Alien
So now it has been revealed that the FBI has files on the supposed UFO incident in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. A one-page memo from 1950 written by Guy Hottel, special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C. field office, to J. Edgar Hoover, has been the most popular document on the Bureau’s online “Vault” for the last two years.
We all knew that story of little green men crashing to earth was true and that the American military, intelligence and law enforcement establishments had conspired to cover it up!
This would be funny, if it weren’t so serious.
The reason this whole seemingly jokey thing is so serious is because it mirrors a phenomenon John Douglas and I saw time and time again as we were researching Law & Disorder. That is, once a given event has taken place – be it a vicious crime like murder, a possible crime like arson, or mysterious sightings over the New Mexico desert – all “evidence” somehow seems to support the existing bias of the community, the police and/or the media.
Was this so-called FBI “Flying Saucer Memo” the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for? Hardly. It merely summarizes an unconfirmed, third-party report, saying the saucers “were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feel in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feel tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture.”
Special Agent Hottel takes no stance on this report and it never went any further. But ever since the memo first surfaced in 1977 as the result of a Freedom of Information request, conspiracy theorists have cited it as the proof that the FBI knew about an alien visit to the United States.
Compare this to the murder prosecution of the West Memphis Three in Arkansas. The community and the law enforcement establishment collectively believed in rampant Satanism, and when three eight-year-old boys were murdered in the woods, devil worship was the “obvious” motive. Three innocent men spent 18 years in prison as a result, one of them on death row, because the crime was clearly a satanic ritual.
Only it wasn’t.
And this all mirrors the 1692-93 Salem Witch Trials, in which 20 women and men were executed because witchcraft was rampant in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Only it wasn’t.
In itself, this use of the FBI flying saucer memo to “prove” a theory is fun and relatively harmless – except as it encourages the kind of shallow and stupid thinking that leads to rushes to judgment like Salem, West Memphis, and so many other miscarriages of justice of the type we detail in Law & Disorder.
And then it won’t be.
Mother Jones had a nice article on confirmation bias:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney
I think this is an important issue and you summarize it well. I can think of two solutions. First, we could have expert juries for cases. Alternatively, we could do a better job teaching science and psychology in k-12 classrooms. There’s arguments for and against both of these solutions.