Roswell Revisited

When we begin to look for documentation for the Roswell case, there is very little available. There are the newspaper articles, a few that suggest what was found was unusual and might explain the flying saucers, and then many that explained it all just a weather balloon. Within hours of the announcement that the officers in Roswell had “captured” a flying saucer, Brigadier General Ramey explained it all away. Pictures of the weather balloon, on the floor in Ramey’s office, were published around the country. One day Roswell was the site of a major historical event and the next it returned to a back water town in the New Mexican desert where people couldn’t tell the extraordinary from the mundane.

Decades later, however, that all might have changed given the photographs taken by Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter/ photographer, J. Bond Johnson in Ramey’s office. Johnson posed Ramey near the debris while he held a piece of paper in his hand. Looking at a regular 8 x 10 glossy print of the picture, you can seen a faint smudge on the paper, and if you have a blow up and a magnifying glass, you can see lines of text. Some of the words seem to be almost readable.

First Attempts to Read the Memo

Brad Sparks might be the first researcher to have recognized this. In 1980, looking at a blow up of one of the photographs, he thought he could see “balloon” or more appropriately “baloons” in the message. Five years later, in 1985 he thought he could make out “weather balloons.”

In 1991, Don Schmitt sent a copy of that photograph to Dr. Richard Haines, a former NASA research scientist, asking if he could read anything on the paper. Haines, using a microscope scanned the message, reporting that he could see vague words but could not make out the individual letters of those words. In a few cases, he could identify a random letter but that was no help in understanding what might be printed on the paper. Haines thought that a better quality, or bigger enlargement of the photograph, might reveal more of the message, but didn’t seem to think it would be of much real use.

Haines’ less than spectacular results were strange. Using a magnifying glass and a good quality print, several words were visible including Fort Worth, Txe (which is apparently a mistyped abbreviation Tex.) Elsewhere there were two words that looked like weather balloon, though balloon was also misspelled.

During its investigation into all matters Roswell in the mid1990s, the Air Force, according to the report written by Colonel Richard Weaver, “… also noted that in the two photos of Ramey he had a piece of paper in his hand. In one, it was folded over so nothing could be seen. In the second, however, there appears to be text printed on the paper. In an attempt to read this text to determine if it could shed any further light on locating documents relating to this matter, the photo was sent to a national-level organization for digitizing and subsequent photo interpretation and analysis. This organization was also asked to scrutinize the digitized photos for any indication of flowered tape (or ‘hieroglyphics,’ depending on the point of view) that were reputed to be visible to some of the persons who observed the wreckage prior to its getting to Fort Worth. This organization reported on July 20, 1994, that even after digitizing, the photos were of insufficient quality to visualize either of the details sought for analysis…”

This seems to be the epitome of incompetence, but then, there might be reasons for that particular conclusion, as we’ll learn later. Clearly words can be read on the paper. Even with just a magnifying glass, some of the words are legible. But Weaver was happy with his report that said nothing could be gained from studying the photographs.

Granted, this conclusion was made in a world without blogs and it is obvious from the interviews conducted (or not conducted) in the Air Force investigation that there was an agenda working. However, this national organization, which was not identified, had their orders. They were to see nothing on the paper and nothing is what they saw.

Attempts by researchers using Freedom of Information to obtain copies of the report were unsuccessful. Since this was not, at least to the official statements, a matter of national security, there should have been no reason to refuse to release the report. Air Force officials suggested that it had somehow become lost in the months after its creation. Independent researchers would later duplicate the effort and the results obtained during the experiments surprised them.

That was where the matter rested until 1998 when J. Bond Johnson, who had taken six of the seven photographs in General Ramey’s office back in 1947, decided to get involved in the investigation of Roswell. Johnson put together a team, the Roswell Photo Interpretation Team (RPIT) to inspect the photographs that included Ron Regehr, a space and satellite engineer and Neil Morris, a technician who works for the University of Manchester in England. Using a huge 16 x 20 blow up of the photograph, a computer and a variety of software and camera equipment, they were able to see more of the message that Ramey held. Or rather, they claimed that they could read the message with some degree of certainty. They were certainly better at it than the national organization contracted by the Air Force.

