Roswell Incident -- The Ramey Telegram: What Does the Note Say?

Roswell Incident -- The Ramey Telegram: What Does the Note Say?

The Photograph

Among the photographs taken at General Roger Ramey's Fort Worth office on July 8, 1947 -- when Ramey held the press conference identifying the recovered material as a weather balloon -- is a photograph taken by Fort Worth Star-Telegram photographer J. Bond Johnson showing General Ramey holding what appears to be a telegram or message document.

The document Ramey is holding is partially visible in the photograph. The text is very small and partially obscured by Ramey's hand and body position, but several researchers have attempted to read and interpret it using digital image enhancement, photogrammetric analysis, and various computer-assisted decipherment techniques.

The Competing Analyses

The Ramey telegram has been analyzed by multiple individuals and groups with competing results:

David Rudiak's analysis (the most detailed and most cited): Rudiak, a Roswell researcher, spent years applying digital enhancement and analysis to high-resolution scans of the photograph. His proposed reading of key fragments includes:

• "the victims of the wreck" -- suggesting the telegram referenced bodies or casualties
• "disc" -- consistent with describing a flying disc rather than a balloon
• References to "Fort Worth" and to forwarding or shipping something
• References to what Rudiak interprets as the "weather balloons" story being adopted as a cover

If Rudiak's reading is correct, the telegram in Ramey's hand contains language inconsistent with the balloon explanation and consistent with the recovery of a craft with occupants.

Counter-analyses: Other researchers and photographic analysts who have examined the same image have produced different readings or concluded that the resolution is insufficient to reliably read any portion of the text. The photograph is a black-and-white image from 1947 of very limited resolution; the text on the document is further compressed by the angle and distance.

Why It Matters

The significance of the Ramey telegram, if Rudiak's reading is even partially correct:

• It would represent a contemporaneous official document in which Ramey -- the officer who publicly announced "weather balloon" -- was privately referring to the recovery in terms that contradict his public statement
• The phrase "victims of the wreck," if genuine, would be the strongest contemporaneous evidence of recovered bodies in the entire Roswell documentary record
• It would establish that the cover story was being managed at a high level while the actual situation was being described differently in internal communications

The photograph is in the archives of the University of Texas at Arlington. It is a public document that anyone can examine. Whether it contains the text Rudiak proposes remains genuinely contested among qualified analysts.