The authors/investigators constantly pride themselves on how complete their research is and how it directly indicates the crash of an alien spaceship. However, as I have demonstrated, the quality of the research is not as good as they claim. The authors have fought amongst themselves regarding the locations of the crash and which witnesses were reliable. Meanwhile, skeptics argued that any witness with a wild or strange story should have their reliability questioned. It has become obvious that a portion of the witnesses have fabricated their tales and the authors, blinded by a desire to confirm their partisan notions, were unable to see this. Instead, they created complex scenarios to explain inconsistencies in eyewitness testimony and why certain testimonies were good and others bad. When the USAF came up with their explanation for the events, the authors had to attack it because it would demonstrate their research was so flawed that they did not even consider this possibility. They were in danger of losing their case and the only way out was to make it appear the USAF was continuing the cover-up and their explanation was ridiculous.
While many of the books about a Roswell crash relied heavily upon stories told years after the fact, the AF reports were something different. They included actual facts from existing documentation that deserved serious consideration. The USAF relied not only on their own sources of information but also on the audio/video tapes of the UFO investigators for their research. In an apparent desire not to share anything with the USAF, Stanton Friedman refused to participate. This is something strange because most scientists (which Stanton Friedman sometimes claims to be) would welcome any independent analysis of their data. Once the reports were released, the various authors responded with a barrage of criticism that exhibited strong skepticism that appeared to be more out of reflex than critical thought. David Thomas responded, "...I commend them for being skeptical and cautious, and urge them to apply these same stringent standards to reports that the Roswell Incident involved an alien spaceship..." (Frazier, Karr, and Nickell 122). Perhaps some of the reasons the authors criticized the USAF so vigorously was because the USAF reports revealed that some of the authors research was not as reliable as they had claimed.
Some of the failures in research included the authors deliberately attempting to deceive the reader by completely omitting important parts of testimony. A perfect example was Randle/Schmitt purposefully leaving out the comments by Jim Ragsdale about "dummies". Jim referred to the aliens as dummies several times in the interview yet the word never appeared in the book. Because of this, I have come to the conclusion that the only way that these authors can contribute to a search for the truth is to release all their transcripts, notes, and evidence to the pubic for scrutiny the same way they demand the US Government release their documentation. When Dennis Stacy questioned why the books did not fully print many of the interviews, Kevin Randle replied, "Because, mainly they are boring. The important points have been published. And I have published transcripts about many of these interviews" (Randle Online). I find this interesting. Why didn't he include the "boring" statement by Jim Ragsdale in his book The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell? The answer is obvious. It was omitted because Randle and Schmitt did not want people to draw the wrong conclusion. The reader has to understand that when you read these books, the amount of truth in them is selected by the authors. Their track record of telling the truth is less than stellar and their investigative research is not much better.
Randle/Schmitt's sloppy research led them to draw several major faulted conclusions in their two books. The first involves the missing records of eleven servicemen who served at RAAF during the time of the incident. In UFO Crash at Roswell, they state:
We submitted the names and documented serial numbers of over two dozen military personnel stationed at Roswell in July, 1947 to both the Defense Department and the Veteran's administration for further confirmation of existence...[They then list eleven names which is less than two dozen]...Why does neither the Defense Department nor the Veteran's Administration have records of any of these men when we can document that each served at the Roswell Army Air Field? (Randle and Schmitt UFO 228)
However, in Paul McCarthy’s expose on the missing nurses, he reports,
The Air Force went on to say, ‘That claim sounded serious, so investigators checked these eleven names in the Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Using only the names (since the authors did not list the serial numbers) the researcher quickly found records readily identifiable for eight of them. The other three had such common names that there could have been multiple possibilities.’ (McCarthy)
Randle and Schmitt would later imply that these records were hidden and suddenly materialized only after they exposed the cover-up. Kevin Randle has stated that Schmitt had copies of the requests that were made but has never presented them. As we will later see, Schmitt made a lot of claims that are not quite accurate. Therefore, anything Schmitt says has to be seriously questioned.
