New Confirmation for Photograph of the Roswell "Alien"

(Blogger's Note: It is with some trepidation that I post the following, given the reaction yesterday to Tony Bragalia's name on the article. But here is additional information, important because of the allegation that the image we all had yesterday was painted on a photograph of a shelf in a museum. Today we have a source for the photograph that couldn't have been altered because of the timing of it. And, importantly, it is from another source. 

I will note, that given the whole story, I'm not convinced that Benerd or Hilda Ray took the "original" slides photograph because that evidence is somewhat obscure, but this unfortunate child is the source of those slides. Who took the original photograph is unimportant given that we have identified the object photographed. The Rays could be called a red herring and as of today, are not important to this story. We can erase them from all that we know because, at best, they photographed a mummy and at worse, were blamed for the photograph because someone had a bunch of other slides they had taken.

Here, then, is another angle on the Roswell Slides and what they actually show.)

“ROSWELL SLIDES” –

THE FINAL CONFIRMATION THAT IT IS A MUMMY,

SOURCE FOUND

BY ANTHONY BRAGALIA

I can now confirm that the photo that appeared on the Net (courtesy Jorge Peredo through his friend Jose Caravaca) that shows the “Roswell Slides” body in a National Parks Service museum in Arizona is that of a child mummy that had previously been displayed at the Mesa Verde Museum in Colorado and photographed by Bernerd and Hilda Ray.

Although Jose and Jorge were not able to show with certainty that the photo was taken at the Arizona museum, I have just made a discovery that does. I had in my previous piece found a newspaper article by a travel writer who saw the mummy in Arizona and recounted researcher David Rudiak’s timeline of the display and transfer of the mummy within the National Park Service system. But now something that is photographic proof has presented itself.

Working with my German research associate ,and by using a deep review of Google images and online photo albums, and by using key word searches on various search engines, this amazing confirmation was found on the account of an elderly lady named “Frances” who had posted on the Picasa Web online photo album site.

She has 43 albums online which include everything from reunions and vacations. One of her trips was to the State of Arizona. And on that trip, she photographed the “Roswell Slides” mummy, on display at a National Park Service museum.

Found buried in the albums is a photo marked “Photo 51” under “Arizona: 1957 & 1967” and posted to Picasa on September 7, 2008 is the “Roswell Slides” mummy displayed at the Montezuma Castle museum / Yavapai Culture Center:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spadie34/Arizona19571967#5243459729619431298

This conclusively proves that the image at the Arizona museum is not photo-shopped as some defenders of the “Roswell Slides” such as Jamie Maussan are now stating. It was placed online in 2008 and it was taken in either 1957 or 1967.

Roswell Slides Statement by Tom Carey with Note from Don Schmitt

(Blogger’s note: Yes, I said there would be nothing more about the Roswell Slides, but I also said that if there was a statement issued by Tom and Don, I would publish it without editorial comment. There is a statement that Tom issued. Before it was published elsewhere, Don had asked for a couple of modifications. That statement was published before Don asked for the changes. This is the statement, slightly modified from the original version. Don made the changes.)

Don Schmitt

We believe that the recently released "reading" of the placard by the so-called "Roswell Slides Research Group" is still open to debate. Ever since Don Schmitt and I became aware of the slides three years ago, our modus operandi has been four-fold: (1) to authenticate the age and integrity of the slides; (2) to obtain professional anthropological and forensic opinion as to what the body on the slides represented; (3) to find out as much as we could about Bernerd and Hilda Blair Ray, the long-deceased owners of the slides; and (4) to "read" the placard located at the foot of the body on the slides.     

 

We physically took the slides to Kodak's historian, who is an expert regarding Kodachrome., and, using several parameters of interrogation, he determined that the slides dated from the 1947-49 time period (manufacture to exposure). For the most part, the American anthropologists we contacted did not want to even look at the slides when they learned that they might be "UFO-related." Those who did, however, did so "off the record." They all concluded that the body on the slides was not that of a mummy but possibly that of a congenitally deformed child. Fortunately, we were able to secure Canadian and Mexican anthropologists and forensic anatomical experts who went "on the record" at our May 5th "beWitness" event in Mexico City. In short, their detailed presentations concluded that the body on the slides was: not a mammal, not a primate and not human. One, Richard Doble, after a detailed morphological examination, concluded that the creature on the slides did not evolve on earth. You already have Doble's report, and the report of the two Mexican authorities is still in translation.

 

The Rays had no children or close relatives we could interview who could shed some light on their activities. Bernerd was an oil geologist whose zone of activity was the Permian Basin of west Texas and eastern New Mexico. He was also the President of a geological society in west Texas. Hilda was an oil attorney in Midland, Texas and an amateur pilot who, according a friend in the nursing home where Hilda passed away in 1988, was also friends with Mamie Eisenhower (General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower's wife). There are a number of color slides in the collection that do appear to show Mamie Eisenhower in various situations. Prior to her death, Hilda Ray bequeathed almost $1M to the American Association of University Women.

 

Regarding the placard, we quickly determined that (1) its content would be key to interpreting the slides; and (2) we could not read it. So, we sent copies to Dr. David Rudiak and Dr. Donald Burleson. Both had done exemplary work in trying to decipher the so-called "Ramey Memo" - a situation very similar to placard issue here. Both responded to us that the placard was "unreadable." Through a contact, we had the Photo Interpretation Unit at the Pentagon in Washington, DC take a look at it. They said that it was "unreadable." A copy went to a company in New York now requesting anonymity that conducted the analysis on a major historical artifact. That company's response to us was that the placard was "unreadable." Another copy went to the people at Adobe, Inc. (manufacturers of Adobe Photoshop and the Adobe Reader on your computer). Their response?  "It's unreadable." A copy also was also sent to aggressive Roswell researcher Anthony Bragalia who also reported to me that it was "unreadable." (Bragalia has now aggressively joined in with our critics). Our own computer guy says that he applied the "SmartDeblur" software to the placard over a year ago without any success. He did so again this week to an enhanced, sharper version of the placard with the latest edition of the "SmartDeBlur" program, again without success.

