Roswell UFO witness: Sgt. Melvin E. Brown

It seems to me that skeptics will only consider changing their mind if they find the perfect case with evidence that is so strong that it balances their infinitesimal prior probability that a paranormal event could happen.

I don't think that's true in all cases. Though of course, as you say, there are many "skeptics" who seem unreasonably set in their ways and prioritise "winning" and "being right" above an objective search for truth.

Why don’t skeptics ever consider the cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence for a particular type of paranormal event?

They probably would and maybe do - but as far as Roswell is concerned the 'evidence' doesn't appear to weigh very much. And nowhere near as much as the counter-evidence and explanations.

What did you think of the literature on cryptomnesia?
 
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I wonder how much weight we should give this "circumstantial evidence", from the report linked above:

1639060918594.png

That's from the daughter of the rancher who found the debris. It's on page 40 and there are several other eyewitness accounts describing what amounted to a small bundle of "foil, sticks, paper and tape".
 
I present a 1996 video of Sgt. Melvin E. Brown's family telling how he had guarded a crashed UFO in the desert and had seen alien bodies under tarpaulin while accompanying them in a truck back to base. His daughter recounted him saying that the disk-shaped UFO was embedded in the sand so maybe it had crashed near White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (although his daughter might have been paraphrasing when she used the word "sand") .
Source: https://youtu.be/LCVeL47P6tA
I'm no expert on Roswell, but this story reminded me of the alleged crashed disk on the Plains of San Augustin, 200 miles from Roswell but in the same time frame and investigated by Anthony Bragalia.

Jesse Marcel seems to have mentioned
another, similar site that was found much farther away and to the west of the site that he had investigated. He said that a "surveyor" there had also come across UFO crash debris
The "surveyor" could have been Grady L. "Barney" Barnett, who was with the US Soil Conservation Service in New Mexico.
Barnett had related to some friends that while out working on projects around the Plains of San Augustin (also spelled San Agustin), he had encountered a disk-shaped spaceship the color of dirty stainless steel, about twenty or thirty feet in diameter. While examining the disk, a small group of university research archaeologists on a dig arrived and also encountered the crash and corpses.

The bodies were entirely unlike anything that Barnett and his companions had ever seen. They had huge hairless heads and were outfitted in one-piece grayish suits with no belts or zippers. According to information provided by Barnett's friends and associates (who spoke publicly about the event after his death), soldiers then soon arrived. A cordon was put in place around the crash site and the civilians were admonished that it was their duty to country not to say anything to anyone of what they had seen.
Source
 
Experts can correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Barnett been discredited? His "account" was apparently given by a (presumably) ufologist friend to the authors of the 1980 book; then the date and location changed for the 1991 book; then it was dismissed as a hoax in the 1994 book.

Also, there were apparently no records of the Plains of San Agustin or aliens in his/his wife's diary and the "small group of university archaeologists" was later changed from the University of Pennsylvania to Texas Tech - at least one of whom was identified and no corroborating evidence was found.

The whole thing smells of a desire to sell books.
 
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I'm no expert on Roswell, but this story reminded me of the alleged crashed disk on the Plains of San Augustin, 200 miles from Roswell but in the same time frame and investigated by Anthony Bragalia.
As discussed above, the whole Roswell thing is a mess and over the years many parts from other UFO incidents have been cobbled together with it to create, and continually re-create, the myth.

The Roswell Incident (1980) was the first book to introduce the controversial second-hand stories of civil engineer Grady "Barney" Barnett and a group of archaeology students from an unidentified university encountering wreckage and "alien bodies" while on the Plains of San Agustin before being escorted away by the Army.[18] The second-hand Barnett stories were described by ufologists as the "one aspect of the account that seemed to conflict with the basic story about the retrieval of highly unusual debris from a sheep ranch outside Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947".[31]

Many alleged first-hand accounts of the Roswell incident actually contain information from the Aztec, New Mexico, UFO incident,[32] a hoaxed flying saucer crash which gained national notoriety after being promoted by journalist Frank Scully in his articles and a 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. The hoax included stories of humanoid bodies and metals with unusual properties.[33][32][34]
Content from External Source

The "surveyor" could have been Grady L. "Barney" Barnett, who was with the US Soil Conservation Service in New Mexico.
"Barney's" story first appears in the 1980 book The Roswell Incident based on research from the late '70s, so roughly 30 years after it supposedly happened. He was not considered reliable by some latter Roswell fans.

