Sunday, April 10, 2016

Soviet Aerial Reconnaissance and Roswell

Although I have hoped to avoid revisiting this suggestion, something that I looked into in the early 1990s, it has suddenly taken hold in several arenas. I suspect that part of the reason is that some of those who clung to Project Mogul now realize that it was not the culprit. The documentation for that conclusion is overwhelming. But this does not lead to the extraterrestrial (for some of you, please note this qualification) and if there is no alien visitation, then there must be a terrestrial explanation somewhere.

As a preamble, let me note that I have done a great deal of research into these other explanations. Although accused of not taking some of this research deep enough, I’m not sure what that means. Few are interested in reading about research that led nowhere. Once something has been eliminated as the culprit, just how much further are we required to go.  I have, for example, a record of every missile and rocket launch from White Sands from its creation into the 1950s. There are no gaps, though the numeric sequence of the launches was sometimes juggled, which means that the experiment kept its number even of the launch had been postponed. But there were no launches that would count for the debris found by Mack Brazel. Should I, at that point, continue the research?

And let me say here, so there is no mistake, that I never took the idea that Nazis had escaped to the Antarctic where they were using flying saucers. Maybe that was a personal bias, but it made no sense, and if they were hiding there, other evidence would have been available… especially in these days of all sorts of satellites flying all over the place.

Oh, and it’s not time travelers because they could return and pick up everything so the event never happened. They could easily manipulate the system to change the history and therefore it is out of our perception of it.

And forget about interdimensional beings, but only because I can’t think of a way to get to that point. I don’t know what sort of evidence you would look for… or how you take it out of our realm of reality to shove it into another. Even if the debris was there and not something mundane, it just seems the better solution is extraterrestrial rather than interdimensional, but as I say, I don’t know how to prove this aspect of it. I guess my bias rears its head, but notice I didn’t say it was completely impossible, only that I can’t think of a way of proving it.

I looked through various archives and listings of aircraft accidents including enquiries to the FAA, NTSB and the Air Force but located nothing that would have left debris. I know that there might have been some gaps in my knowledge, but the Air Force took care of that in their massive report removing all military aircraft and experimental aircraft from the mix. There was simply nothing that fit the time frame and the location.

Karl Pflock
Karl Pflock suggested that it had been the N-9M two engine version of the flying wing, but they had stopped flying those in 1946. I also checked the XB-35, which is the four engine propeller-driven version, but they had been grounded in June 1947 because of a gearbox problem. All were accounted for anyway. The YB-35, the jet version flew sometime after July 1947 and therefore couldn’t have been the cause of the debris found. There was a YB-49 which was designed as a long-range reconnaissance aircraft but only one was built before the program was cancelled. It too flew after July 1947, and therefore did not leave debris on the Foster ranch.

Taking this a step further, there was the XF-95A, which was delta-wing fighter, but the records show that it did not fly until September 1948, or too late to account for the Roswell debris. When I learned that, I lost interest in it.

Nick Redfern Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle
There is Nick Redfern’s idea that what crashed in New Mexico used captured Japanese soldiers in a high altitude experiment. They were lifted in a huge balloon array. It explained the secrecy, the balloon remains, and even the alien bodies. But there is no record of anything like that happening, though given some of the “scientific” research conducted by the United States, it certainly could have happened. Without evidence for this experiment, though Nick liked it, I thought it could be eliminated from the roster of explanations.

John Keel had suggested a Fugo Balloon, but those were Japanese weapons launched against the United States during the Second World War. Although he used the same argument we hear today, that because the government was embarrassed by these attacks they kept it a secret. Of course, by 1947, there had been newspaper and magazine articles about the Balloon Bombs, and had it been one of those, you needed to explain where it had been for two years. I think Keel was attracted by the claim of Chinese or Japanese writing on some of the debris found though the records showed that the Japanese were careful not to use their writing on any portion of the balloons or their apparatus. This was so they couldn’t be traced back to Japan.

There has been the great Mogul debate which, I think, originated with Robert Todd. But the documentation available, as I mentioned, has eliminated it. Other balloon projects, including those by the Navy and General Mills did not provide information that would account for the debris. There was no records to support the idea of one of these projects, though classified in 1947 (or that didn’t begin until after 1947) could have left the debris for Brazel to find. The Soviet Union, because of its location and the lack of allies surrounding the United States, never used balloons as aerial platforms to spy on the US. I could develop no information to suggest any balloon project created by the Soviets was responsible for what had fallen.

Now we’re stuck with this idea that a Soviet copy of a B-29, called the TU-4 by the Soviets and code named “Bull” by NATO, might have been responsible. It is quite true that the Soviets, during the Second World War captured three B-29s. These aircraft had been damaged during raids on Japan or encountered some other emergency and were unable to return to their home bases. They made their way to Vladivostok to land.  (The need to use Vladivostok ended with the capture of Iwo Jima in March 1945, and yes I know the battle started in February). Those three planes were named, Ramp Tramp, Ding Hoa and the General H. H. Arnold Special.

The Soviet TU-4 "Bull."
At that time, the Soviet Union did not have a long-range bomber. After all, the main Soviet enemy was Nazi Germany and they didn’t need long-range bombers to engage the Germans. But Stalin realized the importance of the gift he had been given, and contrary to treaties and agreements refused to return either the crews or the aircraft. The crews were eventually allowed to “escape” through Iran and were returned to US control. The aircraft remained in the Soviet Union.

The Soviets thought it would be simple to disassemble the aircraft and copy it down to its rivets. They took the General H. H. Arnold Special apart ending up with something over 105,000 pieces. It turned out not to be as easy as they though and they had trouble reproducing the Plexiglas, some of the aluminum parts and the fire control systems. They finally produced a prototype which flew on May 19, 1947 and Stalin apparently ordered it into immediate production.

No one in the West knew what the Soviets were up to (or maybe a few did but that knowledge was classified) and when the planes were finally revealed to the world on August 3, 1947, everyone assumed the three B-29-like aircraft were those captured during the war. They were joined by a fourth, which announced that the Soviets had replicated the B-29 and now had a long-range bomber. At least two of those in the formation were TU-4s, though all four might have been.

But the thing is the US military began to make plans to attend Soviet airshows to look for the cloned B-29s. From September 1946 onward they were discussing at the highest levels the possibility, so those officers were aware of what was happening. They also knew that the Soviets did not have, in 1947, a “silverplate” B-29, which were those modified to carry atomic weapons. Such didn’t enter the Soviet inventory until after 1950.

Now we have to look through the history of aerial reconnaissance which it seems those excited by this idea of a TU-4 crash failed to do. The TU-4 had a range that would allow it to reach cities in the United States, but these would be one way flights. They didn’t have the fuel capacity for the return flight. Of course, in a war, the return of the flight crew might not have been one of the overriding conditions. Their mission would have been to drop the bombs and do their best to escape and evade once the aircraft ran out of gas.

But in June 1947, with production just started, after the successful flight of the prototype TU-4, there couldn’t have been very many of them available and it would be a good guess that there might not have been the four flown in August 1947 ready by June 1947. But the project, at that time was shrouded in secrecy and it seems unlikely that they would have flown one of their limited supply of these aircraft deep into the United States knowing that it could not return.

