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:
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.
