Simulcast on KGRA Digital Broadcasting, YouTube, Facebook, & Rumble | Tuesday, June 18, 2024 @ 7:00 PM EDT (-4GMT)
BIO In a former life, David Jones wrote horror fiction under the pen name David Buchan, with his stories appearing in numerous literary journals and anthologies over the years, often alongside those of horror greats such as Clive Barker and John Carpenter. His fiction was also selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, a long-running anthology series that has previously included the work of Stephen King as well as many other masters of the genre.
He maintained an active interest in unexplained phenomena throughout the 1990s but became a sceptic at the turn of the Millennium. In 2020, when he first learned of the footage of UFOs taken by US Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015, his interested in the subject was rekindled, which resulted in his study of the Ramey memo, the document held by Brigadier General Roger Ramey during a press conference in Fort Worth, days after the famous crash outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Because of his background in international logistics, he recognised shipping terms on the memo with which he was very familiar, something that convinced him to take the document seriously. He worked on the Ramey memo for 12 months and was able to uncover 90% of its text, revealing the document to be partially encrypted with substitution and transposition ciphers.
His book The Roswell Memo documents his work on the Ramey memo. www.facebook.com/theroswellmemo
Hi Martin,
I am one of your Australian followers, and I look forward to your shows with interest. Your even handed approach is much appreciated. I listened to the Roswell/Remy memo episode around extracting the memo from the photo. Generally good work on David Jones’s part, a cautious and conservative approach in the decode process, each word taken carefully. With a reasonable guess at the end.
I am less than convinced that the errors in the memo are part of a half-hearted encryption attempt. If so, it was a terrible attempt, and I am not convinced Remy was that stupid. I suspect he was pretty astute and given an urgent clean-up job with instructions to contain it.
I am a bit of a fan of Occam’s razor – “the simplest explanation that fits the facts” is more than likely correct.
I hypothesise the following:
* Remy did not want any further people across the events that happened and rather than give a typist a succinct summary, he typed the memo himself. Maybe it was urgent and there were no typists available. Do we know who typed it?
* Most men in that era did not type themselves – “woman’s work” – please forgive the misogyny – it is not mine, but that of the era. Remy may have known how to type apart from “hunt and peck”, but the balance of probability is against it. But he was a military type and they do have unexpected skills
* The memo shows hallmarks of being typed by an amateur:
– Some words have letters which seem to the result of key collisions, as happens on old typewriters when two letters are pressed at once and the type bars collide on the paper. There are examples of this in some words where letters appear mixed
– If a “hunt and peck” method of typing was employed where the typist did not “know the keyboard”, accidental use of letters near to the target letter are likely. There are examples of this in a number of words
* No easy typewriter correction methods were readily available at the time. No “whiteout” liquid, let alone typewriters which would lift off the wrong letter and replace it with the right one. These typewriters were basic. Which is why skilled typists were used to get it right in one pass. Remy would have no desire to re-type the memo if he made an error – he would only make more – and never finish. So he accepted a few errors and relied on a property of the English language – it has high redundancy – even with a few mistakes the meaning is usually reasonably clear, clear enough for an emergency memo typed under time pressure
So the memo contains errors, not to obfuscate, but from the urgency and secrecy required. If Remy wanted it encrypted it would be a page of five letter groups, separated by spaces, with no hope of a decode.
My hypothesis is not supported by direct facts from the time as far as I know, but as an explanation of a plain text memo peppered with typographical errors it holds some water, I think.
Use my hypothesis if you like or pass it to David, not as a criticism but as food for thought, but please do not identify me in any way.
Regards and keep up the good work.
I passed it along to David, great analysis! Thank you, Martin
Hi Martin,
Been doing a bit of reading, and that memo in the photo is a Telex (according to Wikipedia, and in this case I think I believe them).
And that changes many things. Machines called Teletypes are used to send and receive Telexes (I should disclose I am an electrical engineer by trade and have some familiarity with Teletypes, although more recent ones than the type used here).
Teletypes of that era did not have lower case because the coding scheme that they used was crude, using only 5 binary bits, constraining the character set that was available. The coding scheme was called “Baudot code” and you can see the details here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
Wikipedia reference again, but this article is definitely correct, it corresponds to verifiable experience. You can see how old this technology is, people like Gauss and Weber had direct input into its creation, in the 1870’s when they were encoding it by hand, no Teletypes then.
(Apologies for the aside, but this topic really bugs me. One thing I do not believe is that we needed help from Outside to create the technology we see today. While I regard myself as a competent practising engineer, I am no genius personally. But I have been fortunate to have known a couple from academia/industry. These people are truly incredible. Human genius is more than good enough to create this stuff, I can’t rule out we had help of course, but it is not necessary to get where we are today. I am old enough to have lived through most of it, and it is an easily followed evolution. The leaps we see are supported by a huge human endeavour that is unseen by most and even less understood).
But back to the point.
Teletypes do not have a direct mechanical connection between the keyboard and the printer. When you press a key, the mechanism encodes the keystroke into the 5 bit code and does at least two things with it. It sends it out over the line to the remote receiving Teletype and also feeds the code to the local printer mechanism. (It may also punch it into a paper tape.)
The local printer decodes the 5 bit code and prints the corresponding character. It is therefore impossible to press 2 keys at once. Once you press a key, the mechanism of the encoder locks out all other keys until the encode process is complete, the code is sent, and the user lifts their finger off the key, and the mechanism readies for the next one.
This means that unless the printer part of the Teletype was faulty in some way, only one character could strike the paper at a time. So the speculation about multiple bars hitting the paper is most unlikely. Of course, key mis-strikes are still possible, as the Teletype cannot stop that.
Next, a Teletype is much less likely to be used by an amateur. They had a bunch of quirks in usability and cost a fortune, so untrained users were usually kept away. Now Remy had rank to order access, and he may have been familiar with Teletypes, we do not know exactly.
In particular, Teletype keyboards of the time were tricky. Because of the coding limitations, there we not enough unique codes to go around the full character requirement and the same code was used twice depending on the mode the Teletype was in. For example, if it was in LETTERS mode a particular code would be A for example, but if it was in FIGURES mode the exact same code would be 1.
So an operator sending a message had to track the machine mode as they went and change the mode with a particular key stroke so the code sent would correspond to the right meaning. The process was entirely manual. If the machine was in FIGURES mode, and the operator keyed A, the machine would print and send 1. It did not automatically change. It was awfully easy to type a message which came out as gibberish on the Teletypes of this era just by missing a mode change.
There is also the possibility that the message was prepared as a paper tape first. This was done so that the cost of phone line used was minimised. The operator could mess about off-line until the message was correct on the paper tape, then connect the Teletype to the phone system, and send the message from the paper tape absolutely correctly in the shortest possible time. This idea is speculation and inconsistent with the errors observed. But the possibility exists.
So that puts a hole in my hypothesis to some extent and leads to a bunch of new questions:
* The message origin makes a big difference:
– Did Remy send or receive that message? Is what he is holding the local copy from the transmit Teletype?
– If received, who from?
– If he sent it, was he the operator?, possible but unlikely
– If it was received by him, why is it so sloppy and seemingly full of errors?
* Why do we see what looks like multi-character strikes – need comment from someone familiar with that age Teletype, getting pretty rare now I guess, but that multi-strike should be impossible. It is not like the typewriter case at all.
So more food for thought. Share if you think useful. Please maintain my anonymous status.
Regards, Fred
Yes, I concur