Jan Aldrich, Barry Greenwood and the Ramey Memo

Jan Aldrich seemed to be upset that we are attempting to read the Ramey memo and has likened the effort to that of the promoters of the Not Roswell Slides. I fear that he has misunderstood our mission or maybe he assigned his own beliefs to what he thinks we are doing as opposed to what we are actually doing, but the point is that this is nothing like the fiasco that is the Not Roswell Slides.

We have not expressed a point of view about what the message says… Oh, sure, David Rudiak believes that it is a classified document that might hold important information, but that is not the driving force for us. David would be delighted if we were able to validate his interpretation of the memo including the phrase, “victim of the wreck,” but we have been unable to clarify the image enough to make that call.

Jan is concerned that we won’t mention Barry Greenwood’s interpretation of part of the memo, though such a concern is unwarranted. In fact, more than six years ago, I had explored Barry’s suggestion about his reading of part of the memo. You can read that posting here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/ramey-memo-and-barry-greenwood.html

At that time David argued passionately that Barry’s interpretation didn’t quite fit all the known facts. We have to remember that David has worked on all this extensively for many years and believes that he had established to a high degree of certainty what the memo says. There is a great deal of agreement with his analysis inside the UFO community… the problem is, as anyone who looks at the memo can see, there is ambiguity in the interpretations. If there was none, then we would be having another conversation.

Jan’s point seems to be that we’ll ignore the conflicting data pretending that it doesn’t exist. However, we have attempted to look at all the evidence, including much of what Barry has written and incorporate that in our paper as it deals with the history of the attempts to read the memo. I have, for example, explored the possibility that J. Bond Johnson, the reporter/photographer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, brought the document into Ramey’s office with him, which would make it wire service copy. David disagrees for several reasons including that while Johnson had said just this in some of his earlier interviews, he also repudiated that claim in many of his later interviews. Johnson realized that if it was wire service copy, then the importance of the memo was badly degraded but if it was a classified document, then this could be the “smoking gun.”

But here’s my point. It is true that David is quite passionate in his opinion, which doesn’t make it wrong. Jan is quite passionate in his opinion, which doesn’t make it wrong. Where Jan missed the boat is with his idea that we are attempting to recreate a Not Roswell Slides presentation that will ignore any evidence that conflicts with what Jan believes is our mission. But rather than hide the data, or obscure it with digital tricks, we have made everything available on line for those who wish to look at it. All we are attempting to do is clarify what the memo says not force an interpretation on everyone. We are attempting to solve the riddle and while no matter what we learn, there will be detractors, in the end we hope to have provided an answer for this… a true answer and not one that appeals to one end of the spectrum or the other… an answer that will resolve the issue.

The Timing of the Roswell Photographs

It has long been the contention of those who worked with J. Bond Johnson on the attempt to read the Ramey memo that Johnson did not take the two photographs of Jesse Marcel holding up what looks to be debris of a weather balloon. I never really understood why that was so because the pictures seemed to be of the same quality as those that Johnson did say he took.

The Roswell Photo Interpretation Team including Ron Regehr and Neil Morris, determined by looking at the shadows and sunlight as seen through the curtains

Ron Regehr (Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle

in Ramey’s office that the pictures of Marcel were taken at 3:15 p.m. and that would have been Tuesday afternoon, July 8, 1947. Given the timing of the events, as they have reconstructed them, this means that Johnson couldn’t have taken those two pictures. And, if their estimate of the time is correct, then their assumption is also correct.

I have never understood exactly how they made this interpretation. They talked of measuring shadows seen outside of Ramey’s office, but I don’t know if they had ever been to the base to make measurements, if the building in which Ramey had his office can be identified if it is still standing and how they determined the precise angle of the sun on July 8, 1947. What it is today doesn’t necessarily match what it would have been in 1947. Or, to put it in fewer words, I believe they made many assumptions to come up with the conclusions they wanted.