In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, they saw what they believed to be the image of a telephone and concluded that Ramey was holding a “telephone message sheet” because of this “telephone logo.” They then claimed to have “positively identified a number of words in the message.” There were, quite naturally, gaps in what they could see given the bending of the paper and the angle of the photograph, and they noted that the message had been typed in all capital letters.

Their interpretation of the message was:

If what they found was accurate, and others could corroborate what they had seen, then it was a breakthrough on the Roswell case. Here was a document with an indisputable provenance. General Ramey was holding it in his hand, and copies of the photograph put out over the INS wire provided a time and a date. According to a copy of the photograph that I acquired from the Bettmann Photo Archives in New York City, J. Bond Johnson had taken the picture on July 8, 1947, and it had been transmitted at 11:59 P.M., or one minute before midnight on that date.

But, there were gaps in what they could read, and some of the phrases they spotted made little sense in the context of what else could be seen. However, the reference to victims, to weather balloons, and to Magdalena, New Mexico, were important clues. These words seemed to tie the message to the Roswell events, and suggested that some kind of a quick response was required by the military, either at 8^th Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, or by the 509^th Bomb Group in Roswell.

Here, I suppose I should point out that Johnson, at one time, claimed that the document held by Ramey was, in fact, the teletype notice that had gone to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Johnson said that he wanted Ramey to be holding something and handed it to him. Later Johnson recanted this, as he did so much of what he said originally. However, it should be noted that the document held by Ramey might not even be a military document but something that came from the civilian world.

Others began to request copies of the pictures from the Special Collections in Texas. To the delight of many, they could also see letters, words and images as suggested by Johnson and his team. The problem was that many of those doing the work were not seeing the same words and phrases as Johnson and his team.

For example, the telephone logo that Johnson’s team reported, looked more like a gray smudge on the paper than anything else. One well-known UFO researcher said that the telephone resembled the Liberty Bell as seen on the back of a Franklin half dollar rather than a telephone.

Here I think we need to divert the discussion just a bit. This document, if it is what it is alleged to be, that is a message about a spaceship crash, it would be classified, probably Top Secret. Here’s the problem. There is little that looks like it was stamped as Top Secret. There are no real indications on the paper of any classification, though the regulations governing this were quite clear in 1947.

Tom Printy, addressing the question of the Top Secret markings wrote, “[David] Rudiak [a researcher who has spent hundreds of hours examining the photograph] claims that it is TOP SECRET because he has found markings at the bottom of the page that look like some of the letters in TOP SECRET. If you look at the 600dpi image he presents on his website, those sections he describes as indicating the "TOP SECRET" mark are very faint and highly subjective in nature. This is not something you would expect from a prominent mark even if it were not viewed from the best angle. After all, one can see much of the logo at the top of the page clearly in the image. Why can't one see the prominent marks from a TOP SECRET stamp? In my naval experience, classification stamps are usually very large bold and heavy type that was in the top center and bottom center of the document on both FRONT and BACK of the page, even if one side of the page was BLANK (Often such a page was labeled in the center ‘intentionally left blank’). The only time this was not the case was when a message had just been received/transmitted at the teletype printer. In this situation the classification was found in the header of the message (something Rudiak's message does not have). Prior to routing and leaving the secure area of the printer, stamps were applied to the documents or the documents were placed in folders that were appropriately stamped. These prominent marks were for ease of identification in case the document fell in the garbage can or was carelessly left adrift by somebody who was not paying attention to the rules.”

