UFO HUNTERS - The UFO Before Roswell

History Channel - Original Air Date: January 30, 2008

This is the first of the two UFO Hunter shows (another one, produced by the Ghost Hunters' producer premiers on SciFi soon). The publishers of UFO Magazine make up the investigative team for this show. A "new lead" (though what the lead is or how they got it isn't explained) takes the team to Puget Sound in search of "slag" dumped from a UFO in 1947, a couple of weeks before Roswell. Witnesses claim that the falling slag damaged a boat, killed a dog, and broke a boy's arm. Team members go diving and prospecting for the slag (after 60 years). There was also a plane explosion 40 days after the reported incident, which UFOlogists are trying to connect to the UFO sighting. With all the eyewitnesses to this supposed incident dead, investigating this report seems even more of a stretch than most UFO stories. It struck me very quickly that it would have been useful to have a real geologist on the team, to tell UFO slag from unusual rocks. They could also use a good skeptic, as everyone involved seems like a true believer. And all their speculation seems more like fiction than like science. At the end of the first episode, the leader of the group proclaims that 90% of all UFO reports are bunk. Lets hope that when the crew encounters one of those cases, they're brave enough to proclaim it. On this case, they weren't. Instead, they just added to the mythology that makes actual scientific investigation of UFOs so difficult.