...the best way to guarantee that a drive will immediately become permanently unreadable and unrecoverable is to put the only copy of some really important data on to it, and let nature do the rest. (What? Doesn't nature hate you too?)

When the "fire sale" hit the UK I dashed around the web looking for somebody that would supply me with two. Amazon dropped their prices and at the same time set the status to "Temporarily out of stock, but place your order anyway and we'll fulfil it as soon as possible." (I paraphrase)

I ordered two and waited. Today they emailed me to say they had cancelled my order because "no stock was available". Except they are *in stock* on the very page I ordered from, just with the price bumped back up to £200+. And because I stopped looking when Amazon accepted my order, I missed out on getting them anywhere else.

Damn Amazon.

Now, *that's* what I call a Beowulf cluster.

Both of them stole their ideas from the Xerox PARC.

I read it as the part that says "An investigator from the Air Force stated" having been part of what the "informant" said, assuming the redacted "By:" at the beginning was the name and address of the informant. Thus, we only have the informant's word that the person they are talking about was an official "investigator", and IIRC as the Roswell "incident" predates the final combining of the two services, shouldn't it have been the AAF (Army Air Force), not the Air Force who were investigating, as it happened almost on top of one of their bases?

The US Government could weather the storm of a few animal-testing protestors, but any government that was in office when they revealed that they had killed children to see if a plane would fly knows that, even though they didn't actually do it, they would be out of office in a flash and never allowed to return. It's the kind of secret that could never be revealed.

The story went away completely until the National Enquirer published a plea for people to submit their memories of "the incident" and be paid for any that were "Interesting" enough to publish. I think that was 1971 or 1972.

Actually, you're not so far off one of the more interesting "oddball" theories.

Lets assume that something happened. There was a communication blackout, the local undertaker was asked to provide three child-sized coffins and thereafter the Army Air Force claim that nothing happened.

The "oddball" theory is that a scaled-down test plane, manned by children crashed in the desert. Can you imagine the US Government ever admitting to that?

Indeed. The fact they say that no further investigation happened tells you how reliable they considered the "informant" to be.

As an aside, I find the "style" a little too informal for an official 1950 government memo; it reads like it's been edited by a tabloid sub-editor, which sounds like just the sort of source that would have an interest in sending the FBI off on such an investigation.

I was just discussing this with a friend last night - apparently you can buy off-the-shelf Freeview (DTV) tuners that output 405 lines VHF, purely for keeping "vintage" televisions working. They're not easy to find, but they're out there.