Roswell: The First Witness featuring Maj. Jesse Marcel's Secret Diary

originally posted by: KellyPrettyBear
Another way that 'Roswell' mimics Christianity say..

None of the Gospels were written at the time of purported events.. even Mark, the earliest one, was at least 40 years after the 'fact', with the overall number used for the Gospels being like 70 years.

That's 70 years for something that was so ordinary, so dull, that nobody cared to write it down, that 'grew wings' over the years, as it became more and more of a 'fish story' (ever increasing in size myth).

That's what happened with 'Roswell'.

I think that's a valid analogy though one which may not be popular in some circles, but I think that and Roswell are case studies in mythmaking. In both cases, the early accounts say one thing, and the later accounts get embellished with added stories. In that example Paul the Apostle was one of the earliest writers about Jesus who may have known him personally, and he writes a lot about Jesus but he doesn't appear to say anything about Jesus performing miracles. By the time the later writers told the story, Jesus was performing all kinds of miracles.

originally posted by: Guest101
A theory that crossed my mind is that the press release was just a tool to `squelch’ the flying saucer frenzy among the press and the public. Creating high expectations that end in a huge disappointment is a proven method for that. Maybe we are seeing something similar with TTSA. The irony would be that a balloon was used in both cases … ;-) (referring to the mylar balloon picture in Mellon's presentation).

The hypothesis makes sense in the case of Mellon's balloon photo that he claimed defied the laws of physics, because the balloon was just a #1 party balloon.

With mogul being a classified project, I would expect they would want to find something else like Mellon did, which wouldn't draw attention to a classified project.

I would like to know what you think is the reason why the Ramey memo shows the word "DISC" in quotes, one of the few phrases in that memo that many people seem to agree on.

Some people claim that says they had a disc. To me that's not a proper interpretation, because of the quotes.

This explains why I think the quotes are there, which is perfectly consistent with the memo calling the bundle of debris Brazel found a "Disc"

Scare Quotes

Example...

The Institute for Personal Knowledge is now offering a course in "self-awareness exercises".

Once again, the writer's quotes mean "this is their term, not mine", but this time there is definitely a hint of a sneer: the writer is implying that, although the Institute may call their course "self-awareness exercises", what they're really offering to do is to take your money in exchange for a lot of hot air.

Quotation marks used in this way are informally called scare quotes. Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase from which you, the writer, wish to distance yourself because you consider that word or phrase to be odd or inappropriate for some reason.

So whoever put quotes around that word "DISC" was saying that's someone else's term, but I'm distancing myself from that description. This is what I would expect when Brazel brings some junk in that's not much like a disc and inquires if he can get a reward for finding remains of a disc. The FBI memo did the same thing.

As for the second crash site, and the bodies, that seems analogous to KellyPrettyBear's post about how the miracles sprang up in later stories of Jesus that weren't there in the much earlier stories, another example of mythmaking. There's even a book called UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. One of the authors is Charles Moore, who obviously knows something about Roswell.

The myth, they say, is carefully and contentiously tended by a community of ""ufologists"" who act as ""culture heroes"" in attempting to liberate the truth from the government's clutches. One chapter further argues that the myth and community have many of the hallmarks of a religion.

That sounds like the Roswell myth to me and other people have also mentioned the parallels to religion with not only Roswell but ufology in general.

Great post. I concur.
a reply to: KellyPrettyBear

Arb, I apologize as I missed your earlier comments on Corso. One thing I want to respond to is your reference to the 2019 study by EW. I find it hilarious that he uses Phillip Klass as his basis for disputing Corso's claims and suggesting that people like Corso and astronauts have greater illusions about themselves to embellish or flat out lie about their experiences to the point of destroying their own reputations.

Philip Klass was most certainly on a US Government payroll to supply disinformation PRN>. even our resident skeptic, Mirageman, will find there were people doing this kind of work from the 60's.

www.youtube.com...

Also, for reference the Joe Rogan Jacques Vallee interview and he talks about Corso. It is a mixed bag, especially on the technology claims about FLIR, transistors, and FO. However, he stands by his story and is certainly in the camp of ET is present.

I don't know what happened at Roswell. There is a lot of wonderful critical analysis to be commended. Unfortunately, it also greatly saddens me considering the intelligence of some people who have posted here without any significant knowledge of what has happened since 1947. What I mean, of course, is a question for you Arb , Mirage, and Willtel, JO and a few others who seem most intent on your sweeping skeptical analysis, not just about Ros but on topic of ET, in general. It seems fairly consistent, after a few years, and hundreds , if not thousands of posts, is there seems proof is elusive and all the other observations from Roswell, Benny and Barney Hill, Lazar, Randelsham, to whatever ever else, are falsified, explainable, or hoaxes. Do any of you have a background in our national security apparatus? At least JO states/admits that some observations are unexplainable and he worked for NASA - (Not a Sivilian Agency, incidentally).

