The Roswell Slides: A Kodachrome Body and the Placard That Ended It

In 2015, a set of Kodachrome slides found in an Arizona attic was promoted as a photograph of an alien body from Roswell. On 5 May, promoters unveiled them in Mexico City before a paying audience of thousands. Within weeks, independent researchers had deblurred a museum placard in the image and identified the body: a mummified child displayed in a Colorado museum.

The file

Slides in an attic

The slides belonged to the estate of Bernard and Hilda Ray of Texas, found among their effects by an Arizona couple in the late 1990s and passed to video producer Adam Dew around 2012. Two showed a small, atrophied body laid out in a glass display case. Roswell authors Donald Schmitt and Tom Carey, investigator Anthony Bragalia and Mexican broadcaster Jaime Maussan promoted the images as photographic evidence of an alien recovered in 1947, insisting that the “best experts” had examined them.

The promotion strategy was itself the story. Instead of publishing the slides, the group released a blurred partial image in early 2015 and scheduled a paid global broadcast for May. Skeptics, and eventually some ufologists, argued that the leaked image looked exactly like a museum specimen under glass.

The BeWitness event

On 5 May 2015, the “BeWitness” event at Mexico City’s National Auditorium unveiled the slides to a paying audience — tickets ran to roughly 200 dollars — with an international webcast. The presentation leaned on expert claims: that the placard in front of the body could not be read, that photographic analyses excluded a museum exhibit, and that the body’s anatomy was nonhuman. None of those claims survived the month.

While the event ran, a loose international group of researchers, the Roswell Slides Research Group, was doing something the promoters had not: cleaning up the image. Analysts including the pseudonymous Nab Lator applied deblurring techniques to the placard visible behind the body.

The placard gives it away

The deblurred placard referenced a small boy’s mummy displayed at the Mesa Verde museum in Colorado. A 1940 park naturalist’s article about the museum’s mummies described a small boy of about two with missing skin patches and a missing lower leg — details matching the body in the slides. Researchers cross-checked the exhibit’s display case, its lighting and the 1940s-era Kodachrome stock, and independent experts consulted by the group concurred that the body was a mummified child, a human specimen photographed in a museum.

The implication was ugly in a way the promoters had not planned for: the “alien” was a deceased Indigenous child whose remains had been publicly displayed decades ago, photographed by a couple passing through the Southwest, and repurposed in 2015 as an extraterrestrial. Even for an archive that deals in hoaxes, the slide file is a study in how desire bends an image before anyone looks closely.

A black eye with a lesson

Coverage called the episode ufology’s biggest black eye. The Skeptical Inquirer devoted a full column to the fiasco; SETI astronomer Seth Shostak wrote that one look at the body should trip any baloney detector; and veteran Roswell researchers publicly distanced themselves before the event, with Kevin Randle withdrawing after examining the leaked image. Maussan, who had staked the most, moved on to other photographic claims. The slides did not end Roswell speculation, which has always been fueled less by evidence than by appetite, but they did end this particular promise of “smoking gun” photography.

The archive keeps this file as a caution, not a mystery. The record contains named promoters, a dated event, a readable placard and a museum specimen. Nothing in it required a spaceship, and the one thing it did require — due diligence before a paid debut — is the part that was skipped. Our header shows a dimmed lecture hall with a wooden case under a spotlight; it is an editorial reconstruction of the staging, not a reproduction of the slides.