“MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY.”
Jaws dropped. The results were so stunning that members asked, “Are you kidding me?” Nab assured them, “Not kidding.” Throughout the day, Nab was still learning how to work with the software, and, bit by bit, progress was made in clarifying the text. Tim Printy, Lance Moody and Isaac Koi joined the effort, also using SmartDeblur, all working together learning how to improve, save, duplicate and share the results.
Chris Rutkowski raised concerns over the provenance of the scan and the fact that we were unable to reveal the confidential source for it. At the time we could only verify that our scan matched all the other published images of the placard, including those shown in Dew’s Kodachrome trailer and the views we had of it from BeWitness. We couldn’t prove what we had was genuine, but all evidence showed that it was as genuine as the Slides themselves. We needed another copy directly from the Slides promotion camp, so Lance Moody emailed David Rudiak asking for a scan of the placard, and Nab emailed Adam Dew, saying, “I’ve had limited success with the software SmartDeblur 2.2. In case you didn’t know already, the body is a mummified two-year-old boy. Can you send me a better scan for analysis?”
Another topic of discussion was how to share our findings, and we agreed that the results needed to be independently verified before publication. We talked about showing the deblurring method in a video, and I began writing an article on the reading of the placard text. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, the team gradually continued to clarify the text. Finally, at 6:06, Nab posted the near-completed reading of all four lines of the placard, and it left no doubt that the Slides were photos of a mummy on display at a museum. Still the work continued in an effort to get clearer, consistent results that could be duplicated by others before releasing the news.
There was a leak. An early deblurring attempt was posted on Facebook, then eventually re-posted by Richard Dolan, who stated, “I imagine it would be helpful to have more clarification on the process, but this looks definitive.” Rumors and questions started swirling. Slides defenders began making accusations that the RSRG had faked the results, and even the most reasonable people wanted to see verification. Unfortunately, at this time, the other members of the RSRG were offline and unavailable and, perhaps hastily, I made the decision to release our results. At 9:18 PM, I published the story about the placard on my blog, Blue Blurry Lines.14 The complete placard text was eventually determined to be:
MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY
At the time of burial the body was clothed in a slip-over cotton shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of three small cotton blankets. Loaned by Mr. S. L. Palmer, San Francisco, California.
When the others in the RSRG found out, most were pleased, but some members of the group raised objections to releasing our findings prematurely. Luckily for us all, two hours later Slidebox Media solved our placard provenance problem. In response to the deblurring, Slidebox uploaded an image file of the placard on their web site at 11:12 PM, along with our deblurring, which they labelled a fake. “The ‘Roswell Research Group’ is a group of internet UFO Trolls, claiming to be searching for the truth but repeatedly spreading lies.” They said it was, “…a fake created by taking a low-resolution copy of our scan and editing it in photoshop.”15
Libel and slander issues aside, we then had a scan of the placard directly from the source. Shortly afterwards, more help arrived. On his blog, Rich Reynolds posted, “Anthony Bragalia has provided these scans of the placard seen on the Kodachrome slides… the scans the Roswell Team worked with.”16 With the additional placard scan versions in hand, the RSRG was able to verify that they all pictured the same source image, they could also be deblurred to show the same text, and it proved that the results of reading the placard were genuine.
The RSRG website finally had a report from the group to publish.17 We published our press release exposing the truth about the Slides with the placard deblurring. Later updates included additional material on the mummy, along with the YouTube videos demonstrating the deblurring process by Lance Moody and Tim Printy.
In response to lingering controversy, disbelief and charges that the RSRG had faked the deblurring of the placard, Isaac Koi posted directions at the Above Top Secret site on how to duplicate the process using SmartDeblur on Slidebox Media’s original scan.18 Around the world, others independently duplicated the results, including Frank Warren, Alejandro Rojas, Whitley Strieber, David Rudiak and even Vladimir Yuzhikov, the creator of SmartDeblur. In the following weeks, Nab Lator published an article on his blog to explain the deblurring process.19 Meanwhile, a few others duplicated the placard text using different commercially available software such as Blurity, Photoshop CC and InFocus, making the promoters’ claim of multiple expert attempts to read the placard less credible.