While the United States was developing their aerial reconnaissance of the Soviet Union, there wasn’t the same thing happening in the Soviet Union. They were, in essence, isolated from the New World. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was surrounded by countries that allowed the United States to either build bases or use their facilities to conduct aerial reconnaissance. Given the secretive nature of the Soviet Union, it was very difficult to deploy spies inside its borders. To gather the necessary intelligence, overflight was about the only option.

Such wasn’t the case in the United States. The open nature of the society allowed for Soviet agents to gather the intelligence without the need of aerial reconnaissance. They could just travel around inside the US and gather the information. The FBI prepared a document in May 1960 that provided a history of the Soviet attempts to gather aerial data on the United States. They didn’t need to use aircraft when they could just buy what the needed in the United States. The FBI wrote:

In a free country such things as aerial photographs are available to the public and can be purchased commercially. The Soviets have been fully aware of this and throughout the years have taken full advantage of this free information, collecting aerial photographs of many areas of the United States.
For example, during October, 1953, two Soviet officials visited Minneapolis where they purchased fifteen aerial photographs of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In October and November, 1953, two Soviets traveled in Missouri and Texas and obtained aerial maps of Dallas, Tulsa, Fort Worth and the surrounding areas covering a Naval air station, an Army airfield, and an Air Force base. In April, 1954, a Soviet official purchased aerial photographs of five Long Island communities. Also, in April, 1954, a Soviet Official purchased three aerial photographs of Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, areas. In May, 1954, three Soviets traveled to California where they ordered from a Los Angeles photography shop $80 worth of aerial photographs covering the Los Angeles area.

You can read the FBI’s whole assessment about the acquisition of aerial photography here:


Although I didn’t have the Internet in the early 1990s to make the search, I did have access to some very good libraries and archives, and I could find nothing about Soviet aerial reconnaissance of the United States until we get sometime after 1950 and at that point lost interest. They later developed their own long-range bomber, which did penetrate US airspace long after 1947. Pictures of it, escorted by American fighters, appeared in news magazines. There was no attempt to hide the penetration of American airspace and not all that long ago Russian aircraft did penetrate the ADIZ a number of times, which was also widely reported by the media.

Given the reaction to these later attempts, it seems reasonable to conclude that had a Soviet clone of a B-29 found its way to southern New Mexico, the remains of the aircraft and the bodies of its crew would have been used for propaganda purposes. There would be no embarrassment because the Army Air Forces could claim that they had foiled the Soviet spying operation and offer the proof of it… and if that wasn’t their attitude in 1947, when Gary Powers was captured by the Soviets in 1960, it would have been the perfect time to trot out the TU-4 and its 1947 fate. This was proof that the Soviets had engaged in aerial reconnaissance and we were merely returning the favor.


There is no record or documentation of a Soviet attempt to penetrate the US using aerial reconnaissance in 1947. I make this bold statement because there will be those who wish to prove it wrong and this is the fastest way I know to get the search started. The only long-range aircraft they had at the time that is in July 1947 was the TU-4 and they didn’t have many of them. Had the wreckage found by Brazel been the remains of such an aircraft, Marcel, Cavitt, and others would have recognized it. The evidence, or the lack of evidence, argues strongly against the idea that what fell was a Soviet spy plane. According to the historical record, which is now quite extensive, the Soviet Union was not engaged in aerial reconnaissance in 1947 and is not responsible for the wreckage near Roswell. 

47 comments:

David Rudiak said...

Heavens Kevin! Is that all? You call that “research”? Why haven't you spent thousands of hours chasing down other "prosaic" "possible" theories like:

1) Mass hysteria by the townspeople and base induced by all the publicity being given flying saucers?

2) A hoax by the townspeople and base to turn Roswell into a tourist attraction?

3) Mass hallucination induced by mind-control drugs in the water supply, developed at Fort Stanton, N.M.?

4) A counterintelligence scam to expose those BB Soviet spies that were hiding behind every tree trunk? What better to lure them out of hiding than suggesting we had captured a flying saucer? (Actually not too far from a theory advanced by former MUFON director James Carrion. The 1946 Scandanavian Ghost Rockets were also part of this counterintel conspiracy, designed to scare our lackadaisical allies like Sweden into realizing the Russians were a threat. Really!)

5) A Stalin dirty Commie plot designed to induce national panic like War of the Worlds? Stalin captures Nazi Joseph Mengele. Mengele surgically alters deformed children to look like aliens. They are put on a Horten flying wing (captured from the Nazis, naturally) and flown by remote-control to crash-land near Roswell. (Wait, that scenario’s already been used—Annie Jacobson.)

6) A captured flying saucer being developed by the Nazis at war's end, being super-secretly tested at White Sands?

7) Some other super-secret, super-dirty U.S. project that’s been covered up—don’t ask.

8) Escaped Nazis in Argentina develop secret WWII German flying saucer technology. Joseph Mengele, etc., etc.

9) Captured Japanese kamikaze pilots in a captured German Horten flying wing suspended from a Fugo balloon with a nuclear reactor on board to test the effects of radiation on crews at high altitude. Version 2: For the crew, substitute captured deformed Chinese experimental victims of Japanese Unit 731. (In both versions, the bodies would have an "Asian" look "matching" some witness descriptions). Version 3: For the crew, substitute genetically deformed children from Fort Stanton, suffering from progeria. Oops, all versions already proposed. (Nick Redfern)

10) Mix and match: From its base in Kamchatke, a Russian TU-4 piloted by captured Japanese kamikaze pilots on mind-altering drugs, flies a suspended Horten flying wing carrying genetically deformed, surgically altered Chinese children from Unit 731 plus thousands of plague-ridden rats from Fort Stanton. Releasing the flying wing near California, it glides the rest of the way to near-Corona, just short of its objective of Roswell base, where it was to crash and scare the U.S. into surrender.

I can keep dreaming up "prosaic" "explanations" until the cows come home. Since these are all "prosaic", this makes all of them infinitely more probable than the ETH for Roswell, which we know has a probability of zero.

This all follows "logically" from the primary debunker axiom, that alien visitation is totally impossible. Therefore ANY “prosaic” explanation, no matter how utterly preposterous, improbable to the max, or totally lacking in evidence is still preferable to the ETH.

Anthony Mugan said...

Hello all

Please treat the below as entirely preliminary, although I think it is highly suggestive. I've been having a bit of a dig around about the Tu 4 over the weekend. So far:

1. Whilst development and production of components involved a large number of factories the construction of the initial prototypes was done by Tupulov's OKB-156 organisation. Their flight test facility was at Zhukovskiy around 20 miles east of Moscow.

2. It looks (but not 100% certain) like the initial test flights were from that facility. There is a reference in airspacemag.com article "Made in the USSR" to the workers from the plant going out to watch the first flight by Rybko in May 1947 and cheering as it took off.

3. Around 20 airframes were made by the end of 1947 for acceptance testing, with the TU-4 entering operational service in 1949 (production continued until 1952).
There is reference to production beginning at a plant in Kazan in 1947. The above article refers to Mark Gallai flying an example back to Moscow from Kazan and there are some CIA documents on this.

5. The above airspacemag.com article suggests that Tupulov selected three test pilots to fly the initial tests of the plane. Nikilai Rybkov, Mark Gallai and A G Vasil'chenko. None of these guys disappeared in 1947.

So - In June or early July 47 we have a small number of TU-4s (at least one and less than 20 - probably considerably less but that is not certain at the moment). These were being test flown near Moscow with possibly production starting in Kazan (not certain as to the timing for Kazan - just '1947').

