The Roswell Slides After the Big Reveal

Well, the great reveal has happened and it was… not great. In fact, opinion seems to be running against the idea that this was an alien creature and with many inside the UFO community saying that they were underwhelmed. Even those who are solidly inside the extraterrestrial camp have expressed disappointment in the program and the slides with some suggesting this was all promotion for another Don Schmitt and Tom Carey Roswell book.

Tony Bragalia, who has worked with Schmitt and Carey for months if not years on this, is still convinced that it is nothing earthly and there are scientists who back up his claim. In an article that he has circulated this morning (May 6, 2015), he provided this statement from two of those scientists:

It's nothing like us, we can see that his feet and legs appear to be like that of a reptile and could have evolved from something like a gecko or some similar animal that became larger and developed a large brain and binocular vision. His nose is small, his mouth different from ours. There are parts that could have been removed during autopsy. I[t] seems to have no teeth.

Joint Statement, Luis Antonio de Alba, Anatomist and Physiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Richard Doble, Canadian Physical Anthropologist.

Bragalia also wrote, quoting  Professor Rod Slemmons, Former Director of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography and 1950s Kodak Executive, “It would be really, really hard to fake these slides or to duplicate them if that is what you want to do [.]”

And while all that is somewhat interesting, it doesn’t actually prove anything other than these fellows have expressed an opinion about the slides that don’t actually say anything about it being obviously alien. In fact, the name of the Rochester, NY Photo-scientist who supposedly rendered a positive opinion on the slides dating was not revealed. Bragalia wrote:

The truth is that the name of the photo-scientist is known to researchers and others. It was not publicly revealed for a simple reason: the man was repeatedly harassed at home by strangers. It is known that skeptic Lance Moody and reporter Billy Cox both separately -and within a day of each other- found the leaked name of the scientist and saw fit to call him at home at night out-of-the-blue to question him. Bear in mind that this was before the scientists name had been properly revealed and well before his image analysis report was even released. Understandably, the man was angry and has indicated that he simply does not need this kind of thing in his life.

And while it is understandable that the man would have been annoyed at the telephone calls, it is also understandable that others would want to corroborate the information that was being circulated by those who allege the slides show an alien creature. The real problem here is that they leaked the name, unintentionally, and then are appalled that others wish to verify the information. Lance Moody has written that the Rochester scientist’s verdict wasn’t nearly positive as others have suggested and that he was not named in the great reveal suggests that there are problems with the claims about his testimony.

Or, in other words, the point is moot because the witness was not there to be asked a few questions to clarify the situation.

John Greenewald was as unimpressed as were so many others. To his Black Vault site at:

http://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-roswell-slide-alien-kodachrome-slide-released-but-just-one/#

he posted some rather negative words. “When I woke up the morning of May 6, 2015, I expected to at least see 10, maybe 20, maybe even 50 headlines about this.  What did I see? At 8 am in the morning, well after the first news cycle… there were about 3. And those articles ripped apart this story, and profiled it as the joke it was.”

Greenewald quoted from the UK’s Daily Mirror which had said:

Two photographs of a “dead alien” were unveiled at a big money event last night – and immediately dismissed as fake.

A series of ‘UFOlogists’ appeared at the Be Witness meeting last night to reveal images of an extraterrestrial who supposedly crashed to Earth during the infamous Roswell incident in 1947.

The images were found by former journalist Adam Dew, who reportedly turned down interviews with magazines that wanted to cover the story because “they were not offering any compensation” [Which, of course, shows that they weren’t interested as alleged, they just weren’t interested in handing over some cash].

He claimed to have taken steps to verify the pair of alien snaps and said Kodak experts had dated the film to 1947.

But the rest of the world has not had the chance to test the rigour of his methods, because high resolution images of the alien are not yet available.

They are likely to be sold through his production company Dew Media alongside a documentary about the discovery of the slides.

The photos were supposedly found in Arizona, hidden in a collection of snaps owned by oil geologist Bernard Ray and his wife Hilda Ray, who have both died.

Nick Pope, a researcher who headed up a UFO investigation wing at the UK Ministry of Defence, told Mirror Online he was “underwhelmed”.

