I
have said for a long time that one of the major hurtles in this slides
controversy is the lack of provenance. According to the various inside sources
including Tom Carey, Tony Bragalia and even Adam Dew, they simply don’t know
who took the pictures, when they were taken and where they were taken. To make matters
worse, there is no solid chain of custody for the slides. There are gaping
holes in this important part of the story.
Back
on February 20, 2015, Adam Dew, under the user name SlideBox Media, posted to
Rich Reynolds UFO Conjectures blog the following:
A
quick timeline as I understand it: Hilda died in 1988. Slides were discovered
when emptying out a garage outside of Sedona (Cottonwood we think) in 1998.
Slides were deemed interesting (obviously old color slides) but not fully
examined until around 2008. While I think that the home may have belonged to
Hilda’s lawyer, there is no way to know for sure as the woman who found them [the
slides] didn’t keep records of the homes she cleaned out… I don’t think the
slides came from Hilda’s home.
Could
this be any vaguer? The home might have
belonged to Hilda’s lawyer but they don’t know. The house might have been in
Sedona, but they’re not sure. There is no way to verify whose house it was and
there is little to link the slides to Hilda Ray other than some of the other
slides were marked with her name. He doesn’t think they came from Hilda’s home.
And
with that we return to the question of provenance. They have absolutely nothing
to go on given that statement. By comparison, the Ramey Memo has a provenance
that is iron clad. No, I don’t want to discuss the various interpretations of
the memo; I just want to establish how solid a provenance can be.
General
Ramey is in the picture holding the document in question. J. Bond Johnson, the
man who took the picture has been interviewed repeatedly about it, and while he
certainly slid off the rails as time passed, there is no doubt that he was in
Ramey’s office and he took the photograph. Even without his statements we would
know this because the picture was transmitted over the news wire (INS) back in
the day. Attached to the picture from the Bettmann Photo Archive, was a noted
that it had been sent at 11:59 p.m. on July 8, 1947. Even if we didn’t have
this, the picture had been published in various newspapers on July 9, 1947. The
negative, which can be matched to picture, was stored at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram until it was
given to the Special Collections at the University of Texas at Arlington so
that the chain of custody has been preserved as well. I can’t think of another
document dealing with the Roswell case that has such a provenance or chain of
custody.
But
you can see the difference. With the Roswell Slides, all that information
simply doesn’t exist and I don’t know how you can ever gather it given what the
current owner of the slides says. The chain of custody is broken in several
places and because Dew has not revealed the name of the woman who supposedly
found the slides so that she could be interviewed by independent researchers
(and I doubt that he will give up the name) then that is just one more hole.
So
why do we believe that these slides show alien creatures recovered outside of
Roswell? Well, the film was apparently manufactured in 1947 which is not to say
that it was exposed in 1947. The slide holder was used from something like 1940
to 1949, which opens up the range. Photo experts have suggested that the range
could be even greater, though that isn’t much of an issue given all the other
problems.
I
have yet to hear a good reason for looking at these slides which were unlabeled
and apparently separated from the others in the collection and concluding that
they showed an alien body. If you’re the average guy, sitting out there looking
at the slides and see a strange body on them, I don’t see how you can (a) conclude
they are of alien creatures and (b) that they have anything to do with Roswell.
The Rays lived in Midland, Texas and not Roswell and the slides were found in
Sedona and not Roswell and are now in Chicago. Right now we don’t even have a
good chain of custody from Sedona to Chicago.
This
also generates another question that can be easily answered. Were all the
slides in the box stamped with Hilda Ray’s name? Were others stamped with her
husband’s? And if so, then how do we conclude that the slides belonged to the
Rays other than proximity? Or I should say alleged proximity.
At
this point, with Dew making so many claims, it seems that there is no way to
provide a provenance or chain of custody. Any such attempt will be seen in the
same light as that of Ray Santilli as he continued to change the story about
who had owned the Alien Autopsy film and how he had come into possession of it.
Dew has sort of locked in the tale of a house owned by someone, that was
cleaned by someone who found the slides, which sat around for basically decades
before anyone got around to looking at them and then deciding they showed an
alien creature, an amazing deductive link.
This
could spell the end of the slides saga simply because there is no way to verify
how they came into existence or why those who saw them originally assumed they
showed an alien creature. Without the important questions of provenance and
chain of custody answered, there is no real reason to assume the being on the
slides has anything to do with the Roswell case, or that it is an extraterrestrial
creature. This is basically the same stumbling block that so many of us
interested in the case have encountered before and there is no reason to assume
that anyone outside of the UFO community is going to care about this… and there
might not be that many inside who do.