 

Now, we are told (not asked) to believe that a cast of characters, one of whom has clearly become unhinged and was himself party to a known UFO body hoax some years ago, has used the same program (SmartDeBlur) on a distorted, "screen-grab" of the placard and is somehow able to "read" it when all of the above, some of whom had much more sophisticated equipment and techniques at their disposal, could not. I ask you, what's wrong with this picture?

 

Tom Carey

Finally, lost in all of the vile invective being hurled our way by the members of the RSRG and their fellow travelers, is what the analysis of the physical body on the slides is saying. The RSRG has used a note from an obscure late 1800's journal to weave their tale that the slides show the "mummified body of a two year old boy" (the word "mummy" or "mummified" appears nowhere in their alleged de-blurred "reading" of the placard). In their excitement to play "Gotcha!," it apparently has not crossed their thought processes (I'm being charitable here) that a mummy of a two year old boy several thousand years old would be less than half the size of the body shown on the slides!

 

So, what are we to make of all this? Jaime Maussan, Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, relied on all of the above to reach the conclusions that were reached. They were not our conclusions but those scientists we consulted. We have, at this point in the proceedings, have sent out additional copies of the placard image to third parties whose opinions we can trust to run the SmartDeBlur application on it and are prepared to abide by their findings, wherever the chips fall.

 

 

Tom Carey

(With modifications by Don Schmitt who added, “As I said to Tom this morning, if the independent analysis of the placard comes back in support of the opposition's read, then I will accept that read. I will remain a gentleman and concede that point.)

Not the Roswell Slides and How the Pictures Were Taken

While I hesitate to post anything more about the Not Roswell Slides, there is one point that has not been covered during all this talk. Although we had been told that we would learn all about the slides, the provenance and the scientific testing, little of that came out that we didn’t already know. As I was thinking about this, I realized there is one question that probably would never be answered adequately. That is, how is it that a couple of civilians, no matter how highly connected, were allowed into what would have been a restricted area, with a camera, manage to take two pictures and leave with camera and  film intact?

They have used the pictures of Eisenhower to suggest a connection to the general because he is in uniform, but that doesn’t explain how they got into the restricted area. Eisenhower would have never allowed it.

How do I know?

Take a look at his performance as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. During 1944, Eisenhower demoted a number of officers for their breach of security. True, these breaches might have resulted in higher casualties during the invasion of Europe, but security is security. Eisenhower would not have tolerated civilians in a restricted area… providing we all agree that the Rays were pals with Eisenhower and he would share this information with them. That hasn’t been proven yet.

The first stumbling block in all this is how they took the pictures in the first place… or is the first stumbling block the lack of provenance so that we don’t even know if one of the Rays took the photographs. That’s just speculation because the slides were allegedly found in a collection of slides that belonged to the Rays and if they did take them, there are breaks in the chain of custody so the box could have had slides added later in the decades they floated around.

Anyway, the point is that there is no plausible explanation for the way two civilians would be allowed into a restricted area to photograph the body of an alien creature and if you can’t explain that with some sort of evidence, then the whole premise of Not Roswell Slides of an alien creature fail.

Not the Roswell Slides and Richard Dolan

Richard Dolan has now chimed in on the Not Roswell Slides and his critique while interesting does little to further our knowledge. We are basically back where we were on May 4 except that there is now a better quality photo out there for us to look at.

Dolan says, repeatedly, “…my position on the slides is still not firm. I have been and remained impressed with the story behind their provenance — such as we can put it together. And I am currently impressed with the analyses performed on the slides themselves, as well as the body in question. These analyses are far more technically detailed than the criticism against them that I have seen. My position would change if I am presented with analyses that deal with the data already provided. Not people’s hunches or invective.”

And that is where many of us are, except that we might be leaning in one direction or the other more so today than we were on May 4. We don’t have enough information but the reason we don’t is that it hasn’t been offered though it had been promised.

Dolan said that he was impressed with the story behind the slide’s provenance, but that is all there is, a story. No evidence was provided that proved these slides were taken by the Rays, the chain of custody is broken in repeated instances, and we really don’t know when or where they were taken. What we do have are guesses based on limited information and I think back to the Alien Autopsy when the same games were played. The provenance would be provided but it never was. Here we are told that the Rays lived in Midland, Texas, the slides were recovered in Sedona, Arizona, and ended up in Chicago some twenty years after discovery owned by a man whose identify has not been revealed. Not a compelling provenance.

Dolan wrote about those who had suggested the body is a mummy of some kind. “Such people — all of them English-speakers — obviously did not acquaint themselves with the detailed and technically proficient treatment of these very questions by the three scientists who were featured last night: Jose Benetez, Dr. Luiz Antonio de Alba Galindo, and Richard Doble, The first two of these spoke in Spanish, and I understand there may have been glitches at times with the translation on the livestream. However, Richard Doble’s Skype interview was in English and extremely easy to follow. The Spanish speakers were simply outstanding, and I was able to listen via translation. All of these gentlemen spoke in detail and with deep analysis as to why that body was not a human being.”

This is known as an appeal to authority. We are not allowed to voice an opinion because experts in the field have rendered the proper opinion and we are not qualified to judge it. And while the experts cited by Dolan have impressive credentials, they are not the only experts who have spoken about this. Others, who have been approached by the skeptical community, have suggested a variety of other opinions and before anyone points it out, I’m well aware that they didn’t have access to good quality copies of the slides. The point is, we’ll end up with dueling experts and unless or until someone finds the precise mummy, the arguments will rage.

