PART NINE:
A Discussion With Dr. Mike Heiser

contd......

HORN: How do linguists test documents for authorship identification?

HEISER: This question is answered in some detail in the preliminary report on the tests I had conducted on the Majestic documents that will be available later this month. To summarize here, the linguist who did the testing used a computational method she pioneered, beginning with her own doctoral work in linguistics, and continuing into her professional career. Broadly speaking, her method is stylometry, which is quantitative and computational method that analyzes a range of language features-- e.g. word length, phrase length, sentence length, vocabulary frequency, distribution of words of different lengths, function word frequency, and even punctuation patterns. One more thing--it's important that people understand that these methods only work when a document has a specific named author on it. Documents that have no author named were not tested and could not be in the same way. There are tests that can target documents that bear no name--such as stylometric computational comparisons with forgeries to see if the "no author name" document was written by the same forger--but those methods are expensive. Hopefully as people purchase the first report, I can raise the necessary funds to continue the testing in ways like this.

HORN: Who did the document testing and what are his/her credentials?

HEISER: Dr. Carol Chaski did the testing. Dr. Chaski is the founder of The Institute for Linguistic Evidence (ILE), a research organization that validates reliable document authentication techniques and provides assistance to investigators and attorneys in criminal and civil trials whenever the authorship of any document is questioned or suspicious. Dr. Chaski and her ILE associates are the only forensic linguists in the United States who have won government funding for forensic-linguistic research. Dr. Chaski has pioneered her own computational document authentication software, ALIAS, and is the president of ALIAS Technology, LLC. She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (Engineering Sciences Section), the Linguistic Society of America, The Association of Computing Machinery, the International Association of Forensic Linguistics and the Law and Society Association. She regularly presents her research at national and international conferences and publishes in academic peer reviewed journals and books. Dr. Chaski earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from Brown University.

HORN: I know that the results of your research are going to be unveiled at the Roswell festival, but can you say anything at this point about results?

HEISER: All I can really say right now is that the results aren't a clean sweep for either side. Some of the Majestic documents are authentic, in that they really were authored by the person whose name they bear. Others could not have been written by the person whose name they bear, and so they are best judged as forgeries.

HORN: Again, without revealing too much, what are the implications of this testing for UFO research and the Majestic documents?

HEISER: Dr. Chaski's work in authorship attribution has held up in numerous court cases, and has been thoroughly peer-reviewed. Her CV has specific examples in this regard. That said, if her tests say a document is written by the person whose name it bears, there's better than a 90% chance it was. Same with the opposite. Those documents that her tests say were not authored by the person named on the document ought to be considered forgeries and should not be used as evidence in any discussion of the UFO phenomenon.

HORN: Well, Mike, anybody with a sincere interest in the study of UFOlogy is going to be glued to your presentation at Roswell. To know with statistical probability which of the Majestic documents are authentic, and the ones that are not will not only be historic, but will help researchers follow the correct rabbit hole to greater future discovery. My workshop is just before your keynote lecture and we will be dismissing it a few minutes early so that people can get next door and be part of this amazing disclosure. I'm sure it will be THE buzz for some time to come. Thank you for taking time to do this interview.

[1] See http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/mj12_update2.html#bottom accessed June 6, 2007.

[2] See http://www.utc.edu/Research/SunTrustChair/chair_previous_wescott_index.html accessed June 6, 2007.

[3] International UFO Reporter, vol. 13, no. 4, July / August 1988, p. 19. Cited by Paul Kimball, “MJ-12 – The Wescott ‘Analysis’ Red Herring,” The Other Side of the Truth, July 14, 2005, accessed at
http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_archive.html on June 6, 2007.

Some of the speakers at this year's Roswell festivities include Col. Jesse Marcel Jr, Dennis Balthaser, Greg Bishop, Donald Burleson, PhD, Stephen Bassett, Richard Dolan, Adam GoRightly, Stanton Friedman, John Greenewald, Paola Harris, Michael S. Heiser PhD, Tom Horn, Dr. Roger Leir, Guy Malone, Nicholas Redfern, John Rhodes, Peter Robbins, Rob Simone, and many more.

Learn more about the 60th Anniversary Roswell Festivals see both websites: http://www.roswellufofestival.com
http://www.roswellufomuseum.com/festival.htm

< Part One | < Part Two | < Part Three | < Part Four | < Part Five | < Part Six | < Part Seven| < Part Eight

Copyright © 2007 - A FarShores thanks to author Tom Horn
of Raiders News Network for providing this article.

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