In 1961, the New Hampshire couple lost two hours of their lives while driving down a road beneath a great and powerful light. They later determined aliens had taken them aboard. Their tale became a made-for-TV movie and the model for every "X-Files" season finale since.
As for aliens in Roswell? Don't believe it, Pflock says.
But then there are those 1950 photographs of a spaceship over Oregon. They're hard to dispute, he notes.
Unlike Roswell.
And there's Pflock's own boyhood experience, heading home to San Jose, Calif., with his dad and some friends after a fishing trip. A weird light appeared above them. They stopped the car. It changed from white to blue to red. It bobbed. It grew brighter. It shot straight up. And then it vanished.
Nothing like that happened in Roswell, he says. But that doesn't mean there aren't UFOs.
Pflock debunks New Mexico's favorite aliens in a new book, "Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will To Believe."
On the first of the book's 330 pages, the Placitas resident tells readers how much he wanted to believe that whatever crashed near Roswell in 1947 had ties to outer space, flying saucers and alien autopsies. He even pushed for a federal investigation into it.
But by 1994, he'd seen enough evidence to conclude, reluctantly, that it was just an atmospheric monitoring device hoisted by balloons.
About that time, however, the town of Roswell had discovered it could turn little green men into gold. A museum was built, with Pflock listed as one of its founding members.
The retired CIA agent and longtime "ufologist" hoped it would become a place of serious study into the mysteries of the galaxies. Four years ago, when he saw it had become a place of glow-in-the-dark kitsch, he quietly asked that his name be removed from the founders' plaque.
The museum promptly sent him the brass name tag - "broken in half," Pflock says.
Roswell takes itself that seriously.
A lot of people take Roswell that seriously. They want to believe in aliens as much as others believe in the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle.
"There's a very strong desire to believe that we are not alone," Pflock says. "In this very secular age, it's somewhat a substitute for traditional religion: There are not only beings out there who are intelligent, but they are superior to us. They can get from there to here, and they care enough about us to get here.
"It satisfies a strong human desire to be important in the scheme of things."
Throw in a government conspiracy, and you've got the ingredients of the Roswell Incident. Pflock has already heard that from the critics who contend his book is little more than a CIA plot from a former CIA man.
But their evidence looks less like a scientific inquiry and more like the children's Telephone Game - hearsay upon hearsay, decade after decade.
"The advocates of the crashed-saucer tale," he writes, "wittingly or not, simply shovel everything that seems to support their views into the box labeled `Evidence' and say, `See? Look at all this stuff. We must be right.' Never mind the contradictions. . . . Never mind the blatant absurdities."
In an interview at his home - tidy, well-appointed, hardly a nut's house - Pflock dismisses the subject of his book with words that fans of the subject would rather not hear.
"Roswell has become the Yeti of ufology. It has precluded interest on the part of people who might be able to get significant answers, and it has diverted the attention of people who do take the subject seriously."
Karl Pflock truly believes in UFOs. But, he says, "If Roswell went away tomorrow, I would be delighted."
Pflock's New Book Debunks Roswell Event
Just when Karl Pflock goes and ruins all the fun of Roswell's amazing alien incident, he brings up Betty and Barney Hill - "the only credible alien abduction."
[Original headline: For UFO writer, the Roswell Incident belongs in the round file]
Albuquerque Tribune / NM | Kate Nelson - Aug 2 2001
