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Roswell incident

The Roswell incident is a conspiracy theory which alleges that the 1947 crash of a United States Army Air Forces balloon near Roswell, New Mexico was actually caused by an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field and part of the top secret Project Mogul, the balloon was intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests. After metallic and rubber debris was recovered by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, the United States Army announced their possession of a "flying disc". This announcement made international headlines but was retracted within a day. Obscuring the true purpose and source of the crashed balloon, the Army subsequently stated that it was a conventional weather balloon.

In 1978, retired Air Force officer Jesse Marcel revealed that the Army's weather balloon claim had been a cover story, but speculated that the debris was of extraterrestrial origin. Popularized by the 1980 book The Roswell Incident, this speculation became the basis for long-lasting and increasingly complex and contradictory UFO conspiracy theories, which over time expanded the incident to include governments concealing evidence of extraterrestrial beings, grey aliens, multiple crashed flying saucers, alien corpses and autopsies, and the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology, none of which have any factual basis.

Despite the lack of evidence, many UFO proponents claim that the Roswell debris was derived from an alien craft, and accuse the US government of a cover-up. The conspiracy narrative has become a trope in science fiction literature, film, and television. The town of Roswell leverages this to promote itself as a destination for UFO-associated tourism.

1947 military balloon crash
By 1947, the United States had launched thousands of top-secret Project Mogul balloons carrying devices to listen for Soviet atomic tests. On June 4, researchers at Alamogordo Army Air Field launched a long train of these balloons; they lost contact within 17 mi of W.W. "Mac" Brazel's ranch, where the balloon subsequently crashed. Later that month, Brazel discovered tinfoil, rubber, tape, and thin wooden beams scattered across several acres of his ranch. Amid the first summer of the Cold War, press nationwide covered Kenneth Arnold's June 24 account of what became known as flying saucers, objects which allegedly performed maneuvers beyond the capabilities of any known aircraft. Publicity of Arnold's report incited a wave of over 800 sightings. With no phone or radio, Brazel was initially unaware of the ongoing flying disc craze, but he was told about it when visiting his uncle in Corona, New Mexico on July 5; the next day he informed Sheriff George Wilcox of the debris he had found. Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF, now Walker Air Force Base), who assigned Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt to return with Brazel and gather the material from the ranch. Base commander Colonel William Blanchard notified the Eighth Air Force commanding officer Roger M. Ramey of their findings.

On July 8, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that the military had recovered a "flying disc" near Roswell. Robert Porter, an RAAF flight engineer, was part of the crew who loaded what he was "told was a flying saucer" onto the flight bound for Fort Worth Army Air Field (FWAAF). He described the material – packaged in wrapping paper when he received it – as lightweight and not too large to fit inside the trunk of a car. After station director George Walsh broke the news over Roswell radio station KSWS and relayed it to the Associated Press, his phone lines were overwhelmed. He later recalled, "All afternoon, I tried to call Sheriff Wilcox for more information, but could never get through to him [...] Media people called me from all over the world."

The press release issued by Haut read:

"The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office." Media interest in the case dissipated soon after a press conference where General Roger Ramey, his chief of staff Colonel Thomas Dubose, and weather officer Irving Newton identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon. Newton told reporters that similar radar targets were used at about 80 weather stations across the country. The small number of subsequent news stories offered mundane and prosaic accounts of the crash. On July 9, the Roswell Daily Record highlighted that no engine or metal parts had been found in the wreckage. Brazel told the Record that the debris consisted of rubber strips, "tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks." Brazel said he paid little attention to it but returned later with his wife and daughter to gather up some of the debris. Despite later claims that he was forced to repeat a cover story, Brazel told newspaper reporters, "I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon." When interviewed in Fort-Worth, Texas, Jesse Marcel described the wreckage as "parts of the weather device" composed of "tinfoil and broken wooden beams".

The 1947 official account omitted any connection to Cold War military programs. On July 10, military personnel at Alamogordo gave a misleading demonstration to the press. Four officers provided a false account of mundane weather balloon usage throughout the previous year. They demonstrated balloon configurations that used many of the unusual configurations employed by the Mogul team as ways to gather meteorological data, offering a plausible explanation for any unusual aspects of the Roswell debris. The Air Force would later describe the weather balloon story as "an attempt to deflect attention from the top secret Mogul project."

UFO conspiracy theories (1947–1978)
The 1947 debris retrieval remained relatively obscure for three decades. Reporting ceased soon after the government provided a mundane explanation, and broader reporting on flying saucers declined rapidly after the Twin Falls saucer hoax. Just days after stories of the Roswell 'flying disc', a widely reported crashed disc from Twin Falls, Idaho, was found to be a hoax created by four teenagers using parts from a jukebox.

Nevertheless, belief in a UFO cover-up by the US government became widespread in this period. Hoaxes, legends, and stories of crashed spaceships and alien bodies in New Mexico emerged that would later form elements of the Roswell myth. In 1947, many Americans attributed flying saucers to unknown military aircraft. In the decades between the initial debris recovery and the emergence of Roswell theories, flying saucers became synonymous with alien spacecraft. Trust in the US government declined and acceptance of conspiracy theories became widespread. UFO believers accused the government of a "Cosmic Watergate". The 1947 incident was reinterpreted to fit the public's increasingly conspiratorial outlook.

Aztec crashed saucer hoax
The Aztec, New Mexico crashed saucer hoax in 1948 introduced stories of recovered alien bodies that would later become associated with Roswell. It achieved broad exposure when the con artists behind it convinced Variety columnist Frank Scully to cover their fictitious crash. The hoax narrative included small grey humanoid bodies, metal stronger than any found on Earth, indecipherable writing, and a government coverup to prevent public panic – these elements appeared in later versions of the Roswell myth. In retellings, the mundane debris reported at the actual crash site was replaced with the Aztec hoax's fantastical alloys. By the time Roswell returned to media attention, grey aliens had become a part of American culture through the Barney and Betty Hill incident. In a 1997 Roswell report, Air Force investigator James McAndrew wrote that "even with the exposure of this obvious fraud, the Aztec story is still revered by UFO theorists. Elements of this story occasionally reemerge and are thought to be the catalyst for other crashed flying saucer stories, including the Roswell Incident."

Hangar 18
"Hangar 18" is a non-existent location that many later conspiracy theories allege housed extraterrestrial craft or bodies recovered from Roswell. The idea of alien corpses from a crashed ship being stored in an Air Force morgue at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was mentioned in Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers, expanded in the 1966 book Incident at Exeter, and became the basis for a 1968 science-fiction novel The Fortec Conspiracy. Fortec was about a fictional cover-up by the Air Force unit charged with reverse-engineering other nations' technical advancements.

In 1974, science-fiction author and conspiracy theorist Robert Spencer Carr alleged that alien bodies recovered from the Aztec crash were stored in "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson. Carr claimed that his sources had witnessed the alien autopsy, another idea later incorporated into the Roswell narrative. The Air Force explained that no "Hangar 18" existed at the base, noting a similarity between Carr's story and the fictional Fortec Conspiracy. The 1980 film Hangar 18, which dramatized Carr's claims, was described as "a modern-day dramatization" of Roswell by the film's director James L. Conway, and as "nascent Roswell mythology" by folklorist Thomas Bullard. Decades later, Carr's son recalled that he had often "mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of strangers... [tales of] befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico."

Roswell conspiracy theories (1978–1994)
Interest in Roswell was rekindled after ufologist Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel in 1978. Marcel had accompanied the Roswell debris from the ranch to the Fort Worth press conference. In the 1978 interview, Marcel stated that the "weather balloon" explanation from the press conference was a cover story, and that he now believed the debris was extraterrestrial. On December 19, 1979, Marcel was interviewed by Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer, and the tabloid brought large-scale attention to the Marcel story the following February. Marcel described a foil that could be crumpled but would uncrumple when released. On September 20, 1980, the TV series In Search of... aired an interview where Marcel described his participation in the 1947 press conference: "They wanted some comments from me, but I wasn't at liberty to do that. So, all I could do is keep my mouth shut. And General Ramey is the one who discussed – told the newspapers, I mean the newsman, what it was, and to forget about it. It is nothing more than a weather observation balloon. Of course, we both knew differently."