Rudiak, for his part, in an email to me disputes this, insisting that he has found a top secret marking, though it is off center. He also notes that he has found other classified documents on which the classification stamp is off center. To be fair, in the examples he mentioned to me, the off center stamp is on letters rather than message traffic, or is a note that a document belongs in the top secret file but is not, itself, a classification mark.

The real point is, however, that when dealing with millions of pages of classified documents over more than a half century, exceptions to the rules can be found. Printy’s point is valid, but does not prove that the reading of the Ramey memo is inaccurate.

Moving back to the telephone logo and other aspects of the message, we see that Neil Morris’ interpretation of the symbols did not agree exactly with that made by other components of Johnson’s team. He did do one thing that was beneficial to all researchers and that was break down the message line by line so that it would be easy to follow his interpretation. He used capital letters to represent the parts of the message of which he was sure, lower case letters to represent his best guess of some letters, an asterisk to denote a letter he couldn’t decipher, and a dash where there was little more than a smudge on the message.

Morris’ interpretation of the message was:

It was not an exact match for what Johnson had released and in fact, went off at a couple of brand new angles. In this version, while the word victims remained, as did the Fort Worth, Texas, nearly everything else was different. One of the major points in the Johnson version was the wording that suggested, “Emergency Powers are needed Site Two SW of Magdalena, NMex.” It suggested that those interpreting the message were seeing, to some extent, what they wanted to see.

In still a different version, Rudiak, suggested only a little of what others had seen. In one of his earlier interpretations, and using the same mix of capitals for what he was sure of and lower case for what he suspected, and brackets to suggest alternative words and phrases, he reported the message read:

Rudiak, in his interpretation, here, was attempting to puzzle out the overall meaning rather than just identify various words. His attempts to this point made the most sense, in the context of trying to find a reasonable interpretation, but it did not clarify much.

Others Enter the Arena

Those weren’t, of course, the only alternative interpretations that were offered. Russ Estes, a California documentarian and UFO researcher, using a 16 x 20 print made by the University of Texas Library, applied his expertise to the examination. Estes used a professional quality $50,000 video camera with a $7500 macro lens to capture the image. Then using his huge, $80,000 computer and a variety of technically complex and professional quality software programs, he examined the message every way that he could think of including a jeweler’s loup, magnifying glass and microscope. He even scanned it at 9000 dpi so that it created a file that was 1.7 gigabits in size and could be manipulated and enlarged even further (which seems like something that national organization the Air Force mentioned should have been able to do). Estes said that he could seen nothing that he would be willing to swear to in court. He said there was simply nothing there to see which is surprisingly like what that national organization had told the Air Force several years earlier.

Pressed on the point, because others were seeing all sorts of words and phrases, Estes did say that he could make a “best guess” about the images on the message. Looking at an 8 x 10 photographic blow up of just the message area, using the same techniques and equipment, he could see with a limited amount of confidence, “Fort Work, Tex.” On the line below that where one group saw “Disk” and another saw, “ELSE,” Estes believed he saw, “ELA*”. He did say that it made no sense to him, just that was what the ambiguous smudges that everyone was attempting to make into words looked like to him.

It probably should be noted here that Estes, unofficially, talked of seeing other words as well. He was reluctant to add his interpretations to the already cloudy issue. It helped no one, and added nothing to our knowledge for him to speculate beyond what, to him, was definitive.

As for the signature block, he could see nothing that resembled either of the claims. At best, there might have been an “M” in the middle of the word, and the possibility of an “LE” at the end. That gave the nod to “Temple.”

So let’s think back to the Air Force “national laboratory” that couldn’t come up with anything. Isn’t that basically what Estes was saying here. Yes, there were words that seemed to stand out, but those were the words we all could see with the magnifying glass. Estes couldn’t see anything that was buried in the smudges of charcoal that made up the other words. It was the same thing that Haines had said, though he was not using the same quality of equipment as the others.

