Missing the Message or Missing the Forest because of the Trees

(Blogger's Note: This is becoming a full time job with much criticism and absolutely no reward that I can see. Just minutes ago I posted this article and have received the following email which I think of as a clarification:

Thanks for linking back to my article in "Missing the Message or Missing the Forest because of the Trees"

From your article:

"Jorge Peredo was the one who actually found the picture. He posted it at his web site:" followed by the link.

Jorge Peredo posted the image on Facebook after contacting Maussan. I wrote the article at Week In Weird declaring "Case Closed". This could cause confusion for your readers who are confused enough demanding Caravaca/Bragalia get credit.

Chris Savia

News Editor at The Anomalist

Contributor at Week In Weird

I hope this clarifies the situation about how all this went down in the last twenty-four or thirty-six hours. This is all about getting those who did the work the credit for that work. To be clear, Tony Bragalia wrote the article I posted... He gave credit, first to Jose Caravaca and then to Jorge Peredo... I was going to add more here, but hell, you all can read as well as I can. 

And now back to the regularly scheduled post...) 

Yesterday morning (June 10), when I checked my email, I found a half dozen different people telling me that another picture of the mummy in the Roswell Slides had been found. Some of them mentioned Jose Caravaca and some of them didn’t. Some just noted that the mummy in the new picture was the same one in the slides and that was the end of the story. Tony Bragalia provided a short article that provided documentation that linked all the pictures together. I thought the story good, checked it quickly and then posted it, not in an attempt to rehabilitate Bragalia, but because this should end the debate about the image in the Roswell Slides.

Bragalia’s article, at the end, credited a number of people for their discoveries, and since I had the link to Caravaca’s web site, I added that at the end so that others could look at his post. To me, the story was the new picture and how it provided the one bit of evidence that some thought necessary to end this controversy. Imagine my surprise when the first reactions were not to discuss that image, but to complain that Bragalia was somehow attempting to take credit for the work of others. That was something that I hadn’t thought about it because the story was the image in the picture and not the author of the posting.

Well, the solution for this, I thought, was move the link to Caravaca’s story to the Blogger’s Note at the very beginning to make it clear where the information had originated. Of course, that turned out not to be accurate either because there was a third party involved.

We learned that the photograph had been found by someone else and that neither Bragalia nor Caravaca had found it. They just reported it. Jorge Peredo was the one who actually found the picture. He posted it at his web site:

http://weekinweird.com/2015/06/10/case-closed-mummy-maussan/

And that seems to be where everything originated. Jorge Peredo tracked down the picture and posted it, along with a note from Jaime Maussan, who claimed that someone had painted a picture of the mummy on a shelf as a way to distract us from the real nature of the Roswell Slides. In another post or email, he suggested that it had been photoshopped, apparently ignoring the documentation that provided the clues about this and that linked that image to the one in the Roswell Slides.

Others, rather than looking at the information, were outraged that Tony Bragalia had written an article about it. The “byline” was causing the aggravation believing that Bragalia was attempting to grab credit for the find. He had noted, at the end of his article, that it was Caravaca who had found it and later still acknowledging, as we all have, that it was Peredo who found it.

The real outrage here is that so many commented on the short article that I posted, not on the content which was important but because they didn’t care for the author. Here was a second photograph of the unfortunate child that proved it to be a mummy on display in a museum. The outrage should be directed at those who continue to claim that this is an alien when the evidence, from multiple sources with the proper documentation had been provided. The important point was not that Bragalia had written the article based on information from several sources, but that the mummy had been identified in another museum setting. The point should have been that the “mystery” had been solved.

For those interested, Bragalia’s role in this was to provide a synopsis of the information that could be posted quickly. I didn’t see it as an attempt by him to claim credit for work that he hadn’t done, but an attempt to circulate the best evidence available and he did credit those who had done the work at the end. I posted it because I thought the information should reach as many as possible as quickly as possible. It just never occurred to me that some would take offense at Bragalia’s name on the article he wrote.

The other thing is that it seemed that all day we were changing the article to reflect what was going on. I moved Caravaca’s name to the top and referenced his blog so that credit would be given to him… only to learn that he had done what I had done which is to say, post information that came from many sources. Once I learned, at Rich Reynolds’ blog and the Anomalist web site that Peredo had made the discovery, I updated the article.

So now, I would hope that we’re all on the same page. The important point is not that Bragalia wrote the article for my blog, the important point is not that others had a hand in the discovery, the important point is that the picture was found and credit given to the man who found it. The important point is that we now have the proof that the “alien” in the Roswell Slides is an unfortunate boy who died many centuries ago.