Tom Carey's Fourteen Points or The Roswell Slides Revisited

Tom Carey, who seems set on keeping the Roswell Slides controversy alive, contacted Rob McConnell to say that he had thought of several things that he, Carey, should have mentioned during his last interview. He had a list this time. Fourteen items that he wanted to say, though I confess I don’t know what difference it makes at this late date. You can listen to it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0oNhTsaf3M

We were treated with some of the same things that we’ve all heard in the past. We learned about Joe Beason who contracted Carey to alert him to the slides but this time Carey said that Beason had some sort of IT company which should have been

Tom Carey

a red flag for them. Then Adam Dew appeared on the scene and it was Dew, without Carey or Don Schmitt, who went to Kodak to validate the age of the film. As I have mentioned in the past, Dew, at least according to Carey, told them that the code on the side of the film was the code used by Kodak in 1947… but, of course, had Carey asked me, I would have told him that the code was for motion picture film and was rarely if ever used on slide film.

There are other things in the interview, such as them being fooled by the age and importance of other slides (or maybe Carey still believes that the photographer, that is Bernard or Hilda Ray, were pals with the Eisenhowers). This connection suggested the Rays might have been allowed to see the top secret alien bodies and to photograph them because they knew the Eisenhowers. This really makes no sense, when you think about it, but that connection to Eisenhower, because the Rays had pictures of Ike on the back of a train, seemed to suggest some sort of relationship.

But all of this has been discussed before. The interesting points come near the end of the interview. Carey said that Beason had originally contacted Stan Friedman, but Friedman was too busy to get involved in the investigation of the slides. This, as I have said, makes no sense because Friedman, who sees himself as the first Roswell investigator, has been told about the possibility of the definitive proof for the alien nature of the Roswell crash, but he’s too busy to pursue it. Instead, he said to hand this possible smoking gun over to Carey… And at no time did Carey or Schmitt ever mention any of this to Friedman even after nearly everyone in the world knew something about the slides… It is important to point out that Rob McConnell had asked Friedman about this and Friedman denied that he had ever been approached about it by Beason.

The other revelation, which also came toward the end, was that while Carey and Schmitt and those working with them had done everything they could to read the placard, it simply couldn’t be done. But Carey tells us here that there is a third slide that Dew and Beason kept to themselves. Remember, as I pointed out once we had seen the slides, they were numbers 9 and 11, and I wondered what was shown on slide number 10. Maybe there was something there that would have made reading the placard easier or revealed exactly what had been photographed.

And this is what Carey claimed. He said that while in Mexico City for the Great Reveal, there was another slide that had been shown to, or given to, Jaime Maussan. This was slide number 10, and when Richard Dolan asked for a copy of one of the slides to email to colleagues, Maussan accidentally gave him slide number 10 so that deblurring, or reading the placard, was done quickly. Well, I suppose this could be true, but the fact remains that the placard, using the proper program, could have been read prior to the Great Reveal. But Carey has confirmed that there was a third slide and that the placard seemed to be clearer in that slide which makes you wonder about them not pursuing this.

At the end, Carey seemed to accept the idea that the image was of a human child… but he sort of talked around it, so I’m not sure that if he isn’t holding out some hope that the image might not be human. He concedes that the image photographed by the Rays in the 1940s is the same as the image in photographs made in the late 19^th century and again in the 1930s. But he doesn’t seem to rule out completely the idea that it might be an alien creature that had died sometime earlier and had been interred by the native peoples. Though it seems that the answer is no, it also seems that this might be the last gasp in this sad tale.

The Roswell Slides - Who Got the Five Grand?

I was reading Tim Printy’s SUNlite (which you can easily find by typing Tim Printy and SUNlite into your search engine or use www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite.htm). He mentioned that Jaime Maussan had paid Tony Bragalia five thousand dollars for finding another picture of the mummy displayed in the so-called Roswell Slides. This suggested a couple of things to me.

Tim Printy

First, I wondered, as did Tim Printy, what had become of that money. I asked Tony and he said that he had donated all of it to Native American non-profit organization. Tony had been extremely upset to learn that the image on the slides was not an alien creature but an unfortunate child who had died centuries earlier.

Second, I wondered if this was a tacit admission that the image wasn’t an alien as had been promoted. Maussan, who had rejected the reading of the placard suggesting the identity of the image, was now quietly admitting the truth. Maussan has insisted that the image was an alien and he would prove it. He also offered a reward if anyone could find another picture of the same mummy.

