Is Dawson City Roswell North?

Is 2023 going to be 1947 all over again?

Is it possible that Dawson City could be the Roswell, New Mexico, of the 21st century?

Roswell is small town where, it was claimed, visitors from outer space made their North American landfall — or, more correctly, a crash landing — in June, 1947. The unusual wreckage — tinfoil, rubber strips and bits of wood — was examined the following month at the Roswell Army Air Field where it was, unaccountably, declared to be from of a “flying disc.”

In those early days of the Cold War, tales of strange flying objects were sweeping the nation. When the town newspaper appeared with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region,” the rush to Roswell began.

They came by the tens of thousands, the curious, scientists, ufologists, fantasists and conspiracy who feasted on suspicions that the U.S. government was in cahoots with aliens bent on taking control of the world.

Rumours spread like wildfire. That the bodies of “little green men” had been found at the crash scene; some, still alive, were hidden in a secret government bunker, the remains of others being preserved in gel in glass tanks.

Soon there were reports of different aliens strolling the streets of Roswell; they were friendly, extremely tall with Nordic good looks, and they had a distinguishing feature — they had two heads.

The rumours grew and spread. Before long, Roswell (pop. 25,000) was attracting 100,000 tourists a year.

The “Roswell Incident” was a fraud, a fiction built on a tissue of lies. It was a fraud that launched decades of extraterrestrial coverups.

First, the army “corrected” itself: the wreckage, it said, was from one of its own weather balloons. But that wasn’t true either. It was not until 1997, when the Pentagon released top-secret reports on Roswell, that the truth (so far as we know) came out: it was the wreckage of a top-secret U.S. government spy-in-the-sky balloon, launched in an off-thebooks program to surveil Russian nuclear tests.

What does any of this have do with Dawson City?

A couple of things. A sensible person would not accept at face value “official” explanations for unknown objects — balloons, cylinders or things the size of small cars — that are shot down. At time of writing, four UFOs have been shot down this month. The first, a balloon the size of three school buses, shot down off South Carolina on Feb. 4, was almost certainly Chinese. It may have been spying on military installations — or not. Three more objects were shot down the next week: off the north coast of Alaska; over Yukon, northeast of Dawson City, at the order of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; and over the U.S. side of Lake Huron.

All three remained unidentified and unexplained. Officials on both sides of border, including Trudeau, have been careful to not to speculate about their origins or purposes; most won’t dismiss the possibility, however remote, of extraterrestrial activity.

For example, Norad boss U.S. Gen. Glen VanHerck: “I haven’t ruled out anything.” Fomer CIA director John Brennan: “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

Can you see the possibilities? As long as flying saucers are in the picture, Dawson City might, just might, enjoy a boom it hasn’t seen since the Klondike Gold Rush. Or not.