Three months after the May 5th screening the British press has at last begun to notice Ray Santilli's "Roswell" film footage and the fact that this will be shown nationwide in a Channel 4 TV special in just two weeks time. Despite fairly even handed articles in The Guardian and The Times, other newspapers have approached the story in heavy debunk mode starting from the position that, since we know there are no such things as extraterrestrials, the film must obviously be a hoax.
The three principles of debunking, as enunciated by Stanton Friedman, have been put to full use as never before:
(1) What the public doesn't know, I'm not going to tell them.
(2) Don't bother me with the facts, my mind's made up.
(3) If you can't attack the data, attack the people.
Not only have some newspapers adopted these tactics, but also one UFO group, which has unleashed a series of broadsides against Santilli including the charge that his company was in receivership and that his close colleague, Chris Carey, was director of a company that made plastic dummies for theatrical and movie purposes. Both these things turned out to be untrue. The latest charge, which comes from Graham Birdsall, is that Santilli is now being investigated by Britain's Serious Fraud Squad. Santilli tells me this is utter nonsense. We shall just have to wait to see whether this allegation has any more substance than the previous ones.
Having said that, one cannot deny that there is still a high probability that the film footage is not what it purports to be. Even so, a study of the known facts is more to the point than the character assassination and blind prejudice which is coming from so many directions. One recent development is the release of the cameraman's own story which I myself find frankly unbelievable.
To summarize, the cameraman ("Jack Barnett") is dispatched from Washington DC, on the orders of General McMullen, on a special assignment. He flies out of Andrews Field with 16 other officers and medical personnel to Wright Field (which he calls Wright-Patterson, although this name came later). They collect more men and equipment and then fly on to Roswell in a C54. From Roswell they drive to the cordoned off crash site, which is now specified as being just south-west of Socorro, N.M.
[The site, which I was previously told was just outside an Apache Indian reservation, is now said to be quite near the "Apache Creek" National Wildlife Refuge. This presumably refers to the Bosque del Apache NWR which is 20 miles south of Socorro and straddles the Rio Grande. There is a world of difference between an Indian reservation and a National Wildlife Refuge, but let that be... there's worse to come! Nevertheless, the Socorro location is more in keeping with the "Barney" Barnett crashed disk and alien bodies story.]
There, JB and the others see a "large disc 'flying saucer' on its back with heat still radiating from the ground around it." Those there already had done nothing and were awaiting orders. They wait until the heat has subsided before moving in. "This was made all the worse by the screams of the Freak creatures that were lying by the vehicle. What in God's name they were no one could tell, but one thing's for sure, they were Circus Freaks. Each had hold of a box which they kept hold of in both arms close to their chests. They just lay there crying, holding those boxes."
[If this account is true, the wretched "freaks" must have been lying there bawling at least 24 hours, probably much longer, considering the time it would take to be summoned, briefed, gather the men and equipment, fly from D.C., via Wright Field, to Roswell and then drive for hours across the desert. If the aliens were badly injured, one would hardly expect them to have survived or to still be hollering and howling after all that time... ]
"At around 6 am it was deemed safe to move in; again the freaks were still crying and when approached screamed even louder. They were protective of their boxes but we managed to get one loose with a firm strike at the head with the butt of a rifle. The 3 freaks were dragged away and secured by rope and tape; the other one was already dead."
[Was such brutality the norm, even in 1947? One supposes this poor intelligent female creature (referring to the apparently female body shown in the Santilli film - ed.) had travelled halfway across the galaxy only to crash on barbaric planet Earth. There, lying injured, she is whacked on the head with a rifle butt, tied up and dragged away... Well, I suppose no one had seen the movie ET then, but perhaps this story is only fiction too.]
The account concludes with the removal of the debris on a flat-top (flat-bed?) truck to Wright-Patterson. There is no mention of how, and when, and where, the three surviving "freaks" died. Maybe they were actually killed by their captors? A month later two of them were autopsied in a military hospital in Fort Worth (or Dallas). The cameraman filmed the autopsies wearing a thick protective anti-contamination suit like the surgeons. Because of this it was difficult to handle the camera properly or to load and focus it. This, at least, does seem a plausible reason why the close-up shots were never in focus. In May 1949 he was asked to film the third autopsy; the implication is that one of the aliens lived for nearly two years after the June 1947 crash.
There seems no doubt that the cameraman, "JB," does indeed exist. Channel 4 producer John Purdie and his team insisted on making contact with him and recently travelled to the U.S. specially to see him. A meeting is said to have been arranged at which he did not show. A further attempt to persuade him to appear in front of the Channel 4 cameras was equally unsuccessful. He became angry and said that he would only speak on camera if they produced a note from the President granting him exemption from any government sanction.
Naturally enough this was not something to be had. Rumor has it that Steven Greer offered to secure such exemption through CSETI's "high-level contacts with the White House," but so far there is no note signed by Bill.
Meanwhile all sorts of theories are being promoted about the provenance of the "alien" bodies seen in the autopsy sequence. One is that these are humans with a genetic defect known as "Turner's syndrome." Proponents of this theory should produce photographs of similarly afflicted people. The "Brazilian sci-fi movie" claim ("made about 5 years ago") is still doing the rounds. Surely someone can come up with a copy of such a movie if it were to exist? A more recent claim is that the "alien" bodies are those of nuclear testing victims or even young Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors. The idea that nuclear victims can grow extra digits or that their ears shrink and change position is absurd. The next generation may show mutations but these are hardly the sort of changes which happen in the short term to the survivors of atomic bombs or those subjected to massive radiation exposure.
When the Channel 4 documentary is screened [in England] on August 28th [in the U.S., a similar program will be aired on the FOX Network on August 28; check your local listings] we shall no doubt see what they have to say about their meeting with cameraman "JB." In the meantime Santilli will present his case, together with "all" of the film footage, at BUFORA's UFO conference in Sheffield, England, on August 19-20th. We will keep you posted.
George Wingfield
Original file name: .CNI - Santilli Camerman 8.17
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.