Dolan has suggested that we all should wait until the investigation is completed or as he said, “I do think they absolutely deserve genuine investigation.”

Yes, but shouldn’t that have been done before the great reveal in Mexico City. After all, they sat on this for three years, apparently investigating them. They promised an expert from Kodak, who would explain why the slides were dated to the late 1940s, but he was a no show… and blame is laid at the feet of those who dared to call him at home, irritating him to the point that he wanted no part of this. One of those, Lance Moody, called him in the middle of the afternoon and had a nice conversation with the man. The other harasser was apparently Billy Cox, a journalist who could be expected to attempt to verify the information and who also called in the middle of the afternoon. So who were these other harassers?

Dolan and I agree on one thing. The Not Roswell Slides deserve more investigation and research, and as Jimmy Church said during his radio show last night, there are now, literally millions of potential investigators out there. They have a fairly good image, and they will be scanning the Internet and museums and everything else in search of the twin of this image. We do have access to about every aspect of human knowledge now that we have the Internet and global connection.

There is one other point to be made about the Not Roswell Slides. Paolo Harris made the point, as has Stan Friedman, (and which has also been said by Don Schmitt and Tom Carey) and one that I will reinforce. There is nothing to tie these slides to the Roswell case and that is where the provenance fails completely.

So, here we are, two days after the great reveal and we have nothing new to show for it (other than a better picture). We don’t really know anything that we didn’t before, so, as Dolan suggests, we do need to complete a full investigation. The only thing I fear is that this will take as long as it did for the Alien Autopsy… I hope we get an answer in a little timelier manner but given what I have seen, I don’t see that happening.

The Roswell Slides ARE NOT the Roswell Slides

So now we’re told that the Roswell Slides might not be linked to Roswell and that the name, Roswell Slides was invented by the debunkers and is not a term used by anyone on the inside. For the latest interviews with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, see The Conspiracy Show hosted by Richard Syrett which can be found here:

https://youtu.be/fQyAVrFnTos?t=1h3m59s

The segment with Carey and Schmitt starts at the 1:04:20 mark of the show and they are on for about thirty minutes. You’ll just have to fast forward through the first hour to get to the Carey and Schmitt interview.

Here’s what we learn by listening to this. According to Tom Carey, the couple who took the slides was well connected to the Eisenhowers. The wife was a “high-powered lawyer in Midland, Texas and the husband was an oil field geologist.” Part of his territory was New Mexico. Please note that Carey is suggesting that the Rays, whose name he does not use, were the ones who took the photographs though all that can be said is that they may have owned the slides at one time decades ago. The provenance of the slides is still very shaky.

Carey then went on to explain how the slides were originally discovered. He said:

Current owner came into possession of the slides around 1990. The husband [Bernerd Ray] died in 1982 and the lawyer wife [Hilda Ray] died in 1988 [though not mentioned, it seems that they had divorced at some point]. During a clean out of their house, in their garage, one of the people who was part of the cleanup crew discovered this huge box of color slides, Kodachrome slides, and she said, “Oh, these look interesting,” so she kept them. She took them home instead of taking them to the dumpster. She took them for herself because nobody wanted them… so she kept them and didn’t look at them for a number of years [which seems strange after she had determined they were interesting, but never mind]. She finally looked at them and these two slides… were separate from all the others. There were over 400 slides in total. But there were these two that were taped in an envelope to the underside of the lid to the box. So she looked at those and she got spooked… She shipped the whole box to her relative who has them now. He was no UFO guy but he looked at these two slides and he says, “I don’t know what this is…” he had heard about Roswell… So he looked at them and I better contact somebody who knows something about this.

Of course, in his position, my first thought would have been to search for someone who knew about the Roswell UFO case. Carey said that the man had gone to the Internet (which is something I bet we all do now a days) and looked for something about Roswell. Carey’s name came up and the man set an email.

During the interview, Schmitt suggested that the “debunkers” had labeled them the Roswell Slides and they had not made that connection meaning that the slides were connected to Roswell. Syrett, in recapping some of this said that Carey and Schmitt weren’t linking these images to Roswell but there was a possibility that there was a connection (or in the words of nearly everyone else, let’s beat around the bush some more).

All though the interview, however, Carey talked as if it was an already established fact that the slides were from the Roswell case. Continuing in that vein, Schmitt said, “The dating of the slides is from 1947 to 1949. As we will be demonstrating at the event in May, there were specific areas that the photographers visited… both worked in west Texas and New Mexico… the circle of friends were closely linked to Eisenhower.” Or, in other words, this is connected to Roswell even though these people lived in Midland, Texas and had pictures of Eisenhower in his uniform.

The link to Eisenhower seems to be based on the fact that some of the slides in the box of 400 were of Eisenhower, which doesn’t link them to him personally other than they were in the same place at the same time… Just as I was in the same place as David Letterman and I even have a picture of me standing next to him, but we are not closely linked.

During the interview, Carey was asked about what linked the eyewitness testimony to other alien bodies. He said:

[The] woman standing by a glass slab… the body lying on it appears to be 3½ to 4 feet tall… large inverted pear-shaped head but there is one item on it, on top of the head that was described by one of the first-hand witnesses, one of the first ones to the crash site… the local fireman named Dan Dwyer who described when he got home that night and he told his family about it… they asked him, “What did it look like?” Instead of giving a detailed description he just said, “Child of the Earth.” [Which is an insect also known as the Jerusalem cricket]… It’s something on the head, I don’t want to give anything away here… there is something on the top of the head that one of the eyewitnesses described and it’s on this particular creature on the slide… That’s why Dan Dwyer called it the Child of the Earth.

But what Carey doesn’t say here, and which is extremely important is that Dwyer was never interviewed by any of the UFO researchers and calling him a first-hand witness without explaining the circumstances is misleading. Dwyer died before the interest in Roswell was renewed. Contrary to the impression that this is first-hand testimony, it was relayed by Frankie Rowe, Dwyer’s daughter. While I believe that Rowe is telling us what she believes to be the absolute truth, it is second hand from her so anything deduced from the testimony is shaky at best.

