Thursday, May 15, 2008

Body Snatchers: Better as a Sci-Fi Film?

Nick Redfern, in Body Snatchers In The Desert [Paraview Pocket Books, 2005] sure jumps through a lot of hoops to explain Roswell away:
“A Horton Brothers Flying wing supported by huge Japanese-designed balloons and containing disabled or genetically damaged Japanese who were used as human guinea pigs to provide data on the effects of radiation for use in the NEPA Program.”

Though Redfern bases some of his latest on them, I’d never bet on anonymous whistle blowers. Especially when they’re from the government.

If I went through every scenario disclosed by every anonymous whistle blower in the UFO researcher community, I’d go nuts. But maybe that’s the mission.

I accept documents when conclusive; I accept the testimony of dying military witnesses when they have nothing to gain. Especially when they confess to their relatives, as so many loyal career military did in the Roswell case.

Some whistle blowers lie. One way I think they lie is by exaggerating a real story which loosely may apply. Sometimes, that’s professional misinformation. To do this, they get a researcher like Nick…who, as they say, strains the gnat and swallows the camel. As did many UFO researchers who swallowed the MOGUL story.

Interesting to note how this researcher faction, who discount the MOGUL theory --choose to believe in the witness testimony when it differs from MOGUL, but not when it differs from Redfern’s Body Snatchers version -- suddenly question those witnesses’ memory. There have been a dozen “what really happened at Roswell” books that dismiss all the original boots-on-the-ground witnesses. When you get whistle blowers called “the Colonel” and the “the black Widow’, as Redfern did, you can’t expect anything like serious ufology. But maybe you’d like to option a remake of a classic Sci-Fi film?

Let’s break it down, Redfern’s BS scenario.

First: do these descriptions from Roswell witnesses --who were there-- sound like a Horton Flying Wing made of wood or metals from the ‘40s?

Now let’s hear it from the some of the cojones-sufficient-to-ID-themselves witnesses, instead of “the Colonel” and “Black Widow”.

Start with Jesse Marcell Jr.’s The Roswell Legacy [Paperback, New Page Books, Sept. 2008] on the wonder of the material…

”As we examined the debris and carefully handled it my dad’s excitement was almost palpable… to his family he was a pretty laid back guy taking everything in his stride... [an] intelligence officer on a base with the country’s most guarded secrets… I saw another side to him…It was a mixture of excitement and confusion suffused with a sense of wonder that one just doesn’t see in many grown men.”

And move on to several others who were there.

Counter Intelligence Officer Sergeant Bill Ricket:
“The site itself was generally flat terrain…also evident were sixty or so pieces of what appeared to be very thin aluminum scattered about’…he picked up a piece about 4 inches by 10 inches and placed it over his knee to try and bend it. He couldn’t …Ricket [said]…‘I had never seen a piece of metal so thin that I couldn’t bend it…the more I look at it the more I couldn’t imagine what it was.’”

Major Edwin Easley’s Deathbed confession:
After keeping silent for 45 years, when presented with a book on the UFO crash at Roswell, Easley exclaimed to his granddaughter: “Oh the creatures!”

Sgt. Homer Rowlett, 603 Air Engineering Squadron, who days before passing, told his family:
“Sent as part of a clean-up detail…[he] had seen the memory material…tin foil that kept it’s shape…I saw three people they had large heads and one was alive.”

Rowell Military Hospital administrator Wayne’s Secretary broke down sobbing and told her parents:
[Worried by all the additional personnel running around the hospital her boss,“Wayne”, took her by the arm and had her accompany him to a room and observe a number of bodies on gurneys…]
“‘My God! They are children!’ Then she realized that its body size was the only childlike quality. Their skin was grayest brown…But the heads, the heads were too large…and those large eyes… those eyes that wouldn’t shut…she had heard of all of the talk of a crashed spaceship…‘Why did he[Wayne, her boss] have to involve me?’ she pleaded in the end.”

Lt. Govenor Joseph Montoya, on July 7th, 1947 while at the Roswell base, made this unintentionally close observation:
“We don’t know what it is. There was a flying saucer…[Describing bodies]…big eyes with big eyes shaped like tear drops…mouth small, like a knife cut across a piece of wood and they had large heads…bald heads…they had four long thin fingers on each hand.”

Staff Sergeant Earl Fulford, Top Secret clearance, 603rd Engineering:
[Forced to “volunteer for clean-up duties”, he was bused to any area which had “obviously been policed before”]
“… I only picked up seven small silvery pieces all day… the largest of which was 3 by 4 inches. I looked like thin light aluminum that flex slightly when I picked it up, but once in the palm of your hands you could wad it up into a small ball…and it would immediately form its shape in a second or two.”

Black Cat Mac Magruder, decorated F16 Fighter Pilot, lying on his deathbed, told his daughter:
[During class at the prestigious War College, he was taken to Wright Field and observed a live creature from the Roswell craft]
“…under five feet tall. Human like but with longer arms, large eyes, and an oversized hairless head…a small slit for a mouth, no nose just two small orifices…Ears two small orifices…came from another planet.”

I would never try to discredit Nick Redfern’s research; in fact, his work is usually top notch. But that doesn’t mean the latest Redfern theory makes sense--either in the general context of the larger Roswell story, or in the real-life details-- against the multiple deathbed and end-of-life confessions of loyal military and military support staff, who were there.


BBC Documentary on Roswell Witnesses:



Now that there are a majority who believe UFOs are not ET, it’s that much easier for professional debunkers to do away with the truth. Now debunkers feel safe to take any theory or opinion that comes down the pike to discredit the Roswell ET explanation. But Redfern’s latest scenario automatically puts many of the military professionals and other good, honest witnesses into what I’ll call the stupid category. And I haven’t even included in this discussion the people in the town who actually handled the material from the crafts…like rancher Brazel’s family home, tossed two years after the incident, by military looking for more material from the crafts.

These people have also been ignored or attacked as being too stupid to know a metal with bizarre properties they personally handled was different from the tinfoil on a cigarette package. For me, denigrating these witnesses is unacceptable.

I admit Mr. Redfern tries to cover some of the other witness testimony, like bodies and security measures. But you can’t cherrypick testimony to build a theory. This is what the debunkers do to prove we’re all nuts.

All quotes are from the taped testimony reported in the book A Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-Up, by Schmitt and Cary [New Page Books, 2007].

Stanton Friedman’s take on the history, as well as other problems with explanations put forward by Nick Redfern in Body Snatchers is here:
http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfredfern1.html

Another famous Pilot at a UFO crash sight handles the same type of wreckage as Roswell 8 years later, described here:
http://pr-canada.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32776&Itemid=61

Joseph Capp
UFO Media Matters

Non-Commercial Blog

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