The 1980 book The Roswell Incident popularized Marcel's account and added the claimed discovery of alien bodies, found approximately 150 miles west of the original debris site on the Plains of San Agustin. Marcel never mentioned the presence of bodies. Major Marcel's son, Jesse A. Marcel Jr. M.D., said that when he was 10 years old, his father had shown him flying saucer debris recovered from the Roswell crash site, including, "a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics on it". However, the symbols described as alien hieroglyphics matched the symbols on the adhesive tape that Project Mogul sourced from a New York toy manufacturer. Friedman, Berlitz, and Moore also connected Marcel's account to an earlier statement by Lydia Sleppy, a former teletype operator at the KOAT radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sleppy claimed that she was typing a story about crashed saucer wreckage as dictated by reporter Johnny McBoyle until interrupted by an incoming message, ordering her to end communications.

Between 1978 and the early 1990s, UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman, William Moore, and the team of Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt interviewed many people who claimed to have had a connection with the events at Roswell in 1947, generating competing and conflicting accounts.

The Roswell Incident
The first Roswell conspiracy book, released in October 1980, was The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. The authors had previously written popular books on fringe topics like the Philadelphia Experiment and the Bermuda Triangle. Anthropologist Charles Ziegler described the 1980 book as "version 1" of the Roswell myth. Berlitz and Moore's narrative was the dominant version of the Roswell conspiracy during the 1980s.

The book argues that an extraterrestrial craft was flying over the New Mexico desert to observe nuclear weapons activity when a lightning strike killed the alien crew. It alleges that, after recovering the crashed alien technology, the US government engaged in a cover-up to prevent mass panic. The Roswell Incident quoted Marcel's later description of the debris as "nothing made on this earth". The book claims that in some photographs, the debris recovered by Marcel had been substituted for the debris from a weather device despite no visible differences in the photographed material. The book's claims of unusual debris were contradicted by the mundane details provided by Captain Sheridan Cavitt, who had gathered the material with Marcel. The Roswell Incident introduced alien bodies – via the second-hand legends of deceased civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett – purportedly found by archaeologists on the Plains of San Agustin.

The authors claimed to have interviewed over 90 witnesses, though the testimony of only 25 appears in the book. Only seven of them claimed to have seen the debris. Of these, five claimed to have handled it. Some elements of the witness accounts – small alien bodies, indestructible metals, hieroglyphic writing – matched other crashed saucer legends more than the 1947 reports from Roswell. Berlitz and Moore claimed Scully's long-discredited crashed saucer hoax to be an account of the Roswell incident that mistakenly "placed the area of the crash near Aztec". In an interview with Mac Brazel's son, William Brazel Jr. described how the military arrested his father and "swore him to secrecy". However, during the time that Brazel was alleged to have been in military custody, multiple people reported seeing him in Roswell, and he provided an interview to local radio station KGFL. The most significant witness was Jesse Marcel. Independent researchers would find patterns of embellishment in Jesse Marcel's accounts, including provably false statements about his military career and educational background.

Majestic 12 hoax
Majestic 12 was the purported organization behind faked government documents delivered anonymously to multiple ufologists in the early 1980s. All individuals who received the fake documents were connected to Bill Moore. After the publication of The Roswell Incident, Richard Doty and other individuals presenting themselves as Air Force Intelligence Officers approached Moore. They used the unfulfilled promise of hard evidence of extraterrestrial retrievals to recruit Moore, who kept notes on other ufologists and intentionally spread misinformation within the UFO community. At a 1989 Mutual UFO Network conference, Bill Moore confessed that he had intentionally fed fake evidence of extraterrestrials to UFO researchers including Paul Bennewitz. Doty would later say that he intentionally gave fabricated information to UFO researchers while working at Kirtland Air Force Base in the 1980s. Roswell conspiracy proponents turned on Moore, but not the broader conspiracy theory.

The Majestic-12 materials have been heavily scrutinized and discredited. The various purported memos existed only as copies of photographs of documents. Carl Sagan criticized the complete lack of provenance of documents "miraculously dropped on a doorstep like something out of a fairy story, perhaps 'The Elves and the Shoemaker'." Researchers noted the idiosyncratic date format not found in government documents from the time they were purported to originate, but widely used in Bill Moore's personal notes.

In this variant of the Roswell legend, the bodies were ejected from the craft shortly before it exploded over the ranch. The propulsion unit is destroyed and the government concludes the ship was a "short range reconnaissance craft". The following week, the bodies are recovered some miles away, decomposing from exposure and predators.

Role of Glenn Dennis
The initial claims of recovered alien bodies came from the secondhand accounts of "Barney" Barnett and "Pappy" Henderson after their deaths. On August 5, 1989, Stanton Friedman interviewed former mortician Glenn Dennis. Dennis provided an account of extraterrestrial corpses endorsed by prominent Roswell ufologists Don Berliner, Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, and Donald Schmitt. Dennis claimed to have received "four or five calls" from the Air Base with questions about body preservation and inquiries about small or hermetically sealed caskets; he further claimed that a local nurse told him she had witnessed an "alien autopsy". Glenn Dennis has been called the "star witness" of the Roswell incident.

On September 20, 1989, an episode of Unsolved Mysteries included the second-hand stories of alien bodies captured by the Army and transported to Texas. The episode was watched by 28 million people. In 1994, Dennis's account was portrayed by Unsolved Mysteries and dramatized in the made-for-TV movie Roswell. Dennis appeared in multiple books and documentaries. In 1991, Dennis co-founded a UFO museum in Roswell along with Max Littell and former RAAF public affairs officer Walter Haut.

Dennis provided false names for the nurse who allegedly witnessed the autopsy. Presented with evidence that no such person existed, Dennis admitted to lying about the name. Karl Pflock observed that Dennis's story "sounds like a B-grade thriller conceived by Oliver Stone." Scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning said that Dennis cannot be regarded as a reliable witness, considering that he had seemingly waited over 40 years before he started recounting a series of unconnected events. Such events, Dunning argues, were then arbitrarily joined to form what has become the most popular narrative of the alleged alien crash. Prominent UFO researchers, including Pflock and Kevin Randle, have become convinced that no bodies were recovered from the Roswell crash.

Competing accounts and schism
A proliferation of competing Roswell accounts led to a schism among ufologists in the early 1990s. The two leading UFO societies disagreed on the scenarios presented by Randle–Schmitt and Friedman–Berliner. One issue was the location of Barnett's account. A 1992 UFO conference attempted to achieve a consensus among the various scenarios portrayed in Crash at Corona and UFO Crash at Roswell; however, the publication of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell "resolved" the Barnett problem by simply ignoring Barnett and citing a new location for the alien craft recovery, including a new group of archaeologists not connected the Barnett story.

UFO Crash at Roswell
In 1991, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt published UFO Crash at Roswell. The 1991 book sold 160,000 copies and served as the basis for the 1994 television film Roswell. Randle and Schmitt added testimony from 100 new witnesses. Though hundreds of people were interviewed by various researchers, only a few claimed to have seen debris or aliens. According to Pflock, of the 300-plus individuals reportedly interviewed for UFO Crash at Roswell (1991), only 23 could be "reasonably thought to have seen physical evidence, debris". Of these, only seven asserted anything suggestive of otherworldly origins for the debris.

The book claimed that General Arthur Exon had been aware of debris and bodies, but Exon disputed his depiction. Glenn Dennis's claims of an alien autopsy and Grady Barnett's "alien body" accounts appeared in the book. However, the dates and locations of Barnett's account in The Roswell Incident were changed without explanation. Brazel was described as leading the Army to a second crash site on the ranch, where the Army personnel were supposedly "horrified to find civilians [including Barnett] there already." Also in 1991, retired USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who had posed with debris for press photographs in 1947, acknowledged the weather balloon cover story.

