Roswell Slides: Images Of A Photographic Memory

Today is supposed to be the day that researchers are supposed to unveil what is being called “The Roswell Slides.” Kodachrome slides that allegedly reveal an alien creature that had fallen in Roswell New Mexico back in 1947.

Many have already seen the slides and have resolved that perhaps this is finally the smoking gun that now has all the branding it needs to generate a merry go round of debate amongst critics about authenticity.

25 years to the day of the announcement it is interesting to point out that the world was fooled into believing that a lost film with Elvis footage had hidden in it the ceremonial autopsy and ritualistic carving up of an alien.

The Fox television network aired the “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” special with Jonathan Frakes as host. The special was aired twice on Fox and each time there was in excess of 17 million viewers. Time Magazine compared it to the Zapruder film, saying that no other film has had so much intense debate since the movie that showed Kennedy’s brains being blown out in Dallas.

Each viewer, regardless of whether or not it was a hoax, now has that snuff film in their consciousness and the ritualistic autopsy that some believed was a Satanic ritual performed on a human.

The truth is that those who watched the television special do not realize that, even though your eyes saw an alien being cut up, you were also subtextually watching a human being — or an anthropomorphic facsimile being — butchered on prime time television.

The mental flashbacks that it caused and the historical nature of ritual sacrifice overcame me and I was convinced that, while the “hoax” itself was subtle, the impact of a ritualistic murder and autopsy that reminded me of several famous murder or autopsy scenes.

The allegory of the autopsy and how it came into the possession of the UFO elite is basically similar to how the Roswell slides have now entered into the arena of scrutiny.

Some years ago, while an attic was being cleaned out for an estate sale, a chest was found containing many Kodachrome slides. Two Kodachrome slides were later found to have been separately hidden in an envelope within the inner lining of the chest’s lid. The chest and its contents were traced and found to have belonged to an intriguing, childless couple that is now deceased.

It has been reported that Bernerd A. Ray, the husband was an Oil Exploration Geologist working the fields in New Mexico and the Permian Basin which includes the Corona Roswell New Mexico region in the 1940s for a company that would later become part of Texaco.

In 1947 he was the President of the Texas chapter of the American Institute of Petroleum Geologists, which also at that time “folded in” the state of New Mexico. After 1947, Bernerd Ray disappeared from his profession and did not publish nor appear to be active with the Institute ever again.

Bernerd’s wife was Hilda Blair Ray. Researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt and the current owner of the film learned that Hilda was a highly respected lawyer with a high-end clientele and possible intelligence connections.

As a private pilot, she maintained favorable relations with well-placed individuals in both the public and private sectors during the 1940s.

The other slides in the chest (over 100) are often found depicting accomplished people, including Dwight Eisenhower, Bing Crosby and other well known celebrities.

This is a couple who were of the highest integrity. And both had contacts and activities that could have fortuitously enabled them to obtain these slides. And neither would have been the type to hide away hoaxed images as part of some sick prank, only to have those images found decades later by happenstance. This busy professional couple was also philanthropic with no propensity to prank.

When sharing about the history of the slides and the integrity of the couple involved another story comes to mind as well and that is the unimpeachable photo of Trent flying saucer that was captured in the 1950’s over McMinnville.

The McMinnville Oregon/ Trent photos have always been a contentious case and for decades many debunkers have claimed that the photos are hoaxes. However there has been no concrete proof to show that Paul and Evelyn Trent, the farmers who snapped the photos in May of 1950 were perpetrating a hoax.

The photos sat in the Trent home before they garnered any notoriety. It is told in the annals of UFO lore that the Trents had waited until the roll of film was finished before they even said anything.

Funny how they waited.

Maybe they were not UFO nuts and actually waited until they were sure of what they caught on film. The other interesting thing to note is that the photos were in the middle of the roll of film. There were no practice shots of the UFO and no other evidence to show that they were trying to create a hoax. Just two photo negatives showing an anomalous object buried amongst the mundane pictures of family and friends.

The photos turned out to be some of the first that ended up in a newspaper. If the people wanted to see a disc this was the best one, it was the closest one anyone ever captured.

On June 8, 1950 the McMinnville, Oregon Telephone Register displayed on its front pages two photographs of what is now known as the McMinnville, Oregon UFO.
On June 10th, 1950 the story broke everywhere else and a saucer hungry public saw the pictures. Stories ran in all the papers. It was reported that Evelyn Trent was outside working on the family farm near Dayton Oregon. Dayton is about 11 miles south of McMinnville, Oregon. Evelyn then claims she looked up and noticed a strange metallic object in the sky. She yelled for her husband to grab a camera. He ran outside and snapped the two famous photos. The photos eventually landed in a Life Magazine feature on June 26th, 1950.

The Trents were just simple farmers. They obviously weren’t flying saucer seekers or UFO nuts out to make a fast buck. Paul Trent even said at one time that he believed that the picture that he captured was that of a secret military aircraft.

There was no talk of alien beings or men from Mars at the time. There was also a lot more fascination and wonder. Many people would like to believe that back in the 1950s there was cynicism and paid debunkers that wanted to destroy the credibility of the Trents. That came later in the 1960s after it was great sport to attack witnesses and writers who would talk about saucer stories.

The truth is that the flying saucer or the UFO in the 1940s and 1950s had become a common mystery that was shared by many people. In fact many magazines like Time and Look would devote page after page about saucers stories. The obsession of the flying saucer was also mostly an American fear of the Cold War. The thing that needs to be emphasized is that the UFO was at first discussed without the alien context. It then became more of an extraterrestrial or alien topic in as much that while we were not doing well in the space race we were all dreaming of space flight, manned missions to the Moon and to Mars. It was theorized that perhaps with a little help from our alien friends we could someday make it to other worlds.

