In news that is more than a month old, I learned that Richard Dolan has been invited to participate in the presentation in Mexico City. He wrote that in “February 2015, to my great surprise, I was asked by Jaime Maussan if I would attend” but that he was hesitant to do so.
Later he said, “I didn’t agree to participate, however, until after I had a long conversation with Don Schmitt. Of all the people with a connection to the slides, I know Don the best. He helped to fill in many of the blanks I have had on the controversy, and I came away with an even stronger feeling that this is indeed a fascinating development in the UFO field. I also had a long and productive conversation with Tony Bragalia, for whom I have a lot of respect.”
Dolan isn’t going to talk about the validity of the slides because he doesn’t believe it would be appropriate to jump into that controversy. That will be left to Schmitt, Tom Carey and the other experts in various fields. According to Dolan, “Jaime’s reply was that he wanted me to offer my thoughts on the future of ufology and the potential for the end of UFO secrecy–that is, ‘Disclosure’ — if there were to be general agreement that the slides are authentic. I did co-author a book on the potential ramifications of Disclosure, and do find it interesting to speculate on this subject.”
Dolan recaps much of what has been discussed on a variety of blogs and web sites, telling us the things that we all now know, or rather what we have been told. We don’t need to go through all that here, however, for those interested you can find Dolan’s remarks at:
In his discussion, Dolan does make a couple of comments that are relevant, not only to the Roswell Slides, but to UFO research in general. He wrote:
There will always be things to criticize by those people who are simply intent on finding something to criticize. Nearly everything in UFO research is messy. Plus, there is a perennial shortage of funds to do things the way we would all like. No research money, for starters. Nor, with a few exceptions, is there much funding in the way of presenting highly professional conferences. So when an opportunity comes along in which the evidence can be presented in a professional manner to a large audience, is this really what critics want to focus on? Isn’t it more relevant to restrict one’s analysis to the actual slides and the story behind them?
Dolan suggests that he won’t be arguing for or against the slides showing an alien body but he is excited to have a ring side seat for the presentation of the evidence and the unveiling of high quality copies of the slides in the first public venue.
He might have expressed it best for those of us who have hovered around the periphery of this discussion for the last couple of months. He wrote, “As of now, I am not expecting these slides or this event to be a make-or-break event in ufology. But they are fascinating to me, and I do think they have the potential to be of real interest.”