A 1992 UFO conference attempted to achieve a consensus among the various scenarios portrayed in Crash at Corona and UFO Crash at Roswell; however, the publication of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell "resolved" the Barnett problem by simply ignoring Barnett and citing a new location for the alien craft recovery, including a new group of archaeologists not connected to the ones the Barnett story cited.[50]
Content from External Source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident

The important thing for this thread, is that many of the elements of Beverly's stories about her dad's stories where in print and available a full 8 years prior to his death. And she fully admits to reading about Roswell in the years between his death and this interview.
 
The important thing for this thread, is that many of the elements of Beverly's stories about her dad's stories were in print and available a full 8 years prior to his death. And she fully admits to reading about Roswell in the years between his death and this interview.

That's where I'd put my money. I think some people underestimate - or aren't aware of - the ability of the human mind to weave complex and even believable stories from a mixture of forgotten information, true memory, imagination, delusion, and media influence, etc.

Another Roswell-linked figure who seems to demonstrate this quite well is Gerald Anderson. He contacted the makers of a 1989 'Unsolved Mysteries' documentary claiming that when he was 5-years-old he and his family had come across a crashed saucer on the Plains of San Agustin, that one of the aliens was still alive, and that a University of Pennsylvania archeology professor tried to communicate with the surviving ET. Under hypnosis he recalled the name of the professor and was able to help produce a 'police sketch' of him. The professor was located - closely matching the sketch - but found to be a teacher of American history and anthropology at the New Mexico high school Anderson attended in the late-50s.

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/docs/SUN/SUN14.pdf

Anderson also makes an appearance in the slightly more digestible 232-page 'The Roswell Report', where he is quoted as saying the crashed vehicle looked like a blimp, the bodies looked like dolls, and that he saw it from a distance (a full lengthy interview included in the appendix gives much more and different (and suspiciously vivid for a 5-year-old) detail - indeed, in this interview he remembers Buskirk's name without the aid of hypnosis, so I guess this was given some time after his initial contact and when it had begun to settle into a fully-formed narrative).
 
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It seems certain that Barney told his story of finding a crashed disk somewhere in "the Flats" to several people. Some of them claimed he also mentioned bodies that looked alien.
The exact date and location, however, cannot be determined. That is where most researchers seem to 'crash' themselves.
Source

In that sense Barney's story is similar to the story of Melvin Brown where an exact date and location also cannot be determined, but a crashed disk with bodies is described.

What boggles me about the Roswell case: how did they cross the gap between torn foil, broken sticks, and rubber bands found in the desert and an official press release stating a "flying disk" was found?? Allegedly it wasn't even possible to put the pieces together...
 
What boggles me about the Roswell case: how did they cross the gap between torn foil, broken sticks, and rubber bands found in the desert and an official press release stating a "flying disk" was found?? Allegedly it wasn't even possible to put the pieces together...

it was a craze that summer. and all the geek men who want to believe in aliens, got over excited. (even though the original guy never even said it was disk/saucer shaped.. the media just spun the story wrong).

Article:
Sometime between mid-June and early July 1947, rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel found wreckage on his sizable property in Lincoln County, New Mexico, approximately 75 miles north of Roswell. Several “flying disc” and “flying saucer” stories had already appeared in the national press that summer, leading Brazel to believe the wreckage—which included rubber strips, tinfoil, and thick paper—might be something of that ilk.


...
The next day, the RAAF released a statement, writing that, “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.”


add:
1639073808608.png
 
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Why don’t skeptics ever consider the cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence for a particular type of paranormal event?
In addition to my previous post, please consider this:

Let's assume we have 100 UFO sightings, and we know 1 of these sightings is genuine, while the 99 others are not. Does the "circumstantial evidence" for those 99 non-sightings contribute to the evidence for the 1 sighting?

None of the no-UFO events has made the actual UFO event any more or less likely. It's kinda like saying, I are 99 apples and liked them, therefore I'm certain I'll like a banana.

To cumulate evidence for paranormal events, you have to have paranormal events in the first place. But so far, every report that has been properly resolved has not shown one.