Apropos of nothing, Carey did mention that this ranked as a “smoking gun,” slightly better than the “smoking gun” of the Ramey memo. Both, according to Carey, are extremely important bits of evidence and, of course, the Ramey memo is directly related to Roswell.

What have we learned here?

Well, the Roswell Slides don’t necessarily show a creature from the Roswell crash, at least according to Schmitt. But then both he and Carey talk as if it was already proven that the creature, whatever it was, is from the Roswell crash.

The slides were apparently in a vacant house for two years before they were found, and then the woman who found them and took them, didn’t look at them for a number of years. She was so freaked out by them that she sent all the slides to her brother…I mean a relative, who apparently did nothing with them for years. Then about three years ago this fellow, who lives in Chicago, looked at them and thought he had better find someone who knew something about Roswell. He emailed Carey.

We also learned that when they attempted to interest American scientists in the slides, no one would come forward. The news media was equally unimpressed, but foreign scientists have examined the slides and made comment about them. Two of them are Canadian anthropologists who were not named but whose analysis will be part of the Mexico City show. They will be named there. All this data and much more will be presented in Mexico City.

And, although they suggest that the slides aren’t linked to Roswell, when they begin to talk about them, it is clear that is exactly what they think. And if they don’t, then why bring poor old PFC Benavides into it so that he can say that the creature in the photograph looks like the bodies he saw in Roswell? While they might not like the name the Roswell Slides and don’t refer to them that way, it is what they believe. All we can hope for is that they’ll have some better evidence about the slides than they have mentioned in the various interviews so far. The story of how the slides ended up in the hands of UFO researchers doesn’t allow for evidence of who took the pictures in the first place or for an unbroken chain of custody. There are still too many loose ends. I do hope they can do better in Mexico City.

The Roswell Slides - A Matter of Provenance

I have said for a long time that one of the major hurtles in this slides controversy is the lack of provenance. According to the various inside sources including Tom Carey, Tony Bragalia and even Adam Dew, they simply don’t know who took the pictures, when they were taken and where they were taken. To make matters worse, there is no solid chain of custody for the slides. There are gaping holes in this important part of the story.

Back on February 20, 2015, Adam Dew, under the user name SlideBox Media, posted to Rich Reynolds UFO Conjectures blog the following:

A quick timeline as I understand it: Hilda died in 1988. Slides were discovered when emptying out a garage outside of Sedona (Cottonwood we think) in 1998. Slides were deemed interesting (obviously old color slides) but not fully examined until around 2008. While I think that the home may have belonged to Hilda’s lawyer, there is no way to know for sure as the woman who found them [the slides] didn’t keep records of the homes she cleaned out… I don’t think the slides came from Hilda’s home.

Could this be any vaguer?  The home might have belonged to Hilda’s lawyer but they don’t know. The house might have been in Sedona, but they’re not sure. There is no way to verify whose house it was and there is little to link the slides to Hilda Ray other than some of the other slides were marked with her name. He doesn’t think they came from Hilda’s home.

And with that we return to the question of provenance. They have absolutely nothing to go on given that statement. By comparison, the Ramey Memo has a provenance that is iron clad. No, I don’t want to discuss the various interpretations of the memo; I just want to establish how solid a provenance can be.

General Ramey is in the picture holding the document in question. J. Bond Johnson, the man who took the picture has been interviewed repeatedly about it, and while he certainly slid off the rails as time passed, there is no doubt that he was in Ramey’s office and he took the photograph. Even without his statements we would know this because the picture was transmitted over the news wire (INS) back in the day. Attached to the picture from the Bettmann Photo Archive, was a noted that it had been sent at 11:59 p.m. on July 8, 1947. Even if we didn’t have this, the picture had been published in various newspapers on July 9, 1947. The negative, which can be matched to picture, was stored at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram until it was given to the Special Collections at the University of Texas at Arlington so that the chain of custody has been preserved as well. I can’t think of another document dealing with the Roswell case that has such a provenance or chain of custody.

But you can see the difference. With the Roswell Slides, all that information simply doesn’t exist and I don’t know how you can ever gather it given what the current owner of the slides says. The chain of custody is broken in several places and because Dew has not revealed the name of the woman who supposedly found the slides so that she could be interviewed by independent researchers (and I doubt that he will give up the name) then that is just one more hole.

So why do we believe that these slides show alien creatures recovered outside of Roswell? Well, the film was apparently manufactured in 1947 which is not to say that it was exposed in 1947. The slide holder was used from something like 1940 to 1949, which opens up the range. Photo experts have suggested that the range could be even greater, though that isn’t much of an issue given all the other problems.

I have yet to hear a good reason for looking at these slides which were unlabeled and apparently separated from the others in the collection and concluding that they showed an alien body. If you’re the average guy, sitting out there looking at the slides and see a strange body on them, I don’t see how you can (a) conclude they are of alien creatures and (b) that they have anything to do with Roswell. The Rays lived in Midland, Texas and not Roswell and the slides were found in Sedona and not Roswell and are now in Chicago. Right now we don’t even have a good chain of custody from Sedona to Chicago.

This also generates another question that can be easily answered. Were all the slides in the box stamped with Hilda Ray’s name? Were others stamped with her husband’s? And if so, then how do we conclude that the slides belonged to the Rays other than proximity? Or I should say alleged proximity.

At this point, with Dew making so many claims, it seems that there is no way to provide a provenance or chain of custody. Any such attempt will be seen in the same light as that of Ray Santilli as he continued to change the story about who had owned the Alien Autopsy film and how he had come into possession of it. Dew has sort of locked in the tale of a house owned by someone, that was cleaned by someone who found the slides, which sat around for basically decades before anyone got around to looking at them and then deciding they showed an alien creature, an amazing deductive link.

