There was an early leak of Slidebox’s alien picture. In the Kodachrome trailer, a split-second shot of a slide was shown without the digital blurring, and “Narrenschiffer” captured the image.3 The slide was shown at an angle, and he had to adjust it to restore the correct dimensions. He then posted the image online, where it was widely shared. While an unknown amount of detail and clarity was lost, it was clear enough to show the main features. For the RSRG, Nab Lator produced another version in an attempt to produce a clearer image, but his results were only marginally better. Nab looked at other frames of the video, including those showing the placard.
The RSRG started searching for pictures of objects, like real and fake human oddities, mermaid carcasses and mummies, that could prove a match with the leaked slide. Gilles Fernandez sent Kevin Randle two pictures comparing a child mummy to the leaked slide to show similarities in their feet. Tom Carey dismissed the comparison saying, “(it) isn’t a foot at all… the being’s feet actually end behind the placard. Yes, we were on to that almost two years ago. Of course, this will not satisfy what’s going on out there right now on the blogs, which is insane.”4
My friend, Spanish UFO researcher José Antonio Caravaca, created a new group on Facebook, called “Roswell Slides,” exclusively for the serious investigation of the BeWitness story. We continued to work within that group, sharing information in real time to members who were spread across various time zones and nations. Along with José, the most active members were Isaac Koi, a UK researcher preserving and sharing UFO history, French skeptics Nab Lator, an “armchair researcher of the paranormal,” and Gilles Fernandez, who holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Also active in the group were USA skeptics Lance Moody and Tim Printy (who provided skills including expertise in photography) Roger Glassel of Sweden, Canadian filmmaker Paul Kimball and Texans Ricky Poole and S. Miles Lewis, founder of the Anomaly Archives in Austin.
In a strange twist of fate, our group also included Canadian science writer and ufologist Chris Rutkowski, who had been recruited for Carey’s Roswell Dream Team as “someone with an open mind, who would point out where we might have slipped off the rails.” Chris found himself shut out when the secrecy over the Slides enterprise caused the dream to die.
Along the way, others were brought into the RSRG group for their specialized talents: Alejandro Espino, Aaron John Gulyas, Philippe Hernandez, Irna Osmanovic, Tim Hebert, Jeff Ritzmann and Shepherd Johnson. The group comprised friends, and friends of friends, UFO researchers and skeptics working together to come to grips with an event that was going to “change the world.”
Early on, a possible match for the body in the slides was located. On Feb. 11, Ricky Poole posted a photo, “….showing a child mummy on fabric with a placard.” It was from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and it resembled the body in the leaked photo. Shortly afterwards, Roger Glassel located an illustrated article on the mummy by Dr. David Hunt, the Forensic Anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution.5 Our team contacted Dr. Hunt, and he found the blurry image of the Slides body to be consistent with the one in his studies, saying, “I feel that even if it is not the same mummy, it is strikingly similar.” He also sent us a collection of high resolution photographs of the mummy and CT scan views of its skeleton.
The mummy of the Egyptian boy was catalogued as specimen number 2397; those digits became our name for him. We contacted the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania, where it was curated prior to its transfer to the Smithsonian in 1958, but they were unable to find a photograph from the era displaying the mummy. We did find one photograph circa 1874 that included the child mummy, but the case it was displayed in was not a match. The size, position, proportions and condition of 2397 were nearly identical to what we could see of the body in the leaked slide. While we could not say it was the same mummy, our findings contested the promoters’ claim of “non-human.”
The BeWitness team was bound by NDAs, and secrecy. The RSRG methods were in sharp contrast to this, operating more like a classroom of eager students, sharing knowledge and challenged to excellence by each other’s efforts. Our early efforts were somewhat unfocused, and we faced the problem of duplication of effort by multiple researchers. For example, I was embarrassed to receive a reply from a specialist indicating that he’d already been contacted, individually, by three other members of our team. To avoid annoying experts who might be reluctant to discuss matters, which they might find frivolous or nutty, we began co-ordinating our contacts with consultants, giving us a simplified and complete record of our correspondence with them.
The group gathered a lot of data, and that presented its own challenges. Tim Printy said, “this is sort of a collective thing. Some of the work has been outstanding and it moves so fast it is sometimes difficult to keep up.” Facebook was fast and convenient, but the platform was not designed to support research projects. The constant stream of new material made finding information difficult. Many of us found ourselves missing the organization options available in online message boards, but, by then, we’d gotten in too deep to make a switch.
Isaac Koi took the lead in organizing the data gathered by the RSRG, creating collections of things like photographs of child mummies, sideshow exhibits, human abnormalities, and also museum display cases. As visual data was gathered, I made photo montage collections; with these we could easily show that the BeWitness alien resembled a child’s mummified body and that the skeletal proportions matched that of a child aged between two and three years.
Our work showed that the glass case in the Slides was consistent with period museum displays, and it disproved the promoters’ claim of temporary, erector set-like construction. The shelving provided another clue in the spacing of the holes, which could be used to measure the length of the body. I visited hardware stores and antique furniture shops where similar glass cases and shelving material could be measured and photographed. In studying the shelving, Tim Printy used the data to demonstrate that the body size was significantly smaller than the “gray-sized” 3.5 to 4 feet figure claimed by the promoters.
