| I write this column at great risk to my personal safety. Five weeks ago the
entire weekly Craccum output was destroyed by a suspicious fire,
in what has since been rumoured to be an intricate military conspiracy
attempting to scare me into silence. Two weeks later, this fire was followed
by a second, involving the destruction of my flat and the burning of my
possessions. I evidence this fire with documentation from the New Zealand
Fire Service, which unfortunately omits a “supposed cause”, but shows
undeniably that a fire did in fact occur on that day. Are these fires
purely coincidental? Or are they a deliberate military attempt to frighten
me, perhaps as part of a global military conspiracy to suppress the public
knowledge of extra-terrestrial life on this planet?
According to the supporters of this conspiracy theory, its roots go back more than 50 years to the UFO crash in Roswell in 1947. There are many variations of this theory, but they generally involve some form of treaty between some [mentally ill] aliens and the government, whereby the government is allowed to stay in power in exchange for allowing the [mentally ill] aliens to abduct humans and mutilate cattle for various unknown experimental purposes [relating to their mental illness]. This appears to be a highly confidential arrangement, as the government will take any action necessary to secure the confidentiality of the aliens’ mental illness. As part of this confidentiality, the aliens are allowed to secretly fly into a top secret military base in the Nevada Desert called Dreamland, provided that we are allowed to experiment on them and attempt to duplicate their aircraft. These reverse-engineering activities have led to amazing technological developments such as the Stealth bomber and velcro footware. But as a healthy scepticism may inform you, an unquestioned belief in this theory would clearly be naïve, gullible and stupid. History records 1947 not only as the year of the Roswell Incident and the first wave of modern UFO sightings, but also as the beginning of the Cold War and the year of the first supersonic aircraft flight. It was a time when every experimental aircraft being flown was a UFO sighting, and this was the perfect cover story for military officials wanting to maintain the secrecy of their most advanced secret weapons. It is unanimously agreed that something did crash in Roswell in 1947, but maybe it wasn’t an alien craft, and instead maybe it was a giant, high-flying balloon used to detect Soviet nuclear explosions. And although a military involvement in my flat fire is conceivable,
and it is possible that the military could have abducted one of my flatmates,
returning them with posthypnotic suggestions to leave a piece of clothing
in unnecessary proximity to a photon-emitting light bulb; the scientific
precept of Occam’s razor and the infallibility of human memory would argue
against the possibility of military intervention.
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