How to Make the Roswell Slides Fiasco Right

Apologies from the promoters of the Roswell Slides fiasco in Mexico City, even if they are forthcoming, are not enough. It's easy to say you're sorry while you still hold the cash. The way to make it right, or at least as right as it can be, is as simple as it was for the Roswell Slides Research Group to solve the "mystery" - the promoters must immediately offer a full refund on each and every ticket sold to the May 5th event. Those who were only participants in the event or the build-up to it, like Anthony Bragalia and Richard Dolan, can begin to restore some of their reputation by publicly calling on the prime organizers of the event to take this step.

Anything less is just as worthless and hollow as the event itself.

Paul Kimball

Truth and Lies

As those of us in the Roswell Slides Research Group worked toward finding out the truth about the so-called "Roswell Slides," some of us were subjected to smear campaigns by the most vociferous Slides promoter, Anthony Bragalia.

Here's an example about me, alluded to in a post at Kevin Randle's blog yesterday when Randle wrote, "Paul Kimball, who has been recently and unjustly vilified for his anti-slides stance." It comes from an e-mail that Bragalia sent to my RSRG colleague Tim Printy (and my understanding is that this claim was made to others):

You have allowed your team member Kimball to call Dr. Edgar Mitchell at home out of the blue to disturb him.. You have no moral compass, no filter- you have become desperate.  Kimball urged Mitchell not to attend the event and your reputation  -such as it is- will suffer immensely. You will personally be called out as a harasser and antagonizer who works with a mentally unstable alcoholic to derail other people's hard work.  How could you do this? What is wrong with you? When the world finds out how you operate, that you have no scruples and will stress-out and attack elderly people to get your way- no one  will ever want anything to do with you. My god, Tim, this is over-the-top and you have finally revealed yourself as a repellent nut. Btw, your foul attempt did not work..

To be clear, the claim that I contacted Mitchell was a lie. To be clear, I am not an alcoholic. That claim was also a lie. Either one of them would be grounds for legal action were I to pursue it further. Fortunately for Mr. Bragalia, I am not so inclined. I've got better things to do, and Mr. Bragalia, like his fellow Slides promoters, is now irrelevant.

But I want to let you know that this is what we were up against, folks. These are the people we were dealing with. Secretive, abusive, deceitful, and very, very angry when you challenged their claims, right up to Adam Dew accusing us yesterday of photo-shopping the placard research - another lie. 

For our part, while we skeptics can wield sharp elbows from time to time, and also have been known to pull a good-natured prank or two at the expense of self-important con men and true believers, our research itself was above board, peer-reviewed, factual... and open-sourced for everyone to look at. 

Finally, we had no financial stake in the story. Our only interest was in getting to the truth of the matter.

And that's the fundamental difference between the Slides Promoters and the rest of us.

Paul Kimball

The Roswell Slides placard

Adam Dew and Anthony Bragalia are claiming that the image from which we derived the proof that the "alien" body is actually a human mummified child is a fake - that it was photoshopped. I believe Jaime Maussan has said the same thing.

This is categorically untrue. The only change made was an increase in the contrast to accentuate the actual letters on the page (which were deblurred using simple commercially available software). Nothing was added.

I think we all know who the fakers are in this.

Paul Kimball

The Roswell Slides, Part D'uh

Told you so.

Paul Kimball

The Roswell Slides

Told you so.

Paul Kimball

The 4th of May!!

Breaking news, Roswell slides fans!

I have received, from a secret source, full resolution copies of the infamous slides. 

I am working with some media colleagues and actual scientists now to pull together an event that will reveal the truth about the slides. The wheels are in motion for a live and FREE to view event that we will stream on MAY the 4th, one day before the con event that will be held in Mexico City by the Slides promoters. 

That's right, folks - the day before you'll have to pay up to see them from the slides promoters, my colleagues and I will be presenting the evidence for free!

Why? Because I can, and because it will be fun. Consider it my gift to ufology for all the things it has given me over the years.