That wasn’t, of course, the end of it. Schmitt, now working with Tom Carey from Pennsylvania and sometimes in communication with Don Burleson of Roswell, came up with their own interpretation of the message. Burleson, writing in the January 7, 2000 issue of Vision, a monthly magazine published by the Roswell Daily Record, noted, “A number of attempts have been made to read the Ramey letter. Quite frankly, most of these attempts are amateurish, and even some UFOlogists have concluded that there is nothing in the Ramey image that advances the case for the Roswell incident. They are mistaken.”

Burleson wrote that he had spent a year working on deciphering the letter. He said that he had the advantage of being the director of a computer lab and that he had a background in cryptanalysis. According to him, “I’m quite used to reading things that I wasn’t meant to read.”

Burleson wrote that he had been using several excellent computer image enhancement software packages, “including LUCIS, the most advanced software used today in such fields as microscopy.” Burleson was suggesting that he used very expensive equipment and very advanced software. To hear Burleson tell it, his was the most sophisticated analysis attempted to date and his results were spectacular.

Burleson, who didn’t provide a line by line breakdown, wrote, “Here is my reading, so far… (Indeterminate parts of words are indicated by hyphens, and missing words are indicated by parentheses.) A few spots are a bit tentative, but essentially the letter reads”:

But, once again, the reading of the message wasn’t universally accepted. UFO researcher Stan Friedman contacted Rob Belyea, the owner of ProLab, asking him to examine high resolution scans made of the negative. Friedman had actually paid someone in Fort Worth to hand carry the original negatives (which by now were becoming dirty and scratched because of all the handling) from the Special Collections to a computer lab to have these scans made. The results were then sent on to Friedman who supplied them to Belyea. Belyea said that he couldn’t spend hours examining the message but that he could rule out or confirm the interpretations made by others by using his software to decide on character count and combinations of letters. It was not at all unlike the work being done by Russ Estes in California, though Estes was actually trying to read the message rather than just confirm other interpretations.

While Friedman stood on the sidelines watching and not commenting on the research, Belyea did say specifically that he could not see “Magdalena” in the text as the first part of the Johnson team had suggested. Belyea did say, “They’re pulling off all sorts of [readings], but they’re making some of it up.”

There is an additional problem, only partially addressed in the search of the message. This probably was a military message sent from one military installation to another, which means there might have been some military jargon in it. The attempts at reading it have failed to account for any military jargon and that might have confounded the process. Originally, the closest is Rudiak’s attempt to place military unit designations into the message. He noted in one place where he thought 58 or 58^th bomber squadron might have been indicated. He also located a second place where 54^th SAID could indicate some kind of a military unit, although no one has yet located a unit with that designation.

Rudiak himself noted that what he thought as “5 PM” made no sense because the military would have used the twenty-four hour clock and it would have said, “1700 Hrs” rather than “5 PM.” That is a valid point.

Interestingly, Rudiak noted there was no law that said a military communication had to be loaded with jargon. He wrote to me that Brad Sparks had sent him a top-secret telex from General Walsh to General LeMay concerning a nuclear accident with very little jargon in it. I find it interesting because it contains some jargon but not an overwhelming amount.

But my point was that few, if any of the researchers were looking for jargon which could have changed their interpretations of the message. True, it might contain none, which wouldn’t, of course rule it out as a military message, but it might contain quite a bit and no one seemed to have addressed that problem.

“Victims of the Wreck”

Over the years, these interpretations of the message have circulated through the UFO community and that is a point that is sometimes overlooked. If you look at the message closely and know where to look, it certainly seems that the word victims appears right where they all say it does. And if victims is in that message, then many other interpretations of the content of the message are simply wrong.

Another study, reported in the Minnesota MUFON Journal, in issue #102 and dated July/Aug 2003, provides an interesting diversion from the classical interpretation. Bill McNeff and Glenn Fishbine decided they too would attempt to read the Ramey Memo and their results change, to some extent, the importance of it.

They note that theirs is a preliminary study and then wrote, “Ten different types of image restoration techniques were employed in an effort to make this message more readable. They are highly technical and will not be detailed in this article.”

