THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
May 10, 2015
www.theparacast.com
Getting the Goods on the Roswell Slides
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
Announcing The Paracast+: You asked for it! For a low monthly or annual subscription fee, you will receive access to a higher-quality ad-free version of The Paracast, chat rooms, and don’t miss our exclusive After The Paracast podcast, featuring politically incorrect color commentary, and other exclusive content. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes, and The Paracast+ video channel is coming soon. For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
Attention U.S. Listeners: Help Us Bring The Paracast to Your City! In the summer of 2010, The Paracast joined the GCN radio network. This represented a huge step in bringing our show to a larger, mainstream audience. But we need your help to add additional affiliates to our growing network. Please ask one of your local talk stations if they are interested in carrying The Paracast. Feel free to contact us directly with the names of programming people we might be able to contact on your behalf. We can't do this alone, and if you succeed in convincing your local station to carry the show, we'll reward you with one of our special T-shirts, and other goodies. With your help, The Paracast can grow into one of the most popular paranormal shows on the planet!
Please Visit Our Online Store: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and an expanded collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt now featuring our brand new logo, just pay a visit to our online store at The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We also offer a complete lineup of other premium merchandise for your family, your friends and your business contacts.
About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.
Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.
Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Red Pill Junkie, an outspoken blogger on the paranormal and a regular contributor for The Daily Grail, Mysterious Universe, the Intrepid Magazine blog. He also collaborates frequently with The Grimerica Show podcast and also lends a little hand on The Gralien Report radio show. On this episode, RPJ gives you his first-hand account of the Roswell Slides event in Mexico City, which occurred on May 5, 2015. Do they really president evidence to demonstrate they discovered two slides depicting an extraterrestrial? You’ll also hear a segment featuring UFO historian Richard Dolan, who also attended the event.
Important! The accompanying episode of our exclusive After The Paracast podcast will feature new revelations about the Roswell Slides that may put the nail in the coffin. You can download and listen to this show when you become a member of The Paracast+.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
Richard Dolan’s Site: rdpress
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
Ufology and the Road to Self-Destruction
By Gene Steinberg
I know it has to be frustrating. Some of you have been reading about UFOs for decades. Maybe you chased down some of these sightings, or had one or more yourself. So you have to hope that someone, somewhere, has a solution, or is getting closer to one. Isn’t it about time?
Of course, the prevailing view is that UFOs represent visits by extraterrestrials. We assume they are friendly, simply because they don’t seem to have engaged in overt hostile behavior. Or at least that’s how it seems, although there have been some reports that might indicate otherwise.
But actual proof of the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) is often a matter of the process of elimination. They appear to be solid, metallic aircraft that is capable of feats of maneuverability that exceed that of conventional aircraft, for example. If they can’t be explained away conventionally, they must be from other worlds.
With hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions of sightings, however, swhere’s the smoking gun? How could aliens be visiting our planet for over 65 years, and quite possibly far longer, and not leave solid evidence behind to confirm what they are?
But there are a few cases that have become the stuff of legend, chief of which is the Roswell, NM episode. The public revelations began way back on July 8, 1947, when a press release was issued by Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut. The word spread fast that they had recovered a flying disc that evidently crashed on ranch property near Roswell.
As sensational as this story might have seemed, it essentially died a few hours later when the story was retracted. No it wasn’t a flying disc or a flying saucer. It was just a balloon, and a photo showing that balloon was quickly released to the news media.
For the most part, the story remained dormant for over 30 years. Yes, there were also claims of a UFO crash at Aztec, NM, as chronicled in Frank Scully’s “Behind the Flying Saucers,” published in 1950, but it was shot down over the next few years. In fairness, some researchers still assert that the Aztec episode really happened, although that claim is highly disputed.
That returns us to Roswell. In the late 1970s, UFO researchers Stanton Friedman and William Moore began to probe the Roswell story, and found eyewitnesses who claimed that a flying saucer really did crash there. Some even asserted that the bodies of alien visitors, dead or dying, were recovered.
The findings were recounted in the original Roswell book, “The Roswell Incident,” by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. Although Friedman supposedly did a lot of the research, he didn’t merit an author credit. Regardless, this book, reprinted a number of times over the years, helped jumpstart the Roswell cottage industry.
Over the years, loads of other Roswell books and articles appeared. There were pubic events, TV documentaries, and plenty of radio interviews. As the years passed, more and more Roswell evidence came out of the woodwork, but it seemed as if the final evidence was still elusive.
The Air Force, when confronted with questions about Roswell, usually maintained it was a Project Mogul balloon, a claim that was highly disputed, with a fair amount of justification, by Roswell researchers. They also referred to crash test dummies as the creatures allegedly recovered.