The exception is ball lightning, where we do have evidence that it exists, and some ideas how it occurs; so now we can look at unresolved ball lightning reports and say that some of these are probably real. We actually have some "bananas" here.

But as long as you don't know what you are cumulating, you can't just make all of that evidence support your favored outcome just because it's convenient.
 
how did they cross the gap between torn foil, broken sticks, and rubber bands found in the desert and an official press release stating a "flying disk" was found??
Assuming the "top secret Project Mogul" balloon crash is indeed what was found (i believe it was) I'd expect that cover stories to make adversarial-intelligence less likely to look,at all, and to look for the wrong stuff if they do, would be put out ASAP. The "saucer" story was put out very quickly, then retracted and replaced with a much-less-interesting (and so less likely to attract attention) weather-balloon story, which had the advantage of being close enough to the truth that details that leaked out would seem pretty weather-balloon-like. The one thing that they couldn't say was "It was a top secret spy balloon project with which we hope to repeatedly violate Soviet airspace for espionage, if we can get it to stop crashing like this."

Once the "saucer story" was out and had been trumpeted in the media, though, the sort of heterodyning of rumors, half memories, modified memories and made up stuff that could be expected to snowball, regardless of the more prosaic weather balloon follow up story. Especially since the incident did have a top secret military project hiding in the center of it, about which the military would of course say as little as possible.

That's my take, anyway.

Certainly the pictures I have seen that are claimed to show the debris look like smashed radar-reflectors from a balloon, being made of what appears to be foil, sticks and cords. If a super-high-tech saucer crashed there, I'd want to know why they seem to have been carrying balsa-and-foil radar reflectors suitable for use in balloons. :)
 
What boggles me about the Roswell case: how did they cross the gap between torn foil, broken sticks, and rubber bands found in the desert and an official press release stating a "flying disk" was found?

Yeah, that's a bit of a weird one. The standard story seems to be that neither Marcel nor Blanchard knew what it was and that Blanchard told Haut to put out the press release before Marcel had flown it to Fort Worth.

The Smithsonian article, however, says that "Marcel chose to make a public statement" and that, according to Roger Launius, "a flying saucer was easier to admit than Project Mogul" - which seems a bit of a stretch to me.

In any case, I guess the material was then identified and the weather balloon story put out. Seems a bit unsmart not to at least wait till either the debris could be identified or a better cover story could be concocted - one rancher thinking he's found a flying saucer hardly seems like it would constitute much in the way of pressure - but, then again, this is the US military we're talking about.

Perhaps Blanchard and/or Marcel were UFO believers who got overexcited and were swept along and wanted to share the "good news" as soon as possible. It's hard to imagine what it must have been like back in 1947 in the midst of a craze and in the days before the idea that the government would actually want to hide such a thing became popular. That explanation seems pretty plausible to me.
 
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It seems to me that skeptics will only consider changing their mind if they find the perfect case with evidence that is so strong that it balances their infinitesimal prior probability that a paranormal event could happen.

Why don’t skeptics ever consider the cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence for a particular type of paranormal event?
Because we are skeptics Lol. We don't believe in the paranormal. We are swayed by fact based, scientifically proven evidence. And we love poking holes in these types of stories where the evidence is non-existent. Someone's daughter that is telling a story that her dad told her years ago has no merit.
 
This guy at Above Top Secret has put together some Project Mogul documentation

That's very conclusive - and utterly convincing.

To summarise:

- Many Project Mogul balloons launched the first week of June 1947 from near Alamogordo
- One crashed and was recovered on June 5th 25 miles SE of Roswell
- Wreckage was discovered on June 14th by Brazel (80 miles from Alamogordo)
- Description of materials matches construction of Project Mogul equipment:

1639076096601.png

- On August 21st issues were raised because balloons were coming down near Roswell when they thought they would come down at White Sands

And the rest of the post is very good too.

Because we are skeptics. We don't believe in the paranormal. We are swayed by fact based, scientifically proven evidence.

Steady on. Some of us believe in certain things paranormal. And though we'd obviously hope we're siding with facts rather than fiction not all of us are slaves to scientific dogma. ;)
 
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The exception is ball lightning, where we do have evidence that it exists, and some ideas how it occurs; so now we can look at unresolved ball lightning reports and say that some of these are probably real. We actually have some "bananas" here.
The evidence for ball lightning is not stronger than that for UFOs, just more easily accepted. Cases like the Iran F4 case, the Belgian wave, the Zomorra case... are pretty compelling, just as the Nimitz tic tac case (the only part that has been debunked is the claim of sudden moves in the ATFLIR footage).

