From: Kevin Randle <KRandle993@aol.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 09:37:00 EDT
Fwd Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 14:25:51 -0400
Subject: Re: Last Night's Tragedy - Fleming


 >From: Lan Fleming <lfleming5@houston.rr.com>
 >To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
 >Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 14:11:20 -0500
 >Subject:  Re: Last Night's Tragedy - Friedman

 >>From: Stanton Friedman <fsphys@brunnet.net>
 >>To: <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
 >>Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 20:35:03 -0300
 >>Subject: Re: Last Night's Tragedy

<snip>

 >This "revelation" of routine Roswell documents preserved for 50
 >years made me think of something: has anyone ever made an FOIA
 >request _explicitly_ for the memo General Ramey was photographed
 >holding at his "saucer-emptying" press conference?

I have been attempting to pursue this, but we must all remember
that classified documents are routinely and properly destroyed
because they are soon out of date or they begin to fill the
files. There are many regulations that govern the destruction of
classified materials and because they were destroyed at some
point doesn't mean that a cover up is taking place. One of my
duties, as an intelligence officer, was to destroy the
classified that was out of date or that was not needed for the
operation of my office.

If that document was a message, it might well have been
destroyed in the routine office cleaning that is necessary.

And there is a second point here. J. Bond Johnson, in one of his
many claims, or rather, some of those supporting his story, have
claimed, that Johnson handed the document to Ramey and it was
something that Johnson brought into the office and is,
therefore, irrelevant. I now understand that Dr. Johnson denies
this claim.

 >The government cannot very well deny that there is or was such a
 >memo because it was photographed in Ramey's hand. And after all
 >this time, they cannot reasonably claim that it has any national
 >security implications.

 >I've taken a look at the enlargements of the memo, and the word
 >"VICTIMS" is pretty clearly legible. The rest of the sentence is
 >too blurry to make out if it really says "victims of the wreck,"
 >as some people think. Others have suggested the sentence might
 >actually read "victims of the Major," possibly referring to
 >people who were victims of a misconception about the nature of
 >what was a weather balloon because of Major Marcel's faulty
 >identification of it as a crashed disc.

Jim Houran, at the School of Medicine at Southern Illinois
University and I conducted an experiment to find out how much of
the memo can be read and how much of what people see in the memo
is the result of priming (that is, having already heard what is
in the memo, they see those same things).

The results of the experiment have been published in the Journal
of Scientific Exploration. Interestingly, not one of the people
saw the word "victims" in the memo. There was agreement on many
of the words such as Fort Worth, Texas, and balloons. But no one
saw victims and we were careful not to set up a situation so
that the subjects knew what we were wanting.

What we did find was that the interpretation of the message was
based, in part, on the conditions in which it was given to the
subjects. Most interesting was that those who were told  that
the message was related to atomic testing found other words in
the message such as flash. Their interpretation was consistent
with what they believed about the context of the message.

IUR in the next issue (or the one after that) will also carry
the results of the experiment. The real point here, however, is
that the word "Victims" is not clearly legible to those who have
not been told that it appears in the memo, or told where to
look.

KRandle