“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”

˜Mademoiselle Rose Bertin, French milliner and dressmaker to Marie Antoinette

UFOlogy is a senile discipline. By this I’m not referring to its age, or how after more than 60 years it hasn’t seemingly come any closer into solving the enigma which spawned its existence. What I mean is that UFOlogy as a field has the terrible tendency of narrow-sightedness, and of forgetting the valuable lessons from the past. Some of our critics on UFOs: Reframing the Debate, for example, complained we weren’t really saying anything particularly original compared to the thinkers and ideas of the late 60’s and early 70’s; our defense was we weren’t actually trying to be novel so much as remarking what was pointed out by the true mavericks preceding us, but hasn’t been paid attention to enough by the newer generations… to the detriment of the study of unidentified flying objects, and the intelligence(s) in control of them.

Take for instance the controversial topic of the Contactees: Most people believe it was in the 1950’s when common citizens like George Adamski or Truman Bethurum began claiming to be in contact with extraterrestrials hailing from Venus, Jupiter –or far more exotically-named planets like Clarion– and the main concern of our Space Brothers was the proliferation of nuclear weapons in our world, and the threat they posed to the survival of Humanity… or even to the stability of the entire Cosmos. Psychologists have tried to explain the sociological phenomenon of the Contactees as stemming out of Cold War anxieties, and a religious need from saviors from on-high repackaged for the consumption of the Space Age.

But those psychologists –and even most UFOlogists– would be surprised to learn warnings against a nuclear Armageddon can be traced back before the start of the Cold War and the Space Age –before even the fission of the atom had been experimentally achieved for the first time by German chemist Otto Hahn in 1938! And these warnings didn’t come from long-haired Venusians on board silvery saucers, but from a secretive individual who claimed to be in possession of a powerful legacy of knowledge, assembled from the scattered remains of a lost civilization.

These warnings came from an Alchemist.

The story I’m about to tell can be found on a book I consider to be indispensable reading by anyone interested in these topics: “Le Matin des Magiciens” (Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. Alas, this gem is barely known among most English-speaking UFO circles for three main reasons: It was published in 1960 (strike one); its main topic is not UFOs but philosophy and secret knowledge (strike two) and it was written by two French men (strike three! You’re out!!).

Louis Pauwels (1920-1997) was a writer and journalist with a life-long interest in Eastern mysticism and the philosophy of Gurdjieff. In 1954 he met Jacques Bergier (1912-1978) whose life is probably more deserving of a motion picture than any lazy 80’s remake: Born in Ukraine and of Jewish descent, he was a writer as well as a chemical engineer who became a resistance fighter and spy during the German occupation of France, was later captured and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the Liberation he played a key role into the discovery of the Nazi nuclear program, and how far they have gone into the development of atomic weaponry.

Bergier was credited by his friends for having a prodigious intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge. When he was 6 years old he saw an ancient woodcut illustration of two old alchemists working on their lab, which sparked his interest in the forgotten lore of Alchemy. To him the modern discoveries about radioactivity and the composition of the atom held the promise of unlocking the true secret behind the transmutation of the elements, and creating a bridge between the Past and the Future.

But his contemporaries not only considered Alchemy a superstitious nonsense (the way we still do to this day) but even nuclear energy was still regarded a ‘fringe’ subject in theoretical physics, with no possible applications in real life (just like electricity and magnetism in the XVIIIth century). In 1933 Bergier is scolded by a teacher of his –one of the best chemists in all of France– for wasting his time in such ‘infantile’ interests as nuclear physics, and admonishes him to pursue a ‘sensible’ career in the sugar refinement industry instead.

Thankfully to us Bergier was not only smart; he was also stubborn, bless his heart. He disregards the advice and continues his ‘reckless’ studies in both cutting-edge physics and ancient Alchemy. From 1934 to 1940 he became a collaborator of the eminent physicist and chemist André Helbronner, who was among the first scientists trying to unravel the secret behind atomic energy, before he was murdered by the Nazis in 1944.

It was at the behest of Helbronner that Bergier had a strange meeting with a mysterious individual on June of 1937, two years before Germany invaded Poland and WWII began. The meeting took place in an empty testing lab owned by ‘Gas Society’ of Paris. The strange man started the conversation by saying he knew Bergier assisted Helbronner in the quest of the atomic secret, and mentioned their recent success in unleashing radioactivity in polonium.

