Friday, May 1, 2015

Are the "Roswell Slides" a 20th Anniversary Commemoration of the Santilli "Alien Autopsy" Hoax?


Is it possible that the now-famous Roswell Slides, set to be publicly unveiled very soon on Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City, are a hoax intended to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the infamous Ray Santilli Alien Autopsy hoax, possibly even by the same people who created the Santilli alien? The slides are to be publicly revealed in a big shindig in Mexico City on May 5, sponsored by the Mexican UFO fabulist Jaime Maussan, who has a long history of promoting bogus photos of UFOs and supposed alien creatures. This is the exact twentieth anniversary of when the Santilli hoax video was first publicly shown, a fact that has not gone unnoticed.

The famous Alien Autopsy video. Spyros Melaris says he created it.


After I met and spoke with Adam Dew, the apparent owner and chief promoter of the "Roswell Slides," at the International UFO Congress in Arizona this February, my belief was that the slides were genuinely found in an old house, and probably showed some mummy on exhibit somewhere. In this scenario, Dew recognized the opportunity to promote them as showing a possible "Roswell alien." He contacted Roswell authors Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey, and the rest was history.
Adam Dew at the 2015 International UFO Congress

This "innocent scenario" is beginning to look increasingly unlikely. On April 29 , the French skeptic Gilles Fernandez wrote a Blog entry titled "What if? The Roswell Slides Saga as a Social Experiment or a Hoax of some sort?" In it he pointed out some obvious problems in the scenario we are given by Dew and the other slide promoters. One of the slides in the collection, supposedly in a slide frame that was only used in the 1940s, shows an automobile that was not manufactured until 1958. And the photos, also from the 1940s that are supposed to show Bernard and Hilda Ray, show individuals who are obviously decades older than the Rays would have been at that time. Some slides in the collection are compared to genuine 1940s Kodachrome slides, and the differences are obvious. Fernandez asks whether it is possible that "the set of the 400 slides was put together from various sources, maybe even from eBuyers or physical markets, and a story was concocted, and the two slides were inserted?"

UFO researcher George Wingfield has even stronger reservations. Back in 1995, he wrote a piece in the British publication Flying Saucer Review accusing three men of hoaxing the yet-unconfessed Santilli alien autopsy video:  John Lundberg, Robert Irving, and, and Rod Dickinson, based on their involvement with Ray Santilli, their experience in producing special effects, and their reputation as Crop Circle makers. In that Flying Saucer review article Wingfield wrote that "The alien is, of course, called HILDA, which, in case you hadn't guessed, stands for Hoaxed Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien." In 1995, RAY Santilli's hoaxed alien is satirically named HILDA - and now we have HILDA RAY. It seems as if the hoaxers may have signed their work, as an inside joke.
the “Roswell Alien Slides” were produced in a similar manner and supplied to targeted individuals likely to take the bait. If that’s right, the #1 suspects are John Lundberg and Rob Irving. Both of them were in California in December 2013 where they were commissioned to make a huge elaborate crop circle near Chualar, CA, for Nvidia who wanted to publicize their ultrafast Tegra microchip.
Wingfield concluded, 
Apart from their work behind and in front of the camera, Lundberg and Dickinson were the experts who made foam latex dummies for a TV series on UK's Channel 4 back then called "Crapston Villas". If Lundberg and Irving have been up to their tricks again on this 20th anniversary of Santilli’s alien autopsy hoax, it seems very likely they may have been the creators of the “Roswell Alien Slides”.
John Lundberg is now well-known as one of the Crop Circle makers at circlemakers.org. He is also the director of the documentary film Mirage Men. Based on the book of the same name by Mark Pilkington, it is a look at the purported role of government-sponsored disinformation in shaping the UFO phenomenon. I wrote to Lundberg asking for his comments on this. He might have replied something like, "I had nothing to do with either the Santilli Alien, or the Roswell Slides." Instead, he chose to reply in poetic and evasive terms, which I read as acknowledging that he was involved in those matters, but was unwilling to say so publicly. But one never knows what is to be taken seriously when dealing with Mirage Men.

If the Roswell Slides are indeed a hoax as is here suggested, it is certainly the most elaborate and sophisticated hoax since, well, the Santilli Alien Autopsy of twenty years ago. It almost feels like an act of art vandalism to betray their secrets.



8 comments:

  1. I doubt it. I've corresponded with George Wingfield about this a bit, and don't think it adds up. I will say that it is interesting that John Lundberg is following the slides saga very closely, and it would be an interesting exercise in "perception management!"

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    1. Curt, I think you are wrong if you are saying the Roswell Slides business was NOT a carefully prepared hoax that was deliberately produced for Jaime Maussan's Cinco de Mayo extravaganza with his full knowledge and complicity. A week ago Anthony Bragalia was assuring everyone on this blog that this "Roswell Alien" was the genuine article and that "Wingfield doesn't know what he's talking about". Now he has had to acknowledge that the alien was a mummified child in some (unidentified) museum. So this extraordinary false promotion of '"genuine proof of alien visitation" at long last was just a simple mistake and that's OK since no scam was ever intended? I really don't think so! If Bragalia was lying just a week ago what reason is there to believe he's not lying now?

