WASHINGTON— Talk about your wacky military optimism. Just in time for Independence Day and the big U.F.O. bash in Roswell, the Air Force has finally coughed up an explanation of what happened in the New Mexico desert that caused untold numbers of Americans to believe that the military covered up a 1947 spaceship crash.
The Air Force put an alien on the cover of its Roswell Report and stamped it ''Case Closed.''
Klaatu Barada Nikto. Or as we say in our galaxy, get a grip.
The Roswell report will settle the debate over aliens about as well as the Warren report settled the debate over the single-bullet theory.
There is a perfectly logical explanation, Col. John Haynes told tittering reporters at the Pentagon. The Air Force was taking 200-pound crash dummies up as high as 98,000 feet and dropping them from balloons and planes to see what would happen. Some of the dummies lost fingers and legs in Project High Dive, leaving them -- doo-doo-DOO-doo -- four-fingered and four feet tall.
The Air Force also ventured that a serviceman had crashed in a test balloon near Roswell, suffering cranial swelling that might have made him look like an extraterrestrial.
Oh, that sounds plausible, coming from the folks who brought you Agent Orange, optimistic body counts in Vietnam and denials of chemical weapons in the gulf. And why has the Air Force never mentioned the skies raining dummies, even in the 1994 report on Roswell?
The new report, with sections that sound like ''The X-Files'' episodes (''The Alien at the Hospital,'' ''The Missing Nurse'') will simply be taken as another sign that the truth is out there.
Here is how the Air Force tries to rebut witness descriptions of the ''mysterious little men.'' A witness said, ''Their heads were hairless . . . no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no hair.'' The Air Force said: ''Anthropomorphic dummies did not have 'hair.' '' A witness said, ''No visible ears.'' The Air Force said, ''Dummies had ears that were molded to their heads . . .''
Colonel Haynes could not explain why dummies dropped in the 50's could account for what witnesses saw in 1947, except to say that witnesses might have been mixed up. And he refused to reveal anything about Area 51, a military facility in Groom Lake, Nev., except to say, ''classified things go on there.''
This cover-up may be bigger than we thought. The briefing with Colonel Haynes indicates that aliens may now be working at the highest levels of government. Only aliens would be unsophisticated enough about American culture to think they could dispel suspicions of their presence here by issuing a government report.
Indeed, aliens infiltrating Washington with the aim of destroying the fabric of democracy is a perfectly coherent explanation for a lot of hitherto inexplicable phenomena.
If the military leadership hasn't been body-snatched, then why is the Pentagon conspiring against itself with weird sexual inquisitions? If you were the leader of a hostile galaxy, what better way to disarm the earthlings than to make the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs too pure a job to fill?
Consider this description by a Roswell witness, Frank Kaufmann, 81, who said the aliens ''were very good looking people, ash-colored faces and skin . . . about 5-feet-5 tall, eyes a little more pronounced, small ears, small nose, fine features and hairless.'' The spitting image of Dick Gephardt, obviously.
And doesn't that alien with the big eyes and light-bulb head on the cover of Time bear an ominous resemblance to Bob Kerrey? (D-Pluto.)
Does anyone seriously believe that James Carville and Janet Reno were born on earth? Don't Dick Armey, Bob Bennett, Brian Lamb and Erskine Bowles all have the look of people who were kidnapped and experimented on in a flying saucer? Why else would the President suggest that middle-class people could be lured back to live amid urban blight by offering them a $200 break on their closing costs for a new house? And why else would he talk about rewriting the rules of human evolution, and creating a truly multi-racial democracy? Maybe he doesn't mean just the human race.
It's a strange day in America when the Steven Spielberg view of life and the Oliver Stone view of life coincide.