Roswell UFO Incident (Part 2)

Roswell and Fort Worth base witnesses

Sgt. Robert Porter: B-29 flight engineer. Porter helped load and was on the B-29 flight from Roswell to Fort Worth, where Marcel was supposed to show some recovered material to Gen. Roger Ramey before proceeding on to Wright Field, Ohio. "I was involved in loading the B-29 with the material, which was wrapped in packages with wrapping paper. One of the pieces was triangle shaped, about two and a half feet across the bottom. The rest were in small packages about the size of a shoe box. The brown paper was held with tape ..... The material was extremely lightweight. When I picked it up, it was just like picking up an empty package. We loaded the triangle shaped package and three shoe box-sized packages into the plane. All of the packages could have fit into the trunk of a car.

1st Lt. Robert Shirkey: The base assistant operations officer. Shirkey also witnessed debris being loaded onto the B-29 ..... "Standing only three feet from the passing procession, we saw boxes full of aluminum-looking metal pieces being carried to the B-29. Major Marcel came along carrying an open box full of what seemed to be scrap metal. It obviously was not aluminum: it did not shine or reflect like the aluminum on American military airplanes. And sticking up in one corner of the box being carried by Major Marcel was a small I-beam with hieroglyphic-like markings on the inner flange, in some kind of weird colour, not black, not purple, but a close approximation of the two ..... A man in civilian dress ..... was carrying a piece of metal under his left arm ..... This piece was about the size of a poster drawing board - very smooth, almost glass-like, with torn edges."

Sgt. Robert Smith: Roswell 1st Air Transport Unit. "My involvement in the Roswell incident was to help load crates of debris on to the aircraft ..... We were taken to the hangar to load crates. There was a lot of farm dirt on the hangar floor ..... We loaded crates on to three or four C-54s ..... One crate took up the entire plane; it wasn't that heavy, but it was a large volume ..... All I saw was a little piece of material. The piece of debris I saw was two-to-three inches square. It was jagged. When you crumpled it up, it then laid back out; and when it did, it kind of crackled, making a sound like cellophane, and it crackled when it was let out. There were no creases ..... The largest piece was roughly 20 feet long, four-to-five feet high, four-to-five feet wide. The rest were two-to-three feet long, two feet square or smaller. The sergeant who had the piece of material said that was the material in the crates."

Two witnesses were brought into Ramey's office and told the debris they saw came from Roswell.

J. Bond Johnson: Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter/photographer, took six photographs of the debris in Ramey's office, posed with Ramey, Dubose, and Marcel. He said "It wasn't an impressive sight, just some aluminum-like foil, balsa wood sticks, and some burnt rubber that was stinking up the office." Johnson said Ramey told him, "We've found out ..... it's a weather balloon."

Warrant Officer Irving Newton: Weather forecaster at Fort Worth. He was identified in contemporary accounts as being brought in to make an official weather balloon identification for Gen. Ramey. In original testimony, Newton indicated that when he got to Ramey's office, "he was briefed by a colonel ..... that an object had been found by a major in Roswell and that the general had decided that it was really a weather balloon and wanted him to identify it as such." Newton said, "There's no doubt that what I was given were parts of a balloon. I was later told that the major from Roswell had identified the stuff as a flying saucer but the general had been suspicious of his identification from the beginning." In a later affidavit for the Air Force, he said, "I was convinced at the time that this was a balloon with a [kite] and remain convinced ..... There were figures on the sticks lavender or pink in color, appeared to be weather faded markings with no rhyme or reason." Newton's photo was also taken with the balloon debris by an unknown photographer. (Pflock, another researcher, names Charles B. Cashon of the US Air Force as the photographer.)

Material with exotic properties

There were numerous others who claimed to have seen the debris, and many of them described various types of material having exotic physical qualities. One was a tinfoil-like material which when crumpled would not regain its original shape. Some also described pencil-like sticks with unusual qualities.

Debris field descriptions

Reports of the size of the debris field and of the ranch's ground conditions differ. There is a large range of descriptions of the size of the debris field, from Cavitt claiming the field was about the size of the 20 feet living room he was sitting in, to one account Brazel gave in 1947 of "about 200 yards diameter," to Marcel Sr.'s description "The wreckage was scattered over an area of about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide," or "It was maybe a mile long and several hundred feet wide of debris," to yet another description from 1947 attributed to Marcel saying "he found the broken remains of the weather device scattered over a square mile of land."

