Blowfish,
You ask:
George, is it really worth spending any more money on Roswell Case after all the crap regarding the slides?
No, I don’t think it is worth a dime but let me give you a little more background information on the Roswell Slides hoax business which brought Roswellism into such utter disrepute last year.
By “Roswellism” I mean the firm conviction that extraterrestrials are visiting this planet in UFOs and its basic premise that the 1947 Roswell Incident was the crash of such an ET spacecraft leading to the recovery of one or more alien bodies (and possibly a living alien). People can obviously believe whatever they want to believe about ETs –and they may well be right-- but my contention is that the Roswellists’ basic premise about an ET spacecraft crashing near Roswell is false. One only has to read Karl Pflock’s book, which cost me just $27, to realize this.
In 2013 several Roswellists formed what they called the Roswell “Dream Team” to examine the Roswell case with a fresh outlook and hopefully present new evidence to the world giving proof of the alien presence. Some of them also wanted to publish the “ultimate” Roswell book. The new proof turned out to be the hoaxed Roswell Slides and unfortunately for the team the “dream” became a nightmare.
Kevin Randle was a leading member of the team but was very cautious of the new evidence and where it came from. The two most determined members were Don Schmitt and his current Roswell partner Tom Carey who had made contact via the internet with someone called “Anthony Bragalia” whom they asked to join the group. Besides Bragalia there was David Rudiak, a veteran Roswellist and Canadian ufologist Chris Rutkowski who was referred to as the team skeptic. Stanton Friedman was not a member of this Dream Team but his Roswellist nephew Paul Kimball was invited to join.
Understandably most except for Schmitt and Carey were very cautious but agreeing to terms of secrecy and a “non-disclosure” agreement which Schmitt and Carey had already signed up to proved a stumbling block. This led to a huge falling out between Paul Kimball and Kevin Randle. Kimball published a detailed confidential e-mail from Randle and withdrew from the Dream Team almost before he’d joined it. Much of the furious exchanges and the resulting conflict between some of the team members can still be found at:
Blogger
Unknown to them the cause of the Dream Team’s nightmare was the joker in the pack –the bogus ufologist who called himself “Anthony Bragalia”. Not that any of the team ever met him or even saw photographs of this person who could only be contacted via the internet. For some time he had been writing about Roswell on various internet sites and claimed all sorts of inside information about such things as the supposed fabled “Blue Room” at Wright Patterson AFB where wreckage from the Roswell flying saucer had allegedly been taken and secretly examined by government scientists. Also the small alien bodies that were said to have been taken to Wright Patterson in 1947. Bragalia produced a number of official letters and documents (most probably forged by him) confirming various aspects of the mythical Blue Room. He also claimed he had evidence of a number of alien bodies, possibly from other flying saucer crashes, being taken to the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. An article titled “ALIEN BODIES? THE SECRET OF A PLACE CALLED DUGWAY” by Anthony Bragalia was posted on the UFO Iconoclast(s) website.
Obviously Don Schmitt and Tom Carey were highly impressed by all this nonsense -- the fiction, forgery and UFO/alien fakery that was being put out by Anthony Bragalia. He also told them that he knew someone who had acquired some definite evidence in the form of two 1947 Kodachrome slides showing an ET corpse from Roswell which had been taken by a prominent geologist. Foolishly they accepted his word for all this though all they ever got to see were digital images of the alleged slides received via the internet. These doctored images, possibly of a small mummified corpse or else of a dummy alien, turned out to be fakes though Schmitt and Carey refused to accept that until the bitter end. That, as we all know now, was Anthony Bragalia’s elaborate Roswell Slides hoax which culminated last year with Jaime Maussan’s “Be Witness” event fiasco in Mexico City.
“Anthony Bragalia” was eventually unmasked (by me) as arch-deceptionist John Lundberg (crop circles, fake UFOs, fake alien bodies and, then, a fake ufologist!) who was the principal architect of Ray Santilli’s “Alien Autopsy” hoax twenty years earlier. John is of course one of the leading experts on the history of Roswellism and Roswell lore and in his alternative persona of Anthony Bragalia he added several new dimensions to the myth. At the same time he was making the serious documentary
Mirage Men (2013) which explored the creation of the Roswell Myth and the part played in that by dubious characters like UFO fraudster Richard Doty and by Bill Moore. I do recommend John’s documentary which is primarily an honest skeptical analysis of how the Roswell Myth developed during the 1980s.
Although Kevin Randle and Paul Kimball were both highly suspicious that the slides were fake it seems they were both deceived into thinking that fake ufologist Bragalia was genuine. On his blogsite “A Different Perspective” Kevin Randle seemed to accept all that Bragalia was saying and also the assurances of Philip Mantle, an equally devious accomplice of John Lundberg, who has for years covered up the latter’s infamous role in the 1995 “Alien Autopsy”.
John Lundberg briefly appeared posing as
Ostension on the Paracast forum about the Roswell Slides last year. I had quite an exchange with him but he would not answer any direct questions about his role in the hoax. Nor would he agree to Gene and Chris’s invitation to come on the Paracast since his evasiveness and his complicity in the hoax would almost certainly have become apparent. In a career of 25 years of fakery John’s policy has always been “Neither confirm, nor deny” and many are still taken in by this man.
The Roswell Myth since Stanton Friedman, Bill Moore and, of course, Major Jesse Marcel first made their extraordinary claims of ET visitation in the late 1970s has become a major part of American folklore. The truth or otherwise as regards what actually happened at Roswell in 1947 is hardly relevant and a whole industry based on Roswellism has developed from it. The closest parallel to it is probably Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster Myth which has also produced a specific tourist industry of its own. Needless to say I am very skeptical there ever was a monster lurking in Loch Ness –but then that’s all another story.