Crash at Corona
In 1992, Stanton Friedman released Crash at Corona, co-authored with Don Berliner. The book introduced new "witnesses" and added to the narrative by doubling the number of flying saucers to two, and the number of aliens to eight – two of which were said to have survived and been taken into custody by the government. Friedman interviewed Lydia Sleppy the teletype operator who years earlier had said that she was ordered not to transmit a crashed saucer story. Friedman attributed Sleppy's account to FBI usage of an alleged nationwide surveillance system that he believed was put in place following "an earlier crash". However, no evidence was found that the FBI had ever monitored any transmissions from her radio station. Friedman's description of her typing as "interrupted" by an FBI message and Moore's claim that "the machine suddenly stopped itself" were found to be impossible for the teletype model that Sleppy operated in 1947.

The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell
In 1994, Randle and Schmitt authored another book, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell which claimed a cargo plane delivered alien bodies to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The book abandoned the Barnett crash site on the Plains of San Agustin as lacking evidence and contradicting its "framework of the Roswell event". Randle and Schmitt proposed a new crash site 35 miles north of Roswell, based on statements from Jim Ragsdale and Frank Kaufman. Kaufman claimed he monitored a UFO's path on radar and recovered debris from a crashed spaceship similar in shape to an F-117 stealth fighter. Kaufmann's statements did not match the personnel at the base, his service record, the radar technology available, or the known topography of the proposed crashed site. Jim Ragsdale claimed that while driving home along Highway 285 with his girlfriend Trudy Truelove, they watched a craft that was "narrow with a bat-like wing" crash. A later interview with Ragsdale clarified that his alleged crash site was nowhere near either the purported Barnett or Kaufman sites. In further interviews, Ragsdale's story grew to include bizarre details such as Ragsdale and Truelove removing eleven golden helmets from the alien craft to bury in the desert.

Air Force response
Under pressure from a New Mexico congressman and the General Accounting Office (GAO), the Air Force provided official responses to Roswell conspiracy theories during the mid-1990s. The initial 1994 USAF report admitted that the weather balloon explanation was a cover story, but for Project Mogul, a military surveillance program. Published the following year, The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert supported this with extensive documentation that narrowed the cause of the debris to a specific Mogul balloon train launched on June 4, 1947, and lost near the Roswell debris field. Within the UFO community, the reports were not accepted. UFO researchers dismissed the reports as containing no information about MJ-12 or extraterrestrial corpses but noted that the reports did admit the 1947 account to have been false. Contemporary polls found that the majority of Americans doubted the Air Force explanation.

News media and skeptical researchers embraced the findings. Project Mogul offered a cohesive explanation for the contemporary accounts of the debris – failing only to explain later conflicting additions. Carl Sagan and Phil Klass noted that aspects of the debris reported as anomalous – including the abstract symbols and lightweight foil – matched the materials used by Project Mogul. In 1997, the Air Force published a second report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed. It detailed how eyewitness accounts of military personnel loading aliens into "body bags" matched the Air Force's procedures for retrieving parachute test dummies in insulation bags, designed to shield temperature-sensitive equipment in the desert.

Alien Autopsy
Pseudo-documentaries, most notably Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, have taken a major role in shaping popular opinion of Roswell. In 1995, British entrepreneur Ray Santilli claimed to have footage of an alien autopsy filmed after the 1947 Roswell crash, purchased from an elderly Army Air Force cameraman. Alien Autopsy centers around Santilli's hoaxed footage, which it presents as a probable artifact of the government's investigation into Roswell. The purported cameraman Barnett had died in 1967 without ever serving in the military, and visual effects expert Stan Winston told newspapers that Alien Autopsy had misrepresented his conclusion that Santilli's footage was an obvious fake. Santilli would admit years later that the footage was fabricated.

Over twenty million viewers watched the purported autopsy. Fox aired the program immediately before and implicitly connected to the fictional X-Files, which later parodied the film. Alien Autopsy established a template for future pseudo-documentaries built on questioning a presumed government cover-up. Though thoroughly debunked, core UFO believers, many of whom still accepted earlier hoaxes like the Aztec crash, weighed the autopsy footage as additional evidence strengthening the connection between Roswell and extraterrestrials.

The Day After Roswell
In 1997, retired Army Intelligence officer Philip J. Corso released The Day After Roswell. Corso's book combined many existing and conflicting conspiracies with his own claims. Corso alleged that he was shown a purportedly nonhuman body suspended in liquid inside a glass coffin. The Day After Roswell contains many factual errors and inconsistencies. For example, Corso says the 1947 debris was "shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, headquarters of the 8th Army Air Force". All other Roswell books correctly located the 8th Army Air Force headquarters at Fort Worth Army Air Field, 500 miles away.

Corso further claimed that he helped oversee a project  to reverse engineer recovered crash debris. Other ufologists expressed doubts about Corso's book. Donald Schmitt openly questioned if Corso was "part of the disinformation" Schmitt believed was working to discredit ufology. Corso's story was criticized for its similarities to science fiction like The X-Files and the film "Terminator 2". Lacking evidence, the book relied on weight provided by Corso's past work on the Foreign Technology Division, and a foreword from U.S. Senator and World War II veteran Strom Thurmond. Corso had misled Thurmond to believe he was providing a foreword for a different book. Upon discovering the book's actual contents, Thurmond demanded the publisher remove his name and writing from future printings stating, "I did not, and would not, pen the foreword to a book about, or containing, a suggestion that the success of the United States in the Cold War is attributable to the technology found on a crashed UFO."

Related debunked or fringe theories
Roswell has remained the subject of divergent popular works, including those by ufologist Walter Bosley, paranormal author Nick Redfern, and American journalist Annie Jacobsen. In 2011, Jacobsen's Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base featured a claim that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was recruited by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to produce "grotesque, child-size aviators" to cause hysteria. The book was criticized for extensive errors by scientists from the Federation of American Scientists. Historian Richard Rhodes, writing in The Washington Post, also criticized the book's sensationalistic reporting of "old news" and its "error-ridden" reporting. He wrote: "All of [her main source's] claims appear in one or another of the various publicly available Roswell/UFO/Area 51 books and documents churned out by believers, charlatans and scholars over the past 60 years. In attributing the stories she reports to an unnamed engineer and Manhattan Project veteran while seemingly failing to conduct even minimal research into the man's sources, Jacobsen shows herself at a minimum extraordinarily gullible or journalistically incompetent."

In September 2017, UK newspaper The Guardian reported on Kodachrome slides which some had claimed showed a dead space alien. First presented at a BeWitness event in Mexico, organised by Jaime Maussan and attended by almost 7,000 people, days afterwards it was revealed that the slides were in fact of a mummified Native American child discovered in 1896 and which had been on display at the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado, for many decades.

In February 2020, an Air Force historian revealed a recently declassified report of a circa-1951 incident in which two Roswell personnel donned poorly fitting radioactive suits, complete with oxygen masks, while retrieving a weather balloon after an atomic test. On one occasion, they encountered a lone woman in the desert, who fainted when she saw them. One of the personnel suggests they could have appeared to someone unaccustomed to then-modern gear, to be alien.

Explanations

Secrecy around the 1947 debris recovery was due to Cold War military programs rather than aliens. Contrary to evidence, UFO believers maintain that a spacecraft crashed near Roswell, and "Roswell" remains synonymous with UFOs. B. D. Gildenberg has called Roswell "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim". Accounts of alien recovery sites are contradictory and not present in any 1947 reports. Some accounts are likely distorted memories of recoveries of servicemen in plane crashes, or parachute test dummies, as suggested by the Air Force in their 1997 report. Karl Pflock argues that proponents of the crashed-saucer explanation tend to overlook contradictions and absurdities, compiling supporting elements without adequate scrutiny. Kal Korff attributes the poor research standards to financial incentives, "Let's not pull any punches here: The Roswell UFO myth has been very good business for UFO groups, publishers, for Hollywood, the town of Roswell, the media, and UFOlogy ... [The] number of researchers who employ science and its disciplined methodology is appallingly small."

