Tom Carey Doubles Down on the Roswell Slides

Like so many others, I had thought we were done with the Roswell Slides. It seemed that the reading of the placard, the discovery of the documentation that supported all of that, and the retreat of some of the experts would be enough to kill it. It seemed as if we had all the answers, documented to a level that is rarely achieved in UFO research… and it appears that I would be wrong because there are always those diehards out there.

Tom Carey, a major proponent of the Roswell Slides, appeared on the Paranormal Podcast 393 hosted by Jim Harold a couple of days ago. You can download the program here:

http://jimharold.com/roswell-slides-case-not-closed-the-paranormal-podcast-393/

Carey did make a couple of comments that I thought to be of importance. At about 4:55, while discussing the slides he said, “It was one of the Roswell bodies.”

Tom Carey in Roswell.

At 18:40, he said, “To me it was one of the Roswell aliens. Considering the time frame and what it looked like. It looked exactly like what had been described to me as to what the body looked like from the crash.”

Why are these two quotes important? Because prior to May 5, they, meaning Carey and Don Schmitt, had insisted that they hadn’t tied the slides to Roswell specifically. Schmitt, on The Conspiracy Show with Richard Syrett on April 12, 2015, said, “What I personally resent is that so many of the skeptics… somehow they have done everything they can to link them [the slides] to Roswell… They’re the ones who have labeled them the Roswell Slides. We haven’t done that…" He went on to say that they were not linking “these images to Roswell… It is possible there is a connection.”

To sort of underscore this, Carey said during this most recent interview that the owner of the slides, whom he did not identify (Joe Beason) “wasn’t a Roswell guy or UFO guy but it looked like the body of an alien.” I am still not clear why anyone would jump to that conclusion, but according to Carey, that is what Beason did. The point is that Carey mentioned that Beason was not a Roswell guy shows the connection being made.

The other point that Carey thought of as important, as he was discussing the “deblurring” of the placard, was that the placard seemed to have been written in cursive but when finally deblurred, it was in block letters. This bothered Carey and to him it suggested that something in the deblurring process was flawed. He mentioned that he wasn’t a computer guy but he just couldn’t understand this.

The answer, however, was simple. David Rudiak, who had first suggested that the lettering was in cursive said that his observation was based on the way the lettering looked in the scans he had been given. They were of the placard and little else which masked the true nature of what he was seeing. When he was given a higher quality scan that had more background detail, it was clear that the lettering was not in cursive. The deblurring of a higher resolution scan provided the answer which Carey seems to dismiss.

Of course this argument about cursive, doesn’t explain why the floor as shown when the whole slide frame is revealed matches that in the museum and why other placards visible match the one in front of the “alien” image. Or, in other words, the slide was not taken in some obscure government lab, research center or facility. It matches the floor in the museum at Mesa Verde that was open to the public, and given the timing of the events, was probably taken prior to May 1947, which, of course rules out Roswell.

Nor does it explain the other exhibits that are seen in the background of the slide. Clearly this is a museum setting and not the controlled environment you would expect if this was an image of an alien creature. It would not be out on display for everyone to see.

I could go on in this vein, but is it really necessary? Carey is grasping at straws. The evidence that the image is that of an unfortunate child is overwhelming and the suggestions that it is something alien nearly nonexistent.

But I want to make one thing clear. I do not believe that either Carey or Schmitt were participating in a hoax that they created. They might have been overwhelmed by their own enthusiasm and their desire to find some evidence of an alien UFO crash at Roswell, but they didn’t create a hoax. Fooled?  Yes. Naïve? Yes… but not the creators of a hoax. We all get fooled sometimes and this is one of those times for them. Oh, it is certainly time to let it go, but once you have committed to something so deeply, it is extremely difficult to admit the mistake.

The Roswell Slides ARE NOT the Roswell Slides

So now we’re told that the Roswell Slides might not be linked to Roswell and that the name, Roswell Slides was invented by the debunkers and is not a term used by anyone on the inside. For the latest interviews with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, see The Conspiracy Show hosted by Richard Syrett which can be found here:

https://youtu.be/fQyAVrFnTos?t=1h3m59s

The segment with Carey and Schmitt starts at the 1:04:20 mark of the show and they are on for about thirty minutes. You’ll just have to fast forward through the first hour to get to the Carey and Schmitt interview.

Here’s what we learn by listening to this. According to Tom Carey, the couple who took the slides was well connected to the Eisenhowers. The wife was a “high-powered lawyer in Midland, Texas and the husband was an oil field geologist.” Part of his territory was New Mexico. Please note that Carey is suggesting that the Rays, whose name he does not use, were the ones who took the photographs though all that can be said is that they may have owned the slides at one time decades ago. The provenance of the slides is still very shaky.

