I agree. There are big questions that need to be asked - and answered re this whole Nitinol story.

To what extent there could have been some sort of Cold War op using a (non-existent) crashed UFO ploy is one that’s interesting, but even I admit, that’s practically impossible to prove at this stage.

Tony Bragalia has just made a new post on this, and Bruce Duensing has also done an interesting piece that places Roswell in a deception/Cold War setting (see today’s post here).

Sadly, I think Roswell is destined to only get more confusing!

returning to its original shape ‘when heated’? I always thought all witnesses claimed that the material would return to its original shape after being bent or crushed on one’s hand.

“But if “understood” means as I would interpret the usage of the word - something that Center was told and, as a result, then came to accept - then, really this is not that much different from the story of the Colonel, who stated that the Nitinol operation he had an awareness of “led to rumors among officials that the Army’s FTD had gotten its hands on crashed UFO materials.”"

It is definitely a valid assumption. But there’s two things that worry me:

One is that, if indeed the sample given to Center was of terrestrial origin, then we still have to find out where it was made. What private or government laboratory could have had the technology and expertise to develop such a complex alloy? From what I understand after reading the original UFO Inconoclasts’ article, the reason the Military approached Batelle was mainly because they had an arc furnace capable of melting metals with great precision & purity.

The second thing that bothers me is that, even if the sample was made in another lab, it nevertheless impressed Center so much that he came to the conclusion that it was of extraterrestrial origin. Now, we all know that laymen and simple civilians could easily be fooled into believing they have witnessed something of unearthly origin if exposed to advanced military equipment —in Project Beta, Greg tells us that Richard Doty claimed to have the certainty of the Alien presence because of the things he was shown; maybe this is true, or maybe it was all part of a deeper control system in the disinfo campaign — but a notable scientist and an expert in the field of Chemisty & Metallurgy? How could he have been so easily fooled by a ‘planted’ fake sample?

These people (scientists)are supposed to be aware of the current research of their peers, there’s a level of expectation to what the new developments in their fields are going to be. It’s not impossible that by now the private & military sector might have rather astonishing machinery & equipment that might even baffle outside experts —hologram displays, quantum computers, anti-gravity, pick one.

…But in the 1960s? Could there big such a big gap as early as that decade?

This is definitely an interesting story!