Randle's Mysterious Pumice
Roswell. 1947. Some people claim that an alien starship crashed in that area of New Mexico. There are stories about pieces of metal from that doomed craft that one could crumple up into a ball and it would flatten itself out, a molecular memory.
And then there's the pumice.
Pumice?
The non-fiction book, "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell" (1994), details the 1991 investigation by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt into the Roswell crash. They interviewed people who said they had held hard evidence of the crash, evidence that somehow has disappeared, apparently sucked up by the US government's TOP SECRET vacuum cleaner.
In the chapter entitled "A Complete Examination of the Evidence" I found this statement:
"Kevin Randle handled a small piece of material that he was told was picked up on the crash site. It looked like gray pumice, had no weight to it, some stratification, and seemed to be very tough. It didn't act like any pumice he had ever seen."
I wondered what happened to that hard evidence but there's no mention of the strange pumice in the rest of the book. Some Googling didn't turn up anything.
I couldn't locate an email address for Kevin Randle so I left a comment on his blog, A Different Perspective, inquiring about the mysterious material. So far no reply.
But in trying to find contact info for Randle I did come across the Wikipedia entry under his name. Apparently someone (not me) slipped one through the Wikipedia watchdogs because Randle is described as a "prominent ufoologist."
Comments
I notice the IP address responsible originated in the Merseyside area of England.
No satirical sceptics there!
As you're aware, I'm more intrigued by the action of government employes (even if retired) when writing about UFOs. Randle's real good at the History-Channel type of presentation: a lot of debunking, but a lot of vague sentiment that something is really there.
The pumice, I would see as a trick of rhetoric. You mention a weak piece of evidence, and deliberately refuse to comment on it further. It leaves the impression that the pumice has anything to do with anything.
I'm noting that someone used the derogatory term "ufoologist" -- as in fool.
As for the strange pumice, I'd simply like to hear what happened with it. Did it also disappear with the other evidence? Did Randle follow up on that angle and establish whether or not it was really alien evidence connected to the crash?