Death of a Dream... by self-inflicted wounds

Kevin Randle offers his take on the recent "Dream Team" imbroglio in a blog post that proves to me at least that he is as slippery as an eel and has the ethical compass of a kumquat. This is the opinion I have formed based on my own interactions with him, and his public statements and actions in contrast to his private ones. Others may well come to a different conclusion (it's a free country, after all), but in my opinion I was mistaken to ever trust him, or to believe that he was genuinely interested in the truth about Roswell. Mea culpa.

And I will remind people reading this who go to read Randle's non-mea culpa, where he bemoans my bringing up Don Schmitt's proven record of lying about a wide range of things in the past, that in the already published e-mail to me Randle wrote:

My dilemma, then, is how to tell Tom that I'm now out. I hung in there with the unilateral decision to invite in Schmitt, even given his history of lying (which, BTW, continues in some arenas, and Schmitt's grab for the spotlight to the exclusion of all others).

And yet here we have Randle in his "Death of a Dream" post chastising me for focusing on poor Don Schmitt when in fact he was doing the same thing in his e-mails to me. Sadly, he is more worried about hurting the feelings of a man he says is still lying to him than he is about calling a spade a spade and advancing the truth. As Lance Moody wrote in a comment at the UFO Iconoclasts blog:

The latest revelations show that Kevin made the following decision about Don Schmitt: 

1. I know you were a liar. 

2. I still think you are a liar because you are lying still. 

3. You'll do fine for our Roswell Dream Team as we search for the truth.

Precisely so.

Of course, the real issue goes far beyond just Schmitt. It involves the credibility of the entire "Dream Team" investigation, and in particular the now notorious slides that are allegedly from 1947 and show alien bodies (if you believe Anothony Bragalia). Randle claims to have been out of the loop on it all, despite appearances to the contrary based on the e-mails he sent me. Indeed, at the start of his non-mea culpa, Randle writes:

I freely admit that it appears from those emails that I was involved but the reality is that I wasn’t even completely in the loop. 

Well, judge for yourself just how much Randle knew, and whether or not he was "out of the loop" (and recall that in his previously published e-mail he stated that he had made his own inquiries, which to any reasonable person must mean he conducted an "investigation"). This is the text of the second e-mail he sent me, on September 6:

I got to looking at the documentation that had been given to me, and I asked how they had determined that the slides had been exposed in 1947. Was it chemical analysis? Was it some sort of measurement? How did they know?

I got back an email that explained some things that would happen to authenticate the slides which confused me so I asked additional questions. The testing HAS NOT been done. The document sent to me was a "proposed way to issue the statement." The date was based on the codes on the film, which I had said to anyone who would listen meant nothing because anyone familiar with the Alien Autopsy would know the codes. So, they hadn't determined with the slides had been exposed other than the film had been manufactured in 1947 or 1927 or 1967.  

Now the kicker. The man who owns the slides today has approached Kodak to make the tests, but we all know how that went with the Alien Autopsy. The experts can supposedly tell when the slides were exposed (though I wouldn't put much faith in that) and based on the chemical analysis should be able to pin down the date of manufacture rather than have a forty year window and should be able to tell something about when the slides were processed, again based on the chemical analysis. I mention this not as an alibi but so you know (as I know) that it might be possible to determine some of these things. 

The problems... well, as you note, as do I, there is NO chain of custody. I'm told that they believe they know who took the pictures originally, but he's dead, as is his wife and just about everyone who ever knew him... and that is a guess as to him having taken them. He could have been given them by something else. There is no way to know this. 

Oh, yes, I almost forgot... there is no indication where the pictures were taken. It was a morgue of some kind but when and where doesn't seem to be in the cards. There are a couple of signs in the pictures, but they are angled and impossible to read... another clue you say? Of course. (Clue to a hoax, if I have to clarify). 

I suspect the reason this has been bouncing around for more than two years is because it is a hoax of some kind. If the slides were authentic, I suspect we'd have a better chain of custody and I suspect the guy who had them would have approached someone with the ability to authenticate them and find him some big dough for them because, if authentic, how much would they be worth? Authentic slides of alien creatures... can you say "Millions."

So, yes, I'm thoroughly disgusted. I believe, at this point, the investigation is dead because it is not going anywhere and is badly tainted by the nun's diary story (thanks to Don Schmitt who has told me for two years that he knew where the diaries were but we haven't advanced on that front and I learned the original source who claimed to be a Special Forces officer was neither Special Forces not an officer). While the Ramey memo might provide some interesting results, I really hold no hope for that either.  

I believe, at this point, it is time to strike the flag and move onto other things... sad to say.

This was what I knew when I read Randle's statement to the Examiner that he had never seen the slides (true) and had not participated in their investigation (untrue). Now he tries to go even further and claim that he was "out of the loop." I didn't sandbag Randle - I only released the information when I realized he was not going to be truthful about either his knowledge of the slides nor his role in their investigation, and he was not going to honour his commitment to me that he would withdraw from the "Dream Team" as I had implored him to do in order to salvage his reputation.

No matter how much Randle tries to shift the issues in a classic public relations spin, the self-proclaimed "Dream Team" has imploded not because of malfeasance or betrayal by me or Rich Reynolds or Nick Redfern or anyone else who merely told the truth, but because of self-inflicted wounds motivated by a combination of greed, ego, and believerism. People will have to judge for themselves what to make of Kevin Randle based on this entire episode, but for me the answer is clear. We already knew that you couldn't trust Donald Schmitt; sadly, in my opinion the same now applies to Kevin Randle as well.

Paul Kimball