“You are very close to success, as are many other contemporary wise men,” said the stranger (remember Hahn’s experiment in ’38) “but the work you and your peers are doing is terribly dangerous. And it is not only you who are in peril, but the whole of Humanity.”

The man explained to Bergier the liberation of nuclear energy was easier than what was believed at the time, and the resulting superficial radioactivity could poison the entire planetary atmosphere in just a matter of years. He also warned that atomic explosives could be manufactured using only a few grams of metal and they would have the power to vaporize entire cities. “We Alchemists have known about this for a long time.”

Before Bergier could protest or ask any questions, the man continued: “I know what you are going to say –that Alchemists didn’t know the structure of the atomic nucleus, didn’t have electricity or any detection methods. Therefore they could never release the nuclear energy. I shall not try to prove what I am about to tell you now, but I beg you to repeat this to monsieur Helbronner: It only takes certain geometric assemblies, without the need for electricity or a vacuum medium. And now I will limit myself to reciting a few lines…”

The man took from over a desk a book written by Frédéric Soddy: L’interpretation du Radium (The Interpretation of Radium), found a passage and read:

“I believe there existed in the past civilizations who knew the energy of the atom and were totally destroyed for the misuse of that power.”

The man closed the book and continued his exposition, asking to an astonished Bergier to entertain the possibility of partial techniques of such ancient knowledge being able to survive throughout the ages. That knowledge had been kept in the safe hands of men who tempered their experimental curiosity with moral and religious concerns; whereas our ‘modern’ physics in his opinion was a “Science without Conscience,” having been born during the XVIIIth century for the amusement of “lords and libertine rich men” –here the Alchemist was no doubt referring to the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 under the auspice of King Charles II, which saw considerable expansion in the late 1700s.

The strange man kept explaining to Bergier he had tried to warn other researchers like him about the dangers of their work… to absolutely no avail.

Bergier finally managed to ask a question: “If you yourself are an Alchemist, monsieur, I cannot believe you employ your time in the attempt to make gold, like Dunikowski or Doctor Miethe.” –Dunikowski was a Polish engineer who had announced in Paris he had discovered a new kind of radiation capable of transmuting quartz into gold, but was found to be a fraudster; Dr. Adolf Miethe (not to be confused with Richard Miethe, a name often mentioned in the swampy subject of Nazi-made flying saucers) of the Photochemical Department at the Berlin Technical High School claimed to have found small deposits of gold inside the mercury vapor lamps used on his lab as a source of ultraviolet light. In 1924 he claimed to have changed mercury into gold in a high-tension mercury vapor lamp. Alas, he had produced approximate $1 worth of gold… at a cost of $60,000 due to the staggering amount of energy employed in the process.

Bergier continued: “For around a year I’ve tried to document myself on the subject of Alchemy, and have only stumbled upon with either charlatans or interpretations I find ludicrous. Could you, monsieur, tell me what your own investigations consist of?”

The Alchemist replied: “You are asking me to summarize in 4 minutes 4,000 years of philosophy and the efforts of my entire life! You are also asking me also to translate in clear language concepts which do not admit any plain explanation. I can, nevertheless, tell you this: Surely you are aware that in the official Science now in progress the role of the observer is evermore important. Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle show just how much the observer intervenes in natural phenomena” –Let’s remember the Copenhagen interpretationof quantum mechanics was proposed in the late 1920s.

“The secret of Alchemy,” the man revealed to Bergier, “is this: There is a way to manipulate matter and energy in such a way that it produces what contemporary scientists would call a ‘force field’. This field acts upon the observer and places him on a privileged position in the Universe. From this vantage point he has access to Realities that space and time, matter and energy tend to hide from us. This is what we call The Great Work (Magnum Opus).”

“But, what of the Philosopher’s Stone?” asked Bergier. “What of the making of gold?”

“That is nothing more than applications, particular cases” answered the Alchemist. What’s essential is not the transmutation of metals, but that of the experimenter himself. It is an ancient secret which few men will find throughout the centuries.”

“What do they transform themselves, then?” questioned Bergier.

“Perhaps, one day, I shall find out,” were the final words of the mysterious man.

