Back in the eighties I read this along with a stack of related Berlitz paperbacks investigating mysterious strangeness, flying saucers, the Bermuda triangle, unexplained mysteriousness, and reports which they don't want you to know about. I had a ton of this shit, all picked up on the cheap from Oxfam and the like because I didn't like to read anything that was hard to understand. I eventually saw the error of my barely literate ways and replaced my vast library of cranky tomes with proper books for grown-ups, but I sort of wish I hadn't because this kind of thing is often very entertaining - even genuinely interesting regardless of whether or not you believe any of it.
Anyway…
In short form, the legend has it that the remains of a flying saucer were recovered by the air force from a ranch seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell; and then the story was retracted because it turned out to be a weather balloon; and then this was viewed as a cover up intended to conceal the weather balloon having been a flying saucer after all; except that the weather balloon story was a cover up to conceal the wreckage having originated in some more secretive government effort to monitor Soviet bomb tests at long range; and then somewhere in there we have the bodies supposedly recovered from the crash site, and so on and so forth. All that can really be said is that something crashed, and something was found, and some people were more than a little freaked out by the whole thing*.
I've been to Roswell since I first read this book. To an outsider, such as I am, it seems a very strange place, not quite real and just the sort of landscape wherein one might anticipate the incursion of strange forces. This sense of mystery is unfortunately diminished by the weight of garishly grinning aliens hoping to sell you everything from cigarettes to chiropody all over the town, and while the portentously named International UFO Museum & Research Center is reasonably interesting, it stretches what debate is to be had to the point of undermining its own argument.
As a book which makes the best of what little it has to go on, The Roswell Incident is more focussed than the museum. Although it doesn't quite manage to argue any case beyond that something happened and everyone shat the bed, the legend seems less easily dismissed in the wake of the US government officially acknowledging that an unidentified flying disc somehow deactivated ten nuclear warheads at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana in 1967. In other words, some of this stuff is now accepted as real by the same agencies who spent the last hundred years or so insisting otherwise; which still doesn't mean that everything described in The Roswell Incident happened, but we're at least a little closer to the idea that it could have done.
*: Quoting myself from here.
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