(9) RAMEY
(10) top SeCRet
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the message, as read by Rudiak, it does make sense and terms, such as “safe talk” which no one was able to define, has been replaced by “that CIC/team.”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.
Chapter Ten: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
So where are we today? Is the case for an alien spacecraft crash northwest of Roswell stronger or weaker after all the investigation, all the study and all the witnesses who told stories for their own amusement? Just what does the evidence tell us about Roswell that we didn’t know before and how does it help us understand the situation?
To answer these, and other similar questions, I’ll make a quick recap of the strongest to weakest evidence against, and then the strongest to weakest evidence for. Each reader will have to decide for him or herself which side of the fence to come down on. Each reader will have to set his or her own standards of evidence to decide.
Finally, because it is a question that I’m asked frequently, and given the nature of the case, one that comes from the changing landscape. I’ll point out which witnesses I still believe, which have been discredited to everyone’s satisfaction, and give a quick opinion on some other aspects of the Roswell case. These will be, of course, those who haven’t appeared in other sections of this book.
Documentation Against
To me, and I believe a large number of people, the strongest evidence against the crash is the documentation that is available in a large number of formally classified documents,especially those authored by or attributed to Colonel Howard McCoy and whose provenance is unquestioned. McCoy was, in the late 1940s, one of the few people who should have known about a flying saucer crash if one had taken place. His statements in high level meetings where the notes and minutes were kept and then classified and eventually unclassified, tell us a great deal.
McCoy’s statements in late 1947 and early 1948, including “So far no physical evidence of the existence of the unidentified sightings has been obtained… The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another planet has not been ignored. However, tangible evidence to support conclusions about such a possibility are completely lacking…” is quite important. There is no equivocation here. He is saying that he knows of no evidence that is suggestive of an alien space craft crash. The statement is strong and positive.
Less impressive are statements in the Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79. While it is true that they say nothing about any crash recovered debris, it is also true that the authors report they didn’t have access to everything out there. Because they didn’t see everything, and because they acknowledged that they didn’t see everything, it is quite possible that if Roswell was a real crash, they might not have had access to it. Although they held top secret clearances, it could be argued they didn’t have the need to know this particular top secret so they were not privy to it.
Arguments then, by the skeptics, that the officers writing the report would not lie to their superiors means there was no crash do not completely work. The men writing the report were not given access to everything and therefore could write with complete honesty that there were areas they simply could not penetrate. This, unfortunately for the skeptics, leaves the door open for a crash.
Similarly, the Twining Letter is not quite as definitive as it could have been. Brigadier General Schulgen, in Washington, D.C., asked Lieutenant General Twining for an assessment of the flying saucer hysteria. Twining responded saying that the phenomenon, that is, flying saucers, is real. He also noted that they had been an absence of crash recovered debris. That seems to be a fairly strong statement because Twining, as the commander of the Air Materiel Command, and to whose facilities the recovered debris and bodies of alien creatures would have been brought according to many witnesses, would, quite naturally, have known all about it. That he mentioned the lack of crash recovered debris seems to put a nail in the Roswell coffin.
The problem here, and I freely admit it is splitting a few fine hairs, is that the original document is classified secret, that it is being prepared for a lower-ranking officer, and that it is possible to accomplish the mission (here the establishment of an investigation into the nature of flying saucers) without revealing everything that he, Twining (or more probably, his subordinates who were told to write the letter for his signature) knows. He can, in the words of the skeptics, lie to the subordinate general without compromising the mission. In fact, he can accomplish all he wants without risking compromising the BIG secret.