This could spell the end of the slides saga simply because there is no way to verify how they came into existence or why those who saw them originally assumed they showed an alien creature. Without the important questions of provenance and chain of custody answered, there is no real reason to assume the being on the slides has anything to do with the Roswell case, or that it is an extraterrestrial creature. This is basically the same stumbling block that so many of us interested in the case have encountered before and there is no reason to assume that anyone outside of the UFO community is going to care about this… and there might not be that many inside who do.

The Roswell Slides and Me

This story actually begins in July 2011 when Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and I were all at the Roswell Festival. Tom suggested that he and I head over to Church’s Fried Chicken for lunch and I’m not one to refuse an invitation for Church’s. At lunch Tom said that he had been thinking about doing a sort of ultimate Roswell book and wondered if I was interested in that.

I said that I was, but didn’t mention that I had contacted a publisher about just such a book a couple of months earlier. I hadn’t heard back and thought this might present a problem if the publisher made some sort of offer especially since Tom and I had agreed that my name would go first on a hardback, if I could arrange that and his first if we went with his publisher. We hadn’t discussed the possibility of a book by a publisher who would produce a trade paperback.

We made some tentative plans but Tom said that he needed to finish a book with Don about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. At this point that wasn’t much of a hurtle since we had nothing on paper and we had only just started the idea. The important points here were that we were going to work on a book about Roswell and it would be just the two of us.

Sometime later, after we all had left Roswell, Tom emailed me that he had told Don about the project because he felt some loyalty toward Don and Don had lots of media contacts (Too bad that loyalty didn’t work in the other direction). Since he had told Don about the book, there was nothing much that I could do at that point. In the meantime there were others brought into the project; Tony Bragalia and David Rudiak, both who had some important skills and resources. I worried about how we would split up the credit on the book and knew that publishers didn’t like three names on a book cover and we had moved beyond that.

Nothing much was done, other than my publisher wanted something a little more all-encompassing than a book about a single case so we figured out something else. I was also contacted by a hardback publisher from a prestigious house who was interested in the Roswell book. Everything seemed to be working out.

In July 2012 we were all again in Roswell, and we met late at night in the hotel’s breakfast area to talk about the book project. I mentioned that for this to work that we would need some additional information, some new witnesses, something that would set this book apart from the others. Tom and Don nodded their agreement but said nothing else about that. Remember, this is July 2012.

There was one other thing that I mentioned then and it was the nun’s diary. The story had been told to Don and me by an ex-Special Forces (Green Beret) officer and a woman who might have been a nun or who was still a nun and who verified the existence of the diary and what was written in it. Because these were Catholic nuns and I didn’t know the customs and courtesies of the Catholic Church, this was an avenue for Don to explore which he did (though he had apparently suggested to Tom that I had investigated it). I mentioned at the book meeting that this was something we should corroborate because it was a document created at the time that would provide some very important evidence. No one was going to dispute the provenance because it was held by the church and a photograph of the page would provide the evidence.

Lance Moody got his panties in a bunch over this, but I really wasn’t interested in that. He would have to wait for the investigation to play out and I wasn’t about to be stampeded into something because someone else wanted an immediate answer. I was confident I had it but I now wanted to be sure... Then I learned that the Special Forces officer had been a PFC when in the Army, wasn’t a Green Beret, and hadn’t been in Vietnam which shot his credibility all to hell. And I learned that the diaries had been traced to Oklahoma City and while I had believed they had been seen and verified, such was not the case. Once I learned where they were and arrangements could be made, I’d go look at them myself (and I practiced with my IPad photographing documents). I pushed and learned the diaries had been moved to Wisconsin, which was good, but that they only went back to 1960 which was bad. I asked questions, was told many things, but in the end, I don’t know where the diaries are, I don’t know what they say, and I don’t know if they even exist. Lance got his answer because it seemed that the book was not getting written as fast as I would like and I finally had an answer which would have appeared in the book, if we had written it.

Then in February 2013, Rich Reynolds published a column about some slides that had surfaced showing a body from the Roswell crash but we, meaning the team assembled for the reinvestigation, couldn’t talk about it because of some sort of a nondisclosure agreement that had been signed. I knew nothing of the slides and I had signed no such agreement. Nick Redfern seemed to be the source on this and since I know Nick, I called him to ask about it. He told me that the slides had been found when a woman had been cleaning out a house for an estate sale (though now we learn that it might have been a house that was about to be demolished). She had sent the slides to her brother and he eventually got in touch with Tom and Don (or Dew, after finding the slides sought out Tom and Don, whatever). The owner of the slides, before she died had been Hilda Ray, though I believe that Nick only knew her husband’s name at the time, which is, of course, Bernerd.

Nick said that the information came from a man who lived in Texas and who had been in Midland sometime earlier. He had overheard a conversation between two others talking about the slides and he thought that Nick might be interested. Well, that sounded a little nebulous, meaning only that someone overheard someone talking about slides of an alien creature and assumed that Nick would be interested and provided him with the information. No names except Ray, who had been a geologist in the Permian Basin which covered the territory between Midland and Roswell as well as a lot of other places, had been mentioned. This was all well and good, but I didn’t believe it and sent out an email to my colleagues on the team. Imagine my surprise when I learned that much of it was true. They had slides. They had been found during an estate sale. The family who had owned them was the Rays and they were now in the hands of someone else who had required a nondisclosure agreement before he would go any further in the investigative process. At least that was the story that I got at that time.

At this point I wanted to publish what I knew but also knew that if I did, the owner of the slides would assume that either Don or Tom had told me in violation of their agreement and that could really screw up the deal (which now doesn’t seem all that important.…I should have published what I knew and how I learned it and let the chips fall where they may). Since Tom was deeply involved I believed there was no need for me to inject myself into the investigation. I trusted that I would be told everything I needed to know as things progressed. That wasn’t actually the case, but there was nothing more for me to do about the slides without risking the whole deal for Tom and Don. Ah, loyalty in one direction… when will I learn?

