Eleazar Benavides Strikes Again!

For a man who supposedly cherishes his privacy, Eleazar Benavides, aka Pfc. Eli Benjamin aka The Mystery Lieutenant in Adam Dew's Roswell Slides film trailer, sure gets around. He can be seen starting at 10:20 in this episode of the new Canadian television series UFOs Declassified.

 

Not only does he appear in this episode, but so does his photo from the Roswell base yearbook from 1947 - you know, the one that Anthony Bragalia went ballistic about when Tim Printy sent it to me and I published it a few days ago? You know, the one that specifically identifies "Benjamin" as Benavides? Yeah... that one.

As usual, I'm the bad guy here, but that's because I happened to be first out of the gate with what was already known to many privately, and what was easily discovered by anyone with a little spare time on their hands and a commitment to the whole truth, and not the skewed self-serving version that Bragalia and his cohorts choose to present. Bragalia is also upset that I published a photo of Benavides' house, which anyone can find with Google Earth, and says that it served no journalistic purpose. I beg to differ - it was important to show that Benavides and the "witness" in Dew's trailer are one and the same. It was Dew, after all, who filmed in his driveway. I could have published Benavides' address and phone number as well, but did not (even though those are also publicly available), as there was no reason to do so. The photo of his home was enough to establish the link that, given their track record, one could reasonably expect the Dream Teamers to otherwise deny.

Meanwhile, in somewhat related news, the Halifax Police Department are still waiting for that complaint from Bragalia to be filed against me. I know, because I checked. I assume the police in Tim Printy's neck of the woods are also still waiting. Perhaps Bragalia hasn't filed his threatened complaints yet because he's so been so busy, what with virtually everyone outing Benavides now, including Bragalia's research partner and fellow "Dream Teamer" Kevin Randle. I presume the charges are on the verge of being filed in Randle's hometown of Cedar Rapids as I type.

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 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

Karl Pflock - Witnesses and the Government response to the "Roswell Incident"

In this clip from an interview I conducted with the late Karl Pflock in September, 2001, the author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, discusses the dearth of quality witnesses to anything "extraterrestrial" at Roswell in 1947, as well as the nature of the government's response to the incident, and UFOs in general, and how it points not to a cover-up of crashed spaceships but rather the opposite.

Paul Kimball

Understanding Human Memory

One of the great mistakes of establishment "ufologists" over the past thirty years or so has been their treatment of witness memory as if it is some sort of computer file, capable of pristine preservation over prolonged stretches of time, when in fact human memory just doesn't work like that. 

In this lecture, renowned psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, the pre-eminent researcher into the subject of false memories, shows just how fragile and easily manipulated memory can be, and how dangerous it can be to rely on a person's memory as the be-all and end-all of evidence... particularly when the recovery of memory involves the kinds of leading questions that "ufologists" usually ask, and even more egregiously when the con game of hypnotically "recovered" memories is employed.

Paul Kimball

The Perfect Witnesses?

Here's a question for you:

Assume that you have a multiple witness UFO sighting. Which of the following two accounts of that sighting would seem more credible to you?

Account #1 - All of the witnesses agree on exactly what they saw / experienced.

Account #2 - While the witnesses all agree that they saw / experienced something, they offer different descriptions of the event.

If you chose Account #1, you're wrong.

People experience things differently, and they focus on different things, with the end result being that each person's account of a shared event is going to be like a snowflake: it will be unique.

A good case in point is the 1953 Santa Barbara Channel UFO sighting, where Kelly Johnson and his wife saw a UFO from the ground in Agoura, California, at the same time as a Lockheed crew saw the UFO while flying over the ocean. The case is recounted in my film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings, which you can view here (you can read the original statements here).

Johnson described the UFO as elliptical in his report. Chief Flight Test Engineer H. L. Thoren, however, who was aboard the plane, described it as a "flying wing".

Which one was more accurate? That's a question open to reasonable debate, although to me the clear answer is Thoren, who was closer, and in a better position to observe the UFO in more detail. But the key point here is that the fact that Thoren and Johnson offered different descriptions of the shape of the object doesn't undermine the credibility of the case; it enhances it, because that is what can be expected when different people see the same thing (especially, as in this case, when they see it from different vantage points). What's important is that they agreed on the main point - that there was a UFO, and that it acted in a certain way.