BeWitness team member Anthony Bragalia was initially in denial and disbelief, but on May 10 admitted he’d been wrong. He still insisted, however, that “The data points and the narrative of the slide(s) are all true.” The text of the placard matched the mummy’s description in the September 1938 booklet from Mesa Verde National Park, and he conceded that the “interpretation of the text was correct… that definitively solves the mystery of the ‘Roswell Slides.’”20
On May 12, Tom Carey published a defiant rebuttal to the RSRG deblurring. “We believe that the recently released ‘reading’ of the placard by the so-called ‘Roswell Slides Research Group’ was faked.” He could not believe that, “…a cast of characters… is somehow able to ‘read’ it when (experts with) more sophisticated equipment and techniques at their disposal, could not. I ask you, what’s wrong with this picture?” He concluded by saying that they were getting third parties to run Smart-DeBlur on the placard and they were “prepared to abide by their findings, wherever the chips fall.”
Two days later, on May 14, his partner, Don Schmitt, issued another statement. “I now realize that the image in the slides is a mummy as specified by the display placard.” He asked for understanding, “Still, if I have offended or hurt anyone through my participation in this event, you have my deepest apology and have every right to hold it against me.”21
One of the Slides story’s key “data points” had been the Rays’ friendship with the Eisenhowers. On May 20, 2015, Shepherd Johnson received a reply from the Eisenhower Presidential Library stating, “We have not found any mention of the Rays in either the papers of Dwight or Mamie Eisenhower. It… does not appear that the couples knew each other.”22
One big thing was still missing. No one had located another picture of the body. On May 13, Shepherd Johnson filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the photograph of the mummified boy’s body that was mentioned in National Park Service documents. On June 9, Jorge Peredo of Mexico found another tourist’s picture of the mummified child in an online photo album, a color slide, taken in December 1956 by Frank Hadl at Montezuma Castle National Monument.23 Three days later, on June 12, the NPS released a 186-page file as a result of Shepherd Johnson’s FOIA. It contained thorough documentation of the 1896 excavation of the boy’s grave in Arizona at Montezuma Castle by S. L. Palmer, the transfer of the remains between museums, and also two photographs of the body, one at the grave site, and a clearer one from 1939 picturing it with burial artifacts.24 The photographs and documents provided the final proof. The promoters of the Roswell Slides had it all wrong.
Aftermath
In the aftermath of the placard deblurring, the team promoting BeWitness folded, leaving only Jaime Maussan to defend it. He set up the site “The Face of Roswell,” and held another event, “Mesa De Análisis De Un Cuerpo No Humano,” to refute the debunking of BeWitness. Even with the documentation from the NPS, Maussan and his experts refused to believe it was a mummified boy. While they conceded the reading of the placard, they rejected its value, saying that it did not describe the non-human body it was placed on. Throughout the rest of 2015, Maussan continued to support the Slides in interviews and at his appea
rances at UFO conferences, including the annual MUFON Symposium.25 In May of 2016, Maussan hosted a two-hour special on Tercer Milenio TV on the first anniversary of BeWitness, still promoting it as genuine. In November 2016, Maussan was honored at the StarworksUSA UFO Symposium with their “Award for Excellence In Investigative Journalism.”
In 2016, Don Schmitt and Tom Carey released a new book on Roswell, but it made no mention of the BeWitness fiasco. In interviews to promote it they were sometimes asked about the Roswell Slides, but their incredible (and unsubstantiated) revised position was that they had not seen the Slides prior to BeWitness. They claimed Beason and Dew had “snookered” them by sending only cropped versions of the slides in order to conceal the museum setting and that there was digital manipulation, “hocus pocus,” to prevent them from reading the placard. While they grudgingly accepted the deblurring as genuine, they still thought the body pictured was somehow unusual.26
Slidebox Media, LLC went dark. Joe Beason stayed hidden, but Adam Dew resurfaced in 2016, attempting to film interviews to complete his Kodachrome documentary since the ending had to be changed.