At one point in early 2013, Tom called and told me a little more about the investigation. I learned what they were doing to validate the slides, meaning they were attempting to scientifically prove that the slides had been exposed in 1947 or thereabouts and wasn’t some kind of modern hoax. I believed that the chemical composition of the developing process would have changed as well as the composition of the film stock at some time after the 1940s. All that could be dated and would provide some evidence that the slides were real in the sense that they had been taken in the 1940s and showed an image that was not some sort of artificial construct made in the last couple of years. That wouldn’t mean that the image was of an alien creature only that this was not some sort of a modern hoax.

I asked Tom if I could see the slides but he said, “No.” There was that pesky nondisclosure agreement that he had signed and they weren’t letting anyone see them. That made sense and I didn’t have to see the slides right then anyway. They were doing what I would have been doing in an attempt to validate the slides. The only thing that wasn’t clear was who had actually taken them and if it was either of the Rays, then there was a major problem because neither of them were available for questioning and it wasn’t clear that they had taken them, only that they had copies.

In the meantime I was working on some of the book. I wrote the long appendix about MJ-12 because I thought it was a part of the story that had to be told, but that it shouldn’t be in the main part of the book. It ended up over 20,000 words with 180 footnotes. I wrote an appendix about Project Mogul, again because it was part of the story but it shouldn’t be part of the book. I believe that it removes Mogul from the case because, simply, Flight No. 4 was cancelled and the cluster of balloons flown later that day was just three or four balloons with a microphone and not one of the long arrays.

Tom was still busy with the Wright Field book so I undertook some of the earlier chapters as well… I sent those on to Tom, got his comments, but he was still busy with that other book. At the same time we were interviewing people who had been on the base in 1947, but we were now talking to the low-ranking end of the spectrum because those of a higher rank had been older in 1947 and most of them were gone. Don supplied some telephone numbers and I called a woman who lived on a ranch out near Corona. She told me that there was a diary available, but it was in one of the out buildings that was filled with the debris of several people. It was lost somewhere in there along with the snakes and the scorpions. Here, at last, was someone who talking of a diary written in the right time frame even if it was guarded by snakes and scorpions.

I called Tom and he told me that he’d already seen the out building and that he and Don had already been there and talked to the woman. She and her family smoked all the time so it seemed that the house was filled with a heavy blue haze and that apparently no one ever emptied an ashtray. Tom had seen the out buildings, plural, and they were filled from ground to ceiling with all sorts of boxes, furniture, broken machines, trash, and anything else you might think of. The least of the problems were the scorpions. I’m not sure why Don supplied the phone number but it seemed to be a dead end.

Tom finished the book about Wright Field but we still made no progress on our book, other than what I had done. I warned that the window was closing and we might lose the opportunity, but that didn’t have much effect. And I learned there was quite a bit of material about Roswell in the new book which wouldn’t help us with the sale of the new one. That was, of course, their decision and I had nothing to do with it or say about it other than to suggest that the publisher might see it as a liability.

In the meantime Reynolds was publishing updates on the slide investigation but he wasn’t getting the information from me. Tony Bragalia had an article about the slides, complete with the Rays’ names in Philip Mantle’s UFO emagazine’s first issue in 2013. So the information was getting out.

At this time it was becoming clear to me that this book project wasn’t going work. The window for the book was closing and we weren’t getting anywhere with it. This slide thing was taking more of Tom and Don’s time and everything seemed to be geared toward it. I wasn’t learning anything about the slides. The book project was dying so that I finally gave up on it.

At that time people thinking that I was on the inside were asking me questions about these slides. When they asked me about them, I said that I wasn’t part of that investigation. This was the truth. I did know some things that weren’t wider knowledge, but thought that information belonged to Tom and Don to release. Instead, I get labeled a liar. I think at this point it’s clear that I had no part in the investigation and that my questions to them went mostly unanswered. I’m no longer sure what Tom’s motivation for asking me to assist in a book about Roswell was, but it is clear to me that as time went on, his motivations changed. Somehow our working together on an important book took a backseat to the circus that is now the Roswell Slides.

If I asked questions about the slides, the refrain was much the same. They couldn’t tell me anything about it but I know that wasn’t the whole truth. Remember, back in 2012 when we had the book meeting? They said nothing about the slides then and you could suggest that it was because of the nondisclosure agreement.… except they had a paper copy of one of the slides with them and showed that to David Rudiak. Apparently they could disclose what they knew to him, but not to me. And, don’t forget, it was Tom who asked me to join him in the book project and then invited in Don without consulting me first. I was sort of stuck with that invitation but I also wondered if his invitation to Don had more to do with the slides than anything else.

The other problem was that as we all learned more about these slides, it began to sound like Alien Autopsy Light. Not a big video production like the Alien Autopsy, just two little slides that showed an unusual creature that for some reason every one of them assumed to be an alien and because the slides seemed to have been taken in the late 1940s that it was from Roswell. That would mean the slides were real, but that doesn’t mean it was of an alien creature either and frankly I’m not sure why that connection was made other than the dating of the slides to the late 1940s. It all seems somewhat problematic to me.

Although I wasn’t being included in the investigation and had no input into what they were doing, I was learning a little about it. From the very beginning I was worried about the lack of provenance. How were they going to establish a connection to Roswell if they didn’t really know who had taken the pictures? Like the rest of you, I have learned that the connection to the Rays might even be more nebulous than we thought. Adam Dew has written that Hilda had died in 1988 and the slides discovered when emptying out a garage (or attic) of a house outside of Sedona in 1998. That means the chain of custody is broken as well. Who owned the house for the ten years between Hilda’s death and the clean out... or is that some sort of a typo, which would confound the whole process regardless. Then we learn that they sat around for another ten years or so and that the sister of the man who now owns (or owned) them gave them to her brother (unless, of course, Dew now owns the slides though an arrangement with Dew. Is this getting complicated enough for you?) And let’s not forget that after the Mexico City circus, there is a chance that the slides will sell for a pile of money.