Bergier never saw the Alchemist again. As for his true identity, it remains unknown to his day. Bergier himself was convinced the man was none other than the mythical Fulcanelli, the pseudonym of an anonymous individual who was the author of two books which are highly regarded as among the best in the whole Alchemical bibliography:”Le Mystère des Cathédrales”(The Mystery of the Cathedrals) and “Les Demeures Philosophales” (Dwellings of the Philosophers). Fulcanelli had a protegé, Eugène Canseliet, who was the one entrusted by his master to publish his books in the 1920s. Pauwels and Bergier were convinced Fulcanelli had survived the war but had gone into hiding, never to reveal anything more about his hidden knowledge.

It is said the last time Canseliet met Fulcanelli was in Spain during the 1950s, and he had gone through an incredible transformation. Instead of being an old man, like his pupil remembered him, the Alchemist had miraculously rejuvenated and acquired an androgynous appearance, proof that he had managed to complete the Great Work, and the reward was a total physical –and spiritual– metamorphosis. The caterpillar had been changed into a butterfly.

What to make of this wonderful, and yet unprovable story? We only have Bergier’s word that the meeting between himself and the man (possibly Fulcanelli) took place. The source for the account is a book that was published in 1960, 15 years after the reality of nuclear energy had been proved in the most horrendous way possible, with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What I personally find fascinating about this pre-WWII warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons, is not only that it preceded ALL of the similar admonitions given by the so-called ‘Space Brothers’ to the Contactees in the 1950’s and 60’s –and isn’t it interesting how those ‘superior beings’ were often described as having androgynous features?– but also that, if it really happened as admitted by Bergier, all of the things declared by the Alchemist were essentially true: In 1986, the radioactive cloud produced by the Chernobyl nuclear plant literally covered the entirety of Europe. The Hiroshima bomb contained only 141 lb of enriched Uranium –not “a few grams” like the Alchemist had claimed… although maybe there are methods to further amplify the destructive power of fissible material we (luckily) haven’t discovered yet. And after the Allies defeated the Nazis they discovered Heisenberg’s rudimentary Uranium battery, consisted of extremely pure substances placed together on an specific geometric disposition –the Germans hadn’t placed it on a vacuum, just like the Alchemist had ‘predicted’.

But I guess what has fascinated me the most about Alchemy, ever since I read Morning of the Magicians in my early teens, is the idea of an ancient knowledge which parallels our current understanding on the nature of energy and matter, and perhaps even surpasses it. And yet, unlike our modern times, the men who’ve possessed that knowledge knew they had to keep it away from kings and rulers, lest it would be corrupted –or worse, used to unleash a power capable of wiping out our entire civilization… as it might have happened before.

Werner von Braun said that “Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.” Perhaps so; or perhaps these are words meant to acquiesce the conscience of a man who had no qualms in killing innocents in his selfish pursuit to achieve his dreams to conquer the stars. “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet,” von Braun is credited of saying with regards to his V-2 rocket bomb launched against London. “If we don’t do it first, somebody else will” have been the words used to justify everything from the creation of bacteriological weapons to automated killing drones. Science without Conscience, indeed…

In Morning of the Magicians, the authors tried to interest their peers in the hidden treasures buried beneath the dusty manuscripts and codices written by the ancient Alchemists, which managed to survive into our era –thousands of volumes, and yet a pittance when compared to all the scrolls turned to ashes in Alexandria. They argued that chemists, engineers, and even nuclear physicists should team up with historians and symbologists in order to crack the codes of those treatises, and see if they contained techniques and processes which could be of any use in our modern industries and laboratories. A fool’s errand, some might think, and yet Pauwels and Bergier claim that after the war in Europe was over, there were many American agents trying to get their hands on any alchemical book their could find. Bergier also narrated how when he was collaborating with the French government in the study of the nuclear capabilities of the Germans –something nobody paid any attention to in Europe… prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki– he was asked to meet with an anonymous American commander, whose real interest was not the Nazi nuclear program, but finding the whereabouts of Fulcanelli.