Members researched the background of the Rays, but found nothing to support the Eisenhower friendship or “well-connected” claims by the promoters. Tim searched Texas newspapers and found additional articles and photos of Bernerd Ray through the decades, evidence that refuted the promoters’ claim he’d become “a ghost in his profession” after 1947.
Publish or Perish
The buzz for BeWitness was building. Roger Glassel said, “If this isn’t stopped before the 5th of May, and even if a solid explanation will be at hand on the 6th after seeing the photo slide, I’m afraid that the damage will already be done. With a Mexican event and a documentary, it will be man bites dog in the news media and no time for mummies.” Most of the press was within the UFO community, but the story received some publicity on Feb. 18, when Chicago’s WGN-TV morning show interviewed Adam Dew and aired his Kodachrome trailer. When asked if scientists were consulted, Dew indicated that work was just beginning, saying “We’re trying to find people that will look at it and give those opinions.” While he talked, the images onscreen were Gilles Fernandez’s pictures of mummified bodies compared with the leaked slide, and, apparently, the producer and the hosts were unable to tell the difference. Dew finally noticed and said, “That image has been out on the internet since we released the trailer, people trying to debunk it, which has been really helpful actually, because they have been putting out—doing a lot of research work for me, that I’ve been trying to do the last couple of years in my free time.”6 Dew’s comments raised questions about just who was researching the case, and if it was only a part-time investigation.
We investigated the alien witness shown in the Kodachrome trailer, introduced by Adam Dew as “an Army lieutenant at Roswell Air Force base in 1947.” That was not true. Eleazar N. Benavides was stationed at Roswell, but held the rank of Private First Class.7 Benavides had appeared before, under the pseudonym “Eli Benjamin” in Schmitt and Care
y’s book, and in the UFO shows, Sci-Fi Investigates and UFOs Declassified. The mistake in Benavides’ rank reflected on credibility, either of the witness or of Dew in reporting it. As a result of the alias being exposed, at the BeWitness event, Benavides’ real rank and name was correctly given.
By the end of February, we had enough evidence to make a case that went beyond establishing reasonable doubt towards the credibility of the BeWitness promoters’ claims. It was agreed that we should publish something prior to May 5, and we had to decide on what to say. The promoters’ case for the Slides was based on nothing more than speculation, and Paul Kimball felt that we needed to counter it with facts, not speculation of our own. In the paranormal and UFO arena, there’s often an attempt to reverse the burden of proof, and we were getting trapped into trying to prove a negative. Isaac Koi noted, “While this (discussion) has been perfectly amicable, I think it gives an indication of the difficulties that would be involved in writing an item collectively.” Lance Moody was more optimistic, and insisted that it was worth trying.
On March 2, “The Roswell Slides Research Group” website at roswellslides.com was set up by Paul Kimball, and, immediately afterwards, publicly revealed. Blogger Rich Reynolds provided a puffed-up description: “a group of respected UFO researchers, academics, and media professionals, including a former member of the so-called Roswell Dream Team (formed) to investigate further the Kodachrome slides and activity pertaining to them.”8 Even the name came as a surprise to us. I worried if we could live up to the expectations created by the announcement, but it seemed to prompt Lance Moody.
Lance wrote a paper on the group’s preliminary findings, with the goal of its being “short, simple and non-dogmatic,” and shared it with the group for revisions. His draft was excellent, but there were many differences of opinion over the tone and scope of things, even about the structure itself, whether it should be written as an article for general audiences or more as an academic-style paper. Also, Lance’s first draft was pointedly UFO skeptical, and some of the members, myself included, were concerned that a “skeptical” paper would be ignored by the very people who needed to read it. I thought that we should address only issues relating to BeWitness and the Slides, and not get involved with the tar baby of the reality of the Roswell UFO crash story itself. Others persuasively argued that Schmitt and Carey’s prior work on the Roswell case was being grafted on to the Slides, and their credibility and methodology was pertinent. There was an initial flurry of work on the RSRG paper, but, after contributors saw their input revised or erased by one another, work on it dwindled to nothing.
The RSRG worked great as a think-tank, but got bogged down as a committee. José Antonio Caravaca told me, “I think it was a big mistake not to publish anything.” With the group’s effort to publish a report dead, we decided to allow individual members to use the shared work for articles of their own. On March 16, I published “Roswell Slides or Fraud Prints?,” giving a brief recap of the BeWitness story up to that point, and examining the promoters’ claims of equating the Slides with physical evidence. We thought that 2397 just might be our ace in the hole, but the group agreed that José could publish an article using our studies, and on March 25, his article included arrays of our photo comparisons, presenting evidence that the body shown in the Roswell Slides matched the anatomy of a child-sized mummy.9 Gilles Fernandez published a heavily illustrated article the same day, summarizing some of the findings of the RSRG, and showed how features of the Slides body resembled grotesque human specimens in anatomical museums, and child mummies. With those and other photographs, he refuted several of the claims made by the promoters. Regarding the extraordinary narrative they presented, he concluded, “our team has found nothing convincing about this saga.”10
In early April things were quiet. Paul Kimball withdrew from ufology and left the RSRG to focus on more earthly matters, and later posted, “For anyone wondering where the Other Side of Truth blog has gone, I’ve put it on hiatus…” Paul was the sole key holder to the RSRG site, and we wondered what that meant about publishing our findings, but decided the first priority was continuing the work. Our real problem was that we’d done as much as possible with the evidence then available. Mid-April saw the promotion for BeWitness ramp up, with advertising, media coverage, interviews, and videos, so we soon had some more information to work with. Names of the expert scientific consultants began to surface.
