Viewing vs Victims of the Wreck

It’s funny how things sometimes work out. The investigation into the Ramey Memo seemed to have stagnated with nothing to really report. Then Rich Reynolds publicly wondered what was happening, so I finished up the post about it. And now, I have received both publicly at this blog and privately a number of emails about it, suggesting the critical word in that critical phrase might not be “victims.”

David Rudiak will tell us that the word “victims” has the right number of letters, and that words that begin with a “V” that fit with his word count and positioning are very few. Many can be eliminated because they are simply too strange to fit into Memo (violins, for example) because we can deduce the subject matter based on the words that are universally accepted as being in the text.

The Ramey Memo. Copyright by the University of Texas at Arlington.

Several have suggested that the word is not “victims but is “viewing.” It does contain the right number of letters and it does begin with a “V,” but it also alters the importance of the Ramey Memo if that is correct. “Victims of the wreck,” suggests casualties which implies a crew and that crew could be alien, depending on the rest of the Memo. However, “viewing the wreck,” tells us nothing about a crew and means that we might have something that had no organic component (which is my way of avoiding saying it was either alien, human or animal). And David will suggest that “viewing” doesn’t fit into the proper alignment of the letters eliminating it.

If it is “viewing,” then what we have is a suggestion that someone (Marcel and Cavitt?) had seen the wreckage, but doesn’t suggest anything extraordinary about it. The idea that it was “wreckage” does suggest something other than a balloon array no matter how exotic, because you just don’t think of balloon remains as being wreckage. That term suggests something more substantial was seen but that doesn’t take us to the extraterrestrial by any means.

In fact, if the word is “viewing” it sort of sucks the life out of the drama here. It could say all sorts of things, including “disc” and still provide a rather mundane answer. Given that this seems to refer to a flying disc and given that the term, “flying disc” meant any number of terrestrial based objects as well as the idea they might be interplanetary (as opposed to interstellar), we wouldn’t have the smoking gun that many thought it would be. Or, in other words, we have a rather mundane message telling Ramey that those “viewing the wreck” were reporting what they had seen.

Oh, it could mean that their opinions suggested something alien, but in the long run, we’d be left with the same arguments about the overall importance of the Memo.

And I will mention here, as sort of a cautionary tale, that J. Bond Johnson, who took the photograph that we’re all so interested in, claimed, at one time, he had carried the document into Ramey’s office and handed it to him. That would mean that this was a teletype message that went out over the news wire and wasn’t something generated by the military. True, he recanted that statement as soon as it became clear to him that it lessened the importance of the document, but it is a claim that he made (many of which were later found to be untrue).

Here’s where we are. There are a growing number of people who say that the word is “viewing.” Those suggesting this are not only those on the skeptical side of the fence, but some who believe the Roswell crash was alien, and a few who seem to be disinterested in the crash as an alien event but are interested in solving the riddle.

Again, I’m not sure if we’re ever going to be able to resolve this to the satisfaction of the majority in the way that the Roswell Slides Research Group was able to resolve the placard to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. I had hoped for a resolution, as did those working on this latest effort, but we just haven’t reached that point yet. As it stands now, most of the message is just beyond our capabilities to decipher it though there is still work being done. Maybe next week, next month or next year there will be a breakthrough but I’m not overly hopeful about that. We are stuck with a tantalizing clue that is currently just out of reach.