Indeed, it would be suspicious if Thoren and Johnson had agreed on every detail - that would be an almost certain sign that at best they had "gotten their stories straight" beforehand, and at worst that they had made the whole thing up from the beginning.

In short, the perfect witnesses are the ones who get the big picture right, even as they differ on particular details; they are not the ones who agree on every element of a sighting, and you should be wary of anyone who demands that kind of consistency from witnesses, because they simply don't know what they're talking about.

Paul Kimball

Are Military and Police Witnesses Any More Reliable Than Civilians?

It's an old refrain, often used by UFO researchers when they want to highlight the bona fides of a particular UFO case - military personnel and police officers are "trained personnel" who make for better witnesses, and also of better character, ergo, the UFO case that centers around them is much more difficult to refute.

To which I say (to quote an American general from World War II) - Nuts!

Soldiers are highly trained to do one thing - kill people. They do, of course, have other areas of training as well, but this is their primary function, even in our feel-good age of nation-building and peacekeeping/making.

Police officers are trained to enforce the law, which involves a number of different skill sets, most of them physical, because at their core, the average patrol officer (the vast majority of police officers, and the ones who seem to come into the most frequent contact with UFOs) is in the business of breaking up trouble, or trying to stop it before it starts. They are not investigators.

Most soldiers and police officers are good at what they do. But are they trained any better than Joe or Jane Q. Public when it comes to observing and reporting on events that could be called abnormal / paranormal?

I don't think so, at least not as a general rule. You have to look at the individual soldier, or police officer. For example, there's nothing about the group of soldiers involved in the 1980 Rendlesham case that stands out as being anything extraordinary in terms of their ability to observe events.

Another canard is that military personnel and police officers are somehow immune - or at the very least, less susceptible - to emotions, perhaps even panic, than your average civilian. Again, there is no objective basis for this conclusion. It depends, at the end of the day, on the individual, and the circumstances.

For example, a Green Beret might have nerves of steel, but a cook, or even a military policeman, might be less steadfast. And one suspects that even the best-trained soldier or police officer can overeact, or panic, given the right set of circumstances.

Doubt that? History is replete with examples that drive home my point. One stunning example can be seen in the case of the tasering death of Polish-immigrant Robert Dziekanski by four RCMP officers in 2007. There are many others.

Stan Friedman is often fond of saying that people are good observers, but poor interpreters. I agree with the latter part of the statement, but not the former. Having served with the RCMP myself when I was in law school, I know first hand how tricky observation can be, particularly under duress, and especially when one relies on memory after the event to reconstruct it. This is the biggest flaw in the Roswell accounts, which were given decades later.

The best scenario - although still not perfect - is for a witness to have made notes immediately after an event, as police officers do. Then you can always "refresh your memory" later, as we used to say when being cross-examined on the witness stand.

But no matter what, any single witness is of questionable value. What is needed is some sort of independent corroboration. Obviously, physical evidence would be best (and there is some of debatable worth with Rendlesham), but other witnesses viewing an event, preferably who are unknown to the first witness, and even better if they're looking at it from a different angle, will do as well in terms of making a case worth studying.

Then there's the character question. Often researchers will imply, and sometimes even state outright, that military personnel and police officers are of impeccable character, and would, of course, never lie, or commit any misdeeds.

Again, history says otherwise. A current and noteworthy example can be seen with CAF Colonel Russell Williams, who has just been charged with multiple murders (note: yes, I'm aware he's innocent until proven guilty). Prior to this, if he had been a UFO witness, he would no doubt have been pointed to by researchers as an exemplary man, incapable of any malfeasance. He was, after all, a respected and accomplished senior commander, whose tour of duty included a stint as commanding officer for Camp Mirage, the secretive Canadian Forces forward logistics base that's not officially acknowledged by the government or military, but has been widely reported to be near Dubai.

This is not to dismiss military or police witnesses, of course. Rather, it is to remind people that no UFO case can stand on just eyewitness testimony, and no eyewitness testimony should be allowed a free pass, or the equivalent thereof, based on what amounts to an appeal to authority.

Paul Kimball