Carey then went on to explain how the slides were originally discovered. He said:

Current owner came into possession of the slides around 1990. The husband [Bernerd Ray] died in 1982 and the lawyer wife [Hilda Ray] died in 1988 [though not mentioned, it seems that they had divorced at some point]. During a clean out of their house, in their garage, one of the people who was part of the cleanup crew discovered this huge box of color slides, Kodachrome slides, and she said, “Oh, these look interesting,” so she kept them. She took them home instead of taking them to the dumpster. She took them for herself because nobody wanted them… so she kept them and didn’t look at them for a number of years [which seems strange after she had determined they were interesting, but never mind]. She finally looked at them and these two slides… were separate from all the others. There were over 400 slides in total. But there were these two that were taped in an envelope to the underside of the lid to the box. So she looked at those and she got spooked… She shipped the whole box to her relative who has them now. He was no UFO guy but he looked at these two slides and he says, “I don’t know what this is…” he had heard about Roswell… So he looked at them and I better contact somebody who knows something about this.

Of course, in his position, my first thought would have been to search for someone who knew about the Roswell UFO case. Carey said that the man had gone to the Internet (which is something I bet we all do now a days) and looked for something about Roswell. Carey’s name came up and the man set an email.

During the interview, Schmitt suggested that the “debunkers” had labeled them the Roswell Slides and they had not made that connection meaning that the slides were connected to Roswell. Syrett, in recapping some of this said that Carey and Schmitt weren’t linking these images to Roswell but there was a possibility that there was a connection (or in the words of nearly everyone else, let’s beat around the bush some more).

All though the interview, however, Carey talked as if it was an already established fact that the slides were from the Roswell case. Continuing in that vein, Schmitt said, “The dating of the slides is from 1947 to 1949. As we will be demonstrating at the event in May, there were specific areas that the photographers visited… both worked in west Texas and New Mexico… the circle of friends were closely linked to Eisenhower.” Or, in other words, this is connected to Roswell even though these people lived in Midland, Texas and had pictures of Eisenhower in his uniform.

The link to Eisenhower seems to be based on the fact that some of the slides in the box of 400 were of Eisenhower, which doesn’t link them to him personally other than they were in the same place at the same time… Just as I was in the same place as David Letterman and I even have a picture of me standing next to him, but we are not closely linked.

During the interview, Carey was asked about what linked the eyewitness testimony to other alien bodies. He said:

[The] woman standing by a glass slab… the body lying on it appears to be 3½ to 4 feet tall… large inverted pear-shaped head but there is one item on it, on top of the head that was described by one of the first-hand witnesses, one of the first ones to the crash site… the local fireman named Dan Dwyer who described when he got home that night and he told his family about it… they asked him, “What did it look like?” Instead of giving a detailed description he just said, “Child of the Earth.” [Which is an insect also known as the Jerusalem cricket]… It’s something on the head, I don’t want to give anything away here… there is something on the top of the head that one of the eyewitnesses described and it’s on this particular creature on the slide… That’s why Dan Dwyer called it the Child of the Earth.

But what Carey doesn’t say here, and which is extremely important is that Dwyer was never interviewed by any of the UFO researchers and calling him a first-hand witness without explaining the circumstances is misleading. Dwyer died before the interest in Roswell was renewed. Contrary to the impression that this is first-hand testimony, it was relayed by Frankie Rowe, Dwyer’s daughter. While I believe that Rowe is telling us what she believes to be the absolute truth, it is second hand from her so anything deduced from the testimony is shaky at best.

Apropos of nothing, Carey did mention that this ranked as a “smoking gun,” slightly better than the “smoking gun” of the Ramey memo. Both, according to Carey, are extremely important bits of evidence and, of course, the Ramey memo is directly related to Roswell.

What have we learned here?

Well, the Roswell Slides don’t necessarily show a creature from the Roswell crash, at least according to Schmitt. But then both he and Carey talk as if it was already proven that the creature, whatever it was, is from the Roswell crash.

The slides were apparently in a vacant house for two years before they were found, and then the woman who found them and took them, didn’t look at them for a number of years. She was so freaked out by them that she sent all the slides to her brother…I mean a relative, who apparently did nothing with them for years. Then about three years ago this fellow, who lives in Chicago, looked at them and thought he had better find someone who knew something about Roswell. He emailed Carey.

We also learned that when they attempted to interest American scientists in the slides, no one would come forward. The news media was equally unimpressed, but foreign scientists have examined the slides and made comment about them. Two of them are Canadian anthropologists who were not named but whose analysis will be part of the Mexico City show. They will be named there. All this data and much more will be presented in Mexico City.

And, although they suggest that the slides aren’t linked to Roswell, when they begin to talk about them, it is clear that is exactly what they think. And if they don’t, then why bring poor old PFC Benavides into it so that he can say that the creature in the photograph looks like the bodies he saw in Roswell? While they might not like the name the Roswell Slides and don’t refer to them that way, it is what they believe. All we can hope for is that they’ll have some better evidence about the slides than they have mentioned in the various interviews so far. The story of how the slides ended up in the hands of UFO researchers doesn’t allow for evidence of who took the pictures in the first place or for an unbroken chain of custody. There are still too many loose ends. I do hope they can do better in Mexico City.