The Ramey memo, again

Surely you've heard of the Ramey memo.
"Of course! And don't call me Shirley!!"

From this we got a scan of a large blow-up, which Stanton Friedman offered on CD-ROM:


And here's my attempt to enhance an available jpg of that scan:


Here's Dr. David Rudiak's reading of his copy after two years or work on it:


I wasn't able to enhance it much, maybe not enough to make any difference. But the memo itself certainly seems relevant to the whole field of ufology.

And Prof. Richard A. Muller likes to tell people that "flying disc" was a codename for the Mogul device. Hm.

There have been several threads on this already, and SuicideVirus posted this version somewhere:


And there's plenty background about it on the Web, with various opinions on what can be read:

Roswell Proof, By David Rudiak
Reconstruction by David Rudiak]
Why VICTIMS?
Rense interpretation
Military, not civilian, by David Rudiak
George Filer's interpretation
from Kevin Randle
Skeptical, informative pdf by Tim Printy (also mentions why it's hard to enhance):
The Ramey Document: Smoking gun or empty water pistol?
The FBI telegram, etc.
James Houran, Kevin Randle
MUFON Journal (includes rebuttal to above article)

reply to post by xpoq47


When we see the original photo, we notice him holding the memo with his thumb pointed down, yet your enlargement shows the thumb pointed up, which would mean we are trying to read, almost unreable writing upside down. Not only is your enlargement upside down, but the other pics you posted, you can't see the direction of the thumb, but the words on those memo pics (with translations) are upside down too. why are we trying to read it upside down? Thats what it seems like to me..

Take a look at the letters sent between FBI director J.Edgar Hoover and General Curtis LeMay. They are available....found shortly after the FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT.

They describe a bitter rivalry and fight over control of the recovered disc and E.T. bodies from Roswell. The letters are of a logic that suits the time and purpose of specific military branches and civilian agencies desires and reasons for acess to the recovery data.

IKE eventually settled the dispute. But the rivalry continued. Split Infinity

Originally posted by BluePillOrRedPill
reply to post by xpoq47

 

When we see the original photo, we notice him holding the memo with his thumb pointed down, yet your enlargement shows the thumb pointed up, which would mean we are trying to read, almost unreable writing upside down. Not only is your enlargement upside down, but the other pics you posted, you can't see the direction of the thumb, but the words on those memo pics (with translations) are upside down too. why are we trying to read it upside down? Thats what it seems like to me..

edit on 14-11-2011 by BluePillOrRedPill because: (no reason given)

Nobody is reading it upside down. Scan it in hires already rightside up or scan upside down then flip it 180 degrees on the computer screen to make it rightside up. Same difference. It's still going to be rightside up.

I've seen this silly objection multiple times before, including a claim in an old ATS Ramey thread that the memo was obviously faked for the same reason. The solution is quite simple. If writing is upside down, flip it so it is rightside up.

Originally posted by xpoq47
.

...And there's plenty background about it on the Web, with various opinions on what can be read:

James Houran, Kevin Randle
MUFON Journal (includes rebuttal to above article)

Another rebuttal to the disastrous "science" paper by James Houran and Kevin Randle:

Houran/Randle rebuttal at Roswellproof

Houran and Randle claimed that readers of the Ramey memo are all "pro-UFO" biased and seeing only what they want to see. They claimed their study with experimental subjects proved this: the context provided determined what they read. But looking closely, they actually proved the opposite. The context had almost nothing to do with words read (affected maybe only about 1% of words). Further proper context greatly enhanced readability of words that even Houran and Randle were forced to agree were there (like "Fort Worth, Tex." and "weather balloons" because all experimental groups, even those with no context or misleading context, were reading them. There is also an amazing admission within the paper that the data supposedly supporting their conclusion of reader bias didn't exist because a grad student had supposedly thrown it away.

Other serious problems were low motivation of readers (only 17 minutes average spent on a very difficult task) and poor experimental design with low quality, uninhanced images provided the readers..

Here's another deconvolution test on part of the image, equalizing pixels of 200, 200, 200 or brighter and darkening any pixel darker than the average of those within a radially weghted point spread function (in this test four pixels) but not changing those surrounding pixels:

Originally posted by xpoq47
Here's another deconvolution test on part of the image, equalizing pixels of 200, 200, 200 or brighter and darkening any pixel darker than the average of those within a radially weghted point spread function (in this test four pixels) but not changing those surrounding pixels:

xpoq47, what program were you using? Thanks.

reply to post by debrisfield


This is the latest of several versions of a program I wrote in c for this task. I tried various available software, but the results weren't even as good as that second image I posted. Next I'm aligning the text before trying more algorithms. We already had a thread about image-enhancement claims for the next version of Photoshop, which probably won't do much for the Ramey memo. In the meantime, I'm tinkering.

reply to post by xpoq47


if you get a decent engine for this type of processing, clean up the code and write it to include in GIMP, or as an unsupported Photoshop add on.

