UFOs in the daily Press:

Roswell Incident Had Victims, Program Says

ALBUQUERQUE - While he told the world that a weather balloon went down in Roswell, an Army general had in his hand a memo telling Pentagon brass of a UFO crash with "victims," according to a new television documentary.

A computer analysis of that memo, held by Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey during a July 1947 press briefing, is the "smoking gun" of the Roswell Incident, researchers say in the documentary being broadcast today on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Using a digital photo scanner to enlarge and enhance words printed on the folded piece of paper Ramey held, and using another computer program to select the most likely words, researcher David Rudiak, who has a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley, found two key phrases: "the victims of the wreck" and "in the 'disc' they will ship."

With the textual study plus University of New Mexico archaeological findings from one of three alleged UFO crash sites, science fiction seeks to close the gap with fact, producers say.

A photograph taken July 8, 1947, in Fort Worth, Texas, by James Bond Johnson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram shows Ramey clutching a communique to Washington, D.C., while he displays a deflated weather balloon just hours after other Army officers in Roswell had reported a UFO crash.

It was one of a series of inconsistent military reports about the incident, which has become part of American mythology.

"Unless national security is at stake, there is absolutely no reason to keep this information from the public," said Thomas Vitale, a Sci-Fi Channel vice president. "Whatever crashed at Roswell, let us know what the truth is."

The Air Force had responded to a 1994 call from the late U.S. Rep. Steve Schiff, R-N.M., by saying it had no information on the Roswell Incident. Schiff, an Air Force reserve judge advocate general's officer, then took his query to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In 1997, the Air Force acknowledged the weather balloon had been a false cover story, but a new story also was called into question. In a report written by Lt. William McAndrew, the Air Force suggested reports of alien bodies in the wreckage must have originated because of a crash-test program in which mannequins were dropped from balloons. The mannequins did not come close to matching 1947 descriptions of alien bodies, and the crash-test program was not introduced until 1953, Rudiak said.

Sci-Fi, guided by longtime Roswell UFO researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, commissioned William Doleman, an archaeologist with UNM's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, to excavate the alleged initial crash contact point on the ranch where the late Mack Brazel worked as foreman.

Doleman said he knows little about the Roswell Incident but agreed to excavate the site using purely scientific methods because it is "culturally significant" and because so much of what is circulated about the Roswell crash landing is based on hearsay. What was needed, Doleman said, was physical evidence.

"So this project is a very bold step by people who claim to know what happened and where it happened," Doleman said. "What makes it bold is they were willing to go out there and look for physical evidence."

Details of the excavation are being kept confidential until after today's premiere. But Doleman said he agrees "that obviously something happened in July 1947 in southeastern New Mexico." After his work there, though, he said, "I'm still uncertain" about UFOs and alien beings.

The documentary will introduce some witnesses who have not been heard from publicly before, attesting to the existence of alien bodies in the wreckage of the "flying disc," Carey said by phone from his home in Pennsylvania.

"This is where we loaded the bodies," he quotes one New Mexico witness, Robert Slusher, as saying. Slusher, among those appearing in the documentary, was part of a B-29 crew that he said loaded bodies up through the plane's bomb bay at the Roswell Army Airfield.

Three victims were supposedly recovered from the final crash site, and a team of archaeologists, coincidentally, were in the area doing research on ancient Indians at the time, Carey said. Among them was Curry Holden, an archaeologist from Texas Tech in Lubbock, whom Carey located in 1992.

"Curry Holden said he saw everything - the craft and the bodies," Carey said. Holden died a few months later.

Carey, an investigator for a private corporation, said he started looking into Roswell 12 years ago "as a hobby."

But it became more than that. And now, he said, he and Schmitt are in a race against time, as witnesses become scarcer.

"Just for the record, I want to clear up some misunderstandings in this story. When interviewed I said that I had a bachelors in physics and a doctorate of optometry from UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, the two degrees got merged somewhere down the line when the story was written into my having a doctorate or Ph.D. in physics from U.C. Berkeley. Believe me, I never said that and have never said that. The last thing I want to do in this field is be accused of inflating my resume."

"The second slightly confusing thing is the statement that I used a computer program to select the most likely words. What I used was a search engine at www.onelook.com that searched for possible word matches in the English language when a few possible letters were plugged in and wildcards used for the other letters. This search engine looks through hundreds of on-line dictionaries and lexicons. The computer however does not pick the most likely match. That's left to the human brain using context, grammar, and some common sense."

"The example I gave was what matches do you get for the "VICTIMS" word if you plug in "V I _ _ I _ S"and do the search? (These letters, I felt, were all very probable, whereas other letters in the word were more ambiguous.) It turns out there are only 7 possible matches: VILNIUS, VITRICS, VILLI'S, VIBRIOS, VIOLINS, VIRGINS, and finally VICTIMS."

"The only one of these matches that makes any possible sense in the context of a military telegram and Roswell is the word "VICTIMS". That is, unless you want to believe that Ramey was somehow dealing with a crisis in the capital of Lithuania (VILNIUS), or was dealing with something involving glass-making (VITRICS), or was involved somehow with the bacteria that causes cholera (VIBRIOS), or something lining the guts (VILLI'S), or maybe music (VIOLINS), or sex (VIRGINS). [VILLI'S is also the wrong part of speech given the grammatical context.]"

"The point of this illustration is that the possible choices for a word are not infinite and interpreting this message isn't an exercise equivalent to "seeing faces in the clouds." Use of various forms of context weeds out a vast majority of possible word matches in most cases."

"This is similar in some ways to solving a crossword puzzle. You have words of fixed length. Further, based on what else you have filled in, you may think you know a few letters of the word. Then doing a word search will bring back possible matches with letters in those positions and words of the proper length. But you need to use the context of the clue provided for the word to decide which of any of these matches would actually work."

"There will be cases where none of them seem to work, and that might be a red flag that one of your other cross-words is wrong and providing a wrong search letter. That certainly happened to me on a number of occasions. None of the word matches seemed to make sense. So then I might take another look at the letters and try other combinations of similar letters that might also be possibilities."

"I hope this clarifies this aspect of my methodology a little bit better."

"The important part of the story, which is correct, is the two key phrases in the message: "the victims of the wreck" and "in the 'disc' they will ship." These totally demolish any balloon plus "crash dummy" explanation for the crash. Roswell did indeed have "victims", not "crash dummies from the future." And the crash object was indesputably being called a "disc" with something of great value in the interior deserving of air shipment. Neither weather balloons nor radar target balsa kites had any interiors with anything to be shipped."

"David (Doctor of Optometry, not Physics) Rudiak"