If what they found was accurate, and others could corroborate what they had seen, then it was a breakthrough on the Roswell case. Here was a document with an indisputable provenance. General Ramey was holding it in his hand, and copies of the photograph put out over the INS wire provided a time and a date. According to a copy of the photograph that I acquired from the Bettmann Photo Archives in New York City, J. Bond Johnson had taken the picture on July 8, 1947, and it had been transmitted at 11:59 P.M., or one minute before midnight on that date.
But, there were gaps in what they could read, and some of the phrases they spotted made little sense in the context of what else could be seen. However, the reference to victims, to weather balloons, and to Magdalena, New Mexico, were important clues. These words seemed to tie the message to the Roswell events, and suggested that some kind of a quick response was required by the military, either at 8th Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, or by the 509th Bomb Group in Roswell.
Here, I suppose I should point out that Johnson, at one time, claimed that the document held by Ramey was, in fact, the teletype notice that had gone to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Johnson said that he wanted Ramey to be holding something and handed it to him. Later Johnson recanted this, as he did so much of what he said originally. However, it should be noted that the document held by Ramey might not even be a military document but something that came from the civilian world.
Others began to request copies of the pictures from the Special Collections in Texas. To the delight of many, they could also see letters, words and images as suggested by Johnson and his team. The problem was that many of those doing the work were not seeing the same words and phrases as Johnson and his team.
For example, the telephone logo that Johnson’s team reported, looked more like a gray smudge on the paper than anything else. One well-known UFO researcher said that the telephone resembled the Liberty Bell as seen on the back of a Franklin half dollar rather than a telephone.
Here I think we need to divert the discussion just a bit. This document, if it is what it is alleged to be, that is a message about a spaceship crash, it would be classified, probably Top Secret. Here’s the problem. There is little that looks like it was stamped as Top Secret. There are no real indications on the paper of any classification, though the regulations governing this were quite clear in 1947.
Tom Printy, addressing the question of the Top Secret markings wrote, “[David] Rudiak [a researcher who has spent hundreds of hours examining the photograph] claims that it is TOP SECRET because he has found markings at the bottom of the page that look like some of the letters in TOP SECRET. If you look at the 600dpi image he presents on his website, those sections he describes as indicating the "TOP SECRET" mark are very faint and highly subjective in nature. This is not something you would expect from a prominent mark even if it were not viewed from the best angle. After all, one can see much of the logo at the top of the page clearly in the image. Why can't one see the prominent marks from a TOP SECRET stamp? In my naval experience, classification stamps are usually very large bold and heavy type that was in the top center and bottom center of the document on both FRONT and BACK of the page, even if one side of the page was BLANK (Often such a page was labeled in the center ‘intentionally left blank’). The only time this was not the case was when a message had just been received/transmitted at the teletype printer. In this situation the classification was found in the header of the message (something Rudiak's message does not have). Prior to routing and leaving the secure area of the printer, stamps were applied to the documents or the documents were placed in folders that were appropriately stamped. These prominent marks were for ease of identification in case the document fell in the garbage can or was carelessly left adrift by somebody who was not paying attention to the rules.”
Rudiak, for his part, in an email to me disputes this, insisting that he has found a top secret marking, though it is off center. He also notes that he has found other classified documents on which the classification stamp is off center. To be fair, in the examples he mentioned to me, the off center stamp is on letters rather than message traffic, or is a note that a document belongs in the top secret file but is not, itself, a classification mark.
The real point is, however, that when dealing with millions of pages of classified documents over more than a half century, exceptions to the rules can be found. Printy’s point is valid, but does not prove that the reading of the Ramey memo is inaccurate.
Moving back to the telephone logo and other aspects of the message, we see that Neil Morris’ interpretation of the symbols did not agree exactly with that made by other components of Johnson’s team. He did do one thing that was beneficial to all researchers and that was break down the message line by line so that it would be easy to follow his interpretation. He used capital letters to represent the parts of the message of which he was sure, lower case letters to represent his best guess of some letters, an asterisk to denote a letter he couldn’t decipher, and a dash where there was little more than a smudge on the message.
Morris’ interpretation of the message was:
(1) ————***ARY WERE ————AS
(2)———fxs 4 rsev1 VICTIMS OF THE WR eck and CONVAY ON TO
(3)——-*** AT FORT WORTH, Txe.
(4)———***S** smi Ths *ELSE* ***** unus-d**e T&E A3ea96 L******
(5)——-SO ught CRASHE s pOw*** *** N***** SITEOne IS reMotely *****
(6)——-***D* bAsE ToLd ***a* for we**ous BY STORY are 8*****
(7)——lly thry even PUT FOR BY WEATHER BALLOONS n*d** were
(8)———**** **la** l***denver*****
(9)
(10) Temple
It was not an exact match for what Johnson had released and in fact, went off at a couple of brand new angles. In this version, while the word victims remained, as did the Fort Worth, Texas, nearly everything else was different. One of the major points in the Johnson version was the wording that suggested, “Emergency Powers are needed Site Two SW of Magdalena, NMex.” It suggested that those interpreting the message were seeing, to some extent, what they wanted to see.
In still a different version, Rudiak, suggested only a little of what others had seen. In one of his earlier interpretations, and using the same mix of capitals for what he was sure of and lower case for what he suspected, and brackets to suggest alternative words and phrases, he reported the message read:
(1) ———— officer
(2) —-(jul)y 4th the VictIMs of tHE weECK you fOrWArdEd TO The
(3) ——EaM At FORT WORTH, TEX.
(4) ——5 pM THE “DISC” they will ship [swap?] FOR A3 8th Arrived.
(5) — or 58t(h) bom(be)r sq(?) Assit [Assess] offices? AT ROSwe(ll) AS for
(6) —54th SAID MIStaken——[meaning? weather? balloon?] of [is] story And said
(7) news [clip, chat, dirt] out is OF WEATHER BALLOONS which were
(8)—- Add [And, Ask] land d——-[dirt cover?] crews.
(9)
(10) rAMEy
Rudiak, in his interpretation, here, was attempting to puzzle out the overall meaning rather than just identify various words. His attempts to this point made the most sense, in the context of trying to find a reasonable interpretation, but it did not clarify much.