He’s right.
I guess there’s no time like the present.
Dr. Wescott (now deceased) was a linguistics professor at Drew University. He was engaged by Stan to try and determine whether the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) had been written by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter (below).
Stan gave Wescott the EBD and twenty-seven other samples of memos, notes and other writings that had been established as having been written by Hillenkoetter.
Here is what Wescott came up with, after his first opinion (which Stan never mentions) proved, er... less than conclusive.
“In my opinion, there is no compelling reason to regard any of these communications as fraudulent or to believe that any of them were written by anyone other than Hillenkoetter himself. This statement holds for the controversial presidential briefing memorandum of November 18, 1952, as well as for the letters, both official and personal.”
Even Stan, however, admitted that this second statement, to be charitable, was less than definitive - leaving one to wonder how inconclusive Wescott’s original statement was!
In Top Secret / Majic, Stan wrote:
“Some people are upset that Dr. Wescott didn’t make a positive statement that his work proves that Hillenkoetter wrote the briefing. Obviously, no such statement could be made. Somebody working for the CIA, for example, could have read Hillenkoetter’s papers and simulated his style.” (p. 78 – as a side note, one should substitute “AFOSI” for “CIA,” and you’ll be on the right track)
Wescott himself made this clear a few months after he wrote the statement quoted above. In a letter to the International UFO Reporter, he wrote:
“I have no strong conviction favoring either rather polarized position in the matter… I wrote that I thought its [the EBD] fraudulence unproved… I could equally well have maintained that its authenticity is unproved… inconclusiveness seems to me to be of its essence.” [IUR, vol. 13, no. 4, July / August 1988, p. 19]
No lawyer, knowing what Wescott, as an “expert,” was going to say, would ever put him on the stand.
Why?
Because his “analysis” proves nothing (the very essence of "inconclusiveness").
In short, the reason nobody mentions the Wescott “analysis” is because it is irrelevant.
However, this hasn’t stopped Stan from trumpeting the Wescott letter as a sort of proof of the authenticity of the EBD (and if you don’t think he does this, you haven’t caught one of his lectures lately).
However, Stan rarely, if ever, mentions Wescott’s subsequent clarification in IUR, or even Stan’s own comments in Top Secret / Majic - and the obvious conclusions that must be drawn from them.
Those conclusions again?
Wescott’s “analysis” proves nothing, and is irrelevant.
Instead of admitting this, however, Stan says and writes things like:
“None of the vocal critics including Randle even discuss the findings of world-class linguistics expert Dr. Roger Wescott.” [www.v-j-enterprises.com/mj12_update2.html]
The implication is that Randle, in his book Case MJ-12, was trying to duck the Wescott “analysis.” The same is true when Stan e-mails me and says I’ve never mentioned Roger Wescott.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, when I interviewed Kevin in 2001 for the film Stanton T. Friedman is Real, he was happy to talk about the Wescott “analysis,” giving much the same reply as I have above. I just didn’t use it in the film – because it wasn’t significant… of anything.
So, if you hear Stan bring up Roger Wescott and his “analysis” of the EBD, just remember what Wescott actually said… and what Stan himself has written.
It is the epitome of a red herring.
But that's MJ-12 in a nutshell, isn't it?
Paul Kimball
4 comments:
But, Paul, it's that very ambiguity that keeps MJ-12 alive.
RR
Rich:
It's only ambiguous for the True Believers. For the rest of us, it's clear as a bell.
Paul
Paul -
What is notable about Wescott's analysis is that he did not find anything glaringly "fake" about the document. And said so.
I think that this is because the documents were created (by the military itself) in order to deceive, but I of course cannot prove that. And in fact, if this is so, it can never be proven.
But Wescott did support Friedman in that he found no obvious signs of hoax or incongruity with comtemporaneous documents.
To say that Wescott's analysis is evidence of nothing is factually incorrect.
But I don't believe that MJ-12 was real.
Kyle
UFOreflections.blogspot.com
Kyle:
Sorry, but you're wrong on this one. I never said Wescott's "analysis" was "evidence of nothing," but rather that it was, in Wescott's own words, inconclusive, and therefore worthless for the purpose of determining what it was set out to determine - i.e. is the EBD authentic. It certainly doesn't help make the case for MJ-12, as Stan has suggested.
I wouldn't mind him using it if he'd just provide both sides of the story, as in "Hey, Wescott said A, but then said B, and frankly, the results are inconclusive, which doesn't rule out that the possibility that the documents could have been written by Hillenkoetter, but equally doesn't rule out the possibility that the documents were faked by someone familiar with Hillenkoetter's writing, which would not have been difficult." People would then see the Wescott "analysis for what it is, and, I believe, ignore it.
Of course, the purpose of a red herring is to confuse the issue, isn't it?
Paul
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