Bragalia on mummies and the "Roswell slides"

Child mummy at Penn Museum

This just in from Anthony Bragalia by way of e-mail to Lance Moody, Tim Printy and yours truly. It's the first note I have ever received from him wherein he doesn't threaten me, so I suppose that constitutes progress of a sort. Anyway, here is the letter as it was received.  

Given the ‘anti-sliders’ group’s belief that the slides depict a mummy and their forthcoming conclusion, here is a summation I am sending to several interested parties to help people to understand that the being shown in the slides is simply not a mummy. One must understand that we have thought about the ‘mummy possibility’ thoroughly and have consulted experts and cannot come to the conclusion that it is for these reasons: 

SKIN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6F7xcPcfeA 

There are two basic types of mummies: Accidental and Intentional. 

Accidental mummies have their bodies preserved through atmospheric conditions such as extreme cold or burial in snow or ice. This short video is the best example of mummification through accidental exposure to extreme cold. 

Intentional mummies have their bodies preserved through the application of chemicals and the removal of all organs, and then use desiccation (or extreme drying) to fully dehydrate the remaining corpse. Wraps are then applied, sealed with resin. 

The slides being does not have the skin-look of an accidental mummy. 

The slides being does not have the skin-look of an intentional mummy- it simply is not desiccated. It appears to have been recently embalmed or dead. There is an ‘organic’ patina to the skin tissue. It is possible that their skin is more resistant to necrosis - but no matter, the skin appearance of the being depicted in the slide is not the skin of a mummy. 

FOUR DIGITS 

The being depicted has only four digits (fingers) instead of five like a human mummy. 

EYES 

The being depicted has very wide set eyes. Its eyes/eye sockets are also twice the size of any human. 

FACIAL FEATURES 

The face features and countenance appear totally non-human. The lower part of the face has an almost ‘insectile’ look and the upper part appears frog-like/amphibian. The chin is ‘pointed’ in the extreme, unlike any human. The head is large, but not hydrocephalic. 

EARS 

The ears (such as they are) appear vestigial. They are ‘embedded’ into the skull and they are pointed at the top. 

APPENDAGES 

The limbs (legs and arms) are disproportionately long relative to the body. They are very, very thin and ‘spindly.’ The body appears to be about 3.5 feet long, just as the beings reported at Roswell. The image that anti-sliders are working with is compressed and gives a false sense of size. The body itself is very frail-fragile and under-sized. 

ENCASEMENT 

Though very difficult to discern, the being appears to be placed in a glass container. It does not however, resemble those display cases found in museums and we have looked at dozens of such images. It may be tubular. And the being rests on hastily-cut blanket resembling green-colored military blankets used at the time. The entire setup seems very ‘make-shift’ as if it is temporary storage allowing for viewing with intended transport to another location- not at all ‘permanent.’ 

FRAMING OF THE SLIDES 

Finally, the pictures themselves were not ‘framed’ properly- they are taken ‘askew’ as if taken surreptitiously in a hurried fashion. Had they been taken at a museum, the framing of the slides would have been far better. Every other slide found in the chest is wholly different than the slides of the being in terms of the angle they were taken and the framing of the shots. 

HIDING THE SLIDES 

The Rays hid them separately from the rest of the slides as if to assign them special meaning. There are no other pictures of any other beings in the chest- including those of mummies. There are no other museum pictures. No other ‘travel’ slides were found separately packaged and hidden away from the other slides as were the slides of the being. 

THE SLIDES OWNER 

And given the 1947 provenance of the slides; and that Ray worked the Roswell region in the 1940s as an oil exploration geologist who was confirmed to have taken photographs using Kodachrome film while on oil explorations in NM; it is difficult to come to any other non-Roswell conclusion. 

INDEPENDENT WITNESS CONFIRMATION 

A Roswell vet who saw the bodies acknowledges this is what the slides depict; and that these 1947 slides reveal a creature very similar to those reported at Roswell. 

For all of these combined reasons, most everyone who has viewed the actual two slides agrees that the being depicted is humanoid, but not human.

Anthony Bragalia 

None of this should come as any surprise given that it's Mr. Bragalia, whose "research" on this has been driven by belief from the first day. Despite what he says, the most likely answer to the identity of the body is a mummy on display. The Roswell Slides Research Group is investigating this angle extensively, and we will post our findings when we are ready. Still, I post it here in the interests of fairness, even though it doesn't really contain anything new.