As compelling as the evidence for ball lightning:
The presumption of its existence has depended on reported public sightings, which have produced inconsistent findings. Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a distinct physical phenomenon remains unproven
Source
 
Bringing us right back around to the start of the thread - my dad told me many years ago that a ball of lightning came whooshing through the house when he was a kid. Or maybe my gran told me. Or both.

Then again, it could have been something someone told them or they overheard.

(True story.)
 
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As compelling as the evidence for ball lightning:

Source
That wikipedia paragraph is supported by a 2008 article. However, further down on the wikipedia page, we see this:

An experimental investigation of this effect, published in 2007, reported producing "luminous balls with lifetime in the order of seconds" by evaporating pure silicon with an electric arc. Videos and spectrographs of this experiment have been made available. This hypothesis got significant supportive data in 2014, when the first ever recorded spectra of natural ball lightning were published.
Content from External Source
So there's one type of ball lightning that's been produced in the lab and observed in nature.

The Hessdalen lights have been recurrent enough to not doubt their existence, either, though they remain somewhat unexplained.

This is much better evidence than we ever had for alien spacecraft.
 
Why don’t skeptics ever consider the cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence for a particular type of paranormal event?
Has there ever been any solid cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence? ....Has there ever been any compelling evidence? I can’t think of any. It should work both ways. 6.4 billion smartphone users in the world, with a video in their pocket, not including drone video, CCTV etc, and yet nothing substantial, yet alone cumulative has ever been fully proven. The paranormal world is simply driven by a desire to sell books and make videos and TV Shows. It’s a multi million pound/dollar business. Roswell, for example, keeps getting dragged up because it makes money. It’s been flogged to death, yet still several books on the subject come out every year. Yet Roswell happened in 1947 over 70 years ago.

This original topic has gone more off thread than a broken sewing machine, so perhaps it may be worth starting a new thread, with the wealth of incredible talent and investigative minds we have on MB along the lines of, “is there any paranormal event that you just can not explain”. Hands up please.
 
Why obsessing with the claim that the report of bodies were explained by USAF dummies thrown out from plane during experiments, when bodies were a secondary (and far-fetched) aspect of the story ?

At first I thought that the USAF were trying to counteract the claims in Ray Santelli’s fake Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction film released in 1995.

Actually the USAF Roswell Report was dated 1995 itself so it’s very unlikely that they were replying to Ray Santelli’s claims of alien bodies unless they somehow got wind of the fake alien autopsy film well before it was released to the public.
 
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What did you think of the literature on cryptomnesia?

Wikipedia says:

Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory biaswhereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke,[1] not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

I don’t know where cryptoamnesia is suspected in the Roswell case. No one is claiming to have a new inspiration about a crashed UFO only for it to be proved that it was a forgotten memory of a real event. False memory syndrome maybe but not cryptoamnesia.
 
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I wonder how much weight we should give this "circumstantial evidence", from the report linked above:

1639060918594.png

That's from the daughter of the rancher who found the debris. It's on page 40 and there are several other eyewitness accounts describing what amounted to a small bundle of "foil, sticks, paper and tape".

To be fair, here are some other testimonies from witnesses of the debris, cited in this USAF report.

Jesse A. Marcel, MD (son of the late Major Jesse Marcel; 11 years old at the time of the incident). Affidavit dated May 6, 1991.”. . .There were three categories of debris: a thick, foil like metallic gray substance; a brittle, brownish-black plasticlike material, like Bakelite; and there were fragments of what appeared to be Ibeams. On the inner surface of the I-beam, there appeared to be a type of writing. This writing was a purple-violet hue, and it had an embossed appearance. The figures were composed of curved, geometric shapes. It had no resemblance to
Russian, Japaneseor any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics,but it had no animal-like characters. . .”

Loretta Proctor (former neighbor of rancher W.W. Brazel). Affidavit dated May 5,1991. ”. .. Brazel came to my ranch and showed my husband and me a piece of material he said came from a large pile of debris on the property he managed. The piece he brought was brown in color, similar to plastic . .. . ‘Mac’ said the other material on the property looked like aluminum foil. It was very flexible and wouldn’t crush or burn. There was also something he described as tape which had printing on it. The color of the printing was a kind of purple ....’’

