DATE: Thursday, June 26, 1997               TAG: 9706260391

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   49 lines

DUMMIES? ALIENS? OR IS SOMETHING IN THE AIR?

Sometimes, reading the morning paper with the dog - which takes about an hour, cover to cover, inasmuch as he doesn't want to skip a word - I get the feeling the world is going at such a crazy tilt we would be just as well to go around uninformed.

Take the Air Force's ``explanation'' that the bodies witnesses reported being removed from debris in the New Mexico desert in July 1947 were life-size dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments.

To prove that the dummies weren't aliens, or, to look at it another way, that the aliens were nothing but dummies, an Air Force captain showed black-and-white footage of films and photos including a shot of a fully outfitted dummy called ``Sierra Sam.''

Sometimes you wonder what the Air Force is up to.

Its long-delayed unveiling of pictures of dummies seems to border on partaking of a cock-eyed quality as the stories of people who report seeing big-headed little beings emerging from out-sized Frisbees.

Is there something in the desert air out there that fosters shimmering mental mirages of a sort, that encourages weird sightings and mirthful behavior among the investigators as well as the local folk.

If there was anything that would raise suspicions among the highly susceptible citizens around Roswell, it was to give one of the dummies a name.

``Aha!'' the Roswellians say, ``they tell us that the bodies we saw, or heard about, aren't real - and then they turn around and give the dummy a name.''

Doesn't the Air Force understand that when you name a thing you personalize it and give it an identity and it takes on something of an air of reality?

If they were obliged to pin a name on it, they should have picked one that was faintly derisive, say, Sierra Sue, to show it was in fun.

It was brash, also, to depict Sierra Sam standing upright with his arms outstretched over the shoulders of two officers. That is the type of picture that surfaces in supermarket tabloids.

The majority of the dummies - which had skeletons of aluminum or steel, skin of latex or plastic, cast-aluminum skulls and instruments in their torsos and heads - landed outside military bases in eastern New Mexico, near Roswell, the captain said.

Can you imagine what would have happened if, by some strange coincidence generally found only in science fiction films, real aliens had landed in the vicinity of the spot with dummies' mechanical parts scattered about?

They would have gotten right back into their spacecraft and gone home.

And I wouldn't blame 'em.

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