by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
It was October of '97, and the second annual Australian International UFO Symposium had just gotten underway in the eastern Australia city of Brisbane. Writers gave lectures on the latest extraterrestrial news and theories, various groups manned booths to help counsel alleged former abductees, and the organizers of the symposium presented what they suggested was the first ever filmed crash of a UFO. No one there seemed to know where the film had come from, but almost all believed the event it depicted had taken place earlier that year, in the sandy expanses of southern New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range.
The film of the crash unfolds in total silence, every detail shimmering beneath layers of blocky pixels. Starting in a desert setting of flatly rolling sand and sagebrush, a shining white oval falls from the sky. The oval emits a trail of smoke, exhaust or vapor, and before it gets too close to the ground, it levels out a bit, slams into the earth with a sudden flash, bounces, shoots up wildly in a long leftward arc, passes what appears to be three evenly spaced telephone poles, and then shatters against the ground in a sky-filling spray of fire and debris. From start to finish, the entire episode takes only 15 seconds.
The crash is fascinating to watch, but even many devoted UFO experts are skeptical. A New Mexican columnist for UFO Magazine has suggested it was either military or a hoax. Louis Martin, of MyUFO.com, said he heard the crash was a cruise missile, not an alien craft. UFOCasebook.com has stated that "an American researcher who has a highly placed NASA source" said the craft was an X-38 Crew Return Vehicle - a small, almost wingless, reusable spacecraft made to carry astronauts from the International Space Station down to Earth. And, since no one seems to know who shot the film, where exactly it was made or who released it to the public, it may be worthwhile to consider that this footage surfaced during the same year as the much-hyped 50th anniversary of the famous 1947 Roswell Incident, in which multiple witnesses swore to have seen a wrecked UFO and its dying alien passengers.
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Many of these dismissals, though, can be dismissed themselves. Videos of cruise missiles can easily be seen online, and those cylindrical missiles look nothing like the well-proportioned oval of the film. Also, they explode in clouds of fire, not in sprays of fat sparks like the craft in the film. It could be an X-38, but the X-38s first known flight wasn't until 1999, two years after the film premiered in Australia. And as for it being a hoax concocted solely to cash in on the anniversary of the Roswell Incident, it would have to be a pretty good one.
Jack Hickman, director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Group, said that in 1948, two round, white vehicles made loops in the air above White Sands before disappearing. In 1952, an area local spotted a rounded silver object making a 360-degree turn in the sky. And in 1957, numerous sightings were reported throughout the area, ranging from a strange craft hanging motionless in the sky, to a glowing object hovering above the site of the first atomic bomb test, to a UFO landing nearby. Also rumored to be a part of the missile range is the clandestine Area 29, where, according to UFO Digest's Steve Hammons, recovered alien spacecrafts were test-flown by the government from 1957 to 1970.
The impressive number of such accounts does perhaps give some validity to the 1997 crash, but one thing remains suspicious: All of these sightings took place around White Sands Missile Range and the nearby Holloman Air Force Base. After all, a missile range is a place where the government tests top secret things that fly. Getting excited about seeing a UFO over such a place is a bit like getting excited about seeing a plane by
an airport.
You can view the UFO video at MyStrangeNewMexico.com
Mike Smith is a UNM history major and the author of the regionally bestselling Towns of the Sandia Mountains. E-mail him suggestions for future columns at AntarcticSuburbs@yahoo.com.
