Kimball raised some good points but his conclusion that nothing happened because he saw nothing and no one he talked to had seen anything is flawed. I’ve already pointed out that many officers, including several generals, say otherwise. Kimball’s attitude and his arrogance comes through in his writing. His information needs to be balanced against that from so many others who say differently.
And a final point to be made was that Kimball, while assigned to the hospital was not a doctor himself. He was a medical supply officer. His expertise in ordering equipment might be sought by the doctors and nurses, but in the matter of an alien autopsy and highly classified medical matters, he would certainly be out of the loop.
Last Comments Here
We have now looked at some of the evidence that suggests nothing happened at Roswell, or rather nothing extraordinary. I am tempted to leave it at that, but wonder if a few additional comments might not be necessary here. After all, we have seen, from a variety of important, trained, and trusted people that they believe something fell.
The evidence supporting the idea of a crash has been put forward in other sections and is there for all to see. Most of it is testimony from men who were directly involved, and from the families of men involved. Such evidence is important, sometimes persuasive, and sometimes inaccurate.
We have some documentation about the crash, including the first press release that suggests something extraordinary fell at Roswell. And there is some persuasive documentation, from those who should know, suggesting that nothing fell. In the end, it is up to each reader to decide what evidence is important, what is trivial, what is inaccurate and what is persuasive. Only then can we begin to move forward.
Chapter Nine: General Ramey and the Smoking Gun
When we begin to look for documentation for the Roswell case, there is very little available. There are the newspaper articles, a few that suggest what was found was unusual and might explain the flying saucers, and then many that explained it all just a weather balloon. Within hours of the announcement that the officers in Roswell had “captured” a flying saucer, Brigadier General Ramey explained it all away. Pictures of the weather balloon, on the floor in Ramey’s office, were published around the country. One day Roswell was the site of a major historical event and the next it returned to a back water town in the New Mexican desert where people couldn’t tell the extraordinary from the mundane.
Decades later, however, that all might have changed given the photographs taken by Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter/ photographer, J. Bond Johnson in Ramey’s office. Johnson posed Ramey near the debris while he held a piece of paper in his hand. Looking at a regular 8 x 10 glossy print of the picture, you can seen a faint smudge on the paper, and if you have a blow up and a magnifying glass, you can see lines of text. Some of the words seem to be almost readable.
First Attempts to Read the Memo
Brad Sparks might be the first researcher to have recognized this. In 1980, looking at a blow up of one of the photographs, he thought he could see “balloon” or more appropriately “baloons” in the message. Five years later, in 1985 he thought he could make out “weather balloons.”
In 1991, Don Schmitt sent a copy of that photograph to Dr. Richard Haines, a former NASA research scientist, asking if he could read anything on the paper. Haines, using a microscope scanned the message, reporting that he could see vague words but could not make out the individual letters of those words. In a few cases, he could identify a random letter but that was no help in understanding what might be printed on the paper. Haines thought that a better quality, or bigger enlargement of the photograph, might reveal more of the message, but didn’t seem to think it would be of much real use.
Haines’ less than spectacular results were strange. Using a magnifying glass and a good quality print, several words were visible including Fort Worth, Txe (which is apparently a mistyped abbreviation Tex.) Elsewhere there were two words that looked like weather balloon, though balloon was also misspelled.
During its investigation into all matters Roswell in the mid1990s, the Air Force, according to the report written by Colonel Richard Weaver, “… also noted that in the two photos of Ramey he had a piece of paper in his hand. In one, it was folded over so nothing could be seen. In the second, however, there appears to be text printed on the paper. In an attempt to read this text to determine if it could shed any further light on locating documents relating to this matter, the photo was sent to a national-level organization for digitizing and subsequent photo interpretation and analysis. This organization was also asked to scrutinize the digitized photos for any indication of flowered tape (or ‘hieroglyphics,’ depending on the point of view) that were reputed to be visible to some of the persons who observed the wreckage prior to its getting to Fort Worth. This organization reported on July 20, 1994, that even after digitizing, the photos were of insufficient quality to visualize either of the details sought for analysis…”
This seems to be the epitome of incompetence, but then, there might be reasons for that particular conclusion, as we’ll learn later. Clearly words can be read on the paper. Even with just a magnifying glass, some of the words are legible. But Weaver was happy with his report that said nothing could be gained from studying the photographs.
Granted, this conclusion was made in a world without blogs and it is obvious from the interviews conducted (or not conducted) in the Air Force investigation that there was an agenda working. However, this national organization, which was not identified, had their orders. They were to see nothing on the paper and nothing is what they saw.
Attempts by researchers using Freedom of Information to obtain copies of the report were unsuccessful. Since this was not, at least to the official statements, a matter of national security, there should have been no reason to refuse to release the report. Air Force officials suggested that it had somehow become lost in the months after its creation. Independent researchers would later duplicate the effort and the results obtained during the experiments surprised them.
That was where the matter rested until 1998 when J. Bond Johnson, who had taken six of the seven photographs in General Ramey’s office back in 1947, decided to get involved in the investigation of Roswell. Johnson put together a team, the Roswell Photo Interpretation Team (RPIT) to inspect the photographs that included Ron Regehr, a space and satellite engineer and Neil Morris, a technician who works for the University of Manchester in England. Using a huge 16 x 20 blow up of the photograph, a computer and a variety of software and camera equipment, they were able to see more of the message that Ramey held. Or rather, they claimed that they could read the message with some degree of certainty. They were certainly better at it than the national organization contracted by the Air Force.
In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, they saw what they believed to be the image of a telephone and concluded that Ramey was holding a “telephone message sheet” because of this “telephone logo.” They then claimed to have “positively identified a number of words in the message.” There were, quite naturally, gaps in what they could see given the bending of the paper and the angle of the photograph, and they noted that the message had been typed in all capital letters.
Their interpretation of the message was:
“ AS THE… 4 HRS THE VICTIMS OF THE… AT FORT WORTH, TEX… THE “CRASH” STORY… FOR 0984 ACKNOWLEDGES… EMERGENCY POWERS ARE NEEDED SITE TWO SW OF MAGDALENA, NMEX… SAFE TALK… FOR MEANING OF STORY AND MISSION… WEATHER BALLOONS SENT ON THE… AND LAND… ROVER CREWS… [SIGNED]… TEMPLE.”