Given how Dr. Jacques Vallee’s recent studies with UFO’s ejected material seem to point out to a reingeneering of seemingly common metals which are almost suggestive of a bonafide alchemical transmutation —the way I speculated upon recently at The Daily Grail— perhaps it is not unreasonable to assume the art of Alchemy is one of the key pieces missing in the UFO puzzle, and that someone in the high echelons of power may be in hot pursuit of the alchemists’ ancient secret.

And yet, if they are, then I suspect they will never find it. Because if Alchemy is the true Science with Conscience, as Rabelais –and our anonymous Alchemist– maintained, then the ultimate goal of this ancient art goes far beyond the gaining of material wealth and power. And the Great Work can only be fulfilled by men of ambitions tempered in the melting pots of their laboratories, through years and years of indomitable hard labor. Until they find themselves transformed from common humans into… something more.

…Perhaps the Philosopher’s Stone is the true Red Pill.

In the spring of 2012, Chicago videographer Adam Dew received a mysterious phone call from his former business partner Joseph Beason. “I have something to show you,” Beason said with urgency in his voice.

Later that day, Beason showed Dew a series of slides. The slides had been found 14 years earlier by his sister, who had been hired to dispose of the belongings of an elderly woman who had recently died. His sister couldn’t bring herself to jettison the collection, and so she took the box home, placed it on a shelf and forgot about it.

Many years later, she finally projected the slides on to her bedroom wall. She saw vivid color photographs of Dwight Eisenhower on what appeared to be a postwar victory train tour, pictures of Bing Crosby and Clark Gable, as well as several photos of European towns. Figuring they had some historical significance, she sent them to Beason, who had worked in book publishing.

Now Dew scrolled through the slides. Some were stunning and had the unmistakable clarity of Kodachrome – Kodak’s revolutionary mid-century color processing. He wondered how the person who took them was able to get so close to Eisenhower. They must be important, he thought.

Then Beason showed him another picture, the first of two nearly identical slides. These had not been in the tray, but tucked underneath, wrapped in parchment paper.

Dew gasped. Staring at him was a small, brown, withered body inside what appeared to be a glass case. The figure had withered arms, shriveled legs, a large triangular skull with elongated eye sockets, and a tiny sliver of a mouth.

He had but one thought.

He was looking at a dead space alien.

Until that day, Dew had spent little time pondering UFOs. He’s a stout father of three who shoots freelance sports videos for a living. People would describe him as gruff, diligent, short on chitchat – hardly the type to be chasing little green men. But he just couldn’t stop thinking about the slides.

“I knew immediately it was a good story,” Dew told me a few months ago as we sat outside a coffee shop in Fredrick, Maryland. “Whatever was on that slide was a great story.”

Dew had long dreamed of making a documentary, and suddenly he had the ultimate topic. He convinced Beason, his friend, they should research one together.

The pair found out that the pictures were found in the garage of a woman named Hilda Blair Ray near Sedona, Arizona.

Dew only knew of one UFO place – Roswell, New Mexico, just a state away. A UFO supposedly had crashed there in 1947, and many believed it to be one of America’s biggest government cover-ups. (In its 231-page report about the incident, released in 1997, the US air force denied all of it).

Could this be related?

Newspaper headlines dated 8 July 1947, shortly after the Roswell crash. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock

News accounts and military documents all confirm a celestial device tumbled to earth that night in Roswell, but this is where the stories divide.

Witnesses and their relatives describe a destroyed flying saucer that broke into two wreckage fields. Aliens, many of those witnesses say, were found in the mangled craft, and then transported to a top-secret site. The military, after first announcing a flying disk crash, quickly revised their story, saying it was actually an experimental weather balloon.

For years, the Roswell incident was largely unknown outside New Mexico until 1978, when a Canadian nuclear physicist named Stanton Friedman met an air force officer who had been there. Intrigued by the man’s story, Friedman researched the case, and helped make a documentary called UFOs Are Real. Soon after the documentary’s release, the town turned into an extraterrestrial mecca, giving birth to a culture of self-declared researchers yearning to find the “truth” about the event.

Some of those, like Tom Carey, a retired Philadelphia businessman with a background in anthropology, and Don Schmitt, who owns a ranch in southern Wisconsin, have written several books on the subject. But so far their evidence is only anecdotal, and their years of research have not provided any physical proof aliens crashed at Roswell.

“If Roswell turns out to be true, it’s the story of the millennium,” Schmitt says.