Project Mogul

A 1994 USAF report identified the crashed object from the 1947 incident as a Project Mogul device.The Roswell material has been attributed to a top secret military balloon by astrophysicist Adam Frank, historian Lt Col James Michael Young, science writer Kendrick Frazier, folklorist Thomas Bullard, historian Kathryn Olmsted, Project Mogul meteorologist B.D. Gildenberg, journalist Kal Korff, skeptical UFO researcher Philip J. Klass, and intelligence officer Captain James McAndrew among others: Mogul – the classified portion of an unclassified New York University atmospheric research project – was a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons to monitor nuclear tests. The project launched Flight No. 4 from Alamogordo Army Air Field on June 4. Flight No. 4 was drifting toward Corona within 17 miles of Brazel's ranch when its tracking equipment failed. The military, charged with protecting the classified project, claimed that the crash was of a weather balloon. Major Jesse Marcel and USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose publicly described the claims of a weather balloon as a cover story in 1978 and 1991, respectively. In the USAF report, Richard Weaver states that the weather balloon story may have been intended to "deflect interest from" Mogul, or it may have been the perception of the weather officer because Mogul balloons were constructed from the same materials. Sheridan W. Cavitt, who accompanied Marcel to the debris field, provided a sworn witness statement for the report. Cavitt stated, "I thought at the time and think so now, that this debris was from a crashed balloon."
 * : "The weather-balloon story was indeed a lie. Instead, what crashed on Brazel's ranch was Project Mogul, a secret experimental program using high-altitude balloons to monitor Russian nuclear tests.
 * : "[L]aunch #4 on June 4, 1947, captured the public's attention when a local rancher recovered the balloon debris. Noting unusual metallic objects attached to the debris and suspecting they belonged to the military, the rancher turned the material and objects over to officers at Roswell Army Airfield (RAAF)."
 * : "[...] what we now know the debris to have been: remnants of a long train of research balloons and equipment launched by New York University atmospheric researchers [...]"
 * : "the Air Force [...] concluded that the wreckage belonged to a Project Mogul balloon array that had disappeared in June 1947."
 * : "When one of these balloons smashed into the sands of the New Mexico ranch, the military decided to hide the project's real purpose."
 * : "One such flight, launched in early June, came down on a Roswell area sheep ranch, and created one of the most enduring mysteries of the century."
 * : "Unbeknownst to Major Marcel, the debris was actually the remnants of a highly classified military spy device known as Project Mogul."
 * : "[...] the debris was from a 600-foot long string of twenty-three weather balloons and three radar targets that had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field as part of a 'Top Secret' Project Mogul [...]"
 * : "The 1994 Air Force report determined that project Mogul was responsible for the 1947 events. Mogul was an experimental attempt to acoustically detect suspected Soviet nuclear weapon explosions and ballistic missile launches."

Ufologists had previously considered the possibility that the Roswell debris had come from a top-secret balloon. In March 1990, John Keel proposed that the debris had been from a Japanese balloon bomb launched in World War II. An Air Force meteorologist rejected Keel's theory, explaining that the Fu-Go balloons "could not possibly have stayed aloft for two years". Project Mogul was first connected to Roswell by independent researcher Robert G. Todd in 1990. Todd contacted ufologists and in the 1994 book Roswell in Perspective, Karl Pflock agreed that the Brazel ranch debris was from Mogul. In response to a 1993 inquiry from US congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico, the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. Air Force declassification officer Lieutenant James McAndrew concluded:

"When the civilians and personnel from Roswell AAF [...] 'stumbled' upon the highly classified project and collected the debris, no one at Roswell had a 'need to know' about information concerning MOGUL. This fact, along with the initial mis-identification and subsequent rumors that the 'capture' of a 'flying disc' occurred, ultimately left many people with unanswered questions that have endured to this day."

Anthropomorphic dummies
The 1947 Roswell accounts did not mention alien bodies. The reports of bodies came decades later. None of the primary eyewitnesses mentioned bodies. Jesse Marcel dismissed the reports when asked, and Roswell authors interviewed only four people with supposed firsthand knowledge of alien bodies. The claims of alien bodies – made decades later by elderly witnesses, sometimes as death-bed confessions – contradict each other in basic details such as the location of the crash, the number of extraterrestrials, and the description of the bodies.

The 1997 Air Force report concluded that the alleged "bodies" reported by later eyewitnesses came from memories of accidents involving military casualties and memories of the recovery of anthropomorphic dummies. Military programs, such as the 1950s Operation High Dive, released test dummies from high-altitude balloons above the New Mexico Desert. The Air Force concluded that the number of accounts of body retrievals suggested an explanation other than dishonesty, and that the retrieval process for their dummies resembled the body retrieval stories in many aspects. The dummies were transported using stretchers, casket-shaped crates, and sometimes insulation bags that resembled body bags. Descriptions of "weapons carriers" and a "jeeplike truck that had a bunch of radios" matched the Dodge M37 used for 1950s test retrievals. Eyewitnesses described the purported bodies as bald, "dummies", resembling "plastic dolls", and wearing flight suits. These attributes were consistent with Air Force dummies used in the 1950s.

Roswell as modern myth and folklore
The mythology of Roswell involving increasingly elaborate accounts of alien crash landings and government cover-ups has been analyzed and documented by social anthropologists and skeptics. Anthropologists Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart highlight the Roswell Story was a prime example of how a discourse moved from the fringes to the mainstream, aligning with the 1980s zeitgeist of public fascination with "conspiracy, cover-up and repression". Skeptics Joe Nickell and James McGaha proposed that Roswell's time spent away from public attention allowed the development of a mythology drawing from later UFO folklore, and that the early debunking of the incident created space for ufologists to intentionally distort accounts towards sensationalism.

Charles Ziegler argues that the Roswell story exhibits characteristics typical of traditional folk narratives. He identifies six distinct narratives and a process of transmission through storytellers, wherein a core story was formed from various witness accounts and then shaped and altered by those involved in the UFO community. Additional "witnesses" were sought to expand upon the core narrative, while accounts that did not align with the prevailing beliefs were discredited or excluded by the "gatekeepers".

Tourism and commercialization
Roswell's tourism industry is based on ufology museums and businesses, as well as alien-themed iconography and alien kitsch. Many typical city features in Roswell are UFO-themed, including fast food restaurants, grocery stores, and street lights. A broad range of establishments offer UFO items. A yearly UFO festival has been held since 1995. Several alleged crash sites are open to visitors for a fee. There are alien festivals, conventions, and museums, including the International UFO Museum and Research Center. Around 90,000 tourists visit Roswell each year.

Popular fiction
The incident spread internationally through films depicting the key points of Roswell conspiracy theories. In the 1980 independently distributed film Hangar 18, an alien ship crashes in the desert of the US Southwest. Debris and bodies are recovered, but their existence is covered up by the government. Director James L. Conway summarized the film as "a modern-day dramatization of the Roswell incident". Conway later revisited the concept in 1995 when he filmed the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Little Green Men"; In that episode, characters travel to 1947, triggering the Roswell incident, with their ship being stored in Hangar 18. The 1994 film Roswell was based on the book UFO Crash at Roswell by Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt. In the 1996 film Independence Day, an alien invasion prompts the revelation of a Roswell crash and cover-up, including experiments on alien corpses. The 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sees the protagonist on a quest for an alien body from the Roswell Incident.

In the 1990s, Roswell became the most well-known of the early flying saucer accounts, due in part to frequent portrayals of a Roswell conspiracy on television. The hit series The X-Files featured the Roswell incident as a recurring element. The show's second episode "Deep Throat", introduced a Roswell alien crash into the show's mythology. The comical 1996 episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" satirized the recently-broadcast Santelli Alien Autopsy hoax film. After the success of The X-Files, Roswell alien conspiracies were featured in other sci-fi drama series, including Dark Skies (1996–97) and Taken (2002). Starting in 1998, Pocket Books published a series of young adult novels titled Roswell High; From 1999 to 2002, the books were adapted into the WB/UPN  TV series Roswell, with a second adaption release in 2019 under the title Roswell, New Mexico.