Here’s what we know based on the documentation. According to the time line published in the Daily Illini on July 9, the first of the AP alerts sounded at 4:26 p.m. Central Time (Fort Worth), or 3:26 Mountain Time (Roswell). Since Johnson had said, repeatedly he learned of the debris coming to Fort Worth from his editor and it seemed that the editor had the news bulletin, that means Johnson couldn’t have received word until after the Marcel photographs were taken.

The RPIT has concluded that there was another photographer there about two hours before Johnson arrived. It was this other photographer who took the two pictures of Marcel. Johnson at one point said that another fellow who worked at the newspaper in 1947 said that Ramey owed them a favor and had called the Star – Telegram to alert them about the situation. It was this man, never identified by Johnson or anyone else, who had taken those first pictures.

The problem here is that no one has ever come forward to claim to have taken the pictures of Marcel. After all the publicity surrounding these events, after all the times the pictures have been shown on television or published in books and magazines, it would seem that the man (and since this was 1947 I’m assuming it was a man) would have appeared to tell us that. Johnson, after all, and according to his own words, had been to Fort Worth to try to find his pictures after he had seen them on a television show or two.

And then there is where the negative of Marcel was filed. It was in the same envelop at the University of Texas – Arlington Library Special Collections as those of Ramey. That means the picture came from the Fort Worth Star – Telegram and that means they were taken by a photographer from that newspaper. But, again, according to Johnson, he claimed more than once he was the only one dispatched from there and to hear him tell it, he was the only one who took photographs in Ramey’s office, overlooking or belittling the picture of Irving Newton crouched in front of the same debris in relatively the same locations as it appears in the other photographers.

There is something else in all this. Johnson said that when he returned to the newspaper office, there was a “whole barrage” of people waiting for him. These were technicians from Dallas who had brought transmitting equipment to Fort Worth so that they could send a picture over the news wires. Johnson was told to develop the film and bring out a wet print because they were in such a big hurry to see what had been found and to get it out over the wire.

But, if there had been another photographer there, who could have been from a newspaper in the area though Johnson said it was from the Star – Telegram, he would have had, at the very least, a two hour head start on Johnson. His pictures,

Jesse Marcel with a view of the opening in the
curtains. Photo copyright by the Special
Collection, UTA.

of Marcel, would have gone out over the news wire probably before Johnson could have returned to his office in Fort Worth with his pictures, though there is no evidence of this. While Johnson’s pictures would have been important because they would have been different, they wouldn’t have been so critical that his editor wanted a “wet” print. They could have waited for Johnson to dry them properly. And, there is no indication from any of the archive services that any other picture, except the one of Newton which is clearly different than those first six, were ever taken.

Johnson had to be the photographer and the estimate of the time of the photographs based on looking through a slit in the curtains of Ramey’s office seems to be an amazing bit of deduction. The documentation from the time, Johnson’s own recollections of what he had been told and then related to me in the first two interviews he had ever given (yes, I was the first to interview him… I know this because I found in my notes that I had asked him about it and he said that no one had ever interviewed him) that Ramey told him it was a weather balloon, and what was written in that very first article in the Star – Telegram, sinks much of what he said later.

I won’t even bother to go through all of that again. Much of the information gathered in those first two interviews appeared in the International UFO Reporter (March/April 1990) and (November/December 1990). These articles outline the first interviews with Johnson and our (Don Schmitt and me) attempts to make some sense out of everything. The second article outlines the alterations in Johnson’s statements after his “interviews” with Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera. The critical interviews, that is, the ones I conducted are on tape.

The trouble here is that Johnson told so many stories, modified, changed and deleted information almost at a whim. We can believe the things that are corroborated by others and documentation and we can reject nearly everything else. Johnson’s desire to become an important part of the Roswell story ended up changing him from a valuable witness into just another clamoring for his fifteen minutes of fame regardless of the facts.

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.