There is an additional problem here. The slides were found with those that apparently belonged to the Rays but there is actually nothing to connect them to the Rays. All the slides that belonged to them, if we believe what we have been told, were arranged carefully and many, if not all the others, were marked. These were not. They were separate and hidden in an envelope, which, if you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Here we are with no provenance and a broken chain of custody. While they might have been taken in the late 1940s, the material about the Rays might be completely irrelevant. Discussion of their high level contacts, or the lack thereof, is also irrelevant. That they have pictures of Eisenhower in this general’s uniform (and in one of them, the picture is reversed because the ribbons are on the wrong side) only means that they managed to take pictures of Eisenhower. In today’s world, how many people who had no real connections have pictures of a high level member of the military or the government. A picture or two of Eisenhower or Sammy Snead doesn’t really suggest high level connections. Hell I have pictures of me with David Letterman in Baghdad and of Larry King in the deserts of Nevada... not to mention pictures of one of our Senators.

None of that explains how the Rays would have been able to obtain a picture of an alien creature. We all agree that if there was a crash and alien bodies were recovered, it would all be highly classified. I can think of no plausible scenario in which civilians, no matter how highly connected, would have had the opportunity to see, let alone photograph the body of an alien creature and get out of the room with their camera and film intact.

Most of us have only seen a poor quality copy of one slide. There is little detail visible, but there is enough to suggest what might have been photographed is a mummy, probably from South or Central America.… or could it be a body buried in the desert Southwest that was mummified by the weather. And, that provides an opportunity for the Rays, or some other civilian, to photograph what was found. Yes, I know that they all say it isn’t a mummy and claim once we see the high quality slide, we’ll all agree. But we haven’t seen them and if there are pictures of mummies that match, to a certain degree that body in the slide, then it is going to be a hard sell to convince many that it isn’t a terrestrially based mummy as opposed to some alien creature.

But here’s the thing. Without knowing who took the pictures, without knowing where they were taken, and with a range of when the film might have been exposed and developed, there is a major hole in the story. In the end, all that is really known is that there are two slides of an unusual creature that some believe to be alien, but without all the information, without a photographer to interview, and without additional information, such as a tissue sample with a proper chain of custody and evidence, all there is are the two slides and the circus atmosphere that is developing. Unless Tom and Don have some additional information, and from what Adam Dew is saying they don’t, then this will end badly unless there is a pile of money to be shared by them all.

Roswell Slides and the Video Clips

For those who don’t wish to follow the links to listen to Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and Adam Dew talk about the Roswell Slides, I thought that I would add a little bit of analysis here. This is my take based on these short clips and what is said in them.

First, Don provides little in the way of information about the slides. Instead he speaks about the historical value of them, and if they are what they are reported to be, then his hyperbole isn’t all that far over the top. If these slides show a creature that was born on another planet and who came to Earth, then the slides are of historical importance.

He suggests this is the proof for which all of us have been searching, but then the same was said about the MJ-12 documents and the alien autopsy film. Neither has withstood the test of time, though surprisingly there are some that still wish to argue the validity of them. Don is on a little more solid ground simply because all the evidence isn’t in and until the presentation in May, most of us are left to speculate about the slides… still they are simply photographs of the same creature so we actually have just a single example here.

Don does suggest that there will be some first-hand testimony offered. This is in the nature of “This is what I saw in 1947,” but that doesn’t help much. With the alien autopsy there were a number of people who claimed to have seen the film prior to its unveiling in the mid-1990s, and we now know that they hadn’t seen anything like it simply because that film was faked.

Adam Dew tells us, “I am a graduate of Northwestern University (BSJ '98). If I wasn't on an actual paying job (as opposed to the slide doc project) I’d post the diploma for you [not me but someone who questioned his credentials],” which doesn’t tell us all that much. A great many of us have college degrees and we don’t know what his area of expertise is.

He does tell us however, that the slides have been shown to various experts such as Professor Rod Slemmons who had been the director of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography who suggested that to fake the slide holder, that cardboard sleeve they are in, would be difficult to do. Well, that is something but not really all that much.

And he showed the slides to Neil deGrasse Tyson who seems less than overwhelmed by the slide. I have two take aways for this. One is that the guy actually talked to Tyson and two, it seems that all sorts of people have seen the slides who have nothing to do with the investigation.

Dew also presents footage of an unidentified man, other than to say that he was a lieutenant in Roswell in 1947 and who says that what is on the film looks “identical… if this is a copy, they did pretty good.” Which, again, is of little value until this guy can be vetted… though I suspect that interview was arranged by Tom or Don and they should know if the guy was in Roswell in July 1947.

However, Dew dated the slides from 1939 to 1949… and I’ll just point out that the coding on the slide suggested the film was manufactured in 1927, 1947 or 1967. Kodachrome was not available in 1927, so that suggests that Dew’s range of dates is inaccurate… for what that’s worth.

Dew said, “Logic tells me it’s probably nothing but I simply can’t shake the thought that maybe, just maybe it’s something.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Tom provides the most information about what is on the slide and what the alien looks like. He says, “What we see in the picture is what appears to be a three and a half to four foot tall alien. It’s got a frail body and the oversized head just as it was described to us [Carey and Schmitt]. It appears bipedal… [It] has two arms. It looks like it has some analog to a ribcage but it has been partially dissected. The pleural cavity and the abdominal cavity have been removed. The head has been severed from the body.”

