This sounds to me like they were told they were going on a 10 year mission that they may never return from, that they'd have to lose their identity, etc., but it wasn't until just before they were originally scheduled to leave that they were told "OH! And by the way, the mission is 37 light years away!"
I would expect that to have been the case as well. And lets try to approach this in-keeping with the time at which it occured... In the 1950's, technology and communications are not what they are today. There was no email, no blackberries, no laptop computers, no cell phones, no internet... none of the stuff we take for granted today. Communication was done by telegram or other forms of tranmission with a constant concern about cold-war era spying by the soviets. Moreover, we didn't have much of a perception about the universe. It's very likely that we met visitors from space before any man ever left our own atmosphere. There was no precendent for "astronaut training" or a mission of this magnitude.
I have no doubt that compartmentalization and disinformation went hand in hand with secrecy and paranoia. There was a clear concern about the U.S. public losing sight of their paranoia over commies, in the event that they went into mass hysteria over aliens... and with the possibility that there were more than one race of aliens visiting the planet, each and every sighting came with a concern over a new threat.
Given these realities of life in the time period in which this whole thing is alleged to have occured, and the fact that the subject matter we're discussing is completely foreign to all of us, I think that the need to keep an open mind goes beyond being understanding and deferential... it means putting aside our preconceived notions about what alien life should be like, what technology we would have gleaned from them, etc.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone considered that we're talking about the possibility that a race exists that may be roughly 10,000 years more advanced than we are technologically?
What if we took an iPod back in time just, say, 200 years and handed it to Ben Franklin. How quickly would the scientists of his day have been able to reverse engineer technology from it? They didn't even have the tools to open one without breaking it. They didn't have a computer to hook it up to. They didn't have electron microscopes that would examine the mask-work on the microprocessors, and they wouldn't have had a clue about transistors.
Yet, some of us are debunking this story because we can't see the technological advancements in our own society that would confirm this story? Hey... we might have gotten tons of great stuff out of Roswell. But what if we don't have the scientific means to analyze it yet and don't even know what the stuff is used for? Two hundred years ago, no one knew anything about gallium or indium arsenide, let alone how to synthesize it into a form to create a microchip. I can only imagine just how humbling it would be for our scientists to encounter technology that's 500, 1000, or 5000 years ahead of us.... like pulling energy from a vacuum, it would seem like voodoo magic and the subject of sci-fi daydreams wouldn't it?
[edit on 2-12-2005 by Centrist]
I'll be in the third row, wearing hip-boots (just in case).
') I just run a scan and no "virus / adware etc"
was found. 