Which, of course, opens them up for criticism simply because we can ask, how valid are their techniques if they don’t tell us what they are. It can also be noted that sometimes a detailed description of the technical aspects of a study inhibit the reporting of it, and, they do provide some clues about what they looked at in their study.

Rudiak, for example, made some assumptions that are important to his interpretation of the memo. McNeff and Fishbine wrote, “First of all, we do not agree with the ‘established’ character count, especially at the end because of the creases [in the memo]. Second, while we agree with the interpretation of some letters found by others, there are a significant # (sic) of cases where their reading of a letter was a reading of a film grain pattern. In some cases we were able to find text in the grain background. Also, some of the other readings came from grain patterns above, below, or to the right of the actual letters. Third, a lot of the readings came from what looks like a photoshop gaussian blur of one of the original scans. That kind of blur creates some amazing artifacts & (sic) psychological interpretations. We avoided the blurring at all costs.”

So now we have another study like that done by Estes, that is suggesting that people might be seeing what they want to see. In fact, the key word, “victims” is not one that they identified. They wrote, in discussing their methods, “It was especially good on a few letters. It brought out the E in REMAINS very clearly.”

That is “remains” instead of “victims.” Rather thanseeing “The victims of the wreck,” they saw, “The remains of the wreck…” And that changes the meaning because remains could refer to the weather balloon debris rather than living creatures that were killed.

Rudiak had reported on his web site that victims was the only word that fit into context of the six letter word that began with a “v”. What could the word be if it was not victims? But if the first letter is an artifact of blurring and psychological interpretation, then Rudiak’s argument based on the first letter being a “v” is flawed.

“Priming” of the Victims

Unfortunately, we all have now been “primed” to see the word. There might be other interpretations that if conducted by those who have yet to be contaminated could tell us something. That was the basis of an experiment designed and conducted by James Houran, then a psychologist in Illinois. With my help, he gathered a cross section of people to review photographic enlargements of message. There were three groups and three conditions. One group was told that the message related to the Roswell UFO crash. One group was told that the memo related to atomic testing. And the control group was told nothing about the contents, only asked if they could read any of the words.

Yes, there were some words that were made out easily. Fort Worth, Tex., weather baloons (sic) and the like. But the critical word, that is, victims, was not seen by any of the subjects. And, those who were told the message was about an atomic test rather than a spaceship crash saw words like flash, which related to the atomic test but that has surfaced in none of the interpretations of the message by UFO researchers.

This suggests that “priming” or contamination, might have some affect one what people see. The results were laid out in an article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration in the Spring, 2002 issue.

There is one problem, or rather one that some of the proponents of reading the message make about the experiment. Through error, one of the student assistants threw out the raw data after copying it onto the score sheets. Yes, the raw data should have been saved, but then the data, in a finer state was preserved. Does this negate the experiment? No.

It does however, complicate the matter. Not long ago I was looking at the records about the J. B. Rhine experiments into ESP. Questions about the statistical study were raised and much of the data were reviewed. What was found was that in some cases the graduate students and the post-docs running the experiments had “fudged” the data. Without the preliminary information properly preserved, we wouldn’t have known that.

Now, we must expect those reviewing our data will accept that the raw data was transcribed properly and without error. While there is no evidence that any of the numbers were fudged, and those running the experiment did not know what results were expected, it does throw a bit of a cloud over the work.

I suppose I should also note that the time each of the subjects spent trying to read the message was about twenty minutes. Rudiak pointed out that he had spent months on his work, that he used the best copies of the photographs possible and the best computer programs. It’s not quite the same as a student trying to read the message off a computer screen in twenty minutes. His work should count for more.

But the point is that without priming, no one identified the critical word, which is victims. None of them. Though they were using some of the best images available they were unable to see that specific word. This suggests that a second experiment should be preformed to determine the validity of the results of those reading the Ramey memo.