The National Security Act of 1947 was simply a coincidence that it happened a few months after Roswell, of course. All the other sighting of unexplained aerial phenomena since are barren or disbelievable because the premise or a foundation that Roswell was ET - was false. Once gain, I am not saying anyone is wrong about their respective Roswell hypothesis or theories - and only because I was not specially privy to any mention about Roswell, and that irritated me because of this simple fact:

I was aware of other crash sites - and that of itself, is critical, fundamental, and pivotal to the entire proposition of UFOlogy, that they exist. However, there haven't been any disclosed or confirmed ET craft that have crashed by any world government. So, where does this leave us - right back to 1947. Not a damn thing has changed from the Government and the MI compartmentalization that will lead you people down these rabbit holes in your search for the truth and it's a damn shame



a reply to: [post=25688382]Arbitrageur[/pos

originally posted by: play4keeps
...proof is elusive and all the other observations from Roswell, Benny and Barney Hill, Lazar, Randelsham, to whatever ever else, are falsified, explainable, or hoaxes.

You mean proof that UFOs are alien spaceships is elusive? Yes that is the case. I wouldn't say we have all the answers. I do think it's more than coincidence that the light Halt sees in his Rendlesham tape is not only in the direction of the Orfordness lighthouse, but is flashing at exactly the 5 second interval of same. But I'm not sure what to think of some other things on the tape, like the description of something that looks like molten metal. So I don't think it's all explained or even explainable in the sense that I can say for sure what caused the molten metal like description (though I have some ideas). And Burroughs medical records are a bit mysterious but to me these things like the medical records are more suggestive of possibly some kind of military related secret experiments, than aliens. So no I don't think we have all the answers and can't explain everything, but I haven't seen a need to invoke aliens to explain anything.

Do any of you have a background in our national security apparatus? At least JO states/admits that some observations are unexplainable and he worked for NASA - (Not a Sivilian Agency, incidentally).

Well let's look at Jim Oberg's "Null Hypothesis" since you bring him up specifically, though this is three decades old so he might have updated his thoughts since 1985:

The Black Box Approach To UFO Perceptions

The "Null Hypothesis" for UFO reports, of which I am one of a handful of champions, states that no extraordinary stimuli are required to produce the entire array of public UFO perceptions in all their rich variety, wonderment, and terror. Known phenomena have produced all types of what is commonly known as "UFO reports", including apparitions of flying disks, radar and radio interference, terrifying chases and "intelligent maneuvers", telepathic messages, "missing time" and hypnogenic narratives, recollections of participation in military UFO retrievals, actual "secret documents", and so forth. There seem to be no types of reports which have not been, on record, produced at some point or another by prosaic stimuli and/or circumstances.

We can consider the situation as a "black box" which consists of the human sensory/perceptual/mnemonic process. Into one end we insert any of a thousand various types of currency; we turn the crank and activate some undefined algorithm to process the raw stimulus; out the other end comes a "UFO report". We then collect and categorize these reports, and we attempt to define the inverse algorithm to roing back to records which the stimulus made on other witnesses (different algorithms!) or on other recording media (more hi- fidelity black boxes, with much simpler transformation algorithms). But often the inverse attempt fails.

That's just the first two paragraphs of the article. He goes into a lot of detail to support that hypothesis. I may not have believed that hypothesis before the Yukon UFO explanation surfaced, I mean how can you have a prosaic explanation for 30 eyewitnesses seeing a gigantic mothership 3-4 football fields long that was so close they felt like they could reach out and touch it like in this dramatization graphic:


But when I learned of the cause for that UFO sighting, a lot of my skepticism about the null hypothesis Jim Oberg proposed was addressed and I think he's on to something with that idea. More recently he's gathered even more support for the idea with other mass mothership sightings that had similar explanations, which I would have ruled out in the past, because witnesses say the mothership maneuvered, so it couldn't be a satellite entry, since satellite entries don't maneuver. And the Yukon case also caused electromagnetic interference which satellite entries don't do, so it couldn't have been a satellite entry, or rocket booster. But it was a rocket booster and the fact that someone had trouble with their car battery in a cold place was just coincidence. (Something that's happened to me at times even when I didn't see any UFO).

Note the null hypothesis doesn't say every UFO sighting can be explained or identified. I still can't explain the fuzzy dot in the FLIR video released by the pentagon, but what I can tell you with certainty is that it is not seen to be violating any laws of physics in the video, like the pilot Chad Underwood who made the video claims it shows. He sees an illusion of acceleration at the end but it's only loss of target lock and zoom change and there's really no discernable acceleration at all.