Even more interesting is that the AF noted that one of the individuals who was on the list was DEAD in 1951. Yet, Randle and Schmitt CLAIM to have interviewed the same person in August, 1990 by phone (Note: It takes no rocket scientist to figure that they are talking about Edward M. Sager). Randle gave a response that seems to answer this question but it is really a dodge of responsibility. According to Randle, they interviewed Edward M. Sager's son who has the same name. I find it curious that he does not list him as JR. and his father as SR in the book. Randle claims that he was under a specific list of family members. However, the book does not separate the list of individuals from family members and actual witnesses. The effort to portray that they interviewed Sager is deceiving to the reader. It may seem a small point but honest researchers would have made sure to note the difference. Padding the witness list is nothing new for Randle and Schmitt. In their list of relevant persons in UFO Crash at Roswell, many of these individuals had negative reports or were never interviewed. Buried in the same list is the mythical Captain Armstrong, who has never been shown to exist. This little exercise of chasing after mythical witnesses took on a new turn when it came to the Glenn Dennis tale.
Randle/Schmitt's research into the infamous Nurse X (who Dennis called Naomi Self), was also demonstrated to be seriously flawed by McCarthy in his work titled, Roswell: The case of the vanishing nurses. Initially, Paul’s article was to chronicle the extensive efforts Schmitt had made to uncover the missing Nurse X from Glenn Dennis’ story. Paul states that he was talking to Don Schmitt who told him that they could find no records of the five nurses that were in the Roswell base yearbook and the nurse X wasn’t in the yearbook at all. Schmitt’s conclusive statement was "Once again it appears as if they really covered their tracks" (McCarthy). He was implying that the military/government had made the people disappear. Schmitt also stated that both he and Randle "had scoured the planet up, down, and sideways for those nurses" (McCarthy). McCarthy was impressed and was content to state this in his original work. However, his editors at OMNI magazine asked him to look further into the matter and try to duplicate the efforts of Randle/Schmitt the way a scientist would try to duplicate the results of an experiment. McCarthy was overwhelmed and felt it would be a waste of his time but attempted it anyway. His search hit a few road bumps initially but within three days he ended up talking to Bill Siebert, archivist at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. McCarthy writes:
Siebert had records for the five nurses but nothing for Nurse X. Records were complete for Majors Joyce Godard and Claudia Uebele and partial, reconstructed records existed, because of a 1973 fire, for Captain Adeline Fanton, First Lieutenant Angele LaRue, and Lieutenant Colonel Rosemary McManus. (McCarthy)
Note that Capt. Fanton's first name is incorrect. It is not clear exactly why this is but it may have been a error by McCarthy. It is not of serious concern. He then went out and searched for the last living nurse, Rosemary Brown (formerly McManus), who would state that she had already talked to by some of the investigators. She remembered all of the nurses in the yearbook but no Naomi Self or even Glenn Dennis. What was more impressive is that, even though she felt it was possible that a UFO crash occurred, she stated that, "I had no sense of anything weird happening at all" (McCarthy).
When told that their research was flawed, Kevin Randle shifted blame. He told McCarthy it was Don Schmitt’s responsibility, who promptly stated he had delegated it to Brad Radcliffe. These people gave McCarthy the run around and even told him they actually knew about the records but didn’t want to scare anyone off especially Rosemary Brown. McCarthy became suspicious and pulled the string on the thread even more. He followed the leads that Radcliffe supposedly followed and once again ended up at St. Louis asking for records. McCarthy, at the end of the article makes a few carefully worded statements,
...was their research just unforgivably sloppy? Did they delegate so much responsibility to untrained help that they lost oversight and ultimate control? Did they really think the nurses had vanished off the face of the earth after service at Roswell, only to learn otherwise in the face of OMNI's investigation and then, in a panic, try to hide their mistake?