These locations are out of range for the USA, but logically central in the USSR for test facilities. Our suggested defector would have to have done a long internal flight, managed to get refuelled and then set off again. Not very likely (I would suggest inconceivable).

We have three named pilots involved in the very early tests (note operational acceptance tests did not begin until later). None of these disappeared.

I haven't found any mention of a crash of a TU4 in this time frame (they did have problems later)

As discussed earlier no obvious reason why a defection in a TU 4 would be classified in 1994-5 time period (and as Kevin notes it would have been useful information to put out at the time of the U2 incident also). Even if you managed to get one out of the USSR why on earth risk such a long flight in a still experimental aircraft?

We also have a clear mismatch of the types of debris recovered, at least based on the various descriptions given.

Unless someone can identify a major problem with the above I'm personally signing off on the TU-4 idea at this point - it didn't happen as far as I can see.

starman said...

Good post. But Iwo Jima was taken in 1945 not 1944.

KRandle said...

Starman -

Of course it was... typo corrected.

cda said...

I agree with Anthony Mugan; it didn't happen, i.e. the overfly of New Mexico by a Soviet back-engineered B-29 didn't happen.

So what DID happen?

If the descriptions AT THE TIME closely match balloon plus radar reflector debris, as they do, I suggest (perish the thought!) that this was indeed what fell, or crashed if you prefer, to earth. I am not particularly bothered whether it came from a 'non-existent' Mogul 4 flight, another undocumented flight from the same location, or something from another location. What was described was, and is, entirely consistent with balloon + radar target debris.

Yes I know all manner of people decades afterwards told different and exotic tales and even saw bodies (or knew someone else who did), etc, etc.

Some even wrote affidavits, again decades afterwards.

By the way, why didn't any of the Aztec 'witnesses' write affidavits? Does anyone know?

But above all don't forget the big slogan: New Mexico is the "Land of Enchantment". The ETs knew this - hence their choice of state for crashing their vehicle.

Mark said...

I don't know much about Roswell, so I'm probably being stupid here. Fortunately, I'm sure there are plenty of people here willing to correct me. :)

Let's assume that Roswell was not a MOGUL balloon. That doesn't mean it was aliens (whether extraterrestrial or interdimensional). Except for the alien bodies - and my impression, which may be wrong, is that the evidence for the existence of those bodies is pretty shaky - everything seen was consistent with the crash of some top secret US government experiment, which was subsequently forgotten.

I've done a fair bit of digging through government archives - not about UFOs, about other subjects. The US government did a lot of stuff in New Mexico back in the day, and their record keeping wasn't always the best. It seems perfectly plausible that they launched some secret piece of equipment, it crashed, and they covered it up - and then some time between 1947 and 1990, the records were just _lost_. No nefarious intent needed. There's about as much positive evidence for this hypothesis as there is for aliens, and it does less violence to the dominant model of reality, so by Occam's Razor, it seems a more likely conclusion.

Clearly, quite a few intelligent people, who have done a lot more research on this subject then I have, disagree with me. So what am I missing?

Brian B said...

@ Kevin

Now to be honest Kevin, you're correct about Soviet recon capabilities in 1947. They didn't fly aircraft on recon missions over North America.

However you inserted those words in my mouth. I never theorized a round trip recon flight.

What I postulated was whether or not a small Soviet flight crew defected on a one-way mission. If you want a variation of that read my response to David below.

@ David

Since you brought up Churchill in your response on the other post, I thought you should consider yet another variation of a "one way" flight.

Were you aware that in 1946 Churchill began a campaign encouraging the US to deliberately strike the Soviet Union by dropping the A-bomb on Moscow? It's fact. He advocated that Truman authorize a preemptive strike to wipe out the threat. This began before the Roswell incident, and afterwards too.

https://www.icij.org/blog/2014/10/churchill-urged-us-wipe-out-moscow-bomb

I'm sure the Soviets knew this. They didn't have the bomb themselves but knew the devastation it would cause. We know the nuclear arms race was a game of ensuring Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), using what Dulles called a strategy of "brinkmanship".

Let's speculate that Stalin, a tyrannical mass murdering dictator, decided to purposely fly one of his bombers directly at Roswell (our Atomic hub) as means to simply send a decisive message; "We have strategic bombers too - just like yours - identical in fact - so don't test us or we'll use them." Essentially a "one way" mission to deliver a threatening and deliberate message about international power and the Communist ability to "strike back" in the face of US dominance. A ploy to demonstrate military might to "intimidate". Their cloned B-29 was not a secret weapon, hence they lose nothing in sending one.

Not a "defection" but a message.

Would Truman have decided to inform the American public our Cold War enemy had breached our air defenses unchallenged? That they now obtained capability to bomb our cities, schools, and homes? I think not.

@ Anthony

Why do you assume they would sacrifice their best pilots? I don't.

Why do you assume they couldn't deliberately fly one (by order of Stalin) from Petropavlovsk on the Kamatchka Peninsula, a Soviet air base in operation since 1939 and active in WWII?

Why do you assume the flight couldn't make it when a stripped down version can achieve the distance from Petropavlovsk with a flight path that based on real data actually takes it right over Corona and directly over the reported debris fields? Yes that's right - directly over the debris fields in the same exact flight pattern.

What would make anyone think the Russians would ever willingly disclose such a thing 70 years after the fact in today's political climate?

You know the US had absolutely no plan on telling the Russians or the American public about U2 Flights over the Soviet homeland until after the Powers incident forced them to. That was an accident. What I am saying is that Stalin could have chosen to deliberately show his hand (not an accident at all).

And what would make Truman decide to boast to the world that we just recovered a Soviet clone of our own super bomber knowing that the consequences would have been fear among the American public, that they were now in striking range, and we were foolish enough to let them clone our technology as well as let one fly right into our country unchallenged? I don't think so.

Brian B said...

@ Mark

"So what am I missing?"

Nothing other than alien proponents claim no records could have ever been in error, that a balloon could never be the reason, that the US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico, that the Cold War was inconsequential, and that decades old testimony provided 30 years later by first hand witnesses (almost all whom have been proven to have lied), and second and third hand story tellers PROVES beyond any doubt that aliens exist and crashed landed near Roswell in 1947.

That's all....

cda said...

DR writes:

"This all follows "logically" from the primary debunker axiom, that alien visitation is totally impossible. Therefore ANY “prosaic” explanation, no matter how utterly preposterous, improbable to the max, or totally lacking in evidence is still preferable to the ETH."

Actually the primary debunker axiom is not that alien visitation is totally impossible. It is that if there were such a visitation, however unlikely this is, it would have become widely known to the scientific world and the public long before now. It would not, repeat not, still be under wraps for 7 decades.

At least that is how I, and the great majority of skeptics, see it. But I realise this conclusion is not acceptable to the ET/conspiracy brigade.

David Rudiak said...

Anthony Mugan wrote:
These locations are out of range for the USA, but logically central in the USSR for test facilities. Our suggested defector would have to have done a long internal flight, managed to get refuelled and then set off again. Not very likely (I would suggest inconceivable).

Yep! Unlike the U.S., which had/has allies surrounding Russia that can be used as advanced bases, any flight from Russia to the U.S. would have to be out of Russia. The closest bomber bases would be on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia, 4500 miles from Roswell and even about 4000 air miles from where the early TU-4 prototypes were being built and tested near Moscow.