As you all know, the documentation was extraordinary here. Pictures of the excavation in the late nineteenth century were found, a report about the discovery had been located, and pictures showing the mummy in a museum setting that cemented the identity were produced. Clearly the mummy had been identified as something terrestrial.

It seems at this point that nearly everyone who was involved in this have now, more or less, conceded the truth. We can now relegate the whole thing to a footnote in the history of the UFO phenomenon.

But since Tim Printy had raised the question about what happened to the money, I thought I would answer that. The money ended up with the Native Americans which seems to me to be the proper place for it.

An Experiment about Page Views

A couple of days ago Rich Reynolds over at the UFO Conjectures blog put up a brief article that has something to do with Roswell. Apparently some of his readers took issue with his return to Roswell and made comment on it. Reynolds said that each mention of Roswell boosted the page views of the blog and he provided a screen shot to prove his point. There was a spike on it. And in the comments section, there was a post by Gilles Fernandez remarking that he had just posted to his website a rebuttal of one of Jaime Maussan’s expert’s latest comments on the Roswell Slides.

I thought I would perform an experiment about this and because, as Gilles had mentioned, Jaime Maussan had released another “expert’s” opinion of the image on the Roswell Slides, this was a timely story. I believed that the issue had been settled about forty-eight hours after the Mexico City disaster and while some of those original participants in the slides fiasco were reluctant to let go, it was clear to the vast majority of people that the image was not an alien. To prove that it was, Maussan published another opinion on why it was alien. All this, I thought, would be a good target for the experiment.

I posted a short article about the Roswell Slides and within minutes had the first response to it. There was an immediate spike in the page views, and oddly, a dip and then another spike and twelve hours later an even larger spike. Clearly the Roswell name brought in page views. Just add Roswell to the title and people came to see if there was anything new.

Last year, as the run up to the Great Reveal was a major topic, this blog was averaging more than three times the normal page views that I see today… and Roswell is an on-going topic that peaks the interest of those out there who visit blogs like this one. (But then, so did the articles on Oak Island which doubled the daily average.)

All this really proved was that Reynolds’ observation was accurate and you can pull people to your blog by mentioning Roswell. That some still believe that the Roswell Slides show an alien gives you a feeling for the state of UFO research. That others attempt to hijack the Slides, dragging in other nutty ideas isn’t all that surprising either.

In any case, the experiment revealed the high interest in Roswell and provides us with a clue as to how to drive traffic to a blog, if that is the only mission of a blog. Just stick Roswell in the title and they will come.

The Next Not Roswell Slides Chapter

One of the reasons that the posts here appear on an irregular basis is that I wait for some sort of inspiration to hit. I had put up the post on the size of the debris field with the idea to do the same with descriptions of the debris, or which officers said what about the crash and the like. Rich Reynolds also chastised me for not answering his question about UFO movies and I wanted to do something with the Hangar One nonsense about the Kingman UFO crash which I figured would alienate most of MUFON and the entire population of Kingman. Today, however, a question that I had no answer for appears to have an answer.

I had wondered why Tom Carey had so tenaciously held onto the idea that the image in the Not Roswell Slides was an alien creature. I wondered why Don Schmitt seemed to vacillate between understanding the image was an unfortunate child and it was actually something alien. Given the evidence and documentation, it seemed that the image’s identity was obvious to anyone who looked at it dispassionately, at the other photographs available of that mummy and at the documentation that surrounded its discovery, recovery and display in museums in Colorado and Arizona.

Today, I have the answer in the form of a new book by them, and Jaime Maussan, as part of the BeWitness project or whatever they called it. I’m not going to publish the link because this is not a book that should be in any serious library besides it is currently only available in Spanish. It reminds me of the continuing series of books and programs on the Bermuda Triangle after Lawrence Kusche wrote The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved. It did, in its pages, produce an intelligent and viable solution to the questions asked about the Triangle and seems to be ignored in most documentaries about that nonsense.

We are in the same place with the Not Roswell Slides. The identity of the image has been well established yet we are subjected to another “analysis” of that image based only on what is shown in the pictures and not on an examination of the remains. I suspect they will reject the research done by others that is in conflict with what they say, will trot out the same experts to endorse their original opinions, and continue to promote this as some sort of evidence of alien visitation.

