Guest Post: The "Roswell Slides" depict Alien MATILDA by George Wingfield

To follow up on my previous Blog posting, I am posting this guest article by George Wingfield. The opinions are his, not necessarily mine. Comments are welcome.

Robert Sheaffer

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The "Roswell Slides" depict Alien MATILDA

by George Wingfield

Most people will have probably have lost interest in the highly dubious “Roswell Slides” story by now so I hesitate to trouble any of you with it further. However, since Jaime Maussan’s “UFO Special Event” is still a week away, it’s worth looking at what it has been possible to establish during the past month:

(1) The so-called “Roswell Slides” discovery is a carefully prepared scam.

(2) They have nothing to do with Roswell or any supposed flying saucer crash there in 1947. The alleged Roswell connection has been deliberately devised to attract and deceive UFO/alien believers who would probably not have bothered with yet another of Maussan’s fake aliens from Mexico.

(3) Veteran UFO/Alien fraudster Jaime Maussan and the man who first revealed the existence of the Roswell Slides, Adam Dew, are quite aware of the slides’ real origin.

(4) The supposed story of their origin involving Hilda Ray, finding the slides in a house clearance in AZ, etc., is completely false apart from the fact that some of the slides are marked "HILDA RAY" which is a sly reference to RAY Santilli's fake alien "HILDA".

(5) This scam is entirely similar to Ray Santilli's "Alien Autopsy" scam of 1995 and the fake alien and the photographic slides were produced by the same people.

(6) The special effects alien dummy was prepared and photographed by London based circlemakers.org (Rob Irving, John Lundberg and Rod Dickinson) that made alien dummy HILDA for Santilli's Alien Autopsy film in the UK twenty years ago.

(7) The slides have been specially prepared using old 1940s-style cardboard sleeves to hold the transparency film so as to deceive UFO researchers that they originate from 1947. It is unlikely they will ever be released now as one could soon see they are fakes.

(8) The "UFO Special Event" in Mexico City to be hosted by Jaime Maussan on May 5, 2015, exactly twenty years to the day after Santilli unveiled his "Alien Autopsy" scam in 1995, has been planned to give maximum publicity to the fraudulent claim that this is the ultimate proof of a genuine alien. Maussan will play the same role as Santilli did.

(9) The prime creator of this new "Roswell” alien dummy, John Lundberg, was director of the 2013 documentary film Mirage Men. He sees the production of the slides and the Mexico City event as an act of "ostension". That is, the displaying of a supposedly genuine alien body (or photos, or replicas of an alien) to UFO/alien believers whose faith will be reinforced since they are meant to be unaware it is a scam.

(10) John Lundberg has declined to answer questions about the Roswell Slides or admit that he and his friends created this new hoax. He has also declined a recent invitation to appear on The Paracast which would have allowed hosts Gene Steinberg and Christopher O'Brien to question him about his involvement.

It would be difficult to appreciate the extent and the deviousness of the Roswell Slides deception without being familiar with Ray Santilli’s Alien Autopsy hoax of 1995 and the people who were behind that. That scam is believed to have netted Santilli a million dollars or so from the sale of copies of the film footage to TV channels, program makers, film-makers and researchers worldwide such was the interest and the demand from those who believed it to be genuine. With each copy of the Alien Autopsy footage sold, Santilli provided a disclaimer saying that he could not guarantee the material was genuine and that he had to include the disclaimer for legal reasons. He did, of course, know full well the film footage was faked and he should have been charged with fraud anyway.

I researched the Alien Autopsy scam at the time and was able to reveal the names of the three chief hoaxers who had created the special effects alien dummy and taken part in filming its supposed autopsy. My report on this can still be found on the internet at:-

www.fsr.org.uk/fsrwng12.htm

I have never had any reason to withdraw what I wrote there twenty years ago and from that time on Santilli’s dummy alien became known as Alien HILDA (Hoaxed Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien). Although there is no doubt that the Alien Autopsy film was an elaborate hoax there are still UFO/Alien believers who like to think it was genuine.

John Lundberg, the most prominent of these three hoaxers, was the director of the 2013 film documentary Mirage Men whose central character was the arch-deceptionmonger of US ufology Richard Doty. Everyone who is interested in the UFO subject should see this film which reveals just how much of modern UFO mythology has been shaped by the campaign of disinformation and deception woven by Doty and others based at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, during the 1980s. Lundberg has always been fascinated –if not obsessed— by such deception and disinformation which is one of the reasons that he made this film. With the Roswell Slides he is attempting to supply more of the same.