The early TU-4's only had a nominal range of under 3400 miles with a 3000 Kg payload and a thousand miles less with a 9000 Kg payload. Extrapolating, they might have gotten a few hundred miles more range with no payload and only a skeleton crew. Flying on fumes, they might BARELY have made it to Kamkatcha for refueling. To fly the remaining 4500 miles to Roswell would have still required stripping everything they could out of the plane plus carrying spare fuel tanks, which initially they didn't have (under wing spare fuel tanks were added later). At the time, the TU-4 was more of a mid-range to long-range bomber, not long-long-range (like a real B-29).

So BBs defecting crew would first have to fly to Kamchatka (those of us who played RISK as kids know all about Kamchatka as the base for attacking North America). Then they would have had to get refueled there and somehow carry extra fuel with them (gas cans?) and strip out the interior of the plane to lighten it, all with the cooperation of those at the base (whom Stalin would then execute or send to slave labor camps). Then and only then might they BARELY make a 4500 mile flight.

As you and others have previously pointed out, it would be a LOT simpler to defect to some NEARBY Western base, such as in western Europe, Japan, even Alaska. Why, for Chrissake would you attempt to make Roswell?

In addition, a bee-line to Roswell would require the bomber to fly over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, Washington State, Utah (passing over Dugway Proving Grounds, biological/chemical warfare, which I'm sure we can fit into the Roswell scenario with a little work--part of the "dirty secret" thing), and passing directly over Albuquerque (with Kirtland AAF with nukes--lets work that in as well), probably with at least some radar coverage even if short-range.

Note that the route would also take them exactly where Kenneth Arnold had his sighting a week earlier. We'll ignore the time discrepancy, go for a two-fer, and propose that the Kenneth Arnold sighting can also be "explained" by the defecting TU-4.

Remarkably they flew across about 1500 miles of the U.S. and did this totally UNDETECTED before crashing near Roswell. The U.S. military (asleep at the switch, as usual, in drooling idiot theory) hasn't a clue they are there until civilians report stumbling across the wreckage.

This fulfills all the basic requirements of a good UFO debunking theory, namely being being totally absurd. (As Jacques Vallee once observed, the USAF Project Blue Book seemed to follow the maxim ANY stupid "explanation" will do, and the stupider the better.) But since the debunkers observe the rule that ET visitation is fundamentally impossible (probability = 0.000...) then any prosaic "explanation", no matter how absurd or improbable (say p = .0001), is still more probable (.0001 > 0). (Therefore we are being narrow-minded if we don't consider it as being a real possibility.)

It the real world, a theory has to be MUCH more plausible than that to deserve any serious consideration and time spent on it, and real evidence doesn't hurt either.

David Rudiak said...

Mark wrote:

I've done a fair bit of digging through government archives - not about UFOs, about other subjects. The US government did a lot of stuff in New Mexico back in the day, and their record keeping wasn't always the best. It seems perfectly plausible that they launched some secret piece of equipment, it crashed, and they covered it up - and then some time between 1947 and 1990, the records were just _lost_. No nefarious intent needed. There's about as much positive evidence for this hypothesis as there is for aliens, and it does less violence to the dominant model of reality, so by Occam's Razor, it seems a more likely conclusion.

There are at least two major flaws with the "unknown super-secret government project theory", which has been proposed many times (with never ANY evidence ever emerging to support it): 1) Doesn't remotely fit the testimony of highly anomalous debris and bodies (dozens of people); and perhaps more importantly, 2) The government/military seemed totally unaware of a crash until Mack Brazel sauntered into town and maybe "archeologists" as well for a second site. Then and only then did the military go ballistic.

In the case of #1, if there really were some project with advanced materials technology (very light-weight yet incredibly strong), for inexplicable reasons these advanced materials vanished for no good reason, not being incorporated into any of our weapons' systems. Only very recently has materials' technology started producing advanced materials that seem to resemble those described by Roswell witnesses like Marcel or Brazel Jr., who started talking about them back in 1978-1980.

For #2, for a REAL project, of some sort of secret flying craft, it would confined to test ranges and VERY CAREFULLY TRACKED. And even if it had somehow gone off-range and they had somehow lost track of it, they would immediately launch an exhaustive search to find it. In the case of the Foster Ranch, it is out on an expansive desert plain with no ground cover to speak of. The large metallic debris field there would have been easily spotted by air search.

However, there is zero evidence of any of this happening, literally ZERO, just as there is still zero evidence of any unknown, unaccounted for secret projects, not even decades old testimony from those involved or their families. Yet something definitely crashed, the military from their actions took it EXTREMELY seriously, investigated, then covered it up. One Air Force general (Exon, a former C/O at Write Patterson) explicitly said it was the crash of a space craft and it was covered up at the highest level. (See www.roswellproof.com/exon.html) Another general (Dubose, who was directly involved--www.roswellproof.com/dubose.html), it was again covered up and everything was carried out in extreme secrecy, with the military NOT being aware of anything unusual until rancher Brazel reported and probably brought highly unusual debris to the Sheriff's office. (Dubose said he handled the call from Gen. McMullen, Deputy C/O of the SAC, ordering him to ship that debris by "colonel courier" from Roswell to Washington, hence to Wright Field for analysis.)

There just isn't anything remotely comparable for the secret military project theory--no documentation, no testimony, nothing.

Nitram said...


Clearly frustrated, DR wrote:

"I can keep dreaming up "prosaic" "explanations" until the cows come home. Since these are all "prosaic", this makes all of them infinitely more probable than the ETH for Roswell, which we know has a probability of zero.

This all follows "logically" from the primary debunker axiom, that alien visitation is totally impossible. Therefore ANY “prosaic” explanation, no matter how utterly preposterous, improbable to the max, or totally lacking in evidence is still preferable to the ETH."

Your right of course David - there are some people that will just never accept that they could be wrong... and yes, even a mistimed "Santa Claus flyover" is preferable to your proposed solution in their eyes.

Regards
Nitram

KRandle said...

Brian -

Please point to the places where I said (or anyone else, really) said, "Nothing other than alien proponents claim no records could have ever been in error, that a balloon could never be the reason, that the US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico, that the Cold War was inconsequential..."

You just made that up...

And I acknowledge that while your wild theory is fun, it flies (yes, pun intended) in the face of reality... as you say, it is speculation based on the fact that Soviets had a flying clone of the B-29 and that Soviet pilots have defected... but they didn't fly to New Mexico to do it. Had defection been their plan, they could have flown to Japan, Alaska, anywhere in Europe, there was no need to go to New Mexico... and such a defection would have been a public relations coup for the US. There would be no reason to hide it...

But as you say, you made it up (I mean you noted it was all speculation).

cda said...

Kevin:

If BB's "wild theory is fun", what do you think your own "wild theory" (ETH) is?

Surely ETH is far more fun than BB's (exceedingly improbable, I agree) Russian B-29 theory. Can you suggest any possible reason why, in the 27-odd years since you re-proposed the ET theory with such great gusto in your books, there has been no scientific or official acceptance of any kind? Are scientists just plain blind or stupid?

I notice that at least two writers on another blog are suggesting you may, just may, be having slight doubts about ETH. Are you?

Brian B said...

@ David

You wrote -

"It the real world, a theory has to be MUCH more plausible than that to deserve any serious consideration and time spent on it, and real evidence doesn't hurt either."

You should live by your own words - you fail to apply this logic to your ETH for Roswell. Why?