Bill Brazel Jr. gave an independent description very similar to Marcel's, based on what he said his father later told him, of the debris field being "about a quarter mile long or so, and several hundred feet wide."

An indirect description of debris field size came from combined statements of Bill Brazel and neighboring rancher Bud Payne. The distance between the northernmost portion of the debris field pointed out by Brazel (where he said there was a gouge) and the southern portion pointed out by Payne (where he said he was turned away by soldiers) was about three quarters of a mile.

Brazel's daughter, Bessie Brazel Schreiber said, "There was a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seems to me now to have been the size of a football field. There may have been additional material spread out more widely by the wind, which was blowing quite strongly. "Like Tyree, she mentioned her father mentioning a lot of debris being near a water tank and his concern that the sheep wouldn't water there.

Descriptions of the condition of the field ranged from no disturbance at all to descriptions of deep gouges in the terrain. Marcel Sr. said, "It was nothing that hit the ground or exploded [on] the ground. It was something that must have exploded above ground." Bessie Brazel said she didn't "remember seeing gouges in the ground or any other signs that anything may have hit the ground hard."

However, Brazel Jr. said he saw a shallow groove, about 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, 500 feet (150m) long, and only a foot to 18 inches (460mm) deep, extending down to the hard shale layer underneath, "This thing made quite a track down through there. It took a year or two for it to grass back over and heal up."

Other witnesses to describe a gouge or gouges on the ground were Walt Whitmore Jr. (175 to 200 yards of uprooted pasture land in a fan shape), Roswell counterintelligence officer Lewis Rickett, photographer Robin Adair of the Associated Press, who said he tried to overfly the recovery operation but was waved off by soldiers brandishing weapons, and Gen. Arthur Exon, who said he overflew the area some months later. Exon said that in addition to various gouges, he saw auto tracks leading into the pivotal areas.

In tomorrows Journal (Part 3) - crashed spaceship, aliens, intimidation and cover-ups.

How To Get To Heaven From Scotland

I was testing children in my Glasgow Sunday school class to see if they understood the concept of getting into heaven.

I asked them, "If I sold my house and my car, had a big jumble sale and gave all my money to the church, would that get me into heaven?"

"NO!" the children answered."

If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the garden and kept everything tidy, would that get me into heaven?"

Again, the answer was 'No!'

By now I was starting to smile."Well, then, if I was kind to animals and gave sweeties to all the children, and loved my husband, would that get me into heaven?"

Again, they all answered 'No!'

I was just bursting with pride for them. I continued, "Then how can I get into heaven?"

A six year old boy shouted,

Yuv goat tae be f****n' deid.

Ducking Stools

Ducking-stools and cucking-stools are chairs formerly used for punishment. They were both instruments of social humiliation and censure, primarily for the offense of scolding or back biting, and less often for sexual offences like having an illegitimate child or prostitution. They were technical devices which formed part of the wider method of law enforcement through social humiliation. A common alternative was a court order to recite one’s crimes or sins after Mass or in the market place on market day, or informal action such as a Skimmington ride.
They were usually of local manufacture with no standard design. Most were simply chairs into which the victim could be tied and exposed at her door or the site of her offence. Some were on wheels like a tumbrel that could be dragged around the parish. Some were put on poles so that they could be plunged into water, hence "ducking" stool. The equivalents for men were the stocks, although these were not gender specific.
There does seem to have been a difference in usage between a ducking stool and a cucking stool. Although both were primarily forms of public exposure and humiliation, the cucking stool seems to have involved no water, with the victim raised up in the air on show.

