Press Release: The Roswell Slides Research Group

The Roswell Slides Research Group is a very informal group of about 20 UFO researchers and skeptics formed to critically evaluate claims being made about the so-called Roswell Slides. Some very enterprising work has now been done by one member of the Roswell Slides Research Group ("Nab Lator"). He used commercial software, SmartDeblur (written by Vladimir Yuzhikov, making use of an image processing technique known as blind deconvolution"), to significantly clear up the blurred text. Other members of the Group offered some suggestions and helped narrow down the actual words. 

Following a bit of work by various members of the team over a period of a few hours, an item was posted on the Blue Blurry Lines blog setting out some of the initial results. (The words “MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY" were clear, with 3 further lines of text seeming to say something like: 

"At the time of burial the body was clothed in a xxx-xxx cotton shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of these small cotton blankets. Loaned by Mr. Xxxxxx, San Francisco, California”) 

That post provoked yet further outrage from the promoters of the Roswell Slides. Their website quickly responded with allegations that the deblurring work of the Roswell Slides Research Group was a fake - claiming, for example, that,  “The image they claim to have de-blured is its self [sic] a fake created by taking a low resolution copy of our scan and editing it in photoshop”. 

Again within hours, instructions were posted online in the form of videos and step-by-step instructions which allowed anyone to duplicate the relevant deblurring using material on the website of the promoters of the slides. Various other researchers have now duplicated, and accepted, those results. Most members of the UFO community have now moved on to ask how the text was not clear to the promoters of the slides before a big show was held in Mexico and whether the actions of those few individuals will do lasting damage to the wider field of UFO research.

More details can be found on the website of the Roswell Slides Research Group at the first link below and in a post (which includes the relevant step-by-step instruction) on the AboveTopSecret.com discussion forum at the second link : 

http://www.roswellslides.com/

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1066804/pg1

Illustration by Nippa Downey