Journalist Toby Smith has described Roswell as the "embarkation point" for mass media and pop culture treatment of UFOs, crashed saucers, and aliens on Earth. In a 2001 episode of the animated comedy Futurama, titled, "Roswell That Ends Well", protagonists from the 31st century travel back in time and cause the Roswell incident. The 2005 animated series American Dad features a character Roger who is an alien that crashed at Roswell. The 2006 comedy Alien Autopsy revolves around the 1990s-creation of the Santilli hoax film. The 2011 Simon Pegg comedy Paul tells the story of Roswell tourists who rescue a grey alien.

Statements by US Presidents
In a 2012 visit to Roswell, Barack Obama joked "I come in peace." When asked during a 2015 interview with GQ magazine about whether he had looked at top-secret classified information, Obama replied, "I gotta tell you, it's a little disappointing. People always ask me about Roswell and the aliens and UFOs, and it turns out the stuff going on that's top secret isn't nearly as exciting as you expect. In this day and age, it's not as top secret as you'd think." In December 2020, Obama joked with Stephen Colbert: "It used to be that UFOs and Roswell was the biggest conspiracy. And now that seems so tame, the idea that the government might have an alien spaceship."

In a 2014 interview, Bill Clinton said, "When the Roswell thing came up, I knew we'd get gazillions of letters. So I had all the Roswell papers reviewed, everything". Clinton's administration found no evidence of alien contact or a crashed ship.

In June 2020, Donald Trump, when asked if he would consider releasing more information about the Roswell incident, said "I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting."

title: Roswell incident


text:
Amy Sherman-Palladino

Amy Sherman-Palladino (born January 17, 1966) is an American television writer, director, and producer. She is the creator of the comedy-drama series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Bunheads (2012-2013), and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-2023).

Sherman-Palladino has received six Primetime Emmy Awards for her work, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, and Outstanding Music Supervision, all for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She made history when she became the first woman to win in the comedy writing and directing categories at the Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2019, she received the Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television from the Producers Guild of America.

Sherman-Palladino is the founder of Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions. She is known for her trademark rapid-fire dialogue, which is often full of pop culture references, and as well for her preferred master shot filming style.

Early life
Amy Sherman was born in Los Angeles, California. Her parents are comedian Don Sherman, who died in May 2012 (the first episode of Bunheads was dedicated to him), and dancer Maybin Hewes. Sherman was her father's stage name. Her father, from the Bronx, was Jewish, and her mother was a Southern Baptist from Gulfport, Mississippi. She has stated that she was raised "as Jewish. Sort of."

She was trained in classical ballet since she was four and took other forms of dance in her teens. Originally a trainee dancer, Sherman-Palladino had received a callback to the musical Cats, while also having a possible writing position on the staff of Roseanne in rotation. When she and writing partner Jennifer Heath were asked to join the staff of Roseanne, she left behind her dancing career — much to her mother's chagrin – and began writing for television.

Career
Sherman-Palladino became a staff writer on Roseanne during the show's third season in 1990. Among the storylines and episodes she wrote was an Emmy-nominated episode about birth control.

She left the show after season six, in 1994, and worked on several other projects, including the failed 1996 sitcom Love and Marriage, the 1997 sitcom Over the Top, and writing several scripts of the NBC sitcom Veronica's Closet.

Gilmore Girls
Sherman-Palladino is best known as the creator and executive producer of Gilmore Girls (2000–07), a television comedy drama series that aired initially on The WB network and concluded on its successor network, The CW. A four-episode revival aired on Netflix in 2016. In selling the show, Sherman-Palladino says that during her pitch meeting for landing a script order, Gilmore Girls was presented as a last-ditch effort thought up on the spot due to a lacking response from the network executives towards her other ideas. She presented this last hope as a "show about a mother and daughter, but they're more like best friends" and the executives were all sold immediately. During a trip to Connecticut, she and husband Daniel Palladino were inspired to center the show there, allowing a rich setting for a small-town community and the divide from the WASP y social setting of Hartford, Connecticut.

In producing the show, Sherman-Palladino and her husband wore many hats as the creative forces of the show, writing a large number of the episodes and also acting as directors, producers and show runners for six years of its seven-year run.

End of working relationship with Gilmore Girls
On April 20, 2006, it was announced that Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel could not come to an agreement with The CW to continue their contracts. As a result, the Palladinos' involvement with Gilmore Girls came to an end. The official statement was as follows: "Despite our best efforts to return and ensure the future of Gilmore Girls for years to come, we were unable to reach an agreement with the studio and are therefore leaving when our contracts expire at the end of this season. Our heartfelt thanks go out to our amazing cast, hard-working crew, and loyal fans." Writer and producer David S. Rosenthal replaced them.

The couple did an interview with TV Guide writer Michael Ausiello, where they went further into their reasons for leaving the show.

In a 2012 interview with Vulture, in which Sherman-Palladino was asked to reflect on the issue, she responded "It was a botched negotiation. It really was about the fact that I was working too much. I was going to be the crazy person who was locked in my house and never came out. I heard a lot of 'Amy doesn't need a writing staff because she and [her husband] Dan Palladino write everything!' I thought, 'That's a great mentality on your part, but if you want to keep the show going for two more years, let me hire more writers.' By the way, all this shit we asked for? They had to do anyway when we left. They hired this big writing staff and a producer-director onstage. That's what bugged me the most. They wound up having to do what we asked for anyway, and I wasn't there."

The Return of Jezebel James
On August 1, 2006, The Hollywood Reporter announced that the Fox Network had ordered a pilot of a new comedy project from Sherman-Palladino. The untitled comedy, which received a pilot commitment from the network, was about two sisters who come together after years apart, when one of the sisters agrees to carry the other's baby. Sherman-Palladino wrote, executive produced and directed the pilot.

In December 2006, at the Hollywood Radio & Television Society's Hitmakers luncheon, Palladino revealed the name of her new sitcom: The Return of Jezebel James. The series debuted on March 14, 2008, on Fox starring Parker Posey. It was canceled on March 24, 2008, after only three episodes aired.

Bunheads
ABC Family picked up Sherman-Palladino's pilot, Bunheads, to series. It premiered on June 11, 2012. The series stars Sutton Foster as a Las Vegas showgirl who, after impulsively getting married, moves to the sleepy coastal town of Paradise and winds up working at her new mother-in-law's dance studio: The Paradise Dance Academy. Kelly Bishop, who portrayed Emily Gilmore in Gilmore Girls, plays the recurring role of Fanny Flowers, her mother-in-law. On July 22, 2013, five months after the end of Season 1, it was announced that Bunheads would not be renewed for a second season.

Gilmore Girls revival
In October 2015, it was reported on TVLine that Netflix struck a deal with Warner Bros. to revive the series in a limited run, consisting of four 90-minute episodes. Sherman-Palladino was in charge of the new episodes, titled Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. The four episodes are named after the seasons, and all four became available on November 25, 2016.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
In June 2016, Amazon ordered an hour-long pilot from Sherman-Palladino entitled The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, about a 1950s housewife who decides to become one of the first female stand-up comics. On August 5, 2016, it was reported that Rachel Brosnahan had been cast in the lead role as Miriam "Midge" Maisel. Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle were later cast as the parents of Brosnahan's character, Abe and Rose Weissman, with Michael Zegen joining as her husband, Joel Maisel. On March 2, 2017, Entertainment Weekly reported that Alex Borstein would be playing Susie Myerson. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was made available to watch on Amazon on March 17, 2017, as a part of Amazon Studios' spring pilot season, with viewers having the option to vote for it to be ordered to series. On April 10, 2017, it was announced that The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel had received an "unprecedented" two-season order from Amazon. The series was critically acclaimed; it won a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy at the 75th Golden Globe Awards, and a Peabody Award in "Entertainment" at the 77th Annual Peabody Awards. Sherman-Palladino won Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The success led to an overall deal at Amazon Studios.