The Ducking Stool at Leominster, last used in 1809

(The contributor of this photograph is John Phillips)

Ducking-stools
The ducking-stool was a strongly made wooden armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the victim was seated, an iron band being placed around her so that she should not fall out during her immersion. The earliest record of the use of such is towards the beginning of the 17th century, with the term being first attested in English in 1597. It was used both in Europe and in the English colonies of North America.
Usually the chair was fastened to a long wooden beam fixed as a seesaw on the edge of a pond or river. Sometimes, however, the ducking-stool was not a fixture but was mounted on a pair of wooden wheels so that it could be wheeled through the streets, and at the river-edge was hung by a chain from the end of a beam. In sentencing a woman the magistrates ordered the number of duckings she should have. Yet another type of ducking-stool was called a tumbrel. It was a chair on two wheels with two long shafts fixed to the axles. This was pushed into the pond and then the shafts released, thus tipping the chair up backwards. Sometimes the punishment proved fatal, the unfortunate women dying of shock.
The last recorded cases are those of a Mrs. Ganble at Plymouth (1808); Jenny Pipes, a notorious scold (1809), and Sarah Leeke (1817), both of Leominster. In the last case the water in the pond was so low that the victim was merely wheeled round the town in the chair.

Tumbrels (other definitions)
A tumbrel, or tumbril was a tipcart—usually used for carrying dung, sand, stones and so forth—which transported condemned prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution - called un tombereau in French.
Use in identifying witches
In medieval times, ducking was seen as a foolproof way to establish whether a suspect was a witch. The ducking stools were first used for this purpose but ducking was later inflicted without the chair. In this instance the victim's right thumb was bound to left toe. A rope was attached to her waist and the "witch" was thrown into a river or deep pond. If the "witch" floated it was deemed that she was in league with the devil, rejecting the "baptismal water". If the "witch" drowned she was deemed innocent. This particular method of ducking was also inflicted on men accused of witchcraft.

Fiction
Ducking stools have appeared occasionally in film and television, such as in Babes in Toyland, and Doctor Who (The Highlanders, Episode 3). A variant appears in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a suspected witch has her weight compared to that of a duck in a parody of medieval witchcraft tests; the woman is found to indeed weigh the same as a duck, thus proving her to be a witch, to which she responds, "it's a fair cop" (British English working class idiom for a justified arrest or conviction; Americans might say "You got me fair and square").

Who Am I? - Wednesday's Answer

Wednesday's

Who Am I?

Answer

Adrian Chiles

Popeye

Popeye the Sailor is a fictional hero famous for appearing in comic strips and animated films as well as numerous television shows. He was created by Elzie Chrisler Segar, and first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929. Popeye has now become the series' title as well.
Although Segar's Thimble Theatre strip, first published on December 19, 1919, was in its tenth year when Popeye made his debut, the sailor quickly became the main focus of the strip and Thimble Theatre became one of King Features' most popular properties during the 1930s. Thimble Theatre was carried on after Segar's death in 1938 by several writers and artists, most notably Segar's assistant Bud Sagendorf. The strip, now titled Popeye, continues to appear in first-run installments in its Sunday edition, written and drawn by Hy Eisman. The daily strips are reprints of old Sagendorf stories.
In 1933, Max and Dave Fleischer's Fleischer Studios adapted the Thimble Theatre characters into a series of Popeye the Sailor theatrical cartoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. These cartoons proved to be among the most popular of the 1930s, and the Fleischers—and later Paramount's own Famous Studios—continued production through 1957. The cartoons are now owned by Warner Bros. Animation and Turner Entertainment by way of King Features.
Since then, Popeye has appeared in comic books, television cartoons, arcade and video games, hundreds of advertisements and peripheral products, and a 1980-live action film directed by Robert Altman starring comedian Robin Williams as Popeye.
On January 1, 2009, 70 years since the death of his creator, Segar's character of Popeye (though not the various films, TV shows, theme music and other media based on him) became public domain in most countries, but remains under copyright in the United States.