Yes, I am making this prediction on nothing more than the fact the book is available as an ebook (in Spanish for nearly 20 bucks) and one that I have no intention of buying… and yes again, it is difficult to “review” a book without actually reading it, but then I do know the story of how all this came about and what the evidence supporting their conclusions are. Unless this is an expose on how they were duped into supporting the idea that the image was of an alien creature this new ebook will not reflect any sort of reality. If it is just an outgrowth of the fiasco in Mexico City, this marks the further decline in what we now laughingly call Ufology. I thought we had hit bottom in the hours after Mexico City but I see that I was wrong.

New Defector from the Roswell Slides

Mesa Verde

Once again I’m dragged back into the nonsense that is the Roswell Slides. It should be clear to everyone who is able to think at all that the slides show the image of an unfortunate child who died hundreds of years ago. No one has ever offered an explanation of how we got from the image of what is clearly a mummy to the idea that it was the body of an alien creature. How did they make that first incredibly dumb leap of logic?

This is the latest development, and by latest I mean one that first appeared on Curt Collins blog last week though Jaime Maussan has now produced another document about why the body in the slide is different from the one the rest of us believe to be the same. With Maussan’s latest, Curt’s posting becomes even more important. The post can be found here:

http://www.blueblurrylines.com/2015/06/dr-richard-oconnor-on-putting-away.html

One of the experts who was defending the idea that the slides showed an alien creature was Dr. Richard O’Connor, who, as you’ll see at Curt’s site, wrote to Linda Moulton Howe that he had been able to confirm the deblurring of the placard to his satisfaction but that the statement on the placard “cannot be correct.”

O’Connor joined the alien body team after the great May 5^th fiasco. Jaime Maussan interviewed O’Connor via Skype because he had solid medical credentials and he spoke English. It was used as part of an article that claimed, “Doctors Agree: Roswell Slides Show a Nonhuman Body.”

This interview that was posted to YouTube would be of some value in supporting that idea of “two bodies” as Maussan claims, but all that has changed. O’Connor, having seen the FOIA material recovered by Shepherd Johnson, said, “Yeah, I’ve just, over the past 48 hours more or less, been looking at that, and it seems to me like it's drawing us toward the conclusion that in fact is this photograph probably does represent a native American child. There were some, a couple of photographs in the last pages of that set of documents, one of them in particular on page 176, and in my opinion it really does show a different photograph of what is very likely the same child.”

So, one of those who had once suggested the body was alien, though based solely on an examination of the slide, had now reversed himself. After seeing the available documentation, he changed his mind.

Curt, in fact, sent an email to O’Connor and was surprised to get a response and an invitation to give him a telephone call. According to Curt, at his Blue Blurry Lines website:

He told me that looking at a photograph is fraught with pitfalls, and mentioned the fact that the quality of the Slides photograph was not very good, the details were not clear due to the blurry photograph, which was taken at an angle from the body (and possibly distorted by the glass in the case).

There were some characteristics that he still didn't quite understand, like the condition of the chest cavity, but it occurred to him that the terraced cliffs of Montezuma Castle must have caused the deaths of a number of children from falling off the ledges. He wondered if that could have accounted for the injuries to the child's body, particularly the damage to the head and the fractured femur. I pointed out the shallow grave may have accounted for some of this, particularly the loss of the lower leg. (I [Curt Collins] thought later that the excavation by amateur archeologists could also be a factor.) 

Interestingly, Tom Carey was interviewed on June 2 on a KGRA show about all of this. According to what Curt reported, “Of the placard being read he says, ‘a day or two later, this bombshell hits about it being a mummified two-year-old boy. Well, talk about a right cross, or a left hook. He also seems to feel betrayed by two of the people who he’d asked to help with the placard have since ‘joined our critics.’ Of the critics, he said he’d have worked with them, ‘had they been civil.’ [Though I have to wonder about some of the less civil things that Tom had said in his comments about the placard and how quickly it was read… the data had been there, if the proper investigation had taken place] In the opening, he mentioned having plenty to keep him busy, a new book coming out with Don Schmitt, and another one planned beyond that, but first up is their appearance at the annual Roswell Festival.”