So, the experiment conducted suggested that priming might have lead to some researchers seeing the critical word victims. But it should also be noted that researchers did, independently, pick out some of the more obscured words. In fact, Rudiak, in an email to me suggested there was more consensus than disagreement. And he notes that there is more agreement in context than there is in precise wording.

Agreement in the Wording

Rudiak wrote, “We do have some important points of agreement. Brad [Sparks] and I totally independently of one another [emphasis in the original] picked out the words, ‘disc’ and ‘Roswell’ in the body of the message (‘Roswell’ where the RPIT group saw the obviously erroneous word ‘Magdalena,’ which is too long). We both agree on the Ramey signature, that the message is definitely military, and that the end of the message is about the cover-up. Sparks also agrees that the address heading may contain ‘Vandenberg’ (though disagrees that the message would be directly addressed to him).”

Rudiak did post his reconstruction of the message and details of his analysis to this web site http://roswellproof.homestead.com. While it does agree with some of the other interpretations, it also goes off at its own angles in some places.

Rudiak, using the system developed by Neil Morris, and expanding it, finally produced this interpretation:

So, in the context of the message, as read by Rudiak, it does make sense and terms, such as “safe talk” which no one was able to define, has been replaced by “that CIC/team.” He has created an interpretation that is grammatically correct and seems to account for all the words in the memo.

But this agreement that Rudiak talks about doesn’t seem to be in existence. We’ve already seen that McNeff and Fishbine thought the word was “Remains.” John Kirby, writing to me in 1999, independently thought the word was “Remains.”

On a completely different note, Brad Sparks thought the word was “Finding.” Rather than reading the “Victims of the Wreck,” Sparks believed it to be “The Finding of the Major,” which, I suppose would be the finding of Major Marcel.

A New Experiment

Then Jim Houran entered the picture again. At the end of the first experiment, which was a test for priming, he suggested that qualified laboratories, those that have some expertise in looking at “ambiguous stimuli,” that is, the sort of image that we have on the Ramey Memo take a look at it. He thought that by not giving the labs the context of the memo, they wouldn’t be influenced by other attempts to read it. After all, the Internet is full of information and interpretations of the Ramey Memo.

In a report, A Search for Meaning in the Ramey Document From the Roswell UFO Case, Houran noted that an Independent Triangulated Analysis might just answer some of the questions and could corroborate some of the interpretations of the memo. Houran, with the support of the Fund for UFO Research, began searching for the labs to make the analysis.

Houran details the methods used to review the memo by the laboratories and then offers the conclusions of that analysis. Surprisingly, those results mirror those obtained by the Air Force during their study in the 1990s. In other words, the experts consulted by Houran, after running their various tests, scans, and analysis, concluded that nothing could be read with any degree of certainty in the Ramey Memo. Houran wrote to me, “The labs felt that no words could be read with any accuracy… However, they did say that improved methodologies might yield some legible words.”

So, like the Air Force before them, these labs didn’t want to make a judgement call on what they considered a stimuli too vague to define. They suggested that there was a lower limit to how much resolution there could be because the “noise” from the grains of silver in the emulsion could never be completely eliminated and that even the best labs might never be able to improve the quality of the signal. No, they didn’t rule that out completely, but the fact remains that the object of the photograph was not the paper in Ramey’s hand, and that the paper was turned and twisted and those distortions just might be too much of overcome.

What it seems to boil down to is that there is no real consensus on what the message says no matter how much argument there is about it. And while it can be argued that the message held by Ramey might be about the Roswell case, there really is no way to know that for certain because the stimuli is too vague to be read with any degree of certainty.

While many consider this to be the smoking gun in Roswell research, the truth is that it remains just out of our reach. Rudiak could be exactly right, but there are others, whose interpretations don’t agree who also believe they are exactly right. Given the message, the all can’t be exactly right and that is where the problem lies.