Then Tom says something that I’m not sure he is going to be able to retreat from and I’m surprised that it was in the video clip. He said, “…We don’t know where the picture was taken. It’s taken indoors [so Ray or whoever, didn’t stumble across the body in the desert]… We don’t know exactly what circumstances the photographer was being a part of to take those pictures.”

They don’t know who took the pictures, only that they were found as a house was being prepared for an estate sale. The house had been owned by Bernerd and Hilda Ray and was in a collection of slides from the late 1940s and 1950s. They don’t seem to know who took the pictures or when they were taken or how Ray ended up with them and with that, the trail grows cold.

Now we have to wait to see if there is more information that will come out at the unveiling in May or if we have most of the pertinent information now. At the moment, this is interesting but not overly promising.

Roswell Slides: An Update

(Blogger's Note: I pass on the following information because of the nature of the information and the high level of interest in the Roswell slides. This information is of interest to those who visit this blog... I have not been able to vet the information contained here and do not know the name of the Kodak consultant nor do I know the names of any of the scientists.)

THE PUBLIC REVEAL OF THE ROSWELL ALIEN SLIDES

BY ANTHONY BRAGALIA

What some say represents stunning visual evidence of a humanoid creature that was found crashed near Roswell, NM in 1947 will soon to be released in an international livestream event. Referred to by some as “the Roswell Slides,” the Kodachrome images have now been authenticated by expert scientists and their provenance has been confirmed. During that long process many have speculated about precisely what these pictures show.  People will now be able to see for themselves with the public reveal of the slides on May 5^th 2015.

NATIONAL AUDITORIUM, MEXICO CITY

The event will include presenters Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the Moon, as well as noted authors and Roswell investigators Tom Carey and Don Schmitt. Transmitted live from the 10,000 seat National Auditorium in Mexico City, the history and background context of the slides (as well as other facets of the case) will be detailed. Tom Carey, who made international news when he announced the discovery of the slides at American University in Washington, DC last month, will be providing more information and logistical details on the event shortly.

A SHORT SLIDES REDUX

Some years ago, while an attic was being cleaned out, a chest was found containing many Kodachrome slides. Two Kodachrome slides were later found to have been separately hidden in an envelope within the inner lining of the chest’s lid. The chest and its contents were traced and found to have belonged to an intriguing, childless couple that are now deceased.

This author made the discovery that the husband, Bernerd A. Ray, was an Oil Exploration Geologist working the fields in New Mexico and the Permian Basin (which includes the Roswell region) in the 1940s for a company that would later become part of Texaco.  In 1947 he was the President of the Texas chapter of the American Institute of Petroleum Geologists, which also at that time ‘folded in’ the State of New Mexico. After 1947, Bernerd became a ‘ghost’ in his profession and did not publish nor appear to be active with the Institute ever again.

Bernerd’s wife was Hilda Blair Ray. Researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt and the current owner of the film learned that Hilda was a highly respected lawyer with a high-end clientele and possible intelligence connections.  A private pilot, she maintained favorable relations with well-placed individuals in both the public and private sectors during the 1940s. The other slides in the chest (over 100) are often found depicting accomplished people, including Dwight Eisenhower. This is a couple who were of the highest integrity. And both had contacts and activities that could have fortuitously enabled them to obtain these slides. And neither would have been the type to hide away hoaxed images as part of some sick prank, only to have those images found decades later by happenstance. This busy professional couple was also philanthropic with no propensity to prank.

WHY THE SLIDES ARE GENUINE

Professionals from a range of disciplines who have seen the slides agree that they depict a small humanoid creature –a formerly living thing- that is not a prop nor a genetically defective human [Blogger's note: Of all the UFO researchers involved here, Carey is the most qualified to make judgements... He has a background in Anthropology and completed the course work for a Ph.D, but didn't complete a dissertation]. And importantly, the being that is shown in the slides does not correlate whatsoever to the depictions of aliens extant in the popular culture of the 1940s (such as those that appeared in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories or movies like Buck Rogers) What the slides depict were not even part of the public psyche of that time. This is not how people envisioned things from outer space to look like back then. Instead, these 1947 slides reveal a being that looks like the beings found  in the desert in 1947 as described by the witnesses to Roswell.

I was asked by Tom Carey to find the best available talent to test and analyze these Kodak slides. An extensive search was conducted and I found that talent. A Photo Scientist employed by Kodak for decades who will be named at the event, this expert has led engineering, production and product management groups at the company’s Rochester, NY headquarters. Now a consultant, he also published the definitive book on Kodak film processes. Highly acknowledged in his field, he conducted extensive testing on the slides and conclusively authenticated the slides of the creature as having been exposed in the year 1947. It was also concluded that the slides had not been tampered with nor manipulated in any way. What is depicted is really there, accurately reflected in the emulsion as an actual moment in time in 1947. Science has weighed in and has determined that these are real slides that are really from 1947.

And Law would agree with Science in this case. In the eyes of the courts, the slides serve as two types of legally admissible evidence. Circumstantial Evidence represents informed and reasonable inferences that can be made about a case given the specific circumstances and history surrounding it. The circumstances and history surrounding the Rays is very telling- from who they were and what they did, to where they were and who they knew. Documentary Evidence is a legal term that relates to evidence that accurately reflects a moment in time. This includes video, sound recordings, x-rays, photographs and slides.

THE ONLY CONCLUSION

This humanoid is not a deformed person, mummy,  dummy, simian or dead serviceman. It is not a creature that finds its origin on Earth. And given that the slides of this creature were taken the very same year as the Roswell UFO crash; that the appearance of the creature matches the reported appearance of the Roswell crash aliens; and given that the person who was in original possession of the slides was a geologist working the New Mexico desert throughout the 1940’s, it is not a jump or stretch to then conclude that these slides indeed show the corpse of one of the creatures found fallen at Roswell.