Here’s the thing. Someone in on the beginning of the investigation had to know the truth. The slide placard was deblurred so quickly that any alibi about the failure to do so prior to May 5^th falls onto those making the investigation. They should have been able to do that three years ago rather than get caught up in this sideshow. Basic research and a demand to see the original slides probably would have ended this long before we get to Mexico City. A simple question about the sequence of the slides, such as “Where is number ten?” might have done it. (I note here that according to some, the slides shown were number 9 and number 11, which left the question of “Where is number 10?)

If Adam Dew and his pal, Joe Beason, had any thoughts of proving how credulous UFO investigators are for some kind of a documentary, they failed at that. This wouldn’t have worked had they provided high quality scans of all of the slides to researchers. Given that, those researchers would have been able to read the placard in a matter of hours. How do I know? Because within hours of a high resolution scan appearing on Dew’s website, the placard was read.

I’ll throw one other thing out here. I believe that the mystery caller who told Nick Redfern about all this, the man who allegedly overheard a conversation in Midland, Texas, was probably either Beason, Dew or a pal of theirs. The idea that someone in Midland overheard this conversation, heard enough to understand so much of what was going on including the nondisclosure agreements, and then knew Nick Redfern, is just too much of a coincidence. It had to be arranged so that the story would get out and the hype could begin. And the hype did begin right there.

This should have never happened. It was a combination of the secrecy imposed by Dew and Beason and the enthusiasm of the Roswell investigators for the final “smoking gun” evidence. Had anyone looked at all the red flags and asked some very basic questions, this would have been seen for what it was. The majority of the blame probably belongs to Dew and Beason, but there is plenty to be shared by the others who participated in the long investigation and the program in Mexico City. We should all learn from this and change the way we do business.

Richard Doble and the Roswell Slides - Update

Yes, I know that I said I was done with the Roswell Slides but then I’ve published the comments by Tony Bragalia and Don Schmitt. I’ve heard nothing from Tom Carey and don’t personally know the others involved in this. However Richard Doble has issued a statement about the ongoing mess which might be of interest here. Although his comments mirror much of what he said during his Skype interview on May 5, he has recorded (or more accurately, Jaime Maussan has recorded) a new interview about the slides in which he says much of the same thing. You can see it on Curt Collins’ Blue Blurry Lines web site here:

http://www.blueblurrylines.com/2015/05/the-roswell-slides-anthropologist-from.html

He briefly addresses those who had read the placard suggesting that this is a mummy by telling us that he has worked with mummies for years, seen dozens or hundreds, and provides again, the reasons it is not a mummy. He suggests, I think, that the placard was created as a diversion so that the true nature of the being wouldn’t be obvious and that the photographs were not taken in a true museum setting. I don’t know where all he has been, but to me, that looks like a museum setting and there are evidence of other displays in the background of the slide.

He also rambles off a bit on how the general population was unprepared to be saddled with the knowledge there are alien races. Because of that fear, the nature of the body was obscured… but then the question arises, “If you are worried about implications and reactions to an alien body, why put it on display at all?

For what it’s worth, this all seems to be a very weak argument, based not so much on the evidence but on the “I know more about this than you do argument,” which is a sort of appeal to authority, though he is setting himself up as the authority. The vast majority of us here do not have his training in anthropology nor do we have his experience in dealing with the sort of evidence we are looking at it. He tells us of trouble with the bones, trouble with the number of ribs, trouble with the structure of the shoulders, all of which sounds impressive. In the end, the best evidence that can be gathered from the slides is not the observations about the body but on what the placard said. The people who created the placard did so with the information supplied by those who handled the body. Doble saw a photograph, and probably not the slide itself but a scan of it, and made his observations from that. Those in the museum were in possession of the body. We know their conclusions based on the placard and the journal article that Tony Bragalia found. Which evidence is more persuasive? Bragalia’s article is here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/05/tony-bragalia-and-end-of-roswell-slides.html

For those who are interested, listen to what Doble has to say about this. He certainly is quite knowledgeable but don’t let that be the only factor in making a decision about is shown in the slide. Think about everything that has happened since May 5 and make your decision from all of that.

Richard Dolan and the Roswell Slides

In news that is more than a month old, I learned that Richard Dolan has been invited to participate in the presentation in Mexico City. He wrote that in “February 2015, to my great surprise, I was asked by Jaime Maussan if I would attend” but that he was hesitant to do so. 