“It could be a model, or it could simply be a fake image, dressed up to look like a Forties slide,” he said.

Greenewald concluded, “Others took to social networks, and quickly were able to find nearly identical looking ‘bodies’ right here from human civilizations. This, even further, supports the theory this is nothing more than a museum artifact.”

Bragalia, however, wrote, “An overnight poll conducted by Coast-to-Coast radio has thus far tallied over 800 respondents to a survey asking what the nature of the creature:

42% say it is not an alien image.

58% believe it to either be that of an alien, or that they are simply not
certain what it is.

The figures, however, aren’t quite that supportive when broken down. It is true that 42.1% voted that it is not an alien, only 28.55% voted that it was, leaving 29.35 % voting that they were unsure. It could be said, that over 71% voted no or unsure, which is nearly three-quarters of those who expressed an opinion. I asked Bragalia and he agreed that what he had written about this was misleading, suggesting that I could correct that.

Here’s what I think, if anyone actually cares at this point. We haven’t had a good look at the high resolution slides and have been offered excuses for why that hasn’t happened. The slides seem to depict a creature, cadaver, corpse, in a museum setting rather than the expected situation if it was truly alien. The array of expert opinion we were told would be offered has not materialized and the statements that have been made seem to be weak. Already there have been pictures of mummies in various museums that seem to resemble to a high degree the body in the slide. There is nothing to tie this to Roswell and I will point out that both Carey and Schmitt did say that these weren’t “Roswell” slides, but their commentary seemed to suggest they believed otherwise.

They provided some witness testimony but it did little to validate the slides. Carlene Green, whose father, Homer Rowlette, said that he had seen the bodies. There are those who worry about the color of them she mentioned, but that isn’t the problem here. She is a nice woman I interviewed a number of years ago, but she didn’t see anything herself. She is a second-hand witness who can only report what her father told her so long ago.

We still have nothing for the provenance; we still don’t know who took the slides, when they were taken, or who even owns them now. It could be Adam Dew who has said that his company owns them, or it could be the brother of the woman who found them. That point has not been clarified.

Today, May 6, we really don’t know anything more than we did on May 4. Nothing was clarified at the big reveal. We have the names of some of the scientists, but certainly not in the numbers we expected. We have a better resolution of the slides, but rather than clarify, they have not done that. They seem to be of a creature in a museum setting given what is seen in the background, but we don’t know. At the end of the presentation we are as confused as we were before it started.

Can anyone say Alien Autopsy?

The Roswell Festival - A Brief Interview

While sitting at my table in the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, I heard a woman behind me say, “That was my father.” She was pointing to a picture of one of the soldiers assigned to the base in 1947.

I listened to her for a moment and then stood up to learn who she was and what she had been told.

Her name was Carlene Green (seen here pointing to her father's picture) who was the daughter of Sergeant Homer G. Rowlette, a member of the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron. And as established by the Yearbook produced by Walter Haut in 1947, he was clearly in Roswell at the right time.

According to what she said, she learned of her father’s part in the crash retrieval just days before he died. He was on a Gurney and about to be wheeled into an operating room when he asked her to come closer so that he could speak to her.

He told her that he had been at the base when the “spaceship” crashed and that he had seen it. He said that the craft was rounded and that he had seen three “little people,” and suggested that one of them had survived the crash.

He apologized for not telling her sooner but that he had told her brother the story sometime earlier. (The Yearbook picture of Sergeant Rowlette seen here).

Finally he cautioned her to keep it all to herself, or else.

This all happened in 1988, which is, of course, ten years after Jesse Marcel, Sr. told his story and eight years after the publication of The Roswell Incident. While the story of the Roswell crash wasn’t as well known then as it is today, there were television shows that touched on it, there were documentaries about it and some magazine articles that told of it. In other words, this information didn’t appear in the vacuum that existed prior to 1980.

And yes, this is another second-hand story. It would have been nice to find it prior to Rowlette’s death in 1988 but that didn’t happen. We are left with these tales and we each must decide how important they are to the overall case. It does provide some interesting details, some of which have been suggested by others, but in the end, it is still second hand.

At any rate, Carlene Green was a nice woman who took a few minutes to share with me the information her father had given her so long ago.