Stay tuned for details coming in early April, once we get the technical details worked out. But remember - you will have access to the truth from us the day before you'll have the boondoggle from the slides promoters - and it will be FREE!

Paul Kimball

Karl Pflock - Debunking the Roswell Myth

The late Karl Pflock, author of the book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, deconstructs the Roswell case in this interview I conducted with him in September, 2001, and explains how and why the crash of a relatively simple (albeit top secret) military project in 1947 got turned into one of the great myths of the 20th century.

Karl did more legitimate and useful research into Roswell than any other Roswell researcher. Despite being a proponent for the extraterrestrial hypothesis (he thought the Hill case was a real abduction, for example), he tackled Roswell with rigorous objectivity. For any fair-minded person, his book stands as the sine qua non of the Roswell case. 

Paul Kimball

Karl Pflock sums up modern Ufology

My good friend the late Karl Pflock sums up what really drives modern conspiracy-oriented ufology, particularly Roswell researchers, in this clip from an interview I conducted with him on 9 September, 2001. 

Paul Kimball

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 

Benson Saler - Evidence and The Roswell UFO Case

In this clip from an interview I conducted with him in 2001, anthropologist Dr. Benson Saler discusses the concept of evidence and how it has been applied to the Roswell UFO case by both believers and skeptics. With all the bluster from the "Dream Team" about the "Roswell slides," it's always nice to remind oneself of how a proper academic approaches the subject. 

 Paul Kimball

The Roswell "Dream Team" and the "Slides"

From my friend Jose Antonio Caravaca, who is part of the group of skeptical researchers looking into the Roswell slides. It sums things up nicely. From left to right, Bragalia, Randle, Carey and Schmitt.

Paul Kimball

The Double Standards of Anthony Bragalia (and Roswell researchers in general)

Below is the text of an e-mail just sent to me from Dream Team member and all around nut-case Anthony Bragalia (I have kept the spelling errors and bolding to show you how it looked). Remember, folks, that all I did was publish the name of a witness to a fantasy tale so that people who are less inclined than Bragalia et al to accept every word uttered from someone who confirms their belief system could, should they want to, check this witness out and not have to rely on the Dream Team to filter the information. But for Bragalia, that goes too far.

" Kimball-

How dare you make public the name and location of an elderly man who was a witness to Roswell?

You have no filter- no care for others. This is an old man who does not need this. A pseudonym was used in the Witness book to shield him from unwanted calls.

If he begins to receive phone calls from strangers or visits to his home by strangers- we are calling the police and providing them your name.

Your actions are reprehensible and I swear that I am going to authorities if this man is harassed. Are you mentally ill? What do you not understand about publishing this man’s name and home? Are you trying to incite him? Harm him?

Why do you want to make this man miserable. He is nearing 90- you are really of-the-chain, and I am going to do something about it.

Tony Bragalia"

Apparently it's just fine for Roswell believers (and I use that term very, very loosely) to contact people, and to question them about their claims (and I use the term "question" very, very loosely as well), but not for skeptics to do the same. It's fine for them to demand to know everything, whether it's from the government that is supposedly hiding the truth, or from witnesses that know the truth, but they wish to keep their own secrets for themselves.

Let's remember that Mr. Benavides agreed to appear on Sci Fi Investigates, a network television show. He agreed to appear in Adam Dew's forthcoming film. His identity was known to these people. But they did not want you to know it. It is not as if the man has been hiding away in his house. He's been on television, for crying out loud.

No, this has nothing to do with them wanting to protect a frail old man from the  harassment of evil skeptics. Instead, it has everything to do with the true believers wanting to control the narrative that they are spinning.

An artist's representation of a typical Roswell "researcher," hoarding their secrets.

