Spokane Native Helped Crash Roswell’s Party

Scorched UFO buffs call him a real Man in Black.

To spaced-out believers, Richard Weaver is a gatekeeper for the U.S. government’s conspiracy to hush up the fact that a saucer full of cosmic commuters once took a tumble out among the New Mexico tumbleweeds.

But the 50-year-old Spokane native says he got cheated if his critics are correct.

“I never got the watch or the cool sunglasses,” complains Weaver, referring to “Men in Black” - last year’s science-fiction blockbuster about a clandestine agency that keeps tabs on interstellar travelers.

Now retired from the Air Force, Weaver was a colonel assigned to the Office of Special Investigations when he co-wrote the 1994 Air Force study that debunked the famed “Roswell Incident.”

The Virginia resident was in Spokane this week visiting family members. A Shadle Park High and Washington State University grad, Weaver took an afternoon off to talk about his “Roswell Report - Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.”

As thick as the city’s phone book, the document explores the July 1947 recovery of pieces of a strange “flying disk” on a ranch near Roswell, N.M. “We literally tried to do our best,” he says. “It was never me against the UFO people.”

What was found in the desert a half-century ago was totally terrestrial, the report concludes. The flimsy wreckage came from an experimental high-altitude balloon deployed to eavesdrop on Russian nuclear tests.

Such an earthly explanation predictably sent the UFO community into orbit.

“The Air Force is lying through its teeth,” groused renowned UFO proponent Stanton Friedman, when asked in a 1996 interview about the “Roswell Report.” “… Boy did the Air Force supply the fiction.”

The sandy-haired Weaver is amused by the ruckus that put him in the national media spotlight.

“I got anonymous telephone calls. I got hate faxes from people questioning my sanity and even my parentage. I never received a direct ‘I will kill you,’ but there were a lot of veiled threats,” he says.

“Some were in German, French and Russian. I couldn’t read them, but SOB sort of looks the same in any language.”

Weaver insists, however, that he never wanted his name linked to little green men. “I’d like to be remembered for putting killers and rapists in jail. Instead, I’ll be the guy who did the study on all this goofy UFO stuff.”

For much of his 28 years in the Air Force, Weaver probed crimes and helped keep the lid on real secrets like the Stealth and B-2 bombers.

Then, in 1994, he was given the job of focusing his sleuthing skills on Roswell. That came after U.S. Congressman Steven Schiff, R-New Mexico, filed a request for information regarding the alleged saucer crash.

Schiff got more than he bargained for. Weaver led a staff of crack researchers who spent eight months investigating the case.

You don’t have to be Rocketman to see the Roswell Incident for the load of horse twaddle it is.

Back in 1947, this was only a two-day news story that ended when the sticks and foil found were ruled to have come from a weather balloon. Space aliens didn’t even enter the picture until decades later, when kooks like Friedman and others started spouting off and selling books.

Now Roswell’s space fantasy has evolved into its main industry. The small city has three alien museums. The saucer crash is actively promoted through the Chamber of Commerce.

Why? Because big money is to be made.

Last summer’s 50th anniversary party was a galactic blowout that packed Roswell with a horde of costumed wackos. It was, says Weaver, “a cross between Woodstock and a meeting for the insane.”

There probably is a conspiracy afoot. It is with UFO hucksters who can’t afford to let truth get in the way of such a lucrative scam.

“This is logic vs. emotion,” says the government’s Man in Black. “Roswell has become like Paul Bunyan. It’s a myth that people believe.”

, DataTimes