Personal life
Sherman-Palladino is married to Daniel Palladino, who has served as co-executive producer, writer, and director on many of her shows.

Dialogue and style
Dialogue in Sherman-Palladino's work involves heavy use of pop culture references, delivered in a fast repartee, screwball-comedy style. Palladino is also very particular with her selection and use of music in her work. In an interview with OutSmart magazine, she explained how lazy and instructional its use is on most television shows:"I think music on television is just uniformly dreadful. It is mundane, it says nothing. They use it to say, 'Here's a funny moment!' ... you know? It's not an extension of the drama, it's distraction. It's like, 'I'll distract you, so you won't know how shitty the show is...like a laugh track. That, to me, is what music on television is. They score everything from beginning to end so that after a while the music is just like white noise. It's not giving it its due, its place. Everything has its place. Shows would go by, and we wouldn't put a lot of music in because to me the music was an extension of the drama, so if you just throw it in under everything, it's like throwing a washing-machine sound effect in there, it's not the point of it. It's like having two characters have a long, not very interesting discussion for no other reason except to fill up screen time."

Influences
She has cited comedians Erma Bombeck, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Elaine May, and Norman Lear as influences. She has cited Barbra Streisand, Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Carole King, and Bob Fosse as pop culture inspirations. She has also expressed her love of classic musicals such as Easter Parade (1948), Singin' in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Amy Sherman-Palladino


text:
Poll tax (Great Britain)

The Community Charge, commonly known as the poll tax, was a system of local taxation introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government whereby each taxpayer was taxed the same fixed sum (a "poll tax" or "head tax"), with the precise amount being set by each local authority. It replaced domestic rates in Scotland from 1989, prior to its introduction in England and Wales from 1990. The abolition of the poll tax was announced in 1991 and it was replaced in 1993 by the current system of the Council Tax.

Origins
The abolition of the rating system of taxes (based on the notional rental value of a house) to fund local government had been unveiled by Margaret Thatcher when she was Shadow Environment Secretary in 1974, and was included in the manifesto of the Conservative Party in the October 1974 general election. In the 1979 elections the Conservative manifesto stated that lowering income tax took priority. The Government published a green paper in 1981 under the title Alternatives to Domestic Rates. It considered a flat-rate per-capita tax as a supplement to another tax, noting that a large flat-rate tax would be seen as unfair.

The 1980s saw a period of general confrontation between central government and Labour-controlled local authorities over levels of expenditure (known as the "rate-capping rebellion"), which eventually led to the abolition of the Greater London Council and the six metropolitan county councils. The commitment to abolish the rates was replaced in the 1983 general election manifesto with a commitment to introduce the ability for central government to cap rates which it saw as excessive. This was introduced by the Rates Act 1984.

Although the rates system was supposed to have regular revaluations to minimise discrepancies, the revaluations in England and Wales had been cancelled in 1978 and 1983. The Scottish revaluation of 1985/1986 led to a great deal of criticism and gave added urgency to rates reform or replacement.

The green paper of 1986, Paying for Local Government, produced by the Department of the Environment from consultations between Lord Rothschild, William Waldegrave and Kenneth Baker, proposed the poll tax. This was a fixed tax per adult resident, although there was a reduction for poor people. This charged each person for the services provided in their community. Owing to the variations in the amount of local taxes paid and the amount of grant provided by central government to individual local authorities, there were differences in the amount charged between councils.

It become known as the "poll tax" as this is a general term referring to a tax charged at an equal amount per head (also known as a head-tax), but also as a reference to historical unpopular head-taxes, in particular the English Poll Tax of 1379.

This proposal was contained in the Conservative manifesto for the 1987 General Election. The legislation introducing the poll tax was passed in 1987, 1988, and the new tax replaced the rates in Scotland from the start of the 1989/90 financial year and in England and Wales from the start of the 1990/91 financial year. Additionally, the Uniform Business Rate, levied by local government at a rate set by central government and then apportioned between local authorities in proportion to their population, was introduced.

The tax was not implemented in Northern Ireland, which continued, as it still does, to levy the rating system, despite some unionists calling for the region to have the same taxation system as Great Britain.

Implementation
The poll tax when implemented encountered a number of administrative and enforcement difficulties. Some renters did not pay, knowing they would have moved elsewhere by the time the bills arrived. Councils of towns with highly mobile populations, such as university towns, were faced with big store rooms of unprocessed "gone-aways". The initial register, which was based on the rates register for "owned" houses, contained many irregularities from supplementary data sources such as housing benefit recipients.

A significant collection issue was the 20 per cent /100 per cent split. People in employment had to pay 100 per cent, while students and the registered unemployed paid 20 per cent. The nature of the shared house market meant that not even the landlord knew exactly who was living there; tenants were replaced and may have shared a "single" room with their partner. Therefore, the local council did not know who was living where and when.

Councils were burdened with the task of pursuing the large numbers of defaulters, many of whom were participating in organised resistance to the charge. There is also some evidence that the poll tax had a lasting effect of people not registering themselves on the electoral register to evade collection attempts, possibly because of the false impression that the words "poll tax" created. This may have affected the results of the 1992 general election, which ended in a fourth successive Conservative victory, despite most opinion polls pointing to a hung parliament or narrow Labour majority.

Opposition
The change from payment based on the worth of one's house to a fixed rate was widely criticised as being unfair, and needlessly burdensome on those less well-off. Mass protests were co-ordinated by the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, other national networks such as 3D (Don't Register, Don't Pay, Don't Collect) and by hundreds of local Anti-Poll Tax Unions (APTUs), which were not aligned to any particular political grouping. In Scotland, where the tax was implemented first, the APTUs called for mass non-payment. As the tax neared its implementation in England, protests against it began to increase. That culminated in a number of poll tax riots. The most serious of those was on 31 March 1990 – a week before the implementation of the tax – when between 70,000 and 200,000 people demonstrated against the tax. The demonstration around Trafalgar Square left 113 people injured and 340 under arrest, with over 100 police officers needing treatment for injuries. There were further conflicts and protests, but none on the scale of the Trafalgar Square riot.

As the amount of the poll tax began to rise and the inefficiency of local councils in their collection of the tax became apparent, large numbers of people refused to pay. Local councils tried to respond with enforcement measures, but they were largely ineffective given the huge numbers of non-payers. According to the BBC, up to 30 per cent of former ratepayers in some areas refused to pay.

The anti-poll-tax organisations encouraged non-payers not to register, to clog up the courts by contesting local council attempts to gain liability orders, and ultimately, not to attend court hearings arising from their non-compliance. In November 1990, South Yorkshire Police said they were planning to refuse to arrest poll tax defaulters, even when instructed to by the courts, because it would be "physically impossible for the police because of the large number of defaulters".

The opposition Labour Party, at its 1988 annual conference, decided against support for a non-payment campaign. In July 1991, Terry Fields, Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Liverpool Broadgreen, and a member of the Militant tendency, was imprisoned for sixty days for refusing to pay. At the time of Fields' jailing, Labour leader Neil Kinnock commented: "Law makers must not be law breakers."

In popular culture, the punk band The Exploited featured the song "Don't Pay The Poll Tax" in their album The Massacre, which was released on 15 April 1990.

Over 40 people collaborated on Punk Aide's 1989 compilations Axe The Tax, Can't Pay Won't Pay and Fuck The Poll Tax. Oi Polloi and Chumbawamba released and toured an EP called Smash the Poll Tax. A compilation album, A Pox Upon The Poll Tax, was also released in 1989. The Orchids released "Defy The Law" in response to the Poll Tax.

On their 22 March 1990 Top Of The Pops appearance, Orbital performed "Chime" while wearing hoodies with a crosshair and seemingly-abstract images on them. Upon closer inspection, those images read "no poll tax".

Political consequences
After the poll tax was announced, opinion polls showed the Labour opposition opening a strong lead over the Conservative government. Following the Poll Tax Riots, Conservative ministers contemplated abolition of the tax but knew that, as a flagship Thatcherite policy, its abolition would not be possible while Thatcher was still Prime Minister. Kinnock had vowed to abolish the poll tax if he won the next general election.