I suppose I don't blame them. Every time an independent, objective researcher looks into the witness claims out of Roswell, those claims (from Glenn Dennis to Frank Kaufmann to Jim Ragsdale to Gerald Anderson, and all point in between) fall apart. The claims have never withstood close scrutiny. The same kind of sturm and drang was raised when Robert Todd got access to Jesse Marcel's military records, and found discrepancies in his stories about his background. These "researchers" only want you to know their version of the story - a story that is worth a fair bit of money. The one thing they absolutely don't want you to know is the truth. Mr. Bragalia and his fellow travelers want to stifle dissent, and avoid at all costs having their claims cross-examined. They are the very antithesis of true researchers, and are as far away from being honest seekers of the truth as one can get.

Paul Kimball

The "Roswell Slides" Witness

Much has been made by the Dream Teamers of a military witness who confirmed for them that he saw the same body that is depicted in the two "Roswell slides," and that it was at Roswell in 1947 and it was alien.

Here is Adam Dew, the filmmaker behind all of this, talking about the "slides" on WGN 9 News in Chicago. The relevant part is at 4:42 when Dew states, "We did show them to a Roswell military veteran who was on site in 1947 who says he saw bodies and he says that the slides look like what he saw in July of 1947."

In the trailer for his Kodachrome documentary, Dew refers to the witness as a "Lieutenant." At 2:38 Dew states: "And then there's this guy, who was an army lieutenant at Roswell air force base in 1947."

That veteran does indeed exist. A source provided me with the name - Eleazar N. Benavides. He currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. If you go to Google you can track him down and see a photo of where he lives, which matches the location you see in the film trailer above (apparently interviewing witnesses standing in their driveway is Dew's style).

Thanks to researcher Tim Printy, who is part of an ad hoc, sub rosa group of skeptics who are looking into the slides (of which I am also an associate), here is a photo of a much younger Mr. Benavides in the Roswell base yearbook from 1947.

As you can see, at the time of the Roswell Incident, Benavides was indeed stationed at Roswell, so that much is true, but he was a Private First Class in the 390th Air Service Squadron. He was not, as Dew erroneously claims in the trailer, a Lieutenant.

In fact, he is also not a new "witness." He is the "Pfc. Benjamin" referred to in the book Witness to Roswell by Roswell slides promoters / "Dream Team" members Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt (see. pp. 209 - 217 - "Eli Benjamin" was a pseudonym used by the authors). He can be seen in an episode about Roswell on the short-lived Sci-Fi Investigates series in this clip:

Benavides is repeating the same sort of story that "witnesses" to the "creature" have repeated before. Is he lying, as other "witnesses" like Glenn Dennis were, or did he actually see a body that had been injured somehow, and after all of these years (and no small amount of prodding from Roswell researchers) he has conflated what he saw at some point in the past into the Roswell space aliens narrative? Who knows, although history and hard experience tells us that the former is by far the most likely possibility. The idea that he would be afraid he was going to lose his pension (ergo the pseudonym), but was willing to show his face on national television (and now in Dew's film) seems... well, let's just say that it requires a great deal of "belief suspension" to buy it. But it sure adds to the mysterious and secretive nature of the story that the Roswell myth-makers have used over the years.

Either way, Benavides, aka Benjamin, is the man that the Dream Team is hanging their hats on as a witness to validate the space alien nature of the "Roswell slides." Without him, they just have a couple of slides. Make of that what you will.

Meanwhile, the work of skeptics continues in terms of debunking this con. Perhaps we should schedule a big reveal with the real story... on May 5th.

Paul Kimball 

Latest Trailer for the Dream Team!

Breaking news - I was just sent a super-duper advance look at the next trailer for the Dream Team's My 5th "Roswell Slides" release in Mexico City. What make this interesting is that all of the members are in it.

Enjoy!

Paul Kimball 

BREAKING NEWS - "Roswell Slides" in Shocking Video Footage

A secret source of mine within the NSA just sent this above top secret video clip of one of the aliens from the Roswell slides group - apparently one died in the crash, but his co-pilot survived and was integrated into American society without anyone in the general public knowing it. 

Shocking!!