By 2012 time was running out on Roswell. With nothing tangible to link the accident to aliens, Roswell was becoming a cold case.

Then Joseph Beason contacted Tom Carey.

The most-promising UFO lead in years

At first, Carey was suspicious. He had been disappointed enough times by phony claims of Roswell evidence, and his first reaction was to distrust any new discovery. To make matters worse, Beason also struck him as secretive, insisting that anyone who looked at the slides must first sign a non-disclosure agreement.

When Carey opened the email attachment in his Philadelphia-area home office , he jolted in his seat. Clearly visible on the figure’s head was a dark mark similar to other black blotches across the body’s torso. It appeared to be some kind of skin discoloration, but to Carey, who has anthropology degrees from two different universities, that mark on the head was something else.

“Child of earth,” he said to himself.

In the American south-west lives a small reddish-brown insect called the Jerusalem cricket. It has a faint, dark indentation on its head, almost like a newborn’s still melding skull. The Jerusalem cricket’s more common name is the potato bug but in Spanish it is known as el niño de la tierra – “the child of earth”.

The daughter of Dan Dwyer, a Roswell firefighter in 1947, has said her father saw three of the aliens at the crash site. When pressed by his children to describe them, he had said: “Child of earth.”

Those three words had haunted Carey for years. What did that mean? Carey assumed it had something to do with the Jerusalem cricket, but how?

Now the answer glowed from his computer screen.

“For me, that was almost like a fingerprint,” Carey says. “When I saw that image and saw that marking on that body lying on the slab, it jumped right out at me. That’s what Dan Dwyer was talking about. Also, the body looked exactly like what had been described to me by several eyewitnesses: frail, big head, et cetera. My first thought was: this has to be one of the Roswell bodies. It wasn’t a sketch, it was a photo – and it was taken right after recovery.”

Suddenly, Roswell had its most promising lead in years.

“What do you want of me?” Beason remembers Carey asking.

“I want you to help verify,” Beason replied.

‘Does the government know you have this?’

With Carey and Schmitt’s guidance, Beason and Dew began what UFO experts call “an investigation”. They took the slides to professors, color experts and animators. They cut one of the images from its cardboard border to look for a date code, then had it run through a drum scan to improve clarity. A digital illustrator made a 3-D image of what the body might look like alive.

They consulted people at the Kodak headquarters in Rochester, New York. The experts told them the slides were real, had not been tampered with, and were from between 1945 and 1950, making it possible the photos were taken right after Roswell.

They looked more into Hilda Blair Ray’s life. She had a pilot’s license and worked as an attorney. She was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Minnesota’s law school and had married a geologist named Bernard. The couple moved to Midland, Texas. Bernard became head of the powerful West Texas Geological Society. They never had children. They roamed the world.

Beason and Dew started to suspect Hilda might have known Eisenhower’s wife, Mamie. (Eisenhower’s great-granddaughter Laura once claimed the president actually met aliens while he was president.) They wondered how deep Hilda and Bernard’s connections went. Looking at a map, they realized Roswell, New Mexico, is 250 miles from Midland, Texas. They thought that seemed close.

“You start to fill in the blanks,” Dew says.

Carey took a photo of one of the slides to an old associate at the University of Toronto, Richard Doble, who noticed the figure had half as many ribs as a human, no collarbone and its arms attached to the top ribs.

“The more you look at it, the more you realize it is not from earth,” Doble later said.

But finding other opinions was challenging. Schmitt says American scientists “hold up a cross like to a vampire” when the word extraterrestrial is used. He and Carey also worried that any Roswell evidence taken to a US college that received federal funding would be shipped to the military and disappear forever.

Dew still wasn’t sure he believed in UFOs but he was starting to think the figure in the slides was something. The more he went around Roswell, the stranger people acted. “Does the government know you have this?” one woman asked. Several others told him to “be safe”.

Soon, Dew grew paranoid. He worried powerful people were interested in his slides. He wondered why the same white van kept parking in front of his house. His wife thought his UFO pursuit was absurd and wanted nothing of it.

Finally, he loaded a copy of the slides on to his phone and went to Roswell. He showed the photos to the children of witnesses and filmed their responses. Then he tracked down Eleazar Benavides, an air force base veteran who claims to have seen the aliens when they were brought to the Roswell base.