Sally Strickland Tadolini (neighbor of W.W. Brazel; nine years old in 1947). Affidavit dated September 27, 1993. “. . . What Bill showed us was a piece of what I still think as fabric. It was something like aluminum foil, something like satin, something like well-tanned leather in its toughness, yet was not precisely like any one of those materials. ...It was about the thickness of very fine kidskin glove leather and a dull metallic grayish silver, one side slightly darker than the other. I do not remember it having any design or embossing on it .. . .”

Not cited here, their own lieutenant colonel, Jesse Marcel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Marcel), who was probably more qualified than the witnesses above to know what the debris were : “It was not anything of this earth. Being an intelligence officer I was familiar with all types of material in aircraft and air travel.” How could this guy be promoted at the end of year 1947 ?

What material looks like foil, is thin like it, but cannot be crushed ? This does not look like what is shown on the official picture :

1639143458293.png

I was expecting to find something in the USAF report on why people would have been puzzled by pieces of foil as mundane as the one we see in the picture above. Or if there was a cover-up to protect Mogul, which components of it would align with the witnesses. Nada, or maybe it's buried deep somewhere, but I missed it.

A good way to stop speculations would have been for the USAF to provide a picture of a Mogul balloon from up close, showing the sticks and "flower tape". Maybe they never took such a picture, or kept any material from the balloons ? Add this to the press release reporting the crash of a flying disk, how to be surprised people believe there was a cover-up ? This is a weird story for sure.

Anyway, that is to say I find the USAF report very weak in explaining what it was.
 
At first I thought that the USAF were trying to counteract the claims in Ray Santelli’s fake Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction film released in 1995.

Actually the USAF Roswell Report was dated 1995 itself so it’s very unlikely that they were replying to Ray Santelli’s claims of alien bodies unless they somehow got wind of the fake alien autopsy film well before it was released to the public.
Yes they simply had to explain (convincingly) that the debris were from Mogul, and not discuss the bodies at all since it had nothing to do with the Mogul crash site and the original reports. It's almost like if they aimed to create even more confusion on this one.
 
What material looks like foil, is thin like it, but cannot be crushed ?
plastic-coated foil won't crinkle like plain foil does. or metal-coated plastic foil.
The figures were composed of curved, geometric shapes. It had no resemblance to
Russian, Japaneseor any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics,but it had no animal-like characters. . .”
greek?
handwritten alpha, beta, gamma symbols?
Example-of-Isolated-Handwritten-Greek-Characters-from-the-Proposed-Data-Base.png
(Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure...rs-from-the-Proposed-Data-Base_fig2_327986248 )
If parts of the foil were intended as a cosmic radiation shield, that might be plausible.
 
plastic-coated foil won't crinkle like plain foil does. or metal-coated plastic foil.

If parts of the foil were intended as a cosmic radiation shield, that might be plausible.
I don't find information on such a coated foil in the description of Mogul, but again there is so much stuff in this report it's hard to navigate.

I realized the discussion of alien dummies is in a subsequent report, that's the one I was thinking about :
https://media.defense.gov/2010/Oct/27/2001330219/-1/-1/0/AFD-101027-030.pdf

So they focused on Mogul in the first report, and the alien bodies in this latter one.
 
greek?
handwritten alpha, beta, gamma symbols?
more likely he is referring to the "flowers" many others talk about in the report.
This writing was a purple-violet hue, and it had an embossed appearance.
‘Mac’ said the other material on the property looked like aluminum foil. It was very flexible and wouldn’t crush or burn. There was also something he described as tape which had printing on it. The color of the printing was a kind of purple ....’’

Article:
Then it was even a bigger joke when it turned out that because of wartime scarcities of materials, the tape that they used to assemble these targets, the reflecting material on the balsa frames, was some kind of a pinkish purple tape with a heart and flower design on it. This was, again, a big flap.