Paul Kimball

"Hacking" the Roswell Slides

My good friend Nick Redfern has a new column written at Mysterious Universe wherein he discusses the alleged hacking episode of the broader Roswell slides story. Nick maintains that it's "impossible" that a Dream Teamers would be involved in the hacking, largely because, he says, they wouldn't hack their own e-mail and then call law enforcement. And yet, I know people who have done exactly that, from first-hand experience.

When I was stationed with the RCMP in northern Cape Breton years ago, we were called to investigate a crime - property destruction - where the owner wanted us to believe that his neighbour had done it. Indeed, many of the indications pointed to the neighbour, with whom the complainant had a long-running feud. The only problem was that unbeknownst to the complainant, the neighbour had an air-tight alibi for the night in question... at which point we started to smell something fishy. Eventually, the complainant admitted he had done it himself to try and get his arch-enemy in trouble.

Stupid? Perhaps. But it happens, particularly when one has a motive and potential reward that they judge outweighs any risk. It's a question of a cost-benefit analysis.

Which brings us back to the "hacking" case with the slides. Nick rightly dismisses the idea of government involvement. Unless you're the truest of true believers, then I'm sure you do as well. His prime suspect is some other UFO researcher. But that strikes me as unlikely. There's no motive, other than the possibility of finding the slides and then... what? Posting them? As soon as that happened, he would identify himself as the hacker, or if someone else did it for him it would be traced back pretty quickly. That would be truly stupid given that the payoff would be so penny ante.

No, the people with motive and opportunity would have been the Dream Teamers, because something like having your e-mail hacked is gold if you're trying to build a con based on a conspiracy narrative, which is what the slides story is really all about at its core. The payoff is potentially huge (that 10,000 seat arena in Mexico City just being the lucrative start). Given that, then someone on the Dream Team - and let's recall that Donald Schmitt has a proven record of underhanded activities, and now they have linked up with one of the most disreputable hucksters out there, Jaime Maussan - could easily have judged it worth any risk.

A report to the FBI might have been an unintended consequence, or maybe it was all part of the plan, to add a little extra juice. Because here's the real truth - unless the hacking involved terrorism or corporate espionage, the FBI was highly unlikely to do anything other than a quick pro forma "investigation" and then move on to more important things... particularly when they realized it was UFO nuts (in their eyes) making the complaint. And that seems to be exactly what happened, at least to me. When I conduct a cost-benefit analysis, the risks are just as low for Dream Teamers as any ufologist (and probably lower), while the rewards are the highest.

My friend Nick? An unwitting part of it all, who is giving the "hackers" even more of what I have no doubt they were after all the time. - publicity. They are no doubt sitting back and saying, "mission accomplished" as they plan their trip to Mexico City.

Paul Kimball

Roswell Cultist Anthony Bragalia: "Not of This Earth!"

Not an actual representation of the actual slides...
but it might as well be.

The latest from Roswell cultist Anthony Bragalia with regards to the "Roswell slides":

The three-foot formerly living thing is not a diseased nor deformed human, it is not a simian, it is not a mummy and it is not a dead airman (as skeptic Tim Printy inanely speculates.) The slides depict something that is bi-pedal and not known to Earth. Period.

Well, I guess that settles it!

Paul Kimball 

The Roswell Slides story in a nutshell

In a comment at Rich Reynolds' UFO Iconoclasts blog, my friend Lance Moody sums up the "Roswell slides" story perfectly, by way of an imagined conversation in 1947.

"Sir, we have a dead body from the flying saucer!"

"Very well, place the little green man in a container and be sure to put a placard on it so we don't forget where it came from! I will see if we can get a civilian Oil Geologist to come in with his wife to photograph the little guy."

"Very good, sir! " 

Anyone who took any of this "slides" idiocy seriously (I'm looking at you, Roswell "Dream Team") is either completely detached from reality or a willing participant in a fraudulent exercise designed solely to cash in at the expense of the rubes (something of which "Dream Teamer" Don Schmitt in particular has a long and sordid history). Either way, it's one of the most laughable escapades in UFO "research" since the Alien Autopsy hoax.

Paul Kimball