The Roswell Slides

The "Roswell Slides" are two Kodachrome transparencies, dated by film stock to the late 1940s, showing a small desiccated body in a glass case. Promoted as possible photographs of a Roswell-recovered being, they were unveiled on May 5, 2015 at the ticketed "BeWitness" event before thousands at Mexico City's National Auditorium, promoted by Jaime Maussan with researchers Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey presenting.

The slides surfaced from a Midland, Texas house connected to a deceased couple, the Rays, via an estate chain, with years of private circulation among researchers before the event. The provenance never included any military connection beyond speculation about the couple's acquaintances.

A placard sits beside the case in the image, blurred in the promoted versions. Within days of the unveiling, independent researchers (the Roswell Slides Research Group) deblurred the placard using commercially available software. It reads: "MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY," with museum accession text matching a child mummy displayed at the Mesa Verde-adjacent Chapin Mesa museum, taken from the Montezuma Castle region collections. Archival records corroborated the identification.

Conclusively identified: a photographed museum exhibit of a Native American child's remains, a resolution that added repatriation-ethics grievance to the fiasco.

The affair is the modern reference case for promotion outrunning verification: a solvable question (read the placard) monetized before it was asked. Presenters variously apologized (Carey and Schmitt's standing suffered lasting damage) or, in Maussan's case, disputed the deblurring and continued defending the slides, a sequence often cited in coverage of his later promotions, the Nazca mummies included.

The skeptical record is the resolution itself, achieved by independent researchers spanning belief camps within 72 hours, one of crowd-sourced analysis's cleanest wins.