In recent years, several researchers came together to form a “Dream Team,” to take a new look at the case and attempt to come up with some conclusive evidence. At this point, however, available witnesses consisted of second and third generations, and thus there wasn't lot of evidence to mine.
In recent months, however, people have been talking about the so-called “Roswell Slides,” and they haven’t stopped talking.
The story of how they were found is itself steeped in uncertainty. They were supposedly located in an attic by a woman hired to clean out a home for an estate sale. Two Kodachrome slides, attached to the cover of a cardboard containing several hundred slides, contained the image of a body in what appeared to be a display case. The woman tossed the box in her garage, and just happened to look them over 10 years later — if you can believe this — and thus the slides eventually came into the possession of one Adam Dew, who runs a video production company.
Now the issue of provenance of this alleged evidence is based on some wild assumptions about who owned them and who took the pictures. The long and short of it is that it’s all just guesswork. We don’t know who, we don’t know exactly when, and we don’t know where.
The slides were shown to two prominent Roswell researchers, Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, and things suddenly snowballed. Speaking before an audience at American University in November of 2014, Carey proclaimed that the smoking gun to the Roswell case had been discovered. He stated, “It’s original 1947 images, and it shows an alien who’s been partially dissected lying in a case.”
The truth would be revealed at a public event, called BeWitness. After months of increasingly hysterical pumping of the event, it went off before a crowd of up to an estimated 7,000 people on May 5, 2015 in a Mexico City auditorium. Over a five-hour period, the alleged history of the slides was detailed, along with the analysis of three scientists who claimed that the body depicted on those slides did not appear to be human.
Understand that nobody really knows who took the photos, where they were taken and exactly when, although the slides do appear to date from the late 1940s. It’s not even certain that the body is of something that once lived and not an artificial mock-up, or something intended as a movie special effect. The Roswell connection is even murkier, except for the claim that the body in those slides resembles what has been described in connection with the Roswell crash.
The long and short of it is that there has been lots of talk about the Roswell Slides in the UFO blogs. The discussion has been quite spirited in our Paracast forums, and we’ve continued to talk about it on the show. On April 19, 2015, we featured Kevin D. Randle, a prominent Roswell researcher who presented an overview of what was known about those slides, and why they got the moniker of Roswell Slides. Since the Roswell connection was tenuous at best, he has referred to them as the “Not Roswell Slides.”
On our May 10, 2015 episode, we talk with a prominent blogger on the paranormal, Red Pill Junkie, and UFO historian Richard Dolan, about the Mexico City event, which both attended. Both expressed skepticism, but Dolan was more cautious, suggesting we just have to wait and see.
Indeed, after the event, much of the response was highly skeptical, and one prolific blogger, who was busy touting the slides as genuine evidence for months ahead of the presentation, had nothing more to say. Or at least as of the time I wrote this column.
To me, it looks like the mummy of a child in a museum case, and that view, widely held, is now buttressed by a report from what is called The Roswell Slides Research Group, which consists of several people who decided to do an independent probe of the case. It’s a mixture of UFO researchers and skeptics, and it appears they may have found a smoking gun alright, but not the one the Roswell Slides believers expected.
The two slides depict some sort of placard at the right side of the display glass. The lettering is invisible on one slide, severely blurred on the other. Based on what they claimed to be a higher resolution scan of the slide, the RSRG used software that cleans up blurry content to reveal what appears to be the solution to this curious mystery.
I merely have to quote the first line on the placard that says it all: “MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY.”
Why am I not surprised?
To be fair, Adam Dew asserts, in response, that the effort to read the words on the placard was the result of deliberate Photoshop trickery, and didn’t represent the actual lettering. In other words, he claimed the translation is a fake! But he hasn’t presented an alternative version.
But for most, it appears this sorry episode is over. From two slides with murky origins, to the attempt to force what appears to be a totally conventional museum exhibit to represent evidence of something unworldly, it all appears to demonstrate acts of desperation about Roswell. There is no final evidence of what really happened there in 1947, so perhaps sincere people had their blinders on when these slides came into their possession.
Some might suggest that it was all done for profit and fame, but promoter Jaime Maussan, a controversial figure in the UFO field, claimed he lost some $100,000 in hosting that presentation. That figure, however, can’t really be confirmed. Whether the result of good intentions or hucksterism, this sorry episode has clearly been a serious setback to UFO research.
Is it any wonder some call the field toxic?
