Date:   Sun, Aug 27, 1995 7:29 PM PDT
From:  Derbyguy
Subj:   Santilli film\verification via banality?
To:      PsychoSpy

No doubt you are paying a close, if somewhat jaundiced, eye to the ruckus
being raised in UFO circles over the Santilli film.

You have previously commented to the effect that the credibility of a story
is often enhanced by the inclusion of certain obscure details that are
tangential to the main thrust of a story but, by their very inclusion,
suggest a certain level of reality that is not necessarily evident in stories
concocted from whole cloth. Lazar's "They are Here" poster comes to mind.

The following post from Encounters on CServe about the origin of the Santilli
film refers to a level of military bumbling that leaves me with that same
sensation.  The detail is unnecessarily complex for a pure fabrication and
contains elements that seem quite plausible when viewed from a purely
bureaucratic standpoint.

FWIW, thought you might be interested in the post in the event you had not
already seen it. 


>>Source: 21-8-95, Talk Radio UK

>>Ray Santilli: Well each reel of film is about 3 minutes in duration.  And during the
>>event itself he shot hundreds of cannisters of film.  What he did was, he seperated
>>problem cannisters -either exposure problems or where the film had jammed or focus
>>problems or whatever.  He sent the first batch back to Washington and retained the
>>second batch just to work on in development. And it was a coincidence really,
>>because at that time -or just after that time- the army and the air-force split into two
>>different divisions.  The army went one way and the air-force went in a different
>>direction.  And he just simply called Washington on a continual basis to say come
>>and pick up this second batch of film, it's part of the first job. And he was being
>>passed around from pillar to post and in the end he just gave up.  He gave up
>>hounding them on a weekly basis to pick up the film and he just stuck it in his
>>archive."