One of the biggest problems, and there's no way around it, is that the memo might be making some reference to a "disc" and the subsequent activity surrounding it, but it might just be referring to the hubbub created by a misinformed press release and typical dumb Army snafu, rather than a real object of interest.

It might be telling Ramey to try and downplay the whole stupid "disc" misunderstanding and focus on the weather balloon aspects. Or it might not have anything to do with it at all. Nothing about aliens being "forwarded" to Fort Worth like they were pieces misdirected mail.

At any rate, it's almost impossible to look at the blow up and be objective about what it does or doesn't show because everybody comes at it with their own expectations. Realistically, for the most part, it's just illegible.

reply to post by Blue Shift


Well, I linked in the OP David Rudiak's explanation about the word VICTIMS:

Why VICTIMS?

And since I've got a program up and running that does some cleanup, it doesn't hurt to keep tinkering with it, leaving open the possiblity of unexpected discovery.

Here's another crack at it, hopefully starting to get somewhat legible:

How on earth will that writing every be legible? I just don't buy it myself, although I do believe an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell, this memo just looks too distorted to ever be read.

Why would Ramey (or anyone for that matter) bring a memo detailing the Roswell crash to the press conference meant to cover it up? Not only that, but wave it around for a hundred photographers to see?

Don't get me wrong - I believe an ET craft crashed near Roswell. But the Ramey memo just doesn't make sense to me. It defies logic. If Ramey was that careless and sloppy, he had no business being a General in the United States Army.

Maybe the new 'de-blurring' feature in the upcoming Photoshop CS6 might help with this one ?

tv.adobe.com...


Amazing stuff !

note, watch all as the 'text' part is after the initial big WOW moment !


Peace

reply to post by BluePillOrRedPill


Is it likely that the paper he is holding is upside down??? I think that could be it. He is just casually holding it.

You can see at the very top of the thread the source picture, one of six taken by a single newspaper photographer. That's the only one in which text can be seen. In one other photo the same piece of paper is seen from the back, and it's blank. And it was more than 40 years later that a large blowup of the old negative was scanned upright and enhanced somewhat with a computer of that time.

Photoshop is adding a blind-deconvolution feature like that of special software for medical use, such as increasing the resolution of PET scans or microscopy photos. For that the program requires a reference for the blurring pattern. What I've made in an attempt to get something out of this memo is a C program the builds a weighting table before it starts processing the image, and I can input the parameters for that table. It's different in that I can modify the program as much as I like, and since its only purpose is to clear up this memo, all modifications and testing are dedicated to that. I tried some available deblurring programs, and the results were less than I'm getting out of my own program. Maybe one of those expensive programs can do it better. I don't know. I probably won't be able to get it any better than in the last image I posted above, but It doesn't hurt to keep tinkering with the program.

This shows the condition of the negative after too much handling by the time a large blowup was made in 1998 to be scanned as a ditigal image after being examined extensively under a microscope. So those scratches, etc. add to the problem.

Originally posted by DarthChrisious
Why would Ramey (or anyone for that matter) bring a memo detailing the Roswell crash to the press conference meant to cover it up? Not only that, but wave it around for a hundred photographers to see?

Don't get me wrong - I believe an ET craft crashed near Roswell. But the Ramey memo just doesn't make sense to me. It defies logic. If Ramey was that careless and sloppy, he had no business being a General in the United States Army.

First of all, only one photographer, not hundreds. Keep it factual. Lets not exaggerate.

Second, four photos of Ramey taken with the memo in his hand. In three the back of the paper is facing the camera. In the fourth, Ramey seems to be taking a quick peek at he memo, By chance the cameraman got an angle on the front of the memo.

Third, not exactly a unique situation. Other high people have made mistakes like this in the past. E.g., here's a fairly recent example of where the UK head of counter-terrorism carelessly allowed a sensitive document to be photographed, and much clearer too, totally flat, facing outward, completely readable:

UK counterterrorism blunder

Surely it defies logic that he at least didn't put a cover sheet over it. Talk about careless and sloppy. But real life can sometimes be like that. People make mistakes.

In this case, he was quickly canned because the photographed document was out over the Internet in a few hours. But Ramey didn't have the Internet to deal with and the Ramey memo is much harder to read. Nobody paid any attention to what he was holding in his hand back then. It is only in modern times that we've taken a closer look at it.

Originally posted by karen61057
reply to post by BluePillOrRedPill

 

Is it likely that the paper he is holding is upside down??? I think that could be it. He is just casually holding it.

It was rightside up to Ramey, but upside down from the perspective of the camera. Not a problem, because we can just flip the memo around 180 degrees to read it.