Don Schmitt and Tom Carey’s first North American interview about BeWitness was on The Conspiracy Show with Richard Syrett, April 12, 2015. They emphasized their thorough investigation and Schmitt said, “This will be part of the event… all of these analytical reports… analyses… photographic experts…” He named the placard consultants, saying, “everyone from Dr. David Rudiak, to Studio MacBeth, even the Photo Interpretation Department of the Pentagon, as well as Adobe have all told us… that it cannot be read… we truly feel we have performed due diligence; we have done everything we can to substantiate and prove what is contained within these slides…”11
BeWitness and Beyond
Tim Printy’s online magazine SUNlite May/June issue was published just before the BeWitness event. It featured reports on the characteristics of Kodak film, his experiments in using it at different distances, and an article examining the claims made about the ability to date the film precisely to 1947. His article, “The debut of the Roswell slides,” exposed the many inconsistencies and problems in the narrative of the Slides and summarized the findings of the RSRG.12
The RSRG had examined the BeWitness claims and found no evidence to support them, and our conclusion was that the body in the photos was the mummified remains of a child. Our criticism had been unsuccessful in stopping the event but had raised the awareness of unscientific claims of the promoters and forced them to furnish an attempt at medical analysis of the Slides during the program.
On May 5, the BeWitness show was held with an audience of about 7,000 people in the auditorium and another 2,000 watching via pay-per-view. Several members of the RSRG watched the streaming broadcast together online, and, during the show, Paul Kimball re-joined our group to participate in a running discussion. We noticed that Schmitt and Carey only spoke on the background of the Roswell UFO case, and it was only Adam Dew that discussed the investigation of the Slides. He presented a video clip and an anonymous document testifying to the authenticity of the slides, but there were no analytical reports on the placard or anything else—only anecdotes. We had expected to see new slides showing the Rays together with the Eisenhowers or with other important military figures, but there were none. Nothing was shown even to connect them to Roswell.
The first slide of the body was shown about halfway through the show, followed by computer-generated animation isolating the skeletal face and fleshing it out with alien features. Later, Maussan presented a moving hologram of an alien “reconstruction” of the body. The Mexican team presenting the scientific analysis had worked only from one-dimensional images—digital copies of the original slides—and Dr. José de Jesús Zalce Benítez concluded the body pictured was not human, or even a mammal. Canadian anthropologist Richard Doble said, “this is nothing like us… its legs almost look like it’s a reptile… like it evolved from something like a gecko.” He speculated that its species communicated electromagnetically. Richard Dolan’s lecture closed the show, suggesting that the Slides could open the door for Disclosure and bring down the wall of secrecy about UFOs. As a grand finale, Maussan showed the second slide, but more time had been devoted to imaginative artistic alien artwork than to the photos themselves.13
The program was over five hours long, and, when it was finished, we noted that it had failed to deliver anything of substance beyond the reveal of the two slides themselves. There were no immediate clues to identity or location beyond the other objects seen in the case and the portion of the room that housed it. The clearer pictures of the mummy conclusively ruled out our leading suspect, 2397, as being the body, so the sea
rch was still on.
On May 7, there was a break. José Antonio Caravaca, guaranteeing his source’s anonymity, was able to persuade one of parties involved to send him a high-resolution copy of slide #11, the brighter one with the woman standing behind the glass case. José shared it with the rest of the RSRG, and we eagerly began studying it. The next day his source sent him something even more interesting, a scan of slide #9, which gave a close-up isolated view of the blurry placard. José posted the placard image in our group at 1:57 AM. Nab Lator had mentioned months before the possibility of using the program SmartDeblur by Vladimir Yuzhikov on the slides as “a tool for restoration of defocused and blurred images.” In the case of the placard, we needed it to “unshake” the motion blur from the camera.
Nab immediately put SmartDeblur to work and experimented with reading the placard. While the software can automatically try to improve a picture, it usually needs to be refined by user input, a process that can require much trial and error. Two hours later he announced his initial findings to the group. The placard featured printed text (not handwriting), it was in English, it was still grainy, but he could read part of the top line. This raised the hope that the entire placard could be read, and he went back to work to push further. Throughout the morning other members joined the discussion, excited at the breakthrough. At 9:29 AM Nab posted the deblur that revealed the top line was a headline in all capitals that read:
UFOs- Reframing the Debate Page 15