Article:
The witnesses have recalled small pink/purple “flowers” that appeared1 to be some sort of writing that couldn’t be deciphered. These figures were printed on tape that sealed the seams of the of the radar target. The radar targets, sometimes called corner reflectors, had been manufactured during or shortly after World War 11, and due to shortages, the manufacturer, a toy company, used whatever resources were available. This toy company used plastic tape with pink/purple flowers and geometric designs in the construction of its toys and, in a time of shortage, used it on the government contract for the corner reflectors. A depiction of these figures, as described by C.B. Moore, is shown in Attachment 10.


Article:
He related that a fellow USAAF officer, John E. Peterson, monitored the procurement of the targets and ”thought it was the biggest joke in the world that they had to go to a toy manufacturer” to make the radar targets and an “even a bigger joke when . . . the reflecting material on the balsa frames was some kind of a pinkish purple tape with hearts and flpwers

https://www.afhra.af.mil/Portals/16/documents/AFD-101201-038.pdf



What material looks like foil, is thin like it, but cannot be crushed ?
when were these things invented?
1639147516158.png
 
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@deirdre I know the references you cite, but as much as there is no evidence for exotic material, my point is there isn't either for this flower tape. Which toy company ? If the tape was used for toys, is there any trace of it somewhere ? I know it's old but it was "only" 50 years old when the USAF report was made, there should have been a way to find evidence for this tape no ? This and explanations for the "memory" material are big holes in the USAF report. Maybe they were just lazy, but on the other hand they detailed some other things a lot when it was not really needed.
 
To be fair, here are some other testimonies from witnesses of the debris, cited in this USAF report.

Something notable here is that Jesse Marcel never said, in any of the many interviews he gave to Ufologists or television crews, that the debris shown to newspaper photographers in Fort Worth was different from the debris he found at the Foster Ranch. He did say it was not all of it. From an interview in the film UFOs Are Real, quoted in Roswell: The Major’s Testimony from the Saucers That Time Forgot blog:

The newsmen saw very little of the material, a very small portion of it, and none of the important things like these members that have these members that had these hieroglyphics or markings on. They wanted me to tell them about it and I couldn't say anything. And when the general came in, he told me not to say anything, that he would handle it.

So we have the credible witnesses all agreeing on a foil-like material, and a few of them ascribing to it incredible properties. We also do not have much detail on the efforts of witnesses to try to break either the foil, or the balsa wood sticks, both of which some witnesses said possessed incredible toughness. For instance, Loretta Proctor said she had a pencil-sized fragment of the balsa-like material, and could not break it (quoed in Karl Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, 2001. pp. 163). At the same time, the size of the fragment implies that the sticks were broken at some point, such as the collision.

I see a couple of possibilities here: 1) whatever came down at the Foster Ranch in June 1947 was comprised of recognizable materials, but which had properties far beyond anything known at the time and possibly today, or 2) some people who handled some pieces of the debris did not try that hard to damage it (Marcel was only told by "one of the boys" that the foil could not be damaged by sledgehammer, he did not see any such thing himself), believed it somewhat exotic at the time (both Brazel and Marcel did not think it was a balloon), and over 30 years its exotic-ness grew in their memories.

I think the closest thing to a "smoking gun" in the Roswell case is the tape used to construct the radar reflectors used in Mogul balloon trains. It was recalled by witnesses who ascribed incredible properties to some of the materials, and those who did not. It was also recalled by physicist Charles B. Moore, who participated in the NYU balloon group research that was eventually revealed to have been part of Project Mogul, and by a Colonel Trakowski who was involved in the classified aspects of the program (from the USAF Roswell Report). Unfortunately, I do not know of any surviving remnants of this tape, photographs, etc.
1639149749751.png
EDIT: TheCholla, from your last post, which I missed, it sounds like you are probably familiar with all of this, and your point about the lack of physical evidence for the tape is well taken. I mostly wanted to add the part about Marcel confirming the debris in the photos is the debris he collected.
 
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I searched the USAF report for the word "tape" and found various witness statements corroborating the excerpts below:
SmartSelect_20211210-162134_Samsung Notes.jpgSmartSelect_20211210-162648_Samsung Notes.jpgSmartSelect_20211210-162851_Samsung Notes.jpgSmartSelect_20211210-163316_Samsung Notes.jpg
I'm not really surprised they couldn't recall the name of the company or produce any tape 50 years later.
 
I don’t know where cryptoamnesia is suspected in the Roswell case. No one is claiming to have a new inspiration about a crashed UFO only for it to be proved that it was a forgotten memory of a real event.

