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.

The Roswell Slides and the Mummy's Placard

You would have thought that once the placard in the slide had been read, and once that there was nearly universal acceptance of the translation suggesting that the body in the slide is that of a young boy, the debate would have ended. But this is ufology when nothing is ever ended no matter what the proof might be. It doesn’t matter what can be shown because there are those who won’t believe anything unless it reinforces their own belief structures. Such are the Roswell Slides and the placard. We are now told that it doesn’t matter what the placard says because we have all that “scientific” evidence from all those “authorities” who have examined the body on the slides. They say the body isn’t human and the placard is wrong.

Just days after Don Schmitt had apologized for the fiasco in Mexico City, he was back telling us that the term, Roswell Slides, had been an invention of the skeptics and that neither he nor Tom Carey had ever called them the Roswell Slides… of course, overlooked in that was their attempts to link the slides to Roswell and that much of what was said and published revolved around Roswell. The Kodak expert dated the slides based on the coding, the slide mounts, and other information to the late 1940s, and former USAAF PFC Benavides said the body was like those he saw, so everyone thought of Roswell even if they hadn’t used the term, “Roswell Slides.”

On Jimmy Church’s radio show Friday night, May 29, Schmitt explained some of these things to us. The show and the Don Schmitt segment starting about twenty minutes in can be heard here:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/fade2black/ep-262

Schmitt suggested that it was strange that they had provided high resolution scans to various experts to look at the writing on the placard and were told that they couldn’t make out even one letter. Schmitt said, “What were they (the Roswell Slides Research Group, among all those others) reading? It was a screen grab.” He said that it was from the event in Mexico City and that the slides hadn’t yet been released. It was taken off the Internet. “And they’re able to read it…and nobody else has been able to read it… How do you explain that?”

Well, I can explain that because what Schmitt said was not exactly right. They all worked from a download of the slide that had been put up on Adam Dew’s website, which was a higher resolution scan than previously available and was posted not long after the May 5 extravaganza. They applied various software to that scan and were able to read the placard with relative ease. It wasn’t just the RSRG but others, unaffiliated with them, in various countries, who also read it and came to the same conclusions. Tony Bragalia and an unnamed colleague in Europe discovered a journal article, published in 1938, which contained nearly the same wording, provided a few additional clues, and the location of the museum… a museum setting that Richard Doble said looked nothing like any of the museum settings he had ever seen but then he was apparently never at Mesa Verde.

Schmitt and Carey had offered the scans to a number of organizations and individuals for their opinions on the placard. Schmitt has said that the Pentagon looked at it but couldn’t make out anything on it, implying that if the government couldn’t read then surely a civilian group wouldn’t be able to do so. Well, that’s not exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Here’s what we know, based on what has been said about this in various forums including this one. In Mexico City, at the May 5 presentation, Schmitt claimed that the slides had been subjected to rigorous testing by experts in the field of photography. According to the newspaper accounts from Mexico City, “Exhaustive investigations by other photographic and medical experts have concluded that the photos are genuine. The experts list presented at the Mexico City event include Dr. David Rudiak, an expert in photographic analysis, Dr. Donald Burleson, a specialist in computer enhancement; Ray Downing, materials expert from the Studio MacBeth, New York; Col Jeffrey Thau associated with the Pentagon’s Photo Interpretation Department, and Prof Rod Slemmons, a former Director of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography.”

David Rudiak is not an expert in photographic analysis, but has experience in attempting to read the Ramey Memo. Because of that, he was asked to look at the placard with the body but was unable to unscramble or deblur the image on the scan he was given.

Colonel Jeffrey Thau is a retired Air Force officer who once had offices at both Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Pentagon. The Photo Interpretation Department had been moved from the Pentagon to Fort Meade, Maryland. Their expertise was not in attempting to read messages on placards in museums that were obscured but in interpreting photo intelligence of various kinds including ground based military facilities and movements. It seems that this failed attempt to read the placard wasn’t actually an attempt by the experts at the Pentagon or Fort Meade, but friends seeing if they could make out anything on the placard as a favor to Colonel Thau. To suggest the Pentagon had attempted to read the message and failed was, at best, hyperbole.

"Light Blasted" Placard.

Or, in other, more precise words, those tasked with reading the placard, were not the experts they were claimed to be. To compound the problem, it is obvious that the scans submitted for the analysis were not the high resolution scans promised and had probably been manipulated to obscure the wording on the placard. The failure was not with those who had attempted to read the placard but with those who provided the original scans for analysis. And this explains why they were unable to do so. It wasn’t until a better quality scan was available and it has a provenance that is traced straight back to Adam Dew that the placard was read.

So, on the one hand, we’re told that they made a concentrated effort to read the placard but failed to do so. On the other hand, now that it has been read, and again, it seems that nearly everyone agrees with what it says, we’re told that they don’t care what the placard says.

Seriously, we’re supposed to buy that. They had suggested that reading the placard was important and that information on it would be critical to understanding exactly what is on the slides. Now that it has been read, we’re told, by Doble that the placard was created as a diversion so that the true nature of the being on display wouldn’t be obvious. He explains that he believed the general population was unprepared to learn there was alien visitation. That was the reason the placard said was created. It was to obscure the truth.

This is spin doctoring at its worst. The placard tells us what is on display. The journal article tells us more about the body. Now, with that information, we’re told that it is unimportant to what is on the slides. This is an indefensible position.

But it gets worse. The actual slides might tell us more. It is my understanding that they were numbered and those numbers were nine and eleven. Where is number ten, and what is shown on that slide? Does it make it clear that the body is a mummy? Is the placard facing the camera so that it can be read without using a computer program to deblur it?

What is unbelievable in this is that there is still an attempt to prove that the body is alien. And when the evidence argues against it, evidence right on the slide, we’re told that the slide promoters don’t care what the placard says meaning they don’t care what the evidence is. They still believe it is an alien because, I suppose, that is what they have to believe. No one wants to be this wrong about something they consider this important, this publically. But sometimes you just have to look at the evidence and realize that you blew it big time.