      It may be hard to tell who were the crooks and who were the dupes in all this but I've no doubt that Jaime Maussan and Adam Dew were fully aware this was a scam and it was Maussan who commissioned it. Bragalia and others still seem to accept Dew's cover story about the origin of the so-called Roswell Slides including the transparently false (forgive the pun) tale of "Hilda Ray". If the truth be known the photos of the mummified child were almost certainly taken during the last twelve months and they were prepared to look as if the photographic materials and transparency sleeves were from about 1947. This was NOT just a casual UFO/alien hoax by an amateur of the sort you can find by the dozen on YouTube these days. This was quite obviously the work of a professional alienfaker like John Lundberg whose fingerprints are all over it.

      The deliberately blurred out strip on the slide film which is now said to specify that it shows a mummified child was an ingenious trick. If the Mexico City audience and the rest of the UFO community had widely accepted this scam as being genuine I suggest that the strip from the "real" slide would have been alternatively deblurred to read something like this:-
      "Embalmed body of Extraterrestrial Biological Entity recovered from flying disk which crashed near Roswell N.M., July 1947. (Courtesy the MJ-12 Collection at Hangar 18, Army Air Force, Ohio)."

      Unfortunately for Mr Maussan and his followers the whole scam was rejected by all those in the UFO community with half an ounce of common sense and some of the "world's leading UFO experts" have been made to retreat to the ridiculous fall-back position of "Oops --we somehow mistook a photo of a mummified Native American kid for a real Roswell Alien". Need I say more?

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  2. Dear Robert :

    When I wrote my article there are other things making me "skeptic".

    There is none EVIDENCE that the 400 slides are from a true family collection, and the defenders of the "Roswell slides" have the burden of proof to prove it, because it is that they are offering.

    I'm waiting they offered RAY's familly "moments": diners "en famille", Christmas moments, birthdays, etc. between the 400...

    That's why (among other many things), it smells more and more the hoax or social experiment for me.

    Regards,

    Gilles Fernandez

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  3. I am reluctant to accept George Wingfield's claim of a hoax for the Roswell slides affair, although he does seem to have some valid points.

    The reason I have my doubts is that some 24 or 25 years ago Wingfield appeared on a TV program where two men named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley owned up to creating many, if not most, of the crop circles of the early period. They explained their methodology. Wingfield was present and the first thing he said was that Bower & Chorley were merely government disinformation agents! He more or less accused them of either lying about their true involvement or of acting on behalf of the UK government.

    So we should be on guard about Mr Wingfield's allegations, even if they sound plausible.

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    1. Well, CDA, you haven't got that quite right as the sensational claims by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley were made in the now defunct TODAY tabloid newspaper in 1991. Together with other researchers I acknowledged that these two septuagenarians had made quite a few crop circles but in that TODAY scoop they claimed to have made ALL the crop circles that had been appearing in England in 1991 and in previous years.

      This was patently untrue and when questioned they made various other false claims. I assume there were several other groups of circlemakers operating back then (before Lundberg & Dickinson got going) and since then I've discovered who a few of these were. As for "genuine" crop circles I still say "Show me the evidence".

      Some investigators suggested then that Doug & Dave were acting as disinformation agents on behalf of the UK government but I never found any evidence of that and I have written many times that this was definitely not the case. Similarly I've said only last month on The Paracast that there's no reason to think that Messrs Lundberg, Irving and Dickinson have ever received a single penny from the UK government or any other intelligence agency for their circlefaking, ufofaking and alienfaking activities which they have turned into a lucrative business. I'm not making any moral judgements on such deception-mongering and I accept them as just another nuisance like the Nigerian gentleman who frequently writes to me asking if he can lodge $50,000,000 in my bank account or the internet phishers who often write asking me to confirm details of my various credit card accounts and such like. I guess that "perception management" specialists like John and Rob are just another aspect of modern life.

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  4. I can accept that a family trove of pics were found, then someone looking through them saw one they couldn't easily recognise. If they were predisposed to believing in alien visitations, or showed it to someone (hoping for some feedback as to what it was) who was predisposed, then it could quickly snowball from there. Maybe it's a hoax, but Occam's razor says to me it's just good old confirmation bias and misidentification, which other more opportunistic people have taken advantage of.

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  5. When I'd just as soon see this silly "slides" nonsense disappear, we now have some interesting or just plain goofy conspiracy-minded coincidences, and a bit of the "fallacy of misplaced rationalism" presented for a hoax.

    Eager intelligence chasing silliness, when it is still--most probably--a found object forced into a Roswell myth context. Yes, the slides could be fakes, a real manufactured hoax, but the evidence presented doesn't make that case.

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  6. UFO reports
    The film made according to the report witness.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofWJe3Q77h4
    Greetings

    ReplyDelete

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