It's posted to suggest other alternatives beside the two solid opposites of truth or lies. If highly intelligent people can forget they've heard a song or read a story and then have that song/story reshape itself in their subsconscious and come out in a new form that initially suggests they created it themselves then it doesn't seem unlikely that Melvin Brown could have unconsciously reshaped information that had come to him in TV shows and books and combined it with his own long ago life - and, indeed, that his daughter could have also unconsciously combined his stories with what she'd read/watched. And to her retelling those stories they would be true accounts and memories which wouldn't come across as lies to others.

Really, it's a further answer to this question:

How does a skeptic deal with this testimony? He has to say that either Sgt. Brown or his family were lying or both.

ie, we don't have to say that they're lying - there are several other possibilities, even if the stories aren't true.
 
It's posted to suggest other alternatives beside the two solid opposites of truth or lies. If highly intelligent people can forget they've heard a song or read a story and then have that song/story reshape itself in their subsconscious and come out in a new form that initially suggests they created it themselves then it doesn't seem unlikely that Melvin Brown could have unconsciously reshaped information that had come to him in TV shows and books and combined it with his own long ago life - and, indeed, that his daughter could have also unconsciously combined his stories with what she'd read/watched. And to her retelling those stories they would be true accounts and memories which wouldn't come across as lies to others.

Really, it's a further answer to this question:



ie, we don't have to say that they're lying - there are several other possibilities, even if the stories aren't true.
We may also want to "zoom out" a bit on the issue of lying. The same logic can be applied to say that either it was something conventional, likely a Project Mogul balloon train, or a far greater number of witnesses were lying, including all of the people who are known to have had the most thorough and prolonged contact with the debris found by Brazel on the Foster Ranch. Accepting that there will always be some number of liars, the Mogul/conventional explanation requires a great deal fewer liars than the crashed flying saucer explanation.

And for what it's worth, here's what Karl Pflock, author of the essential Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (2001), and a longtime researcher of the case (going from believer to skeptic) had to say about the testimony of Brown's children (Pflock 2001, pp. 103):
According to an account attributed by his daughter, Beverly Bean, to the late Sgt. Melvin E. Brown, the strange bodies found at the crash site were placed on ice and trucked back to the base late the same afternoon. Bean claims her father was a member of the recovery detail on the crash site. She says he rode back to the base in the back of a truck with the bodies, which he saw when, against orders, he lifted the tarpaulin covering them. At the base, Bean says, her father was posted as a member of the guard detail at the hangar where the bodies were stored temporarily.
[...]
The Brown-Bean story presents a number of difficulties. First, it is secondhand. Unfortunately, the late Sergeant Brown left no written or other record of his experiences, and all we have are the recollections of what his daughter Beverly says he told her. His widow and oldest daughter refuse to discuss the matter [Bradley Johansson note: this was obviously no longer true at the point the video posted here was made], and despite concerted efforts by myself and others, Beverly has never responded to requests that she sign an affidavit attesting to her account.

[Bradley Johansson note: Pflock then explains that the alleged description of the bodies differs from that given by others who claimed to have seen or claimed to have been told about bodies at Roswell]

Finally, Brown was a cook, assigned to Squadron "K" of the 509th, not a military policeman or any other sort of security or intelligence/counterintelligence specialist. Given the highly sensitive nature of the recovery operations, it seems most unlikely cooks would be detailed to such duty. Moreover, standard military procedure is that mess and medical personnel are the last to be taken from their primary duties for other assignments, and then only in extreme situations. Roswell AAF was a huge base with thousands of personnel assigned, many of them in redundant staff positions (e.g. squadron clerks), so if there was a need for extra hands on the Lincoln County sites [Bradley Johansson note: dubious claimed secondary crash sites appearing in Ufological literature], there was a substantial pool from which to draw before resorting to a raid on the mess hall kitchens.
 
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It's posted to suggest other alternatives beside the two solid opposites of truth or lies. If highly intelligent people can forget they've heard a song or read a story and then have that song/story reshape itself in their subsconscious and come out in a new form that initially suggests they created it themselves then it doesn't seem unlikely that Melvin Brown could have unconsciously reshaped information that had come to him in TV shows and books and combined it with his own long ago life - and, indeed, that his daughter could have also unconsciously combined his stories with what she'd read/watched. And to her retelling those stories they would be true accounts and memories which wouldn't come across as lies to others.