And some corrections are necessary to what you wrote:

- Max distance 3600 WITH full payload. You need to convert your estimates into Nautical Miles too. Obviously it could fly the distance when stripped down as I said and with fewer crew (but let's just claim aliens flew further - say 4 or 5 light years in a tinfoil and balsa spacecraft).

- Oh, and the captured B-29s flew from Vladivostok all the way to the Moscow area test facility. They could easily fly back to Vladivostok and then to Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula.

- Defection? Well read my posts about a DELIBERATE Stalin-sent message "salvo" concerning Cold War strategy. Not impossible.

- One-way trip? That was its operational mission from the very get go - why the surprise anyone would actually do it?

- A US military caught off guard? Sure. Our forces were dramatically stripped down after WWII. Oh - and there's this little thing called "Pearl Harbor" too.

@ CDA

"Actually the primary debunker axiom is not that alien visitation is totally impossible. It is that if there were such a visitation, however unlikely this is, it would have become widely known to the scientific world and the public long before now."

Absolutely correct. Too bad David doesn't understand this and just keeps pushing that all "skeptobunkers" deny the possibility of ET life. We don't.

Brian B said...

@ Kevin -

"Please point to the places where I said (or anyone else, really) said, "Nothing other than alien proponents claim no records could have ever been in error, that a balloon could never be the reason, that the US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico, that the Cold War was inconsequential..."

Ah....Kevin? Just read through these posts and others.

You and others have clearly written:

1) NYU/ Mogul doesn't work.

2) No other balloon projects were ever recorded because you researched it and found nothing.

3) There were no errors in Crary's journal and Moore fabricated his explanation that it was Flight #4.

4) That Cold War explanations (such as a TU-4, rockets, Soviet recon balloons, etc) could never be the reason.

Am I missing something here or are you now recanting these conclusions?

And while you keep referring to my initial "defector" hypothesis, can you explain why you keep deferring to it while ignoring my updated (speculative but based on facts) theory it was a deliberate flight ordered by Stalin? I know you're the moderator but please, I'm beginning to think you're refusing to discuss counter points because it may erode the broad Roswellian ETH.

And as CDA has stated, can you update all of us on what YOU really think landed on the ranch nearly 70 years ago? The last I heard from your own lips was you still believe it was ET (2015 pod casts).

But is that really the case and why given the lack of proof positive?

Thank you.

Nitram said...

Brian wrote

"Yes I know - more conspiracy. But there are some conspiracy theories that have been shown to have been real afterall."

Correct - only wish CDA could grasp this - his view is that a "conspiracy" has a finite time period. No longer than a year before the truth comes out!

Regards
Nitram

KRandle said...

Brian -

You said, "Nothing other than alien proponents claim no records could have ever been in error, that a balloon could never be the reason, that the US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico, that the Cold War was inconsequential..."

I asked where and you said, "You and others have clearly written:

"1) NYU/ Mogul doesn't work.

"2) No other balloon projects were ever recorded because you researched it and found nothing.

"3) There were no errors in Crary's journal and Moore fabricated his explanation that it was Flight #4.

"4) That Cold War explanations (such as a TU-4, rockets, Soviet recon balloons, etc) could never be the reason.

"Am I missing something here or are you now recanting these conclusions?"

Saying that Project Mogul and Flight No. 4 do not work as an explanation is not the same as saying, "...that a balloon could never be the reason..." I said that Mogul was eliminated because of the evidence... any flight after July 4 could not have left debris prior to July 4, and all the flights are referenced. There is no documentation to support a flight that left the debris.

Saying, "...No other balloon projects were ever recorded because you researched it and found nothing..." is not the same as saying that I found no evidence of a balloon project that could have left the debris. If you have evidence to the contrary, then trot it out.

Saying, "..."3) There were no errors in Crary's journal and Moore fabricated his explanation that it was Flight #4." is not the same as saying that Flight No. 4 is eliminated based on the documentation. There are typographical errors, but the diary and field notes establish that there was nothing launched from Alamogordo that would account for the debris.

Saying, ""4) That Cold War explanations (such as a TU-4, rockets, Soviet recon balloons, etc) could never be the reason." This is not remotely what I said. You have no evidence for any of this and you yourself have labeled it all speculation.

You have not proved your case by misquoting me, putting words in my mouth and twisting things around. So I say again, "Please point to the places where I said (or anyone else, really) said, "Nothing other than alien proponents claim no records could have ever been in error, that a balloon could never be the reason, that the US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico, that the Cold War was inconsequential..." because you have yet to do it.

Oh, and just for the hell of it, I note again, that those in Army Air Forces intelligence were aware of Soviet efforts to clone the B-29, and that in September 1946, made plans to attend airshows to look for the evidence... So the TU-4 wasn't the great surprise that you made it out to be. And explain why defectors would choose a base at the very limit of the aircraft's range when other bases were much closer.



Nitram said...

Kevin Randle - telling it like it is wrote:


"Oh, and just for the hell of it, I note again, that those in Army Air Forces intelligence were aware of Soviet efforts to clone the B-29, and that in September 1946, made plans to attend airshows to look for the evidence... So the TU-4 wasn't the great surprise that you made it out to be. And explain why defectors would choose a base at the very limit of the aircraft's range when other bases were much closer."

While I agree that Brian's solution is unlikely (LOL) my question for you Kevin is, would you not perhaps agree that it is no less unlikely than CDA's "mogul" solution?

Regards
Nitram

David Rudiak said...

I wrote: (1 of 2)
"It the real world, a theory has to be MUCH more plausible than that to deserve any serious consideration and time spent on it, and real evidence doesn't hurt either."

Brian Bell retorted: "You should live by your own words - you fail to apply this logic to your ETH for Roswell. Why?"

First of all Brian, if you propose a "prosaic" theory, it better be prosaically plausible, not requiring numerous, highly questionable assumptions. A prosaic theory better have verifiable prosaic facts to back it up, including documentation after all these years for something that clearly would have no plausible reason to remain classified, otherwise it is just another crap theory.

So far you have supplied ZERO actual evidence to support your defecting TU-4 crew: no testimony, no documents, nothing. Ditto for Stalin ordered them to do it to send the U.S. a message.

It is also laced with logical absurdities, such as the crew trying to fly to a base well beyond the plane's range instead of the nearest available friendly base. (If you were risking you life defecting, would you want to do it the absolute easiest way, or the most difficult and dangerous way possible?) For the Stalin angle, it is absurd that he would immediately give his enemy access to his new bomber by crashing it there.

For Roswell, there is considerable testimony supporting an ET interpretation (multiple descriptions of nonhuman bodies, descriptions of highly anomalous debris, the “flying disc” press release, Ramey in his internal memo continuing to describe the object as “the disc.” Blanchard & Ramey ran B-29 bomber bases; a TU-4, a B-29 clone, would most certainly NOT be described by them as a “disc”.)

The Pentagon also made a point of denying that the saucers were ET, just moments before the Roswell press release. Why? And Ramey and his intel chief were debunking the saucers as men from Mars a week before Roswell. Why? Why weren't they debunking them as not being Russian?

Two AF generals, Exon and Dubose, stated there was a very high-level cover-up, Exon being very explicit it was because it was the crash of a space craft. Principle investigator Marcel described the debris as being “not of this earth”. Did any of them ever say anything to suggest it was the crash of something conventional, like a Russian bomber?