The UFO community’s reaction to the Roswell Slides fiasco was mixed, but most were left wondering if it was all a big mistake or if we had been hoaxed. There were many who felt it was just another embarrassment and wanted it quickly forgiven and forgotten. That’s not enough. Forgetting such problems is a passive invitation for future fakes. When you get bad product from a shopkeeper, it may be his supplier’s fault. What matters is how the problem is resolved to restore good faith. In the case of the Slides, all the merchant offered was excuses.
The secrecy of the BeWitness promoters with their NDAs prevented a thorough investigation and thwarted the true due diligence they had sought. Instead it was show business. We were told that the evidence had been subjected to expert analysis, but the promoters themselves were the ones deciding which experts were qualified, only presenting findings supporting their existing beliefs that the body in the Slides was something non-human. The fatal problem was not in mistaking the body in the Slides for an alien, but in allowing an elaborate narrative to be built around that mistake like a house of cards. What the Roswell Slides episode did was to expose the serious flaws common in standard ufology research practices. The BeWitness fiasco was just a by-product.
Some commenters expected the RSRG to become a UFO truth squad and wondered what we would tackle next. It was largely by chance the group came together on this project—we all enjoyed working on it and shared the drive to pursue a common goal. That said, it’s unlikely lightning would strike twice. The truth is, most UFO cases can’t be satisfactorily solved. Usually we have only witness testimony; when there is actually something tangible, it’s often ambiguous physical traces, a photo or a recording of some sort, and the evidence itself is puzzling. There are often enough questions remaining for UFO mystery mavens to claim even the flimsiest cases are unsolved and anomalous. In the BeWitness story, the evidence itself provided the solution. The placard the Slides pictured not only told us exactly what the body was, its text led to further documentation and proof beyond any reasonable doubt. Without the placard, the promoters would all still be on the UFO lecture circuit touting the Roswell Slides as genuine alien photos, the extraterrestrial “smoking gun” that changed history.
Could the Roswell Slides Research Group serve as a model for future research and investigation of UFO cases? I’ve provided an inside look at the strengths and weaknesses of our group’s methodology… now you can make your own decision. By pooling our resources, we each had the best available data, access to the counsel of our peers, and the inspiration and encouragement to keep trying to find the truth. Groups can be great tools, but they have their limitations. Each of us must remain objective, seek the best evidence and ask challenging questions, whether as part of a team or as individuals.
TRUFO VS. UFAUX: PLANETARY POLTERGEISTS & WEAPONS OF MASS ENCHANTMENT
SMiles Lewis
The following transcript is a condensed excerpt from a two-part lecture titled “UFOs and Consciousness: The Fantastic Facts About UFOs, Altered States of Consciousness, and Mind-at-Large.”1 The lecture sought to highlight the literature supporting areas of research I think could be most useful in moving UFO investigations forward and which support some of the speculative hypotheses that I find the most compelling. It has been edited to focus solely upon the probable use of the UFO for Covert Folklore Warfare by all too human actors.
In this talk, I’ll give you an overview of what I call ParaCryptoUFOlogy—the alternative theories of the UFO phenomenon that suggest a covert socio-cultural control system of earth lights and ball-of-light phenomena that interact with human consciousness in parapsychological ways. It may also interface with the collective unconscious of humanity and other species as well as some sort of a planetary mind, or Gaian consciousness, that some have described as a GeoPsyche and Planetary Poltergeist.
We’ll also discuss the potential misuse of these mechanisms for “Grand Deception” stratagems that manipulate the phenomenon and we’ll reconsider classic strange encounters in light of known government mind control programs. Finally, we’ll discuss the probable fake, false, faux UFO campaigns and concocted contact narratives being created by certain human agencies for reasons that have to do with socio-cultural control rather than extraterrestrial aliens.