Copyright 1999-2015 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
May 10, 2015
www.theparacast.com
Getting the Goods on the Roswell Slides
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
Announcing The Paracast+: You asked for it! For a low monthly or annual subscription fee, you will receive access to a higher-quality ad-free version of The Paracast, chat rooms, and don’t miss our exclusive After The Paracast podcast, featuring politically incorrect color commentary, and other exclusive content. NEW! We’ve added an RSS feed for fast updates of the latest episodes, and The Paracast+ video channel is coming soon. For more information about our premium package, please visit: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio.
Attention U.S. Listeners: Help Us Bring The Paracast to Your City! In the summer of 2010, The Paracast joined the GCN radio network. This represented a huge step in bringing our show to a larger, mainstream audience. But we need your help to add additional affiliates to our growing network. Please ask one of your local talk stations if they are interested in carrying The Paracast. Feel free to contact us directly with the names of programming people we might be able to contact on your behalf. We can't do this alone, and if you succeed in convincing your local station to carry the show, we'll reward you with one of our special T-shirts, and other goodies. With your help, The Paracast can grow into one of the most popular paranormal shows on the planet!
Please Visit Our Online Store: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and an expanded collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt now featuring our brand new logo, just pay a visit to our online store at The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We also offer a complete lineup of other premium merchandise for your family, your friends and your business contacts.
About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.
Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.
Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Red Pill Junkie, an outspoken blogger on the paranormal and a regular contributor for The Daily Grail, Mysterious Universe, the Intrepid Magazine blog. He also collaborates frequently with The Grimerica Show podcast and also lends a little hand on The Gralien Report radio show. On this episode, RPJ gives you his first-hand account of the Roswell Slides event in Mexico City, which occurred on May 5, 2015. Do they really president evidence to demonstrate they discovered two slides depicting an extraterrestrial? You’ll also hear a segment featuring UFO historian Richard Dolan, who also attended the event.
Important! The accompanying episode of our exclusive After The Paracast podcast will feature new revelations about the Roswell Slides that may put the nail in the coffin. You can download and listen to this show when you become a member of The Paracast+.
Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet
Richard Dolan’s Site: rdpress
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.
Ufology and the Road to Self-Destruction
By Gene Steinberg
I know it has to be frustrating. Some of you have been reading about UFOs for decades. Maybe you chased down some of these sightings, or had one or more yourself. So you have to hope that someone, somewhere, has a solution, or is getting closer to one. Isn’t it about time?
Of course, the prevailing view is that UFOs represent visits by extraterrestrials. We assume they are friendly, simply because they don’t seem to have engaged in overt hostile behavior. Or at least that’s how it seems, although there have been some reports that might indicate otherwise.
But actual proof of the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) is often a matter of the process of elimination. They appear to be solid, metallic aircraft that is capable of feats of maneuverability that exceed that of conventional aircraft, for example. If they can’t be explained away conventionally, they must be from other worlds.
With hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions of sightings, however, swhere’s the smoking gun? How could aliens be visiting our planet for over 65 years, and quite possibly far longer, and not leave solid evidence behind to confirm what they are?
But there are a few cases that have become the stuff of legend, chief of which is the Roswell, NM episode. The public revelations began way back on July 8, 1947, when a press release was issued by Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut. The word spread fast that they had recovered a flying disc that evidently crashed on ranch property near Roswell.
As sensational as this story might have seemed, it essentially died a few hours later when the story was retracted. No it wasn’t a flying disc or a flying saucer. It was just a balloon, and a photo showing that balloon was quickly released to the news media.
For the most part, the story remained dormant for over 30 years. Yes, there were also claims of a UFO crash at Aztec, NM, as chronicled in Frank Scully’s “Behind the Flying Saucers,” published in 1950, but it was shot down over the next few years. In fairness, some researchers still assert that the Aztec episode really happened, although that claim is highly disputed.
That returns us to Roswell. In the late 1970s, UFO researchers Stanton Friedman and William Moore began to probe the Roswell story, and found eyewitnesses who claimed that a flying saucer really did crash there. Some even asserted that the bodies of alien visitors, dead or dying, were recovered.
The findings were recounted in the original Roswell book, “The Roswell Incident,” by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. Although Friedman supposedly did a lot of the research, he didn’t merit an author credit. Regardless, this book, reprinted a number of times over the years, helped jumpstart the Roswell cottage industry.
Over the years, loads of other Roswell books and articles appeared. There were pubic events, TV documentaries, and plenty of radio interviews. As the years passed, more and more Roswell evidence came out of the woodwork, but it seemed as if the final evidence was still elusive.