Later he said, “I didn’t agree to participate, however, until after I had a long conversation with Don Schmitt. Of all the people with a connection to the slides, I know Don the best. He helped to fill in many of the blanks I have had on the controversy, and I came away with an even stronger feeling that this is indeed a fascinating development in the UFO field. I also had a long and productive conversation with Tony Bragalia, for whom I have a lot of respect.”

Dolan isn’t going to talk about the validity of the slides because he doesn’t believe it would be appropriate to jump into that controversy. That will be left to Schmitt, Tom Carey and the other experts in various fields. According to Dolan, “Jaime’s reply was that he wanted me to offer my thoughts on the future of ufology and the potential for the end of UFO secrecy--that is, ‘Disclosure’ -- if there were to be general agreement that the slides are authentic. I did co-author a book on the potential ramifications of Disclosure, and do find it interesting to speculate on this subject.”

Dolan recaps much of what has been discussed on a variety of blogs and web sites, telling us the things that we all now know, or rather what we have been told. We don’t need to go through all that here, however, for those interested you can find Dolan’s remarks at:

http://www.richarddolanpress.com/#!The-SoCalled-Roswell-Slides-and-Mexico-City-Why-I-am-Going/c1q8z/897B8072-98CF-434D-A883-1D9C2AC1D821

 In his discussion, Dolan does make a couple of comments that are relevant, not only to the Roswell Slides, but to UFO research in general. He wrote:

There will always be things to criticize by those people who are simply intent on finding something to criticize. Nearly everything in UFO research is messy. Plus, there is a perennial shortage of funds to do things the way we would all like. No research money, for starters. Nor, with a few exceptions, is there much funding in the way of presenting highly professional conferences. So when an opportunity comes along in which the evidence can be presented in a professional manner to a large audience, is this really what critics want to focus on? Isn’t it more relevant to restrict one’s analysis to the actual slides and the story behind them?

Dolan suggests that he won’t be arguing for or against the slides showing an alien body but he is excited to have a ring side seat for the presentation of the evidence and the unveiling of high quality copies of the slides in the first public venue.

He might have expressed it best for those of us who have hovered around the periphery of this discussion for the last couple of months. He wrote, “As of now, I am not expecting these slides or this event to be a make-or-break event in ufology. But they are fascinating to me, and I do think they have the potential to be of real interest.”

The Roswell Slides and Stan Friedman

While many seem to be tired of the Roswell Slides nonsense, there has been one additional announcement. Stan Friedman, who now labels himself as the “first civilian investigator of Roswell,” was invited to participant in the Mexico City extravaganza by Jaime Maussan and then Don Schmitt.

Friedman, who had remained somewhat silent as the controversy swirled finally chimed in. In a well-publicized statement he wrote:

My first thought was since I would be asked my views, as the first civilian investigator of the Roswell crashed saucer event, it would be nice to have first hand [sic] information…. So I read as much as I could, positive and negative. I have not held copies of the slides. I could find no convincing information that there is any connection between the slides and Roswell. How would an outsider gain access to the real bodies? ... I have seen no specific data to convince me these are phony. But that doesn’t establish a connection to the Roswell events…. But I don’t want to appear to add legitimacy by my presence in Mexico City in the absence of serious evidence of the slides being what is being claimed they are. Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence…

Overlooking the fact that what is claimed without proof can be denied without proof, Friedman’s statement sums up the situation as most of us understand it. There is no proof that the creature in the slide is alien or from the Roswell crash. There seems to be no solid evidence that the slides were made in 1947, near Roswell or who took the pictures. There are too many loose ends in this and unless they can be cleared up, this will end badly for those involved, something that Friedman seems to understand.

Don Schmitt, once Friedman made his position clear, issued his own statement. He said that Friedman had been offered an opportunity to review all their information including, if I understood it correctly, a chance to see high quality copies of the slides. Friedman didn’t take this opportunity, which seems a little strange. He certainly could have looked at the slides and received his briefing, unless it was tied to an agreement to attend the Mexico City presentation.

At any rate it would seem strange that Friedman, who has endorsed the nonsensical Aztec UFO crash and continues to endorse the long discredited MJ-12 documents, would pass up this opportunity. I think that says something about the slides themselves and the situation around them.

Paul Kimball, a nephew of Friedman’s by marriage (if I have that relation right) talked to his uncle about this because some thought the statement hadn’t been issued by Friedman. Friedman confirmed that he would not be among those in Mexico City. In this case, it seems that Friedman understands the real consequences of involvement in Mexico City and was wise enough to avoid it.