Not a damn thing has changed from the Government and the MI compartmentalization that will lead you people down these rabbit holes in your search for the truth and it's a damn shame

Hey if you have any proof of anything, I'd love to see it. But just mentioning a rabbit hole and saying the government keep secrets doesn't get us anywhere. Of course that's true and the new US policy as I understand it is to do a declassification review after 40 years, and then if there's no reason to keep the secret anymore, declassify the secret. In the case of Roswell it was 47 years later the air force report discussed the Mogul project which was secret in 1947.

I think most if not all skeptics would agree that there's no doubt secrets are being kept in the interest of national security. It may be fun to speculate what the secrets are, but, if we don't know, we don't know. There are some glimpses into classified technology, like projecting false swarms of radar targets to confuse an enemy, which sounds quite plausible but details will remain secret for good reason...if they were known, potential enemies would use that information to create more effective countermeasures.

I can't say for sure the government isn't hiding some alien craft, maybe they are, but I doubt it. What they seem to be doing is sewing confusion like the example mentioned earlier of Mellon's mylar party balloon shaped like the #1 that defied the laws of physics, but that was a distraction, the real FLIR video which the pilot says shows an object defying the laws of physics shows an optical illusion, so is the pilot really confused by that or has he been asked to lie to us to spread further confusion? I don't know. But just because I can't explain what the fuzzy dot in the FLIR video is, doesn't mean it's alien, so yes it's unexplainable in that we don't know what it is, but the claims it defies the laws of physics are false. In fact I've heard that claim so many times and there's never any proof of that, ever, and when we finally get a video that supposedly shows a physics-defying object, it doesn't prove anything either, except that the highly trained pilot either can't analyze the video properly or he's lying to us (probably because someone asked him to, for the good of his country's national security or something like that). I prefer to think the latter is more likely, since Underwood doesn't seem like an idiot who can't figure out what's going on in his video.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Look at the psychological profile of UFO witnesses that have been tested.
This study was done back in 1988 about the time of the Rendlesham forest UFO sighting but 41 years after Roswell.

psycnet.apa.org...

So does this imply autistic children are gullible?

In the popularized account of Kim Peek who wasn't actually autistic Raymond had to be told K mart sucks so he could chastise his doctor before leaving on the shiny new train.

I think the disinfo campaigns are actually empowering mental illness as this study describes.
scholarshare.temple.edu...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

For what it's worth, I 99% concur with your position on 'UFOs'.

I'm not going to argue about the 1% in this thread. I'm not even going to argue about that 1% on ATS.
I'm researching that 1%.

Now, might that 1% turn out to be nothing important, overall?

Certainly.

originally posted by: Slichter
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Look at the psychological profile of UFO witnesses that have been tested.

Two different browsers give me a blank page for that link that says "loading". That's odd because their home page loads just fine.

I think the disinfo campaigns are actually empowering mental illness as this study describes.
scholarshare.temple.edu...

I can see that link's abstract, but I'm not sure I see any link to disinfo campaigns, though after reading the story about Bennewitz maybe we shouldn't rule out the possibility. But Bennewitz had already been in a mental facility several times even before he was fed false information.

I think lots of ordinary and respectable people see unusual things they can't understand, which doesn't imply any hint of mental illness, but rather the frailties of human perception, like in the Yukon case where I have no reason to suspect any of the 30 eyewitnesses have any mental illness. Yet Dr. Hynek tried to argue that the only way so many people could all see a close encounter at the same time was if they all had temporary insanity,from page 116 of his book "The UFO Experience":

Hynek asks, "Do we have a phenomenon in which several people suffer temporary insanity at a given instant, but at no other time before or after?"

Before I understood what happened in the Yukon case that may have sounded like a reasonable question, and one which indicates a common line of thinking by some UFOlogists. But now I can appreciate the fallacy of that argument, and I say the Yukon case and similar cases suggest no insanity need be present for such mass sightings of UFO close encounters to occur, from prosaic phenomena.

However, in some cases, like this account of Betty Hill seeing 50-100 UFOs a night from "The Ufo Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating, and Reporting Ufo Sightings" by Allan Hendry, mental illness may indeed be a factor:



As for Jesse Marcel and the Roswell case, I am not trained to diagnose any mental illnesses, but my inexpert opinion is that someone who tells me they found many, many pieces of debris made out of some indestructible material, isn't quite right in the head, which is basically Marcel's story. If it's indestructible, why is it in pieces?

a reply to: KellyPrettyBear
Betty Hill was a 1%er, seeing 50 UFOs a night, since 99% of people don't see 50 UFOs a night. But that's probably not the 1% you're talking about. My guess is that the one percent you're talking about may have had experiences similar to what this scientist describes at the beginning of this video, but almost nobody except a scientist is likely to come to the same scientifically supported hypothesis that he describes as a possible explanation for his sighting:

Where are all the aliens? | Stephen Webb

Stephen Webb at 0:53: "Psychologists have shown we can't trust our brains to tell the truth, it's easy to fool ourselves. I saw something, but what's more likely, that I saw an alien spacecraft, or that my brain misinterpreted the data my eyes were giving it?"

