The Science of Stephen King

At least fifty women working in the watch factories died from radium poisoning. Once the radium invaded their bodies, there was no cure.

The true horror was that the corporation came to have the knowledge that these young women were dying, yet they did not reveal the truth, allowing more women to suffer. The radium that they had been breathing in, even rubbing on their hair and teeth, made them develop anemia, holes in their bones, and necrosis of their jaw and other body parts. This necrosis deformed their body, making them unable to walk, work, or speak.

The poisoning in the air thanks to the alien spacecraft in The Tommyknockers brings a similar vibe. It comes from a particular object, has no smell or clue that it is harming those nearby, yet has devastating effects. There is, of course, a paranormal element of telepathy, which is shared between those poisoned. This led us to question whether objects have been found on Earth that have been deemed alien or unidentifiable?

We found that there are objects known as extraterrestrial materials. These refer to objects derived from space that are now on Earth, including meteorites, as well as lunar samples taken by astronauts and brought home. Even particles, like the dust collected in 2019 in Antarctica from the Local Interstellar Cloud (a cloud which our solar system is moving through) is considered extraterrestrial material.

In 1994, the US Air Force released a statement claiming that it was not a weather balloon that crashed in Roswell, but rather a floating spy device built by the United States that was being tested to use in the USSR.

But what about something a little more exciting? Like, say, proof of an alien craft or technology on Earth? When most of us think of aliens on Earth, aside from the Hollywood treatment, we may think back on the incident at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Today, Roswell’s identity is steeped in aliens, as it has become a tourist hot spot for those fascinated with little green men. So, what exactly happened on a summer evening in rural New Mexico in 1947 that has spawned numerous movies, books, and conspiracy theories? On the town’s website they offer a brief history:

In 1952, a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board concluded that, when it came to UFOs, the American public was dangerously gullible and prone to “hysterical mass behavior.”3

The debris recovered by rancher WW Mack Brazel was gathered by the military from the Roswell Army Air Field under the direction of base intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel. On July 8, 1947, public information officer Lt. Walter Haut issued a press release under orders from base commander Col. William Blanchard, which said basically that we have in our possession a flying saucer. The next day another press release was issued, this time from Gen. Roger Ramey, stating it was a weather balloon. That was the start of the best known and well-documented UFO cover-up. Once it became public, the event known as The Roswell Incident—the crash of an alleged flying saucer, the recovery of debris and bodies and the ensuing cover-up by the military—was of such magnitude and so shrouded in mystery that, seventy years later, there are still more questions than answers.4

There are a number of theories of what really fell from the sky. Some point to “dummy drops” in which the Air Force conducted experiments to “test ways for pilots to survive falls from high altitudes, sent bandaged, featureless dummies with latex ‘skin’ and aluminum ‘bones’—dummies that looked an awful lot like space aliens were supposed to—falling from the sky onto the ground.”5

In a recent poll, aliens were the most “believed-to-exist” cryptid at 63 percent of participants. They even beat out ghosts!

While military experiments or weather balloons are more likely, it’s a lot more fun to imagine that interlopers from another planet found themselves in the expanse of New Mexico. There is no concrete, scientific proof of what crashed in the desert, only witness testimony and speculation. Because of the government’s evasiveness, the conspiracies grew, and thus Roswell, epicenter of alien curiosity, came to be.