...It seems to me that in UFOlogy, more than in fields where follow-up and replication are common, researchers HAVE A SPECIAL OBLIGATION TO GET IT RIGHT AND NOT INFLATE THEIR CLAIMS. (My Emphasis) To paraphrase astronomer J. Allen Hynek, one of the scientific fathers of the field, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Randle and Schmitt have not produced the latter here. (McCarthy)
The revelations about the nurses set the stage for another startling expose' that Don Schmitt turned out to be lying about his educational and occupational background. He wanted everyone to believe he was a medical illustrator, had a bachelor's degree and was working on his doctorate. A quick check of records by a local reporter turned up the fact that he was a mailman (which is an honorable profession and did not require a lie)! According to Sheridan Cavitt, Don Schmitt would often give him mean looks, infer that he was lying, and grate on him during interviews. Schmitt, who seems to think everyone in the government is lying about Roswell, turns out to be lying himself in attempt to deceive others. One must now question what else he lied about when he was interviewing all those witnesses on their deathbed and not recording the interviews!
When it became obvious to everyone else that his partner had fooled him so many years, Randle made a public response that was posted in the October 10, 1995 issue of "Saucer Smear":
Before you begin to laugh too hard, let me point out that the OMNI article by Paul McCarthy is wrong. At no point have I admitted to fabricating anything. That whole missing nurses fiasco belongs to Don Schmitt and Don Schmitt alone. In fact, contrary to what McCarthy alleges, I was kept no better informed than he was. Schmitt was off on his own tangent there. For the last year, I have had as much trouble getting Schmitt to return my calls as everyone else.
These untruths do not appear in either of the books I wrote about Roswell. Yes, I did the writing. Schmitt would review the rough draft of chapters for the first book and then add his comments. Sometimes I would use what he wrote, if I had verified it. Many times I wouldn't, because his changes were not particularly well written.
He did contribute one chapter, which was the ‘Conclusions’. In it, he claims that he had searched for the records of eleven men. He could not find those eleven records. The Air Force researched the names and found the ‘missing’ records for most of them The others were of men with such common names that no determination could be made...
In the second book, Schmitt didn't even bother to make any changes. He was too busy doing other things to care about the book. The chapters would come back with no comments, or in a couple of cases, with comments written by someone else. He was so busy that he couldn't even take time to make sure he approved of the work. Let someone else do the work and then take credit for it!
Everything I put into the books, I knew to be the truth because I had researched it myself, or I had checked to make sure the documentation existed. The research as it appears in the book is solid. Audio and video tapes exist, others besides Schmitt have interviewed the witnesses, and there is documentation to support the conclusions.
That said, let me now point out that I do not now believe anything that Schmitt says and neither should you.... I will have nothing more to do with him from this point on. He has revealed himself as a man who cares only for his own promotion. He has destroyed his work and badly damaged mine… I didn't know the real Don Schmitt. Now I do... (Saucer Smear Online)
In other words, "Don't blame me, it is all Don Schmitt's fault!" Kevin Randle had to do this to find a way out for his organizations failure to do adequate research. He put his name on that book and claimed it was true. He bears the responsibility to provide factual data and not make wild claims that are incorrect. It was interesting that much of what was written in the second book supposedly came from his research. However, much of what was written in the book has been shown to be false. What does that say for Randle's "careful research"? Had the AF made a similar mistake in their research, Randle would not have hesitated to point an accusing finger. When that finger is pointed at him, he simply blamed others for the mistakes. It demonstrated a lack of integrity, a lack of responsibility, and a deceitfulness that bordered on criminal negligence.
Randle keeps repeating this little exercise of shifting blame in his blog, A different perspective. Recently, in an effort to paint Professor Charles Moore as a liar, he stated, among other things, that Moore had simply "invented a number" as the range of the radar at White Sands. It appeared that Randle never read what Moore wrote or did not understand how various radar differ. Moore specifically mentioned the SCR-584 radar in his article written many years ago that Randle referenced. The range he listed for this radar was correct per the technical manual and there was nothing wrong with what he wrote about the SCR-584. Randle, in his article, chose instead to talk about a completely different radar to demonstrate Moore was just making things up. In an effort to set the record straight, I posted a response to this incorrect statement among other things. Randle later admitted in another blog entry that the information was incorrect but it wasn't quite all his fault. He now states that he purposefully used the incorrect information he received from a "rabid believer" in his previous entry. When I pushed him on what he meant by this, he admitted that he blindly accepted the information as factual. Apparently, the individual, who he did not name, must have been an "expert" when it came to White Sands radar for him to trust the information. Randle either misunderstood what he was told or the individual was wrong to begin with. I am sure the individual is pleased that he got "tossed under the bus" by Randle. I think it is important that before one decides to call somebody a liar, one needs to make sure the information is correct. Kevin Randle, like all the Roswell authors, should know that they can write just about anything that supports the Roswell case and get "rabid believers " to accept it. This was quite evident in the comments section of the first blog entry. Multiple individuals read Randle's incorrect statements about "inventing numbers" and said nothing. Nobody was interested in checking on what Randle wrote! Had I not commented, Kevin Randle might have repeated this incorrect statement in books and his blog for years. Meanwhile, all the "rabid believers" would parrot what he stated as if it were a fact. Randle's blog entry just reinforces the impression that Roswell believers and proponents can be deceived easily IF the information supports their version of events.