Meanwhile, I'll give the final word to UFOs-as-space-aliens true believer Robert Hastings, who wrote today:

I will conclude by predicting, perhaps redundantly, that this affair will end badly for the Roswell Slide promoters. If, as I contend, the body in the slides is the mummy of an Inca child, or some such, then Carey, Schmitt and Maussan will owe the whole world an apology. They should also seriously consider returning whatever money they made as a result of their unfortunate, unfounded and misguided claims.

If you can't even convince Hastings of the space alien nature of the person depicted in the slides, you know that you're in real trouble.

Paul Kimball 

Ufology Unplugged - Episode 1.2: Kevin Randle - Cattle Mutilations

UFO researcher / author Kevin Randle (The Abduction Enigma, The Government UFO Files, Case MJ-12, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell) discusses the cattle mutilation phenomenon, which he investigated in the 1970s for APRO.

Having looked into the cattle mutilation stories myself several years ago, I agree with pretty much everything Randle says here. The more interesting take-away for me from all of this is that most of what Randle says about cattle mutilation investigations, and investigators, is equally applicable to every other type of ufological investigation, whether it be "alien abductions" or crop circles... or Randle's own bread and butter, crashed flying saucers. His great failing is the blind spot that he has always had when it comes to that latter subject.

But as Karl Pflock always said, and it is a sentiment that Randle ironically echoes in this episode - belief can be a powerful thing.

Paul Kimball

UFOs - Skepticism vs. Belief

In 2001 I interviewed skeptic Vaughn Rees from the Center for Inquiry - West for the documentary Stanton T. Friedman is Real. In this clip that didn't make the film, Rees discusses what differentiates skepticism and skeptics from belief and believers, and why some people believe that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors.

Paul Kimball

David Eagleman, Possibilianism, and Transcending the Boundaries of Belief and Disbelief

Rich Reynolds at the UFO Iconoclasts has written a short post encouraging people to take a look at the work of neuroscientist / author David Eagleman, in particular with respect to his ideas about memory, and his philosophy of Possibilianism, and I couldn't agree with Rich more. Eagleman is one of the most interesting thinkers of our time. His book Sum: forty tales from the afterlives, is one of my favourite novels (although to call it a novel, i.e. a work of complete fiction, isn't quite accurate).

The podcast above contains an excerpt from Sum, read by the actor Jeffrey Tambor. It also has biologist Lee Silver telling the story of a physician’s ambitious 1907 experiment to discover the weight of the soul, a discussion of when people actually die with author and researcher Gary Greenberg and John Troyer, and a conversation with neuroscientist Adrian Owen about whether or not the dead can play tennis?

Consider it an Easter gift, from me to you!

As for Possibilianism, here is Eagleman explaining it in twenty minutes:

Three quotes from Eagleman in his lecture that pretty much sum up the way I look at both science, religion, and all things about the paranormal.

After you walk the pier of everything we know in science, at some point you reach the end of the pier. And beyond the pier is everything that we don't know; it's all of the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet. That's the real lesson that you get from science - it's about the vastness of our ignorance.

And...

Science is really about the creativity of making up new hypotheses. Part of the scientific temperment is the tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. Now, what we actually do is we make up new stories in the laboratory every day, and then we go and we seek evidence. We gather evidence to weigh in favour of some stories over others. But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now. They're beyond the toolbox of science, and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them. And in that situation it's okay. Science is comfortable holding multiple hypotheses on the table. That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with Mother Nature. It's part of the vast mysteries around us. We have to have that ambiguity.

And finally:

This is not just a plea for simple-openmindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas... Look around the strange world you're in, and see if you can live a life that is free from dogma, and full of awe and wonder, and see if you can celebrate possibility, and praise uncertainty.

Fascinating and thought-provoking stuff, and an example of the kind of thinking that transcends the boundaries imposed by those who insist we should simply believe or disbelieve in something.

Possibilianism is exactly the approach that I'll be taking with Beyond Best Evidence, the UFO-related documentary for which we're currently trying to raise the financing, because it's the only reasonable way of looking at the UFO enigma.

Paul Kimball