“That’s what I saw in 1947,” Benavides said after looking at the slides.

“That was a chill-inducing moment for us,” Dew says.

Dew started to put together the trailer for his documentary, which gives a flavor of his truth-seeking efforts.

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By the fall of 2014, whispers trickled through the UFO community that Carey and Schmitt had photographs of a Roswell alien.

The world of UFO research can be a vicious one, filled with self-proclaimed researchers certain they can find evidence others have not. “You don’t need an advanced degree to be a UFO researcher,” says Kevin Randle a UFO researcher himself, as well as an author, blogger and radio host. “In 10 minutes you can say: ‘I’m a UFO researcher’ and start posting on [internet message] boards.”

Many of these “investigators” turn on each other, and Carey and Schmitt could hear the sniping about their slides. People wondered what they were hiding. They couldn’t respond – they had signed a non-disclosure.

Finally, Carey couldn’t hold back. While speaking at a UFO conference in November 2014 at Washington DC’s American University he blurted: “We have the smoking gun!”

He told the audience about Hilda and Bernard, about the Eisenhowers, about the slides in the box, about the shriveled body in the pictures and about the Toronto anthropologist who said the figure wasn’t human.

Within days, the entire UFO world knew about the alien in the slides.

But since Beason and Dew wouldn’t show the slides publicly until they proved the body was an alien, the UFO community was flustered. Tom Carey had access to the smoking gun, and he couldn’t show it? Rather than hail Carey’s proclamation, the message boards and chatrooms that make up the vast extraterrestrial internet buried it in scorn.

“Smells like bullshit,” said one Reddit poster.

“Sasquatch community is rife with charlatans like this,” said another.

“A carefully-prepared scam,” wrote a UFO blogger.

Carey and Schmitt were shocked. While accustomed to criticism for their research, they lived shielded from the modern internet’s rage. Carey couldn’t comprehend someone calling him “a hemorrhoid with glasses”.

“Say it to my face!” Schmitt wanted to scream to his invisible attackers.

A stunning reveal

By early 2015, Beason and Dew knew they had no choice but to reveal the slides. The pressure to do so was extreme and Dew needed money to fund his documentary. Dew spoke to a reality show producer, hoping to build a TV special around the slides, but the offer was too small.

The only appealing proposal came from Jamie Maussan, an investigative journalist based in Mexico City. Depending on whom you talk to, Maussan is either a fearless crusader tackling environmental issues or a sensationalist with an unhealthy UFO obsession.

Maussan wanted a great slide-revealing spectacle in Mexico City. He said attitudes about UFOs are more open there than in the US.

He imagined renting the Auditorio Nacional, Mexico City’s grandest theatre, and said they could sell a live stream of the event around the world. He had a name for his extravaganza: BeWitness. He promised Beason and Dew enough money to fund a documentary.

Beason and Dew hated the idea: it sounded like an overblown fiasco. But Maussan was their best option, so in early 2015 they signed an agreement for BeWitness, and sent Maussan a scan of the slides. He took the scan to Mexico’s National Forensic Institute where researchers found 20 anomalies in the figure’s body that they said made it different from a human’s, including the extra-large head, four sets of ribs instead of 10, the position the eyes, and the fact it lacked a pelvis.

On 5 May 2013, Cinco de Mayo, nearly 7,000 people paid between $20 and $86 to attend BeWitness

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BeWitness: 7,000 people paid to attend the event.

The show was more than four hours long, the list of speakers endless

Carey and Schmitt gave a PowerPoint presentation. Doble testified that the body was not human. The forensic scientists described the anomalies they discovered.

Beason found BeWitness too much of a spectacle to attend. Almost to prove his point, a person dressed as a giant alien strolled the stage.

Then Maussan projected the two slides on to enormous screens.

At first, there was little response from the UFO world.

Though the slides had been on huge screens in the auditorium, they weren’t easy to see online. Many people noticed what appeared to be a reflection of a woman’s leg and the corner of a bench in one photo. It looked suspiciously like something from a museum. No one could tell for sure.

Three days after BeWitness, someone involved in the show leaked a high-resolution scan of one slide to a group of skeptics. The next morning, Beason called Dew as he prepared to leave Mexico.