Characters and story
In most appearances (except during the World War II era), Popeye is a middle-aged sailor with a unique way of speaking, one eye apparently missing, disproportionately muscular forearms with two anchoe tattoos, thinning red hair, and an ever-present corncob pipe (which he toots like a steamship's whistle at times). Despite some mistaken characterizations over the years, Popeye is generally depicted as having only one blue eye, his left. In at least one Fleischer cartoon, Bluto refers to Popeye as a "one-eyed runt." It has never been revealed specifically how Popeye lost his right eye, although he claims it was in "the mos' arful battle" of his life. Later versions of the character had both eyes, with one of them merely being squinty, or "squinky" as he put it. According to the official site, Popeye is 34 years old and was born in a typhoon off Santa Monica, California.
Popeye's strange, comic and often supernatural adventures take him all over the world, and place him in conflict with enemies such as the Sea Hag and Bluto. His main base of operations is the fictional town of Sweethaven. Popeye's father is the degenerate Poopdeck Pappy, who does not share his son's moral righteousness and is represented as having abandoned Popeye in some sources. Popeye's sweetheart (and in some sources, wife) over the years is Olive Oyl; although the two characters often bickered, especially in early stories after his first appearance. Popeye is the adoptive father of Sweet'Pea an infant foundling left on his doorstep. (Sweet Pea is a term of affection used by Popeye; in the cartoon We Aim to Please, he addressed Olive Oyl as "Sweet Pea" at one point.)
In addition to a gravelly voice and a casual attitude towards grammar, Popeye is known for having an apparent speech impediment (a common character-distinguishing device in early cartoons), which either comes naturally or is caused by the ever-present pipe in his mouth. Among other things, he has problems enunciating a trailing "t"; thus, "fist" becomes "fisk" (as sung in his theme song, which makes it conveniently rhyme with "risk") and "infant" becomes "infink." This speech impediment even found its way into some of the titles of the cartoons. (Pictured right: Popeye and Olive).
Popeye is depicted as having superhuman strength, though the nature of his strength changes depending on which medium he is represented in. Originally, the comic-strip Popeye gained his strength and invulnerability in 1929 by rubbing the head of the rare Whiffle Hen. From early 1932 onward, especially the cartoons, Popeye was depicted as eating spinach to become stronger. The animated shorts depicted Popeye as ridiculously strong, but liable to be pummeled by the much larger Bluto before his eating of the spinach.
When fed up with this treatment or exhausted, he would eat spinach, which would instantly restore and amplify his strength to an even greater level. In the comic strips, spinach is presented as a panacea, infusing Popeye not only with his extraordinary strength, but also making him invulnerable to all sorts of threats (including bullets, a basilisk's petrifying gaze, or aliens' weapons) and even capable of feats like flight or extraordinarily fast swimming (usually with the aid of his pipe as a propeller). In the animated shorts, Popeye's ingestion of spinach – which is almost invariably canned – is equally fanciful and often involves squeezing the can until the top opens, or sucking the spinach through his pipe, and on rare occasions, even ingesting the can as well. Occasionally, spinach has a similar invigorating power on other characters.
Other differences in Popeye's story and characterization show up depending upon which medium he is presented in. While Swee'Pea is definitively the adopted child of Popeye in the comic strips, he is often depicted as being related to Olive Oyl in cartoons. The cartoons also occasionally feature family members of Popeye that have never appeared in the strip, notably his look-alike nephews Peepeye, Pupeye, Pipeye, and Poopeye.
Even though there is no absolute sense of continuity in the stories, certain plot and presentation elements remain mostly constant, including purposeful contradictions in Popeye's capabilities. Though at times he seems bereft of manners or uneducated, Popeye is often depicted as capable of coming up with solutions to problems that (to the police, or, most importantly, the scientific community) seem insurmountable. Popeye has, alternatively, displayed Sherlock Holmes-like investigative prowess, determining for instance that his beloved Olive was abducted by estimating the depth of the villains' footprints in the sand, scientific ingenuity (as his construction, within a few hours, of a "spinach-drive" spaceship), or oversimplified (yet successful) diplomatic argumentation, by presenting to diplomatic conferences his own existence (and superhuman strength) as the only true guarantee of world peace.
Popeye's vastly versatile exploits are deemed even more amusing by a few standard plot elements. One is the love triangle between Popeye, Olive and Bluto, and the latter's endless machinations to claim Olive at Popeye's expense. Another is his (near-saintly) perseverance to overcome any obstacle to please Olive - who, quite often, treats him like dirt, and ends up being the only character capable of beating him up. Finally, in terms of the endless array of villain plots, Popeye mostly comes to the truth by "accidentally" sneaking on the villains, the moment they are bragging about their schemes' ingenuity, thus revealing everything to an enraged Popeye, who uses his "fisks" in the name of justice.