The long wait for a conclusion..

They knew who Somerton man was

They didn’t want YOU to find out

I have it on authority that aircraft arrivals cards for passengers arriving into Australia: ‘all records for this series for 1948-1950 were destroyed in the 1950’s’

We’re not talking a statutory period for holding and destruction, it was almost immediate. Someone may start digging through the arrivals, so they got rid of the lot. Boxes of them for that date range 1948 and 1949. So nobody could see the person’s name that we now know arrived into Mascot Sydney in November 1948, or trace that person to his place of departure in the US, or his details, or trace other persons involved and obtain their names from the records who arrived with a purpose in that era, being US CIA agents, on flights in 1948 and also early 1949 when the cover-up was being played out by Australian authorities, top level police, and intelligence

LikeLike

Hi there gremmie! I have to say this case doesn’t seem to have progressed one whit since I last commented many moons ago. Cipher Mysteries contributors such as Dusty, Dutch Calypso and Dave the Morgan just keep goin’ round in circles. And still the dreary doubters question the Webb identification –  eg Dusty’s ref to “the original Abbott/Fitzpatrick, one hair wonder SM candidate Carl Webb” and Dave’s egregious protestations that “Colleen on the Mind over murder podcast said they didn’t get a hair from the plaster bust. The hair shaft plot was therefore a lie – unless from another source. If he told the truth about how he obtained it I would have believed him.”

In fact there is NO mystery as to where the hair shaft came from. As stated on the University of Adelaide Tamam Shud Timeline page: “2009 March 19th, The Adelaide University project team, with an ABC film crew, all visit the SA Police Museum and examine the bust of the Somerton man closely, noting that hair is definitely embedded in the plaster cast and Prof Derek Abbott notices the ears of the man are distinctive…” The programme went out on 27 March and can be viewed on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine ‘ Stateline Report 2009:Tamam Shud Case Part 1’ – https://web.archive.org/web/20150710174426/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIUP-wVw60k

See the hairs in the cast from 7mins 50 seconds onwards. Oddly the video has been removed from YouTube for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines” although Part 2 is still available there.

Top SM researcher Gordon Cramer seems to have forgotten that he provided a link to Part 1 in his post ‘The Library’. Yet in a later post (‘Somerton Man Plaster Bust Mystery Part 3’) GC claims “The journalist Pat Burgess was the first to notice the hair on the bust around 1968. Gerry [Feltus], learning of Pat’s findings examined the bust around 2006 and agreed with Pat regarding the colour of the air being ‘pale ginger’.  I came along after Gerry and mentioned the hair seen in the plaster bust and informed Professor Abbott around 2010. I hadn’t read Gerry’s book at that time. Professor Abbott dismissed it as being not possible. In 2012 approximately Professor Abbott claimed he had noticed hairs on the bust. There is also a 2009 video from the ABC that has Professor Abbott mentioning that having seen the bust he thought that the man was ‘very hairy’.” Eh?  

As Abbott explained in his 20 March 2023 Spectrum article: “As the death mask had been molded directly off the Somerton Man’s head, neck, and upper body, some of the man’s hair was embedded in the plaster of ­Paris—a potential DNA gold mine. At the University of ­Adelaide, I had the assistance of a hair forensics expert, Janette Edson. In 2012, with the permission of the police, Janette used a magnifying glass to find where several hairs came together in a cluster. She was then able to pull out single strands without breaking them or damaging the plaster matrix.”

As you said in an earlier piece Peter, even if you distrust Derek, Colleen Fitzpatrick is a thoroughly reputable scientist; “a former NASA employee who had trained as a nuclear physicist but then became a forensic genetics expert” as Abbott puts it, with a great track record of identifying John/Jane Does. In 2022 at Colleen’s suggestion Abbott “sent a hair sample to Astrea Forensics, a DNA lab in the United States. This was our best hair-root sample, one that I had nervously guarded for 10 years. The result from Astrea came back—and it was a big flop. Seemingly out of options, we tried a desperate move. We asked Astrea to analyze a 5-centimeter-long shaft of hair that had no root at all. Bang! The company retrieved 2 million SNPs. The identity of the Somerton Man was now within our reach.” All seems pretty clear to me! Abbott discovered the hairs in 2009, had some of them extracted in 2012 and sent samples to Astrea in 2022.

Incidentally another video on YouTube, uploaded (like the Stateline Reports) by Foxglove 48 – geddit? (for Dave the Morgan) – ‘Jestyn’s reaction when she sees the dead man’s bust’ from 2010 shows that the name “Mrs Thompson” was publicly acknowledged years before her name was ‘officially’ released. As Foxglove 48 puts it “Interestingly, Paul [Lawson] refers to her as “Mrs Thompson” (!)” Again, all a bit odd. And Lawson is a real drama queen! https://youtu.be/u571rcZHs-I?si=Y1fbQdcmZKDvwjJB

LikeLike