I notice you mentioned Exon’s later flyover of the crash sites, as if this supported a TU-4 theory, but left out his testimony where he said it was definitely ET, based on conversations he had with men handling it that he knew personally and trusted. Exon also said Ramey was one of the generals on a high-level UFO control group within the Pentagon when Exon was stationed there. Why did you leave out the ET part of Exon's testimony? More of your typical cherry-picking?

David Rudiak said...

(2 of 2)

I have seen you produce nothing remotely close to the Roswell ET evidence to back up your TU-4 theory, which by now should also have declassified documentation to back it up. (Absolutely no need to keep this secret anymore.) The only Roswell witness you have mentioned as somehow supporting your theory was Sgt. Chester Barton, who said provost marshal Easley sent him to a nearby north site where he saw a large burned area with some metallic debris still strewn around, which he ASSUMED was from a B-29 crash carrying a nuke, not that he knew it was. In fact, part of his testimony (which of course you DIDN’T mention) was that he DIDN’T recognize any obvious B-29 parts and wasn’t allowed to get close enough to actually examine any of the pieces first-hand, only seeing them from a distance. He was also surprised at how little debris there was; a B-29 crash should have produced a lot more. That is hardly sterling testimony that B-29 or TU-4 copy actually did crash there, really more of a guess by the witness.

Barton did confirm that, based on what he saw, it couldn't have been a balloon crash, as reported in the papers, and he also heard the dead crew had been taken to the base hospital and then flown to Fort Worth. Barton of course assumed it was a human crew, but that part of his testimony squares exactly with a few others actually reporting non-human bodies at the base hospital. The flight to Fort Worth squares exactly with the testimony of three crew members of s B-29 flight the next day to Fort Worth, loaded in extreme secrecy, carrying a large crate in the bomb bay surrounded by an MP guard of officers, greeted in Fort Worth by a mortician whom another crew member had gone to school with. (To this you pooh-poohed the notion that anyone ever rode in bomb bays and I had to write another post to document that this commonly happened.)

That doesn't prove alien bodies were in the crate, but it does suggest bodies of some sort. However, I can't for the life of me understand why dead Russian crew members would be handled this way. It seems that they could have been transported in a more dignified way in normal coffins with some simple, plausible cover story to explain to nosy crew members who they might be. Human is human, after all, and foreign dead, even enemy ones, the military treated with some respect as fellow soldiers.

But small bodies in child-size coffins would be another story, and raise a lot of questions that would be difficult to answer. (Yes, I believe the Glenn Dennis story of a call from the base for child-size coffins, which now has a lot of corroboration from other witnesses.)

David Rudiak said...

More Brian Bell nonsense(1 of 2):
And some corrections are necessary to what you wrote:

Brian has it backwards, as usual.

- Max distance 3600 WITH full payload

Nope, according to the sources I've read, 5400 km or 3355 ACTUAL miles, NOT nautical miles, with 3000 kg payload, and much less with full payload: 3580 km with max 9000 kg load or 2220 miles, or 1135 miles less. (See, e.g.: http://tinyurl.com/TU4-statistics). Extrapolating to no payload, they might get another ~550 miles range or ~3900 miles total, but Roswell would be about ~4600 miles from closest possible base in Russia.

You need to convert your estimates into Nautical Miles too.

You're not very good with math, are you Brian? Nautical miles would result in FEWER numerical “miles” not more, by about 15%.

E.g., Wikipedia article on TU-4: Range: 5,400 km (3,355 mi; 2,916 nmi) at 3,000 m (9,843 ft) with 63,600 kg (140,214 lb) take-off weight including 3,000 kg (6,614 lb) of bombs and 10% fuel reserves.

Obviously it could fly the distance when stripped down as I said and with fewer crew

“Obviously?” Shortest distance from Russia (eastern Siberia) to Roswell ~4600 miles. Range with ZERO payload, maybe 3900 miles.

Standard crew 11, minimum crew ~4. The difference in weight between the two is ~500 kg, maybe giving them an extra 100 miles. Assuming max range is with 10% fuel reserve, add another 400 miles till they run out of fuel, so if they were VERY LUCKY, if navigation was perfect, if the weather cooperated, if everything else went perfectly, if they were willing to risk their lives to make a totally unnecessary flight to the absolute theoretical limit of their range & beyond, they might get to Roswell on fumes, but they were most probably going to die in the attempt. Not very smart, when they could much more easily defect to a much closer base.

Perhaps you can also explain in your original defection version, how they "stripped down" the plane without being noticed, unless they had considerable collusion on the ground, with the colluders knowing full well they would be signing their death warrants aiding and abetting the defectors.

(but let's just claim aliens flew further - say 4 or 5 light years in a tinfoil and balsa spacecraft).

Your usual inane strawman argument Brian. Only debunkers claim the spacecraft was made of tinfoil and balsa (the actual later, uncoerced descriptions were of very lightweight, very strong, very heat-resistant, materials, ideal for making a spacecraft that was also operational in the atmosphere) and nobody but debunkers make the argument that such a small craft would have been interstellar, instead of a local scout craft. It would be similar idiocy to argue that a helicopter gunship crashing in Afghanistan necessarily flew all the way from Fort Riley, Kansas, instead of an advance base near where it crashed. That’s the way humans logically operate (from advance bases), because it is much more efficient and practical.

And, uh, Brian, if you insist we have to stick with the newspaper descriptions, then you are arguing against your own TU-4 theory, while trying to have it both ways. Make up your mind. Your TU-4 theory REQUIRES it WASN’T tinfoil and balsa found, but plane parts, like aluminum sheet metal, engines, wires, etc. According to your theory, any newspaper descriptions of “foil, rubber, and sticks” would ALSO have to be cover stories, just like in an ET crash theory, which would also have DIFFERENT materials found than newspaper descriptions.

David Rudiak said...

(2 of 2)
- Oh, and the captured B-29s flew from Vladivostok all the way to the Moscow area test facility.

Oh, that's because the B-29 "ferry range", or the range WITHOUT a payload, was 5600 miles. Vladivostok to Moscow is 4000 miles, so a B-29 would have no trouble making such a flight. But, wasn't it a TU-4 you were talking about, not a B-29? For whatever reason, the ferry range of a TU-4 was much less than a B-29, maybe 4000 miles with a skeleton crew. If we assume 10% fuel reserve, then maybe 4400 miles running on empty. A TU-4 would be near the very limit of its range, might even crash if wind and weather conditions were wrong.

They could easily fly back to Vladivostok and then to Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula.

In the real world, NOT so easy, and I see your defection scheme keeps getting more complex and more absurd. Instead of getting out of Russia to to the nearest possible base, such as western Europe, they take the longest possible route, making not one, but two stops, making it even more likely they would be caught. First the defectors fly from Moscow to Vladivostok, where they would need to refuel, before flying to Petropavlovsk, where they would again need to refuel, before doing their 4600 mile kamikaze flight to Roswell, which could only, barely be accomplished if they somehow stripped thousands of pounds more out of the plane, exactly how they did this undetected, you somehow don't explain. Either that, or they would need to carry extra fuel tanks. (B-29s had spare tanks they could insert into the bomb bays to extend range, but I've seen no evidence the Russians made any of these yet for the TU-4.)

- Defection? Well read my posts about a DELIBERATE Stalin-sent message "salvo" concerning Cold War strategy. Not impossible.

