“Roswell was nothing. Roswell is nothing even now. It never has had any value. It’s just a tourist attraction,” said UFO researcher Norio Hayakawa. “Nothing went on in Roswell. The only thing that Roswell became was monetary benefit, and they make a lot of money every year around this time of year.”
Hayakawa was speaking to about a dozen attendees during his presentation at the North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center on Friday. The presentation, titled “Mystery of the UFO Phenomenon,” is part of a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the 1947 sightings by pilot Kenneth Arnold that brought the term flying saucers into the world’s consciousness.
The alleged 1947 UFO crash at Roswell only became popular because of Arnold’s sightings that same year, Hayakawa explained. A rancher in Corona who saw pieces of debris on the ground thought that maybe, after hearing of Arnold’s sightings, he too had seen a flying saucer. After the military said the debris was nothing more than pieces of a weather balloon that crashed to the ground, most people in the area forgot about the whole ordeal.
“Nobody in Roswell in 1947 talked about aliens. Nobody talked about an alien invasion. Nobody,” Hayakawa said. It wasn’t until 30 years later when the book “The Roswell Incident” came out that the small New Mexico town became world renowned for UFOs. According to Hayakawa, many people benefited from the story, including the first director of Roswell’s UFO Museum, Glenn Dennis, who made several claims in the book.
What really happened at Roswell, Hayakawa says, is the military was testing a weather balloon that could detect nuclear explosions using high-powered, top-secret sensor technology. The UFO conspiracy helped to keep the military experiments and technology secret from the public and American adversaries, so the government used the alien tale as a cover-up, as the story goes.
More fascinating than Roswell are the stories of a secret alien base, mysterious lights, and cattle mutilations in and around Dulce, New Mexico. Hayakawa spent several years researching the phenomenon at the Jicarilla Apache reservation in northern New Mexico, but his findings are inconclusive. One theory is that cattle in the area became sick after radiation leaked from the ground after an underground nuclear test took place in the area.
About 10 years after the Dec. 10, 1967, underground nuclear explosion, called Project Gasbuggy, cattle around the Dulce area started getting sick from radiation poisoning. To prevent ranchers from knowing what was happening to their cattle, the theory goes, military helicopters were sent in to tag, move and prod the cows, leaving them mutilated in a mysterious fashion no one understood. According to the theory, the military was trying to figure out what was making the cows sick, and perhaps looking for a cure and killing them off on purpose, and in the process leaving their mutilated corpses for ranchers to find without any explanation.
As for the mysterious lights and underground alien base, Hayakawa implies they are related to the military activity in the area and delicately interwoven tales connecting the Apache belief that their ancestors came from beneath the earth to the alleged alien base. “One thing sure that I can say is that there is a presence of some powerful physical phenomena going on in that whole area,” Hayakawa said. “The reason is because of the rich, cultural and spiritual traditions of the, not only Jicarilla Apache folks, but many people like the Hopi people in Arizona, they also have this rich cultural tradition that their ancestors actually came from underground.
“And so, this may be the reason the Air Force was interested in the Dulce area, because it was a good, convenient area to do experiments on psychological warfare and staging what appeared to be some kind of alien thing,” Hayakawa continued. “So that’s just my perspective, but I say that things like that go on even right now.”
Despite Hayakawa’s explanations of the government’s use of alien visitations to cover up top-secret experiments, he doesn’t think the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors too far-fetched. He says there is no real hard evidence to prove extraterrestrial biological entities have visited Earth. “Now does that mean that there are no aliens?” Hayakawa asks. “I can’t say that because I’m convinced that in this humongous universe there are, and that’s my personal opinion.
“There are entities that are both paraphysical and sentient that exist in this cosmos or even exist in a parallel dimension that coexist with us,” Hayakawa continues. “And these entities occasionally manifest themselves to select folks for some reason or other. And this is the reason why some people claim to have seen aliens or UFOs, and that may be true because we don’t know what those people saw.”
Hayakawa says both his parents saw something in the sky that can’t be explained and that others have confessed to him about seeing unexplained phenomenon in the skies above Albuquerque. “Who are we to debunk anybody’s experience that have seen a humongous triangular object just slowly flying over Albuquerque that was so large that it was five or six times as large as a football field? And I’ve heard that testimony many times,” Hayakawa said.
He said just two weeks ago someone confessed to him they saw just such in object in the sky over the Duke City. “So, who are we to debunk her claim? Let’s have an open mind,” Hayakawa said, concluding his presentation for the night.
After the event, attendees exchanged stories and business cards, including Sara and Ed Sather of the Duke City Paranormal Research Society. Sara and Ed are organizing an event at the Shaffer Hotel in Mountainair, which many claim to be haunted. Also present was Stephen Bradford, co-director of Weekenders Media. Bradford is helping to make a documentary on Hayakawa and his research into the UFO phenomenon. More information on their projects is forthcoming.