I must stress that I am not trying to convince you that my perspective is the right one. That, to me, is the hallmark of somebody from whom you should run screaming. I am here tonight to tell you about the many different areas of exploration I’ve come across that I think point to something more interesting and more complicated than simple extraterrestrials in nuts-and-bolts vehicles whose tires you can kick physically. That is not to say that there are not these types of encounters happening. In fact, many of the ideas I’m going to talk about would provide the perfect cover for such traditional extraterrestrial encounters.
This is the problem I have with most people who claim to have an answer to the UFO phenomenon: they pick a theory, but it only fits part of the data. That’s also why I advocate for a multi-theory interpretation of the UFO phenomenon. I don’t think there is any one explanation that accounts for all the data. I think there is a number of things going on simultaneously.
My obsessive search for information about UFOs occurred during the height of the 1990s “Zine Scene” as desktop PC-enabled publishing was expanding upon the photocopied Samizdat networks. Great magazines like Crash Collusion, from here in Austin, Excluded Middle Magazine in California, Arcturus Books catalog in Georgia, inspired my own foray into self-publishing. Those were great heady times, which led me to publish my first issue in the summer of 1994. It was called E.L.F. Infested Spaces, after Terence McKenna’s phrase, “Elf Infested Spaces;” E.L.F. because of the ubiquitous stories of mind control I kept coming across and research about the psychoactivity of electromagnetic fields, and how these various psychotronic mind-influencing technologies could be used to manipulate people, and theories of E.L.F. waves serving as the conduit for psychic information.
Over the years, I reprinted in ELFIS a number of really important UFO studies that speak to these alternative theories of UFOs: “UFOs: The Pineal Connection” by Serena Roney Dougal,2 “Topographic Brain Mapping of UFO Experiencers,”3 and, one of my favorites, “A Testable Theory of UFOs, ESP, Aliens, and Bigfoot”4 by Synchronicity author Alan Vaughan looking at correlations between geomagnetic activity and reports of various types of phenomena.
Another is the “Bibliography on the Psychoactivity of Electromagnetic Fields,”5 which is an incredible resource. It is page-after-page listing scientific papers about the effects of ELF and other electromagnetic radiation on physical and psychological responses. A number of the research projects were at military bases near where, gee, there’s been a lot of UFO activity. See also, “ELF Magnetic Fields and EEG Entrainment: A Psychotronic Warfare Possibility?” by Robert C. Beck.6
&n
bsp; It was likely Whitley Strieber’s first book, Communion, that got me thinking about psychotronic effects and the role of the earth. He wrote that the human brain and various body parts give off electromagnetic fields and that perhaps these could be manipulated: “A more acute technology than our own might be able to mediate mental and physical function to a great degree.”7 His intimations of an interplay between these energies and a planetary consciousness inspired the romantic animist in me.
Terence McKenna also encouraged that notion when he said, “one possible view of the flying saucers is that it is a kind of projection from the consciousness of the planet, that is Gaia,” and “I think in that sense, Jung was really onto something when he saw it as coming from the unconscious … almost as though the UFO is a manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess.”8
In his “Five Arguments against the Extraterrestrial Theory” paper, Jacques Vallée said that “… it could be Gaia.” He provided two variants on this idea. “An alien intelligence, possibly earth based, could be training us towards a new type of behavior. It could represent the visitor phenomena of Strieber or some form of super nature,” like Lyle Watson talked about, “possibly along the lines of a Gaia hypothesis.”9
It is, perhaps, Paul Devereux’s research that has most influenced my romanticized thinking of UFOs as organelles in a Gaian ecosystem. For years he’s researched these weird earth lights phenomena—luminous lights that are generated by the earth due to earthquakes and tectonic stress. In 1995 he wrote a passionate article called “Beyond UFOlogy: Meeting With the Alien”10 in which he talked about the importance of altered states of consciousness, the DMT research of Rick Strassman, and Terence McKenna’s perspectives that this is some kind of history-haunting phantasm that is somehow tied to the earth. He also cites Dr. Kenneth Ring’s work,11 and includes many other little known bits of data regarding the effects of these electromagnetic fields on human physiology and consciousness.
UFOs- Reframing the Debate Page 16