The alien context of the UFO phenomenon has unfortunately dogged any objective analysis of so called evidence that there have been sightings that are remarkable and worth a second look.

That is why when we hear of Kodak slides being produced by well known UFO researchers that are cashing in on the idea that anyone still has interest in Roswell or any other possible crash that has been thrown into modern mythology we put up a few red flags when it comes to our trust.

In the 1960s UFO material was actually difficult to get a hold of. Now we see it everywhere. In the 1960’s there were a few reference books collecting the most famous sightings and photographs. There were a few stories of people taking rides on Saucers or stories of celebrities being taken to military coolers where locked in deep freeze were aliens or body parts of these beings.

The term “flying saucer” has evolved in the communal mythology to be UFO, a term that originally meant Unidentified Flying Object. But now it seems to be stuck as a marketing label on everything mysterious which includes, the Chupacabra, crop circles, mutilated cattle, Men in Black, government conspiracies, alien abductions, genetic manipulation, and everything else that seems to have no definitive answer.

I wish we had a looking glass where we could go back in time to 1950’s where Harry Truman admitted that there were flying saucers. Were flying saucers were seen buzzing over the nations’ capital. I would love to hear those stories of how president Eisenhower took a ride in a space craft and how Jackie Gleason was shown aliens in refrigerators on a military base.

These stories are seldom given the spotlight because they sound so outrageous. However many of them were even sealed in death bed confessions and those who know firsthand the testimonies of these witnesses are either dead or dying.

Which brings us back to the Roswell case.

The only man who could probably identify whether the Roswell slides are authentic or not is mortician Glenn Dennis.

Glenn Dennis died on Tuesday, April 28, 2015. He was the last of the three founding members of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico.

Dennis told researchers in 1989 that while he worked at Ballard’s Funeral Home in Roswell, he was called by an officer at the base who asked if they had any small, children-sized caskets. Later he said he was at the base while the recovery of the alien craft and the bodies of those killed had been brought in. In the back of an ambulance, he saw some strange metallic debris.

He told several researchers that he was friends with a nurse who told him about the alien bodies and the preliminary autopsy that had been preformed there. In later years his story would be challenged but he did not waver from the details.

Many had claimed that he lied about the nurse’s name. He probably promised not to give her name because he didn’t want her to be in any trouble.

By telling that one lie, he left himself open to disbelief about the rest of his story.

However, the rest of the story has a good deal of corroboration, particularly the part about the base call for small caskets. He was telling friends about that within days, not 40 years later to gain fame.

If he made that part up in 1947 to promote the idea of an alien crash, he had one hell of an imagination. And the witness from Hagerman, N.M., whose family owned the mortuary business there, would have to be lying too, about them being the ones to supply the small coffins since Ballard’s Funeral Home in Roswell didn’t have them on hand.

Part of Glenn Dennis’ story was of Sheriff Wilcox being good friends with his father and warning his father that his son should keep his mouth shut about what he knew. Brother Bob confirmed that part of the story. Anything else was for his brother to tell.
It was his story.

Glenn Dennis when interviewed said one of the main factors in him staying quiet for so long was the very nature of the story would invite ridicule, and he didn’t want to hurt or embarrass his family. So here we are awaiting the revelation or so called smoking gun that one man could have identified as true or false.

On a simple and quick run through, we know the story of Roswell as the Nativity of contemporary UFO lore.

On July 2 1947, during the evening, a UFO crashed on the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico. The crash occurred during a severe thunderstorm. The nearest military base to the crash site is in Roswell, New Mexico. It is later called the Roswell flying saucer event.

The story varies about what happened next, and mythology takes over from here on out but the facts are simple. There was no flying saucer at the crash site. The initial report claimed that the “saucer” was similar to a delta shape missile with large flipped up wings.

Pieces of the crash debris consisted of balsa wood with strange writing on it that looked Chinese and thin metal that was similar to foil or mylar that would return to its original shape when crumpled up or hit with a hammer.

There is also the story of bodies that were found in the debris. Today the talk of alien grays being found in the wreckage at Roswell is common, However once again this is a myth as well. The occupants of the flying machine were sketched on paper and were given to the pilot of the plane that flu the debris to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. They were never called aliens or grays when they were retrieved from the wreckage. They were however small, bald and looked like malnourished children.

Some even claimed that they looked like circus freaks. The word alien was never used to describe the occupants of the craft.

The Kodachrome slides appear to be alien grays according to some witnesses which raised a very interesting point.

Professionals from a range of disciplines who have seen the slides agree that they depict a small humanoid creature –a formerly living thing- that is not a prop nor a genetically defective human And importantly, the being that is shown in the slides does not correlate whatsoever to the depictions of aliens extant in the popular culture of the 1940s, i.e. such as those that appeared in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories or movies like Buck Rogers.

What the slides depict were not even part of the public psyche of that time. This is not how people envisioned things from outer space to look like back then. Instead, these 1947 slides reveal a being that looks like the beings found in the desert in 1947 as described by the witnesses to Roswell.

If it is proven unequivocally that these slides were exposed in 1947, then several logical questions arise.

The slides show either a non- human biological entity or a very well made prop designed to look like one. Those are the only plausible explanations.

It is very hard to imagine how or why there could be a prop made in 1947 depicting a type of “humanoid” that would not be depicted or described otherwise for another 20-30 years, and which also matches exactly the recollection of the Roswell security guards, pilot, and Glenn Dennis who claim to have seen the creatures after the crash.

That is very powerful circumstantial evidence that this is a photo of a real being.

However we await the so called proof and the debate that will rage on as to their validity.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org