Robert v. the flying saucers

摘要

ON 12 FEBRUARY MAT IRVINE, model-making wizard and BIS Fellow, very gamely stepped into the breach when unexpected circumstances left us at a loss, to give us his talk on the strange coincidence of location between Dr Robert Goddard and the infamous "Roswell Incident", with his scale models of Goddard's "launch control" and of the fanciful view of the crash of an imagined alien spacecraft. Mat first spoke of his holiday in the United States of America, and of his fascination with pioneering rocketeer Dr Robert Hutchings Goddard. He showed us the monument on the site of Goddard's first launch at Auburn, Massachusetts, at Pakachoag Hill, now the site of a golf course. The rocket landed in a cabbage patch belonging to Goddard's Aunt Effie! At one end of the town in the Roswell Art Museum can be found a recreation of Goddard workshop, outside of which there is a statue of Goddard at his launch control panel. At the other end of this municipality is the UFO Museum, (a converted cinema, bigger than the Arts Centre!), dealing with the "Roswell Incident", in which a "flying disc" is alleged to have crashed in the desert, in curious proximity to the US Army Air Corps base at Roswell.