Others Enter the Arena
Those weren’t, of course, the only alternative interpretations that were offered. Russ Estes, a California documentarian and UFO researcher, using a 16 x 20 print made by the University of Texas Library, applied his expertise to the examination. Estes used a professional quality $50,000 video camera with a $7500 macro lens to capture the image. Then using his huge, $80,000 computer and a variety of technically complex and professional quality software programs, he examined the message every way that he could think of including a jeweler’s loup, magnifying glass and microscope. He even scanned it at 9000 dpi so that it created a file that was 1.7 gigabits in size and could be manipulated and enlarged even further (which seems like something that national organization the Air Force mentioned should have been able to do). Estes said that he could seen nothing that he would be willing to swear to in court. He said there was simply nothing there to see which is surprisingly like what that national organization had told the Air Force several years earlier.
Pressed on the point, because others were seeing all sorts of words and phrases, Estes did say that he could make a “best guess” about the images on the message. Looking at an 8 x 10 photographic blow up of just the message area, using the same techniques and equipment, he could see with a limited amount of confidence, “Fort Work, Tex.” On the line below that where one group saw “Disk” and another saw, “ELSE,” Estes believed he saw, “ELA*”. He did say that it made no sense to him, just that was what the ambiguous smudges that everyone was attempting to make into words looked like to him.
It probably should be noted here that Estes, unofficially, talked of seeing other words as well. He was reluctant to add his interpretations to the already cloudy issue. It helped no one, and added nothing to our knowledge for him to speculate beyond what, to him, was definitive.
As for the signature block, he could see nothing that resembled either of the claims. At best, there might have been an “M” in the middle of the word, and the possibility of an “LE” at the end. That gave the nod to “Temple.”
So let’s think back to the Air Force “national laboratory” that couldn’t come up with anything. Isn’t that basically what Estes was saying here. Yes, there were words that seemed to stand out, but those were the words we all could see with the magnifying glass. Estes couldn’t see anything that was buried in the smudges of charcoal that made up the other words. It was the same thing that Haines had said, though he was not using the same quality of equipment as the others.
That wasn’t, of course, the end of it. Schmitt, now working with Tom Carey from Pennsylvania and sometimes in communication with Don Burleson of Roswell, came up with their own interpretation of the message. Burleson, writing in the January 7, 2000 issue of Vision, a monthly magazine published by the Roswell Daily Record, noted, “A number of attempts have been made to read the Ramey letter. Quite frankly, most of these attempts are amateurish, and even some UFOlogists have concluded that there is nothing in the Ramey image that advances the case for the Roswell incident. They are mistaken.”
Burleson wrote that he had spent a year working on deciphering the letter. He said that he had the advantage of being the director of a computer lab and that he had a background in cryptanalysis. According to him, “I’m quite used to reading things that I wasn’t meant to read.”
Burleson wrote that he had been using several excellent computer image enhancement software packages, “including LUCIS, the most advanced software used today in such fields as microscopy.” Burleson was suggesting that he used very expensive equipment and very advanced software. To hear Burleson tell it, his was the most sophisticated analysis attempted to date and his results were spectacular.
Burleson, who didn’t provide a line by line breakdown, wrote, “Here is my reading, so far… (Indeterminate parts of words are indicated by hyphens, and missing words are indicated by parentheses.) A few spots are a bit tentative, but essentially the letter reads”:
(1) RECO — OPERATION WITH ROSWELL DISK 074 MJ
(2) — AT THE ()() THE VICTIMS OF THE WRECK YOU FORWARDED TO THE (3) TEAM AT FORT WORTH, TEX.
(4) () ON THE “DISK” MUST HAVE SENT LOS ALAMOS ADVANCED ()
(5) URGENT. POWERS ARE NEEDED SITE TWO AT CARLSBAD, NMEX.
(6) () SAFE TALK NEWSPAPER MEANING OF STORY AND
(7) ONLY SHOW ()() BY WEATHER BALLOONS () WAVE ()()
(8) L — DENVER CREWS
(9)
(10) TEMPLE
But, once again, the reading of the message wasn’t universally accepted. UFO researcher Stan Friedman contacted Rob Belyea, the owner of ProLab, asking him to examine high resolution scans made of the negative. Friedman had actually paid someone in Fort Worth to hand carry the original negatives (which by now were becoming dirty and scratched because of all the handling) from the Special Collections to a computer lab to have these scans made. The results were then sent on to Friedman who supplied them to Belyea. Belyea said that he couldn’t spend hours examining the message but that he could rule out or confirm the interpretations made by others by using his software to decide on character count and combinations of letters. It was not at all unlike the work being done by Russ Estes in California, though Estes was actually trying to read the message rather than just confirm other interpretations.
While Friedman stood on the sidelines watching and not commenting on the research, Belyea did say specifically that he could not see “Magdalena” in the text as the first part of the Johnson team had suggested. Belyea did say, “They’re pulling off all sorts of [readings], but they’re making some of it up.”
There is an additional problem, only partially addressed in the search of the message. This probably was a military message sent from one military installation to another, which means there might have been some military jargon in it. The attempts at reading it have failed to account for any military jargon and that might have confounded the process. Originally, the closest is Rudiak’s attempt to place military unit designations into the message. He noted in one place where he thought 58 or 58th bomber squadron might have been indicated. He also located a second place where 54th SAID could indicate some kind of a military unit, although no one has yet located a unit with that designation.
Rudiak himself noted that what he thought as “5 PM” made no sense because the military would have used the twenty-four hour clock and it would have said, “1700 Hrs” rather than “5 PM.” That is a valid point.
Interestingly, Rudiak noted there was no law that said a military communication had to be loaded with jargon. He wrote to me that Brad Sparks had sent him a top-secret telex from General Walsh to General LeMay concerning a nuclear accident with very little jargon in it. I find it interesting because it contains some jargon but not an overwhelming amount.
But my point was that few, if any of the researchers were looking for jargon which could have changed their interpretations of the message. True, it might contain none, which wouldn’t, of course rule it out as a military message, but it might contain quite a bit and no one seemed to have addressed that problem.
“Victims of the Wreck”
Over the years, these interpretations of the message have circulated through the UFO community and that is a point that is sometimes overlooked. If you look at the message closely and know where to look, it certainly seems that the word victims appears right where they all say it does. And if victims is in that message, then many other interpretations of the content of the message are simply wrong.