking at what we know happened in Roswell even from the ufologist point of view, there’s too little debris and not enough damage to the surroundings. And there was no eye searing, earth shaking, ear shattering explosion that would throw Roswell and its surroundings awake in the middle of the night. One could argue that what really crashed was an alien landing pod without a powerful fuel source on board, but that raises even more questions. Why would aliens land on a potentially hostile planet with an atmosphere very likely to be toxic to them? Why wouldn’t the mothership send for them? And this is just the tip of the iceberg here. Stay tuned, well tackle Good Samaritan aliens, Project SERPO and much more…