Don Schmitt, who's track record for the truth is openly questioned, continues to be considered an expert on Roswell. He appeared on the Sci-Fi channel's program and has teamed up with Tom Carey to write numerous articles on the subject. In typical Don Schmitt fashion, he produced another book on Roswell that was full of dubious testimony that does not stand up very well to serious scrutiny (see http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/vultures.htm). Much of what is written in this book is hearsay and some of it was not even fact-checked by the authors. The content of this book and others revealed to me two very fundamental laws about Roswell witnesses and the authors:
- Any testimony of Roswell witnesses will be accepted without any critical evaluation as long as it fundamentally agrees with the author's present theory about Roswell.
- Eyewitness testimony will not be rejected unless it agrees with the Project Mogul scenario, does not agree with the theory being pushed by the author (i.e. witness describes a location tens of miles away from desired crash site), or is absolutely shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the testimony is false.
The research by the authors has been demonstrated to be flawed over the years. They often only seek what they want to seek and publish only what they want to publish. The testimony of just about anyone that supports their claims is accepted with little or no questioning while those who suggest a more mundane source are rejected just quickly. Kevin Randle stated in The Randle Report, "We should accept only those tales that can be substantiated by additional testimony and documentation" (Randle Randle 193). However, Randle does not practice what he preaches as I have shown many times over. No wonder Stanton Friedman has referred to Kevin Randle as a "Fiction writer" (Brookesmith 163). Friedman's comments are quite amusing because his little glass house of Roswell research is no better as he continues to peddle the fraudulent MJ-12 documents.
The late Robert Todd realized the problems involved with Roswell research when writing in the December 8th, 1995 issue of "The KowPflop Quarterly":
The Roswell Incident has emerged as a myth of such power and allure that it is no longer in anybody's best interests to seek - or admit - the truth. The town of Roswell profits from increased tourism. The supposed Roswell ‘witnesses’ get their two hours of fame, and immortality in the history books. The Roswell ‘investigators’ garner the adulation of their peers (assuming they have any), and the royalties from book and movie deals. The UFO ‘organizations’ enjoy a new respectability they otherwise haven't been able to achieve after nearly fifty years of worthless ‘research’... Is it any wonder the truth has been lost in this hodgepodge of vested interests? (Todd 4)
Despite the apparent attempts at the authors for being above board and open, we actually find out that many of the authors have refrained from publishing key information in their books in order to shed the best possible light on their theory. In the Condon Report, Astronomer Dr. William H. Hartmann noted this problem:
Many writers in our culture, from fanatics and hypocrites to sincere reporters, are not after all, committed to complete investigation and understanding of the subject, but to telling and selling a good story. Unfortunately there is a selection effect: if a "flying saucer" story is investigated too completely, and is found to be a misperception or a hoax, its interest and sales value are reduced. Examples of journalists’ distortion and slanting, conscious or unconscious, abound: misinformed amateurs quoted as authorities, repetition of hearsay evidence, and naive selection of data are examples of such dubious reporting. (Condon et al. 543)
It is amazing how prescient Hartmann's words were even though they were written a decade before The Roswell Incident was published.
The reporting of the spaceship and bodies by witnesses has been the cornerstone of the Roswell "crashed saucer" defense. Why would these people want to fabricate lies or mislead interviewers about what actually happened? Perhaps there is an all too obvious reason.