For this, among other reasons, Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine for the Conservative leadership in November 1990. Although she prevailed by a margin of fifty votes, she narrowly missed the threshold to avoid a second vote, and on 22 November 1990 she announced her resignation after more than a decade in office. All three of the contenders to succeed her pledged to abandon the tax.

The successful candidate, John Major, appointed Heseltine to the post of Environment Secretary, responsible for replacing the poll tax. In early 1991 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, announced a rise in Value Added Tax from 15 to 17.5 per cent to pay for a £140 reduction in the tax. The abolition of the poll tax was announced on 21 March 1991.

The Conservative government was re-elected for a fourth successive term in office at the 1992 general election, shaking off the strong challenge from the Labour Party. The Labour Party having been defeated in this way, their leader Neil Kinnock resigned.

Abolition
By the time of the 1992 general election, legislation had been passed replacing the poll tax with the Council Tax from the start of the 1993/1994 financial year. The VAT rate of 17.5 per cent remained despite an earlier policy of charging a higher poll tax.

Council Tax strongly resembled the rates system of tax that had been in effect prior to the poll tax. The main differences (at the Council Tax's inception) were that properties were placed in bands based on a range of property values, thereby capping the maximum amount, and that the tax was levied on the property's capital value rather than on its notional rental value. Households with only one occupant were also entitled to a 25 per cent discount. The only substantial change since the introduction of the Council Tax form of direct taxation is the gradual introduction of certain exemptions and discounts.

title: Poll tax (Great Britain)


text:
Talk:Tărtăria tablets

Missing section
...currently in an unidentified private collection? Wetman 22:37, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)~

They are in the collection of the museum in Cluj-Napoca.--Fata Muntilor (talk) 13:01, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Tartaria tablets
I made some research on these Tartaria tablets.Absolutely all elementary signs on them can be found among different ancient alphabets.I wonder how so few realised this.I do not understand why highly specialised schollars got near zero output on this matter.These tablets were written using : the round-one mostly phoenician-like letters e.g archaic greek. See on upper-left quarter those greek archaic letters HP/HD (H in the archaic shape of heta and Rho in the form of P or D).The other-one, squarred seems to have on it signs or letters from anatolian alphabets ( lycian/carian ?)..User:eugenrau It is showing a clear phase when writing systems were not stabilised,or not finished.See archaic greek alphabets= greek epichoric alphabets

 * Pure speculation.--Mazarin07 10:02, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

 * Hi Eugen. Newcomers often do as you did above, but Wikipedia talk pages should be for discussing changes to the article or comments intended to affect the content of the article directly, not merely pertaining to the subject matter (for example, on Talk:Cigarette, I shouldn't just talk about cigarettes, but preferably relate it to the article Cigarette directly). Alexander 007 07:18, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
 * In fact, your post can be interpreted as spam (by calling it spam, I do not pass judgment on its merits, merely implying that the only purpose of your post seems to be to direct people to your blogs and your research), and I was about to remove it, but I did not want to be rude. Alexander 007 07:19, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Spam is too harsh a word, I dont think it was deliberate advertisement, more along the lines of original research. HuronKing Mazarin 07: Take a look on Archaic Greek and Anatolian alphabets and after this respond again to me.User:eugenrau 11:08, 08 October 08 2012

Mazarin's decipherment
These are not writings!

 * 1) We did decide to go on hunting. (upper left)
 * 2) We followed the foot-marks in the forest. (Or: five of us followed the foot-marks) (upper right)
 * 3) We managed to kill the (two?) prey animals, with the bow (using two arrows?)(lower left)
 * 4) Back at home we cooked the meat in a cauldron (see the smoke and/or steam raising to the sky), while dancing around. Wow! (lower right)

The other Tartaria tablets have similar subjects: hunting, prey animals, means of hunting (bow, ambush), tree/forest, means of preparing the meat (skinning knives etc.), and the feast that follows (cauldron, dance). All is like an ancient cartoon! You just need to add the speech balloons.--Mazarin07 09:56, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

 * ...and exactly how this isn't pure speculation too? Giuseppe86 (talk) 12:59, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I admit that my theory is just another speculation...:-)--Mazarin07 (talk) 23:41, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I think that Mazarin07 meant it as a joke, but really his interpretation is probably just as good as anyone elses. --Fata Muntilor (talk) 13:06, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

User : eugenrau. Of course is a joke;this kind of reasoning and reading could be aplied to that squarred tablet (on wich is a vegetal motiv and kind of goat). In any case not to that round one wich has on it signs wich seems to be true letters.Please compare some of the signs on it with those found on archaic greek alphabets. Shame on you Mazarin, those signs wich you made fool of, and interpreted as
 * "1.We did decide to go on hunting." (upper left) are in fact archaic greek leters: 1.Heta/eta/open heta ...it is about old h with 3 close to horizontal bars,initialy pronounced h,H(eta) later in time E, E(ta) and 2.P (rho) !!
 * Heta-rho was used in that form of archaic h/heta and P(rho) e.g. mainly for writing HP= HP(A)=Hera ...but not only : "HP(AKLES)"
 * http://www.antalyaonline.net/futhark/AVRASYA_dosyalar/image006.gif or http://www.webtopos.gr/archives/languages/greek/alphabet/chart_gre_anc_alphabets_cities_1369x1301_tr.gif — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenrau (talk • contribs) 16:53, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

So many questions
Radiocarbon dating - is it applicable to clay? Where are the tablets now? --Ghirla-трёп- 04:13, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
 * No, it isn't. Radiocarbon dating may only be applied to organic artifacts. The original Tartaria tablets were of dried, unbaked clay. The Romanian scientists baked them in an oven, to avoid their decay, but any subsequent dating by thermoluminescence (which is the usual method for the age determnation of ceramic artifacts) became impossible.--Mazarin07 (talk) 23:38, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

 * The radio-carbon dating was performed not on the tablets themselves but on the bones with which they were found and with which they are presumed to have been buried. The article's (currently) second external link is to a report dated 2004 of an investigation of the bones, tablets etc that dates the bones to a calibrated r-c span of 5370-5140BC. Incidentally, that report also corrects several of the original excavator's incorrect assumptions which the article currently still contains. For example, the bones were not burnt, and are of an elderly female, not a male. I leave it to someone with more wiki-fu to study the report and update the article. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 13:37, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

User: eugenrau. The tablets are containing only few/small amounts of carbon, so an accurate radiocarbon dating was not possible in the past with those tiny amounts.But now is impossible mainly because the tablets were baked in a furnace and as a result of elevatet temperature the carbon was degradated and this is the final reason for wich never will possible a direct radiocarbon dating.My sincere opinion regarding the age of the tablets : as in forensic sciences also in archeology one cannot atribute the age of an object to other object even when both were found close one of each-other.Especially when we have such circumstances related tothe very moment of finding covered with fogg. Think to a possibility that some items could fall from an upper earth layer.Eugenrau (talk) 20:48, 4 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenrau (talk • contribs) 17:11, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Controversies
Just because someone writes something and publishes it, doesn't make it so. There are a lot of controveries surrounding the research of Vlassa. Future excavations at some of his sites have shown stragraphies completely different from what he reported. As well, he didn't keep (or didn't make public) his excavation notes. Regarding the tablets, it's not even known if they in fact came from Tartaria. They were only documented years after the excavation, and then after being fired (supposedly for preservation). The technician who fired them wasn't even sure which excavation box they came from. Why was nothing similar found in the Vinca layers during later excavations at Tartaria? Without documentation, we have no way of knowing which layer they came from (or even if they were in fact found at Tartaria). During Vlassa's era, people could publish anything as long as it wasn't contradictory to Party doctrine and especially if it promoted Romania's image. --Fata Muntilor (talk) 13:01, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Regarding Merlini's publications... again, just because he's published a lot about the topic doesn't make his theories any more correct than other people's. He rarely published in refereed journals and often just repeats himself and cites his own publications as references.--Fata Muntilor (talk) 13:01, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