These three hoaxers started out by making crop circles in England during the early 1990s. Although they admitted they were circlemakers they never admitted making any specific formation. They justified what they did by saying it was art –crop art— but denied the deception dimension of what they were doing. One could say that their work was more like that of an illusionist, or magician, than that of a regular artist. From these beginnings they went on to fake UFO photographs and even contrived UFO fly-bys using things similar to Chinese lanterns to deceive Steven Greer and his CSETI people who went out on skywatches in Wiltshire, England, during 1992. From crop circlemaking (or, maybe one should say, circlefaking) and UFOfaking, these three progressed to alienfaking in 1995 with the production of alien dummy HILDA for Ray Santilli.

Their circlemaking activities and their circlemakers.org website led by degrees to lucrative contracts to make crop circles for a whole variety of customers such as UK newspapers, TV channels, film-makers, companies and corporations who wanted their logos --or maybe some publicity ad-- imprinted in the wheatfields of England and then photographed from the air. The team of three, sometimes with additional helpers, made crop circles to order in the UK, the USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and other countries often charging many thousands of dollars a time plus expenses.

One of their best known crop circles in recent years was made for a computer electronics manufacturer in December 2013. John Lundberg and Rob Irving were commissioned to make a huge elaborate crop circle near Chualar, CA, for Nvidia who wanted to publicize their ultrafast Tegra microchip. The chip was announced a week later at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Lundberg and Irving’s giant crop circle resembled a vast replica of the microchip. With most commissions Circlemakers.org doesn’t reveal its authorship of the crop circles which they produce but sometimes it is disclosed and also the fact that a large elaborate circle like the Nvidia one can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

If the crop circle side of the business is the most lucrative one then alienfaking commissions are the most secretive. Apart from the Alien Autopsy and the Roswell Slides no other such productions are publicly known nor what is charged for such productions. One can be certain that these alienfakers watch the reactions of their target audience closely on blogsites and websites dealing with such matters. Acceptance by members of the UFO community is important since everything depends on belief.

John Lundberg popped up recently on one of The Paracast forums dealing with the “Roswell Slides” which he had joined with a view to checking the reactions of those who are fascinated anything to do with Roswell. On the forum he called himself ‘Ostension’ which is probably a term that is lost on many people.

Having lived years ago in staunchly Catholic Ireland I am very aware that "ostension" is the displaying of the sacrament at the altar during the mass so that it could receive the adoration of the communicants who have come up from the congregation. In these secular days some may be unaware that the sacrament is the bread (or communion wafer) and the wine that communicants receive during the mass. Transubstantiation is the supposed change whereby, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, the bread and wine used as the communion sacrament become --in actual reality -- the body and the blood of Christ.
Not that many people, even Catholics, actually believe this today, but the parallel here to the displaying of a "genuine" alien body --or at least a supposed photographic slide of one-- at a meeting of UFO True Believers in Mexico City is not lost on some of us. That's a real piece of what Lundberg would call Perception Management for you. If such ostension actually works, one can assume that it will fill the coffers of that celebrated UFO high priest Jaime Maussan.

There is no other definition of ostension in the dictionary but John Lundberg defines it in the following terms on his Wikipedia page:

"Entire legend plots can be reduced to an allusive action. If a narrative is widely known individuals may become involved in real life activities based on all or part of that narrative. This is ostension in action; when legend alters or shapes the behavior of people. Real events patterned on an urban legend, fact mirroring fiction. In a nutshell? To folklorists, ostension is the real-life occurrence of events described by a legend. Legends we live."

Ostension is apparently John Lundberg’s justification for creating the Alien Autopsy and now the so-called Roswell Slides. There’s money in it too but to simple folk like me this is simply an attempt at mass deception that is entirely similar to the deception practiced by Richard Doty and his colleagues with regard to the UFO subject back in the 1980s. So those of us who are interested in the UFO subject should be acutely aware that there are people out there who are seeking to manipulate our belief systems by various forgeries, fakery and deception.

Finally I think this new alien dummy, successor to the infamous HILDA, needs a new name which really should be MATILDA. That, if you hadn’t already guessed, stands for Maussan’s Maussan’s Absurd Trick: Irving-Lundberg-Dickinson Alien.

MATILDA is particularly appropriate since that was the name of the little girl in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales (1907) who told such dreadful lies:

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one gasp and stretch one’s Eyes,
Her Aunt, who from her Earliest Youth, 
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth, 
Attempted to believe Matilda: The effort very nearly killed her …….. 

(for the rest of this cautionary poem and its sad ending see http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/matilda.html )

Maybe one day a real extraterrestrial alien will catch up with Maussan, Dew, Lundberg and Irving and if that ever happens one wonders if they’d know what to do. Perhaps they would suffer a similar fate to the wretched Matilda who everyone had ceased to believe?

George Wingfield
April 30, 2015