The placard they could never read had been deciphered.

A member of the Roswell Slides Research Group posting under the screen name Neb Lator examined the high-resolution image using SmartDeBlur Pro, a software program easily found on the internet. Several hours later, the placard’s top words had cleared enough to be deciphered.

“MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY”

The smoking gun: the picture showing the ‘alien’. Photograph: Hilda Blair Ray

Further deblurring revealed most of the placard’s other writing:

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

Dew was stunned.

“No way could they read in two days what it took us three years trying to decipher,” he says.

The deblurring had to be phony, he thought.

For a few days Carey and Schmitt, much like Dew, refused to believe the placard actually had been read. They accused the Roswell Slides Research Group of photoshopping the placard. Carey released a statement calling the members “a cast of characters” and accused one of “being party to a UFO hoax years ago”.

But soon more information was unearthed. A better reading of the placard identified the mummy’s donor as an SL Palmer. Debunkers located government records showing Palmer discovered the body in 1896 near Montezuma Castle, a series of cave dwellings cut into the Arizona cliffs about 30 miles from the garage where Beason’s sister initially found the slides. The records included evidence that the child was Native American, and photos of the burial site along with pictures of the body spread on blankets not long after its discovery.

The mummy was traced to the Chapin Mesa Archeological Museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado. The museum confirmed the child’s body had been on display for years. Which is where it seems an attorney and geologist named Hilda and Bernard might have snapped photos of it in the later 1940s.

“The Smoking Gun: RIP To The Roswell Slides,” screamed a UFO blog headline.

“Fraud Put To Rest,” said another.

“Busted,” shouted one more.

A road sign near Roswell. Photograph: Getty Images

The UFO world mocked Carey and Schmitt for not realizing their Roswell alien was a mummy in a museum. “The whole investigation was amateurish,” scoffs Kevin Randle, the UFO researcher and radio host. How could everyone not see the pictures clearly came from a museum? Did they really think that even if Dwight Eisenhower somehow knew the Rays he would let them look at something as top-secret as a dead Roswell alien?

Not long after the placard’s deciphering, Carey was pulled from a prime speaking role at a top UFO conference. Humiliated, Carey and Schmitt apologized to the Roswell Slides debunkers.

“I came back to the States thinking: the only redeeming thing is that 99% of the American press has no clue or idea about this or that it happened,” Schmitt says.

They wondered how they could have been so wrong. They considered the previous three years, and concluded that Beason and Dew had duped them by distorting the slides and blurring the placard, making it impossible for anyone to read. They said Beason and Dew only showed them a low-resolution photo that kept them from realizing the body was in a museum.

“It was a very sophisticated hoax,” Carey says. “Dew manipulated the slides. The one clue we couldn’t figure out was the placard, but they played hocus pocus with the placard. We were given something that had been altered.”

“These guys would tell you they were being up front and honest, but they were controlling the slides,” says Schmitt. “I shouldn’t have trusted them as much as I did.”

But why?

“M.O.N.E.Y. That’s why [Dew] did it,” Carey says.

Night is falling outside the coffee shop where Dew tells his story. He gazes into the inky darkness then shakes his head.

He says he and Beason did show Schmitt a high-resolution version of the slides early in their investigation, and the experts they approached were those recommended by Carey and Schmitt. He insists he has always tried to “remain neutral” about the slides, even as he and the others let their imaginations stretch random pieces of Hilda’s background into believing they had the world’s only photos of a Roswell alien.

When asked if he wanted too much for the body to be an alien – something Carey and Schmitt both admitted to me that they themselves did – and that he was willing to set aside all good sense, he said: “I’m definitely guilty of not discouraging the talk [of it being alien]. It was good for the project.”

Beason has moved on, but Dew wants to finish the documentary. He will call his film Kodachrome, a tribute to the red processing label stamped on each of Hilda’s pictures. It is, after all, the reason he dedicated four years to the slides and why he still clenches his jaw as he denies Carey and Schmitt’s charge that he manipulated the photos.

“They got their hopes up,” he says. “They will never get the answers they are looking for. They dedicated their lives to this. Me, I just go back to shooting high school football.”

He chuckles.

His laugh clanks empty under the vast night sky.