The Air Force, when confronted with questions about Roswell, usually maintained it was a Project Mogul balloon, a claim that was highly disputed, with a fair amount of justification, by Roswell researchers. They also referred to crash test dummies as the creatures allegedly recovered.
In recent years, several researchers came together to form a “Dream Team,” to take a new look at the case and attempt to come up with some conclusive evidence. At this point, however, available witnesses consisted of second and third generations, and thus there wasn't lot of evidence to mine.
In recent months, however, people have been talking about the so-called “Roswell Slides,” and they haven’t stopped talking.
The story of how they were found is itself steeped in uncertainty. They were supposedly located in an attic by a woman hired to clean out a home for an estate sale. Two Kodachrome slides, attached to the cover of a cardboard containing several hundred slides, contained the image of a body in what appeared to be a display case. The woman tossed the box in her garage, and just happened to look them over 10 years later — if you can believe this — and thus the slides eventually came into the possession of one Adam Dew, who runs a video production company.
Now the issue of provenance of this alleged evidence is based on some wild assumptions about who owned them and who took the pictures. The long and short of it is that it’s all just guesswork. We don’t know who, we don’t know exactly when, and we don’t know where.
The slides were shown to two prominent Roswell researchers, Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, and things suddenly snowballed. Speaking before an audience at American University in November of 2014, Carey proclaimed that the smoking gun to the Roswell case had been discovered. He stated, “It’s original 1947 images, and it shows an alien who’s been partially dissected lying in a case.”
The truth would be revealed at a public event, called BeWitness. After months of increasingly hysterical pumping of the event, it went off before a crowd of up to an estimated 7,000 people on May 5, 2015 in a Mexico City auditorium. Over a five-hour period, the alleged history of the slides was detailed, along with the analysis of three scientists who claimed that the body depicted on those slides did not appear to be human.
Understand that nobody really knows who took the photos, where they were taken and exactly when, although the slides do appear to date from the late 1940s. It’s not even certain that the body is of something that once lived and not an artificial mock-up, or something intended as a movie special effect. The Roswell connection is even murkier, except for the claim that the body in those slides resembles what has been described in connection with the Roswell crash.
The long and short of it is that there has been lots of talk about the Roswell Slides in the UFO blogs. The discussion has been quite spirited in our Paracast forums, and we’ve continued to talk about it on the show. On April 19, 2015, we featured Kevin D. Randle, a prominent Roswell researcher who presented an overview of what was known about those slides, and why they got the moniker of Roswell Slides. Since the Roswell connection was tenuous at best, he has referred to them as the “Not Roswell Slides.”
On our May 10, 2015 episode, we talk with a prominent blogger on the paranormal, Red Pill Junkie, and UFO historian Richard Dolan, about the Mexico City event, which both attended. Both expressed skepticism, but Dolan was more cautious, suggesting we just have to wait and see.
Indeed, after the event, much of the response was highly skeptical, and one prolific blogger, who was busy touting the slides as genuine evidence for months ahead of the presentation, had nothing more to say. Or at least as of the time I wrote this column.
To me, it looks like the mummy of a child in a museum case, and that view, widely held, is now buttressed by a report from what is called The Roswell Slides Research Group, which consists of several people who decided to do an independent probe of the case. It’s a mixture of UFO researchers and skeptics, and it appears they may have found a smoking gun alright, but not the one the Roswell Slides believers expected.
The two slides depict some sort of placard at the right side of the display glass. The lettering is invisible on one slide, severely blurred on the other. Based on what they claimed to be a higher resolution scan of the slide, the RSRG used software that cleans up blurry content to reveal what appears to be the solution to this curious mystery.
I merely have to quote the first line on the placard that says it all: “MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY.”
Why am I not surprised?
To be fair, Adam Dew asserts, in response, that the effort to read the words on the placard was the result of deliberate Photoshop trickery, and didn’t represent the actual lettering. In other words, he claimed the translation is a fake! But he hasn’t presented an alternative version.
But for most, it appears this sorry episode is over. From two slides with murky origins, to the attempt to force what appears to be a totally conventional museum exhibit to represent evidence of something unworldly, it all appears to demonstrate acts of desperation about Roswell. There is no final evidence of what really happened there in 1947, so perhaps sincere people had their blinders on when these slides came into their possession.
Some might suggest that it was all done for profit and fame, but promoter Jaime Maussan, a controversial figure in the UFO field, claimed he lost some $100,000 in hosting that presentation. That figure, however, can’t really be confirmed. Whether the result of good intentions or hucksterism, this sorry episode has clearly been a serious setback to UFO research.
Is it any wonder some call the field toxic?
Copyright 1999-2015 The Paracast LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
