Today, I am thankful for the awe, wonder, and delight of an unsolved mystery.
Growing up in the Palisades in New Jersey in the 1970s, I still can remember the time I visited the newly built Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands in 1977. For years, I would stare out of my father’s Rambler as we drove down the New Jersey Turnpike to witness a pile of steel rise into the sky. After the stadium was finally opened in 1976, my father took my brother and me to go see a football game into the new stadium. No, it was not the New York Giants, but rather the New York Cosmos. As I sat in the concrete and steel structure, I marveled to see some of the greatest athletes of the time – Pele, Giorgio Chinaglia, Shep Messing, and Franz Beckenbauer – play a regular season game in the National American Soccer League (NASL). So, you can only imagine my horror, a few years later when rumors began circulating that the missing leader of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa, was buried in the cement in one of the end zones of the massive edifice. Now that a new arena, Metlife Stadium, has been erected at the same site of the former Giants Stadium, I guess we’ll never know if the mystery is true.
Throughout time, certain unsolved mysteries have captivated humans, leaving many of us wondering for hours as to the answers to these perplexing matters. These baffling and confusing queries have troubled humans since almost the beginning of time. Is there really a magical land of Atlantis buried somewhere under the ocean, as the Greek philosopher Plato claimed to be? What exactly happened to the settlers of Roanoke in 1590, after their governor sailed to England to procure more supplies for the colony’s survival? Who was the real Jack the Ripper that terrorized the streets of London way back in 1888? Did Lee Harvey Oswald, perched high on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, really work alone that fateful day in November 1963 when he assassinated President John F. Kennedy? Is there really some mystical triangular section in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Bermuda that devours helpless planes and ships?
And, then, there are those mysteries that some believe have been solved, while others still debate the veracity of the explanation. On this day (July 8) in 1947, a public information officer, named Lt. Walter Haut, who was situated on the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico, issued a press release chronicling the events that transpired the days before. After a terrible thunderstorm a few days prior, the army had recovered unusual debris from the property of a local rancher. Haut noted that the detritus that had fallen from the sky was a ‘flying saucer.’ The next day, Air Force General Roger Ramey issued a statement correcting the account, noting that the refuse was the remnants of a weather balloon and other high-tech equipment from a previously undisclosed governmental program, Project Mogul. As no photographic evidence of the wreckage exists (at least to our public knowledge), many skeptics began questioning the findings, especially as numerous personal accounts from witnesses started to materialize, ultimately contradicting the Air Force statement.
The legend of the Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, was born that day. To this day, many continue to press that what happened in Roswell was a cover-up in the highest echelons of our government, even claiming that the US military is in possession of the actual bodies of aliens from the crash site. Personal sightings of UFO, including the occasional photograph and video, crop up on occasion, raising the theory that humans are not alone in the universe. This past weekend, the 25th anniversary of the UFO Festival was to be held at the site of the famous crash in an effort to refuel this notion.
Is there really such a thing as a UFO? I have no clue, nor will I dare to guess on social media. However, I must admit that I find it a bit gratifying to know that as a species, we have not solved every dilemma. It’s exactly this reason, that whenever I drive by Metlife Stadium on the New Jersey Turnpike, I silently say to myself:
Rest in peace, Jimmy.
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