User: eugenrau You`re damn right, Fata Muntilor ! But with a corection regarding Mr. M. Merlini work and articles. My opinion is like this:1. He has a mount/big amount of valuable work related to Danubian Writing phenomenom,with sharp,detailed analises, (as any before him), studied and gathered fresh and scientific perspectives regarding the Danubian Proto-Writing (if we not have at the final stage tru-writing.2. He is not sustaining directly with sound arguments and not analysed the writing proper (analisys of those signs)on that round Tartaria tablet.At least not as me wich I was comparing every signg on round Tartaria tablet with many other signs wich existed in the world (from sumerian ones to European eg. greek).Remember that writing could exist despite, out of carring sounds or words proper ! In respect of this aspect, he knows better as many scientists,and is aware of the complexity of ancient or not using of signs (semiotic science).His scientific level on this matters is not that of a student, but that of a true, high-level scientist. Eugenrau (talk) 20:54, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
 * "Nicolae Vlassa, an archaeologist at the Cluj Museum, unearthed three inscribed but unbaked clay tablets, together with 26 clay and stone figurines and a shell bracelet,...".

No, it is not him who "unearthed" the artifacts, but some students and workers. he was not present at the very spot in the very moment of discovery. He was told about a full day later.After that,(moment of discovery) some hours or more exactly one day Vlassa was not been found and any contact was made. Eugenrau (talk) 20:54, 4 June 2011 (UTC) Eugenrau (talk) 20:51, 4 June 2011 (UTC)Eugenrau (talk) 20:50, 4 June 2011 (UTC)Eugenrau (talk) 20:49, 4 June 2011 (UTC) Eugenrau (talk) 20:47, 4 June 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenrau (talk • contribs) 20:39, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

 * [Inserted leading colons to repair layout of preceding post. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195~] 90.201.110.45 (talk) 14:09, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Tartaria site
I wonder if a page should be made also for the Tartaria site itself. I see that there is a page for the village of Tartaria (from which te site gets it's name). The site itself has several cultural phases. Vinca, Petresti and Cotofeni (if i remember correctly). There are also connections between this site and other sites in the area, such as Turdas (aka Tordos) a little ways down the Mures river, Piatra Tomii across the river where likely they mined flint from, Vintu-de-Jos also nearby along the Mures river with contemporary finds. --Fata Muntilor (talk) 13:12, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

User: eugenrau I am not sure at all to wich those described phases are pertaining each discovered item. cause was a pile of them, in total some 28 artefacts. My opinion is like that (and advancing with this ocasion): Not all artefacts partaining to a single/same age, or culture phase. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenrau (talk • contribs) 17:44, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Today's edits
Sorry but I've removed quite a bit of them as unsourced. In one case the person mentioned seems to have no qualifications in the field and the only source I could find was his blog. This article needs good academic sources. I'll add, not directly related to today's edits, that I'm dubious about Merlini. I haven't removed the bit about the Cyclades and origin yet as I hope to be able to rewrite this with a source (and simplify the section heading). Sorry about this - oh hell, that's you isn't it! You obviously have a keen interest in this and I'm glad you're participating, no insult meant,. I've also tried to improve the English (of course, I couldn't write in your language to save my life, so no disrespect meant). Dougweller (talk) 05:36, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

File:Tartaria round tablet.True archaic greek letters eta/heta-Rho on upper-left quadrant !
That twoo signs situate on upper/left quadrant of the round Tartaria tablet are TRUE letters, as a result we have there TRUE WRITING. See in attic pot/sherd and other places the sequence/monogram/mason mark "eta/heta-rho".Other noticed on Sevilla ancient phoenician inscription the same sequence h-r, their opinion beeing that hr is for hu/ru (hr strt huru ashtoreth huru Astarte, syro/phoenician astarte)

CELE 2 SEMNE ALE CADRANULUI SITUAT ÎN STG. SUS PE TABLITA ROTUNDA DE LA TARTARIA SANT LITERE MARII SAVANTI AI LUMII INCA SE INTREABA DACA PE TABLITA AVEM PROTO SCRIERE AU IDEOGRAME AU SCRIERE EVENTUAL see the sign/archaic greek letter eta,heta vezi semnul H,He "eta-heta-e-he-h cu 3 bare-heta ala scala" http://upload.wikime..._Eta_08.svg.png http://www.google.ro...29,r:6,s:0,i:85 see sign D used in archaic greek/epichoric greek writing as for "R" vezi semnul D folosit initial ba pentru d ba pentru R http://upload.wikime...t_Varianten.png http://www.codex99.c.../greek_sign.gif

Great mistake
Right at the the very begining or in the begining resume, as you wish, right not far under the title "Tartaria tablets" there is stated that "the bones are of a male human" wich is entirely wrong. The bones, as were analysed by an anthropologist at the Cluj History Museum under the direction of Mr. Marco Merlini was concluded that the bones were of a female, average 1,50 m height, 50 y.o. and suffering of some chronic disease wich directly afected her bones, at least or especially the bones of one leg wich is/was shorter. Please make urgently the necessary corection. [eugenrau/23.03.2013/18.27] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenrau (talk • contribs) 15:31, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Location
The article does not tell us where these tablets are - are they in a museum? Are they on pubic display? Who now owns them? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:21, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Carbon-datable: yes or no?
"The dating of the tablets is difficult as they cannot be carbon dated" states the lead.

But further on this WP article claims that they WERE indeed carbon-dated AFTER being fired. Which one is true? If there is a debate, which are the arguments?

Where does the indicated age (c. 5300 BC) actually come from, and how reliable is it? If no C14-dating and no stratigraphy, isn't it just wishful thinking? Arminden (talk) 10:40, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Carbon-dating of clay is usually very hard, as carbon-dating needs (as the name says) carbon. It is certainly impossible after firing (which will burn most of the carbon, while contaminating it with new carbon). The article states there were carbon-dates on other objects. But the article states that the stratigraphy of the find is unclear, and the leading scientist had never been willing to answer questions about it. Al things considering it has too many similarities to the very disputed Phaistos Disc to take it very seriously. Also the step of firing it after the find seem to me last thing you want to do to an important object you want to study (I've never heard of anything similar to it!) and seems to me something you would only do to destroy any evidence of it's origin. So probably best to lay these tables aside in the study of this fascinating proto-script. --Codiv (talk) 15:02, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Following text needing better references
I'm moving the this text here for the time being. Originally it was in the section "Dating" but (if from valid sources) should be moved to "Purpose and meaning" or "Context". However, I cannot find and verify the references specified:

The symbols are Sumerian pictograms (not cuneiform signs). A. Falkenstein )1965), J. Harmatta (1966, 1973), A. Záhonyi (2011, 2018))

Astronomical approach

As a celestial map we can see constellations on the Tartarian disk (M. Merlini 2004; 2008), or rather the half of the starry sky, from Auriga to Archer/Aquila (A. Záhonyi 2018).

With the help of precession the estimated time of manufacturing (of the Tartaria findings) is 4500 B. C. (M. Merlini: Milady Tartaria and the riddle of dating Tartaria tablets. Dacia Magazine 14 (2004; 2008), T. Rumi: Two circles. Imagent, Budapest (2007), A. Záhonyi (2011, 2018)).

The Sumerian reading of the disk signs: PA(.BIL) (Sagittarius), MUSH (Hydra), HUN(.GA) (Aries). (A. Záhonyi (2011, 2018))

The symbolic meeting point of the Zodiac and the Milky Way can be observed on the third (rectangular) tablet. (A. Záhonyi (2011, 2018))

- DNewhall (talk) 00:50, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Dispilio tablet
This article links to Dispilio tablet. That article seems to have serious problems regarding sourcing and notability. Though not a formal AfD (yet), I have here to delete that aricle. Please chime in there if you have an opinion (or help improve the article)! Nø (talk) 12:11, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Tărtăria tablets