Father Time and Flawed Memories
  While the pro-UFO community and the Roswell authors stress the number of
witnesses, another factor in their firm belief that an extraterrestrial
spacecraft crashed at Roswell is the apparent consistency of the eyewitness
testimonies.
  However, a careful reading of the statements presented in The Roswell
Incident and elsewhere reveals that there are serious discrepancies among the
various accounts which, when analyzed in detail and taken collectively,
severely weaken the case.
  One undeniable truth that many UFO advocates seem to easily forget is that
when Moore and Friedman first started interviewing some of the original
witnesses regarding Roswell, the recollections of these people had
undoubtedly changed. If nothing else, their memories reflected the passage of
nearly thirty-one years, if not more. Even the very first person interviewed,
Marcel, was not questioned by Friedman until 1978, again almost thirty-one
years after the event.
  It is an irrefutable fact that the passage of time erodes the accuracy of
one's recollections of an event. Despite this, the Roswell authors continue
to stress just how "clear and sharp" their witnesses' memories are, even
though nearly fifty years have now elapsed. Certainly these memories could
not have improved.
  Perhaps the most absurd attempt to paint the Roswell eye-witnesses and
their testimonies as beyond dispute can be found in Randle and Schmitt's The
Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, which was later adapted for television
by Showtime, under the name Roswell.
  In drawing a parallel between the alleged UFO events at Roswell and the
assassination of President John E Kennedy, Randie and Schmitt state, "The
Roswell memories are vivid and detailed, despite the passage of so many
years" and constitute a "snapshot memory."
  If this is the case, to use Randle and Schmitt's analogy, then these people
forgot to load film in their camera, for even the most important "star"
witness to Roswell, Major Marcel, when first interviewed, could not even
remember the year of the alleged UFO crash, let alone the month. Indeed,
Marcel's own answer as to when this supposed "snapshot memory" event took
place was simply "in the late forties"!
  In my book on Roswell, I examine systematically the accounts of all major
"witnesses" presented in the Roswell Incident and all others. For the first
time, these testimonies are exposed for what they are: a mishmash of
erroneous accounts, embellishments and outright confabulations. In fact, as I
show, some of the people who have been touted as witnesses by the pro-UFO
Roswell authors are not really witnesses at all. Here are some examples:
  Lydia Sleppy: Claims she was operating a teletype machine announcing the
recovery of the flying disk when her teletype suddenly went dead and
broadcast an ominous message from the FBI back to her ordering her to stop
broadcasting the story in the interests of national security.
  Truth: A check by this author with all relevant FBI field offices and their
headquarters turned up no evidence that the FBI sent any such message, nor
did they have the monitoring equipment in place to do so. Furthermore, the
type of teletype machine in use by Sleppy at the time would have required her
to throw a "receiver" switch in order for her to receive an incoming
transmission. There was no way that the FBI could have "interrupted" her as
she claims.
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