Really, it's a further answer to this question:



ie, we don't have to say that they're lying - there are several other possibilities, even if the stories aren't true.

Ok so you’re saying that cryptoamnesia can be the mechanism that produces a false memory. Fair enough.
 
I wonder how much weight we should give this "circumstantial evidence", from the report linked above:

1639060918594.png

That's from the daughter of the rancher who found the debris. It's on page 40 and there are several other eyewitness accounts describing what amounted to a small bundle of "foil, sticks, paper and tape".

What about the foil material that Frankie Rowe, daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, claims she witnessed? She said that she crushed it in her hand and it felt like there was nothing there. When she opened her hand it dropped on the table and spread out like a liquid.

This is not consistent with the behavior of a metal foil with a rubber backing as described above.

Here she is describing the foil in a UK channel 4 (not BBC) documentary:


Source: https://youtu.be/eSoRHwKWRxM&t=385s
 
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What about the foil material that Frankie Rowe, daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, claims she witnessed? She said that she crushed it in her hand and it felt like there was nothing there. When she opened her hand it fell on the table and spread out as easily as liquid.
Frankie Rowe is another of those claimed witnesses whose story cannot be connected to the known events at Roswell. This has all been debunked long ago, and I recommend looking into some of the skeptical literature around it. This may not be the best place for recycling old videos/claims. Quoting Karl Pflock, who investigated the story and interviewed Rowe:
There are numerous problems with Frankie Rowe's tale. Most obvious is the basic account of the fire all to the crash site which her father and other Roswell firemen answered. Since [Rowe's father] Dan Dwyer reportedly saw two beings in body gags (or at least two body bags with something in them), it would appear the army was already there with security in place. How did Dwyer and his fellow firefighters get so close? If they did manage to ge through the military cordon somehow, why were they not detained and sworn to secrecy on the spot, precluding Rowe from ever hearing the story? And who called the town fire department in the first place? The military certainly would not have done so.

There is another difficulty on this point. As part of my investigation of Rowe's story, I interviewed three retired members of the Roswell Fire Department who served with Rowe's father at the time of the incident. I also discussed the matter with a former member of the Roswell City Council who served on the council committee responsible for public safety policies. None of the former firefighters remembered the department making such a run. Moreover, they and the fomer councilman said it was standing department policy not to respond to calls outside the city limits, even if they were close in - let alone thirty or thirty-five miles out - because of concerns about not being able to respond to in-city calls if the department's equipment was committed elsewhere (the department had only two trucks in July 1947). The department chief - in July 1947, Rue Crissman - had the authority to make exceptions in extreme emergencies, but this was only rarely exercised. No official record of his alleged exception has been found, although Kevin Randle reports finding a record of another in June 1947, the month before.
[...]
Further, Rowe's description of the material she says she saw at the fire station differs considerably from those of all others who claim to have seen the saucer wreckage. No one else has described anything that behaved like quicksiklver or that could be "wadded up into nothing." Moreover, it hardly seems likely a state trooper worried about the army discovering he had palmed a piece of debris would have stopped by the firehouse and so casually shown it around. And if he did so, is it likely he would have permitted his friends to attempt to cut, tear, or burn his souvenir?

(Pp. 63-64)
It goes on, but is somewhat more obscure and interwoven with other things Pflock is dealing with in that chapter.
 
I was expecting to find something in the USAF report on why people would have been puzzled by pieces of foil as mundane as the one we see in the picture above.
I'm certain that if the average person came across a good sized sheet of Kapton out in the woods, they'd be similarly perplexed by it.
 
What about the foil material that Frankie Rowe, daughter of fireman Dan Dwyer, claims she witnessed?

That sounds incredibly silly to me (though it did make me laugh, so that's a good thing).

Why would firemen be involved?

Though I do notice that "her greatest joy was going to the UFO museum on a regular basis" and that nephew and his wife are among the locals making money out of it (they have an alien gift store in Roswell called Invasion Station).

Seems like among the locals there are those who have always thought it was nonsense and those who see business opportunities and promote it (and maybe those who inhabit both groups).

The story of how the crash site has moved over the years - sometimes depending on who can make dollars from it - is quite amusing and telling.
 
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