You might be inquisitive enough to ask the same question he asks, but many other people are so arrogant about their perceptual abilities they would not consider the same possibility as Stephen Webb, hence we have UFO movies with titles like "I know what I saw", and nobody even wants to fund the response film "It's entirely possible you don't" starring Stephen Webb and James Oberg.

I'm not sure about his speculation on alien life, which very likely exists, but his point that intelligent life may be more rare than people suspect is worth considering. I was hoping SETI would have found something by now, more convincing than the "WOW" signal.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

A good response.

I have very compelling personal experiences not just once, but multiple times.

I mean, I about # my pants, being paralyzed or 10-15 minutes, after APPARENTLY
something broke into my house that was not human, etc.

Now could I be mentally ill? Of course.

(BTW.. I've had brain scans.. no strokes or brain issue that anyone can find).

Could I have misperceived something? Of course.

But can't move at all, except to barely breathe at like 7 PM on a workday
is very compelling. Trust me. If it had happened to you, it would have
caught your attention.

It's things like this event that make me want to investigate that 1%.

Now, if I'm wrong, that 'nothing happened', any of the times there were
events like this, then I will say, "I was wrong". But I suggest that you too
would be investigating this 1% if it had happened to you, and more than
once (though other events did not include a 'ufo').

For the record, i've only had 6 'epic' encounters with the 'unusual' in my
entire life; I'm not some flake who seeks such things or often experiences
such things.. Maybe a dozen relatively minor event's. so that's like 1
every 10 years (i'm approaching 60).

I can't speak for other people's 'impressive encounters'; some seem
to fit my profile, but as I can't absolutely solve my own, I won't go
ranting about what other people should do or believe.

This is a personal journey for me, to make sense of my own life.
It's up to others, to do the same for themselves.

All that said, I'd urge anyone in UFOlogy or spirituality or religion
or what not, to FIRST reach for the prosaic explanation, and never
give up on asking for that, as that is the path to (consensual) sanity.

The more you need infinite dimensions and aliens and what not,
to explain something the farther away you MAY be from mental health.

Kev

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'm not sure about his speculation on alien life, which very likely exists, but his point that intelligent life may be more rare than people suspect is worth considering. I was hoping SETI would have found something by now, more convincing than the "WOW" signal.

I"m with Isaac Arthur on this..

A prokaryotic cell capturing a bacterium and becoming a eukaryotic cell,
may have been a once in a universe type event. Or almost certainly a once
in a galaxy event, at most. Without something very energy efficient like
a mitochondria, you CANNOT get large/complex life .. you run out of
energy. THAT and the relative scarceness of Lithium may be the only
two 'early great filters' that you need to explain the 'great silence'.

So after taking into account all the factors of the rare complex life hypothesis
and the early and late great filters, logically?

We may POSSIBLY be the only 'advanced technical life' in half of the Universe,

and as you know, space is expanding so fast, we can never visit most of it,
even if we have a near lightspeed drive. You literally can't get to there from here,
even at 99% of light speed.

Now, do I think that rudimentary life may be relatively common?

Yes.

But any way you look at it, the odds that we are going to be the first species
in this part of the galaxy who MIGHT make it long enough to venture out even
to our closest stars?

It seems likely.

It may just be us, and we are assholes to each other.

Kev

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thank you for the links, Steven Webb talks about barrier statistics which could be more easily imagined by someone trained in cryptography.

Only the abstract was free, in this video she talks about autistics being vulnerable to covert manipulation.
She gives the example of *very clever* birds who hide food only when they are sure they are not observed.

Hidden stuff like the history of the NASA rocket program in the Sahara where they found flight 19 in CEOTTK.
Those were multi stage birds.




Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1988). Autistic children's understanding of seeing, knowing and believing. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6(4), 315–324. doi.org...
Abstract

18 autistic children (aged 7 yrs 1 mo to 18 yrs 6 mo) were found to have severe and specific difficulty with understanding mental states. Even with a mental age of 7 yrs, Ss mostly failed in tasks that are normally passed around age 3 and 4 yrs. Previous findings by J. Pemer et al (submitted for publication) on the poor understanding of false belief and on delayed grasp of the notion of limited knowledge were confirmed. Language delay was ruled out as a cause of failure, since a group of 12 children (aged 6 yrs 11 mo to 9 yrs 11 mo) with specific language impairment, matched for verbal mental age, performed at ceiling. It is proposed that autistic children are specifically impaired in metarepresentational capacity and that this impedes construction of a theory of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)