So now its evolved to a another Stalinesque plot, like Annie Jacobsen. (All that’s missing are the Mengele manufactured alien beings.) Stalin was somehow trying to scare us by sacrificing one of his brand new, B-29 clones, deliberately crashing one here for the U.S. to examine? Doesn't sound very smart or possible to me. Sounds to me like the usual debunker 0.001% "possible" beats 0% possible for the ETH.

- One-way trip? That was its operational mission from the very get go - why the surprise anyone would actually do it?

For the defecting crew theory, it would be suicidal and an extremely dumb way to defect. Isn't the point of defecting to live somewhere else, not almost surely die in the attempt, especially when there were much easier and far less risky ways to defect to MUCH CLOSER bases.

And if it were a Stalinistic Commie plot, it would also be incredibly stupid, allowing your new bomber to immediately fall into enemy hands for examination. No sane leader or military would allow that to happen.

cda said...

Nitram/Martin:

"While I agree that Brian's solution is unlikely (LOL) my question for you Kevin is, would you not perhaps agree that it is no less unlikely than CDA's "mogul" solution?"

This 'Mogul' solution is the one put forward by the USAF, not me. It was in their official 900+ page report issued in 1994, just in case you don't remember. Even they did NOT say it was of a true Mogul flight. They said it was part of a pre-Mogul series of test flights.

DR:

Yes I agree the debris did NOT come from a downed B-29 or TU-4. As for all those people you trust so much who claim it was from a space craft (e.g. Exon and DuBose), can you give us a good reason why these two should have been privy to this highly secret information? Did they have the necessary clearances to be told of such an earth-shattering discovery? Did Ramey likewise? More important: how did these gentlemen recognise an ET craft anyway, when no such thing was (or still is) known to science?

You complain, rightly, of the total lack of documentation of the back-engineered B-29 (or TU-4). Here is what you wrote:

"I have seen you produce nothing remotely close to the Roswell ET evidence to back up your TU-4 theory, which by now should also have declassified documentation to back it up. (Absolutely no need to keep this secret anymore.)"

If you omit the term "ET", replace the "TU-4" with "ET spacecraft", I could, and will, say exactly the same about yourself, Kevin and countless other ETHers.

A scientific discovery of this nature top secret for 7 decades? Get real!

Brian B said...

Kevin wrote:

"Please point to the places where I said (or anyone else, really) said, "Nothing other than alien proponents claim no records could have ever been in error, that a balloon could never be the reason, that the US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico, that the Cold War was inconsequential..." because you have yet to do it."

Kevin those are MY words describing those who insist the ETH is the likely and ONLY explanation. I never said those were YOUR WORDS, but rather your stance (and others) on those issues.

Evidence I'm correct:

Kevin has written:

"There was no admin error but a precise record of what happened until Charles Moore changed his story and complicated the issue to keep the myth of Mogul alive for his own, personal reasons."

"...Moore’s mission wasn’t to learn where this flight might have gone but to prove that it had drifted to the northeast, passing over the exotically named places which is why he remembered them, regardless of what the atmospheric data showed."

"....Moore covered this by suggesting that Crary and part of the team were firing shots from midnight to six, and suggesting that the only reason to do that was if a balloon array had been launched. This, of course, is untrue..."

"Other balloon projects, including those by the Navy and General Mills did not provide information that would account for the debris. There was no records to support the idea of one of these projects, though classified in 1947 (or that didn’t begin until after 1947) could have left the debris for Brazel to find."

"The evidence, or the lack of evidence, argues strongly against the idea that what fell was a Soviet spy plane."

"The conclusion borne out by all the documentation is that it is not filled with “many, many errors” nor the idea that the “missing data on the Mogul flight is a wrinkle,” but that Flight No. 4 was cancelled."

"..they [USAF] had access to all the necessary records and found no secret USAAF test flight or a manned aircraft."

"There is no evidence of the government testing radar reflecting material at high altitude in New Mexico at the time. Endless speculation about balloons does not advance the discussion. If it was some other top secret project, please tell us what it was since the Air Force failed to find it in the mid-1990s and if such a project existed that would explain the Roswell debris you can be sure they would have trotted it out."

"You can't debate the other crash possibilities such as aircraft or missiles because the Air Force said it was none of those and my research including visits to White Sands, Holloman, New Mexico state archives and research in various newspaper files proves this to be correct."

David has written:

"My website traces in detail how Moore kept changing his story and playing games with the alleged launch time..."

"I used to respect him [Moore] but no longer, not after his long string of clear deceit on the topic of how his Mogul caused the Roswell incident. What I see is very calculated lie after lie..."

"AFOSI lied even worse than Moore in their report, such as resurrecting two other non-existent balloon flights (#2 and #3) in order to make a case for #4...."

"Of course, thee main reason nobody can develop such evidence is this supersecret military project never existed."

cda said...

Nitram/Martin:

You wrote:

"Correct - only wish CDA could grasp this - his view is that a "conspiracy" has a finite time period."

So your view is that it has an infinite time period, I suppose.

As with DR, You need to get real too.

KRandle said...

Brian -

I refuse to argue the point any more... Your extrapolations from my comments are your extrapolations. It is clear from the record that Mogul is not the answer and that my research failed to find any balloon project that would account for the wreckage which is not the same as saying, "... that a balloon could never be the reason..." only that I have found no documentation to support this and no one else has offered any at this time.

Your example of my quote, ""...they [USAF] had access to all the necessary records and found no secret USAAF test flight or a manned aircraft," is not the same as your extrapolation that "US never tested any advanced aircraft in New Mexico..." I said nothing about New Mexico specifically but did say the Air Force had searched and found nothing to account for the wreckage.

And my statement, "You can't debate the other crash possibilities such as aircraft or missiles because the Air Force said it was none of those and my research including visits to White Sands, Holloman, New Mexico state archives and research in various newspaper files proves this to be correct," suggests that this conclusion is correct but says nothing about they never tested the equipment there, but to suggest all the tests were accounted for in the records. If you have some evidence to the contrary, then present it.

In fact, none of your examples prove your extrapolations are correct (and I'll let David point out your errors with him). You have not proved your case and I don't have time to keep correcting you. Get your facts straight and then we can talk but twist my words into what you thing I said and I'll just ignore you.

Brian B said...

@ CDA

"This 'Mogul' solution is the one put forward by the USAF, not me. It was in their official 900+ page report issued in 1994, just in case you don't remember. Even they did NOT say it was of a true Mogul flight. They said it was part of a pre-Mogul series of test flights."

Indeed, Col. Weaver wrote:

"Comparison of all information developed or obtained indicated that the material recovered near Roswell was consistent with a balloon device and most likely from one of the Mogul balloons that had not been previously recovered."

"These "service flights" were not logged nor fully accounted for in the published Technical Reports generated as a result of the contract between NYU and Watson Labs. According to Professor Moore, the "service flights" were composed of balloons, radar reflectors and payloads specifically designed to test acoustic sensors (both early sonobuoys and the later Watson Labs devices). The "payload equipment" was expendable and some carried no "REWARD" or "RETURN TO..." tags because there was to be no association between these flights and the logged constant altitude flights which were fully acknowledged. The NYU balloon flights were listed sequentially in their reports (i.e. A,B, 1,5,6,7,8,10... ) yet gaps existed for Flights 2-4 and Flight 9. The interview with Professor Moore indicated that these gaps were the unlogged "service flights."

