A paper that puts Roswell and other UFO things in perspective

Dead on Arrival?
The Development of the Aerospace Concept, 1944–58
by STEPHEN M. ROTHSTEIN, MAJOR, USAF
School of Advanced Airpower Studies

This paper, which is archived at our (private) UFO web-site, contains the military milieu for the period when flying saucers were prominent and the Roswell incident had taken place.

These excerpts show the internecine conflict between the U.S. Army, The U.S. Navy, and the new U.S. Air Force, and why I think the U.S. Navy is the ultimate source for UFO information, not the U.S. Air Force.

The paper also makes clear that if a extraterrestrial craft had crashed and was recovered near Roswell, the event didn't impact the United States military in an overt, significant way.

The paper also allows for a possible non-extraterrestrial accident that might account for the Roswell incident.

And the last excerpt here could give a clue as to why James Forrestal was murdered....

On 20 November 1943, von Kármán forwarded the report to the War Department.4 For reasons unclear, the Air Force backed away from the project. ORD, however, did not; and in January 1944, they contracted von Kármán’s team to begin research in White Sands, New Mexico. By the year’s end, ORDCIT had fired an eight-foot, 500-pound missile 11 miles down range and was be-ginning to explore the effect of attaching lifting devices to improve its range and guidance characteristics. 

Interestingly, all of these events—as well as the emergence of the aerospace concept itself—took place prior to the Air Force gaining its independence in July 1947. Furthermore, these events established virtually every strand of horizontal and internal issues that will come to challenge the aerospace concept throughout the rest of this study. Consequently, understanding the period of 1944–47 is critical.

The Navy’s role was to control the high seas. Naval leadership—attuned to the emerging possibilities of rocketry to extend the reach of their fleets, as well as the Army’s organizational maneuvering with the Germans and Project Hermes—decided to enter the missile melee.

Beginning roughly in July 1947, the aerospace concept fell upon hard times, stagnating—and at times perhaps even receding—for the better part of the next six years.

If in the summer of 1947 the aerospace concept appeared to be taking hold within the Air Force, encouraged by Air Force leaders clearly thinking about the prospect of an operational domain that naturally extended beyond the atmosphere, within three years the concept had all but died.

“Secretary Forrestal Announces Results of Key West Agreements, 26 March 1948” (n.d., located in Air University Library, Maxwell AFB, Ala.), 9, 12. The resulting potential ambiguity between the Air Force and the Navy over which service owned the strategic at-tack role was clarified in a subsequent amendment to the Key West Agreement that appeared three months after it was signed. On 1 July 1948, Secretary Forrestal issued a memorandum for record that said “the Navy’s requirement for . . . forces . . . would not be the basis for the development of a strategic air force. On the other hand, the memorandum also included the statement that ‘although strategic air warfare was assigned to the Air Force as a primary function, it was agreed that the Navy should not be denied the air necessary to accomplish its mission.’” Quoted from “Chronology of Changes in Key West Agreements, April 1948–January 1958,” prepared by the Historical Section, Joint Chiefs of Staff on 7 February 1958...

RR