Roswell - New scans of the Ramey Memo : Can it now be enhanced/deciphered?

Awesome post!

It occurs to me that since we can see the amount of letters in the word.

Someone could write a OCR recognizing the amount of characters in the word. Not the actual word.

And then come back and give words with those character counts.

Then that can then again be narrowed down with an algorithm that would pick the words that make sense.

After spending some time on the previous high-resolution scans (including trying a de-blurring program), all I can say is "good luck." It's not that the scans are blurry. Actually, they're remarkably in focus thanks to the large format, deep focal range of those old newspaper cameras. But there's a limit to the resolution because of the film. Then it becomes a matter of stretching and enhancing and guessing.

I'm curious to see what people come up with, and if they can avoid making some basic assumptions that would throw so much confirmation bias into the mix (such as that the memo has anything at all to do with the event in the first place) that it results in nothing worthwhile.

P.S. -- Along with trying to decipher the memo, also keep an eye out for the "hieroglyphics" on the sticks.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
After spending some time on the previous high-resolution scans (including trying a de-blurring program), all I can say is "good luck." It's not that the scans are blurry.

What I think is possible is that there may be some software incorporating a clever algorithm which could achieve some dramatic result ANALOGOUS to the way in which Smart Deblur helped with clarifying the Roswell Slides placard.

Incidentally, I did recently try Smart DeBlur on these new scans. Given the success of Smart DeBlur with the Roswell Slides placard, I couldn't resist trying it on the Ramey memo. (I didn't mention trying this in the outline I gave in my OP because, well, I realise that the problem isn't one of blurring...).

One of the previous articles included in the bibliography I posted above included an attempt to use Photoshop's Smart Sharpen function - but that didn't seem to result in any real improvement in the relevant article nor when I tried playing with it on the new scans.

a reply to: IsaacKoi

I don't think it's the words you need to focus on, but the 'not words'.

Here's what is being hidden, near the thumb.



93

This is really cool stuff. I didn't know that Kevin Randle was still alive; last I heard about the guy was 10-12 years ago.

It would be kind of anti-climactic if it was indeed just the press dispatch, that the reporter had handed the general.

Hey, has anybody ever proposed that Roswell, Kecksburg, etc. may have been US shootdowns of hostile alien craft ? That would certainly be a good reason for all the secrecy.

originally posted by: stevieray
Hey, has anybody ever proposed that Roswell, Kecksburg, etc. may have been US shootdowns of hostile alien craft ? That would certainly be a good reason for all the secrecy.

Anything's possible, I suppose. But it took the Army a couple of days to go look at the Roswell "crash," and only after a farmer told them about it. If they had shot it down, they probably would have been on the scene a little sooner. As for Kecksberg, they responded a little faster, but pretty much only after it was spotted by civilians first. If you're duck hunting, you send the dog out faster than that.

originally posted by: MoshiachIusDei
a reply to: IsaacKoi

I don't think it's the words you need to focus on, but the 'not words'.

Here's what is being hidden, near the thumb.

93

I don't see it. I'm missing something.

Always loved yur work Isaac through out the years. I'm anticipating yur next work... (as I drool for more alien info)

a reply to: Blue Shift

well there was supposed to be two different crash sites. The one at the Brazil ranch was a secondary crash site that the Army wasn't aware of until Mac told them about it and brought in pieces.

Jaden

originally posted by: stevieray
It would be kind of anti-climactic if it was indeed just the press dispatch, that the reporter had handed the general.

That's a very likely outcome!
A real memo outlining the beginnings of the "Cosmic Watergate" might have required a full page - maybe even two.

a reply to: charolais

a reply to: IsaacKoi

Another outstanding thread, IsaacKoi!

I'm curious if running certain filters from third party manufacturers would help? One company that comes to mind is Topaz Labs (I have their entire set), specifically their sharpening filters.

There tons of plug ins and filters out there for PS, so there's gotta be something that'll help!

A star and a flag on effort alone.

Looking at those photos of the supposed debris, I have a hard time believing it came from advanced spacefaring extraterrestrials.

I want to believe as much as the next person, but to me this whole Roswell thing smacks of our beloved government WANTING us to believe it's alien in order to cover up any black projects they had.

originally posted by: MoshiachIusDei
a reply to: IsaacKoi

I don't think it's the words you need to focus on, but the 'not words'.

Here's what is being hidden, near the thumb.

93

Huh? Could you elaborate please? Ty.

Also, the "editing" of the image makes it very cartoon like and really just kind of cheapens the subject matter. No need for fancy graphics and all that jazz...IMHO, anyway.

a reply to: IsaacKoi

Flagged this earlier today, but, I have to respectfully step back from any further digging myself, thank you for the excellent thread-craftmanship, and settle for a jaunt through the pages, because this is just begging me to delve into it with far more time than I have to spare!

The memo has been one of the greatest things of interest to me for some time now, and this is what amounts to a further breakthrough. Its all so tantalizingly almost clear, it just feeds the intrigue receptors. And so I find myself talking myself into not staying up until 4am, but relying on the OP and follow up discussion to sift through. So thank you again OP and all whose posts I'll be reading here.

I've got some work to do this evening but when I'm finished I will download the images and mess around with them in Photoshop and with some of the actions/filters I have.

Time to see what those Topaz plug ins can really do!

Isaac you’re a hell of a guy

Thanks for your great contribution to sharing knowledge


Your efforts are well appreciated!


Its people like yourself who one day will bring us to this truth

a reply to: IsaacKoi

I've always been curious about this particular memo.

But I have one question for you, with enough funding and todays technology could this image in theory be processed fine enough to make at least 90% of the words legible?

Marcel said it was a massive debris field, and explained what the debris consisted of, of which nothing being shown in any of those photos were what was really found, as he claimed

Most likely what was in that Memo, was specific orders to be shown to the witnesses, to follow direction from Ramey, or was the description of the target balloon they were using in the photos.

Explaining the use of a top secret balloon in the news paper for the Russians to read about, makes no logical sense. especially when we were in the middle of a high alert status with a nuclear enemy

a reply to: IsaacKoi

All the various scans showing the text of the “Ramey memo” are generated from part of the single photograph of Ramey in which the text is visible.

So they have a physical printout of that photograph and they are scanning it and photographing it to generate all the other images? If that's the case, the limiting factor is really the resolution of the original image. Making more and more scans of that image is not going to help, all we need to focus on is the original image. Assuming the digital copy captures all the detail of the physical copy then it's all we need.

Also, I did some brief reading on super-resolution processing because I thought it could only work if you had multiple images taken at slightly different times or angles. Then you could combine them to create a single image with a higher resolution. But it seemed to me that it would be impossible to pull any extra resolution from a single image because it's basically just pulling extra information out of thin air.

However it turns out there is actually a way to enhance the resolution of a single image using some very clever techniques. It is sort of cheating in a way because what it does it use similarities between different parts of the same image. For example if the picture contains a bunch of flowers which look similar, you can combine them to create a more detailed representation of the flower with a higher resolution.

In the case of text I think this technique could actually work quite well because it could combine different letters which look similar to guess what the actual letter is. However the text on the Ramey Memo is at such a low level of detail it may be impossible to actually apply such methods to the image. The letters themselves barely seem to cover more than a pixel on the original image so it might be a pointless effort.

I think the approach mentioned by grey580 will probably yield the best results. Knowing the number of letters in each word does actually reveal quite a lot of information. The sequencing of words in English sentences is often extremely predictable if you know just a small number of words and their position in the sentence. I wrote an algorithm once to predict the next word in a sentence based on the last couple of words.