"Additionally, a copy of a professional journal maintained at the time by A.P. Crary, provided to the Air Force by his widow, showed that Flight 4 was launched on June 4, 1947, but was not recovered by the NYU group."

Now that seems pretty clear cut to me. Notice Weaver used the words "most likely" and "probably" in coming to his written conclusions. He never wrote "definitively", "absolutely", or "most certainly".

And yet, we have ET proponents who have written:

David -

"I used to respect him [Moore] but no longer, not after his long string of clear deceit on the topic of how his Mogul caused the Roswell incident. What I see is very calculated lie after lie..."

Kevin -

"There is a distinct possibility that there was no Flight No. 4, and at best, for them [skeptics], it was only the balloons but none of the other equipment. Moore told me that if a launch was cancelled they pulled the equipment from the array, but they let the balloons go because they couldn’t get the helium back into the bottle. If this is true, then Flight No. 4 would have had no radar reflectors to scatter debris and another leg of the Mogul explanation is kicked free."

"So, let’s just start that whole debate again by saying, there was no Mogul Flight No. 4. Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes and his diary entries are quite clear on the point. Flight No. 4 was cancelled… end of story. Period."

"If there was no Flight No. 4, then Moore’s role as the man who launched the Roswell case falters and fails and the Mogul experiments are reduced to an attempt to spy on the Soviets. He doesn’t find his name in the newspapers and he isn’t visited by those researching the case and he certainly doesn’t get to appear on TV or participate in a book."

Of course posting these comments is likely to bring rebuttals that I have taken them out of context to support my world view. Yet any casual reader of this blog is likely to ponder:

1) If they wrote the statements why do they claim they are being taken out of context?

2) In the face of the USAF's conclusions, why do they ridicule, and attack Moore and Weaver?

I think any plausible prosaic explanation that has a foundation in tangible facts, whether that be a balloon from Mogul, a TU-4, or even the possibility of some other device, will consistently be attacked as insufficient. Therefore the ETH remains viable despite not a single shred of tangible facts to support it.

KRandle said...

Brian -

I didn't say my comments were taken out of context, I said that your extrapolations from my comments were yours and did not directly flow from what I have said.

I do not attack Weaver. I have had some pleasant and lengthy communications with him, and provided him with a long document about Flight No. 4 which concluded that it was never launched. He agreed with many of my conclusions but not with the idea that Mogul was not the culprit or that Flight No. 4 was completely cancelled.

I believe that a reasonable person who reads all the relevant documentation about Mogul will realize that the answers are in those documents which include a definition of what these service flights were. Crary was quite clear. Flight No. 4 was cancelled. The cluster of balloons was just that, lifting a sonobuoy in an attempt to detect the detonations on the ground.

Moore told me things about these service flights and how they were arranged that does not agree with what he told Colonel Weaver and others. It is clear that the cluster launched on June 4 had no radar refectors though Moore tried to manipulate the data to suggest there were. The comments about the good reception on the ground but not in the plane referred to radio and not radar... but for Moore's story to work there had to be radar reflectors. He lied about that. And his unlogged service flights was another device to explain away the fact that Flight No. 4 was cancelled but really wasn't.

He also lied about the source of the winds aloft data he used in her reports. Although he acknowledges it in is 1995 report, later he talks about how these others supplied the data. I have a letter from him requesting more of the charts... see, I was trying to get all the data and wondered if the winds aloft might provide a clue...

But the facts argue against Mogul, and you ignore the clear statements made in the documentation. As I see the situation, no plausible mundane explanation has been offered which doesn't lead us to the extraterrestrial, only that no mundane explanation exists. Maybe tomorrow someone will find the evidence to end the discussion.

cda said...

Kevin wrote:

"As I see the situation, no plausible mundane explanation has been offered which doesn't lead us to the extraterrestrial, only that no mundane explanation exists. Maybe tomorrow someone will find the evidence to end the discussion."

I now offer, or re-offer, an explanation "which doesn't lead us to the exterrestrial".

The balloon fabric, so widely scattered on the Foster Ranch, WAS from the flight mentioned in Crary's notes for June 4. The radar reflector(s), that you so vehemently insist was not, or were not, present on that flight, came from another flight, but this flight was unlogged, maybe intentionally. I also say that SOME of the balloon fabric might have come from this unlogged flight.

As you can see, this is a possible solution. I do not say it is THE solution, but it is perfectly "plausible and mundane", and has a far higher probability of being correct than the ET one (which depends entirely on something unknown to science).

So here is a solution entirely free from any extraterrestrial connection. If you and your ET crowd still insist that a crashed visiting spacecraft is a more likely solution than mine, that is your privilege. But you can see (I hope) why the scientific establishment refuses to give you any leeway over the ET idea. And for DR and others to repeat that a number of 'tittle-tattle' stories from 30 to 50 years after the event strongly indicates that we had an ET visit at Roswell is, quite simply, bunkum. The hardware for my explanation exists (or did exist). The hardware for yours does not and did not. See the contemporary reports if in doubt.

Go on, now shoot me down. After all, what the hell do I know about the US military anyway?

KRandle said...

CDA -

I think I got twisted in my own syntax or you misunderstood my poorly constructed sentence. The elimination of Mogul, for example, does not mean that we may now conclude that what fell at Roswell was an alien spacecraft. It means simply that Mogul is not the answer.

But I do not understand your rejection of the documentation and the creation of scenarios that do not fit with the established facts. It seems that Crary was meticulous in his recording of the experiments and flights in New Mexico and the only reason that we now engage in these discussions is that Charles Moore, who had to know the truth, threw up clouds of terminology and speculation to cover the fact that Mogul was not the culprit.

But, I say again, the elimination of Mogul does not mean what fell was alien.

cda said...

Kevin:

Yes I may have misunderstood your syntax, but we are still stuck with what is the more likely solution: your ET answer or my non-ET answer.

True, eliminating Mogul does not imply that what fell was alien. But 'Roswell was alien' is what you have been strongly plugging for at least 25 years. I, along with others, detect that you have recently begun to have doubts. Have you?

I am reminded of the old phrase: "A man should never be afraid to change his mind, for it simply shows that he is wiser today than he was yesterday".

Brian B said...

@ CDA

You wrote:

"The balloon fabric, so widely scattered on the Foster Ranch, WAS from the flight mentioned in Crary's notes for June 4. The radar reflector(s), that you so vehemently insist was not, or were not, present on that flight, came from another flight, but this flight was unlogged, maybe intentionally. I also say that SOME of the balloon fabric might have come from this unlogged flight."

This assumes there were errors in Crary's journal. Of course I went down that path only to be blasted by Kevin and David. As you know, they state there was no unrecorded flight and no such debris from an earlier flight is possible. That means they maintain there were no errors in the records.

Furthermore, they also contend that polyethelyne (plastic) balloons were not used until much later, meaning there could be no "fabric" of any kind from the balloon itself - just neoprene rubber. And let's not forget the foil found was not from a Rawin target since it displayed "exotic qualities" unknown to mankind, not to mention purple alien symbols.

Plus they say there were no shroud lines either, so clearly this was no balloon.

I don't think you're going to get any further than I did. It doesn't pay to argue with a brick wall.

Besides, there always remains the possibility it was some other prosaic project. Of course no such discussion will be entertained on this blog.

albert said...

@cda,

Please explain what you mean by "...something unknown to science...".

. .. . .. --- ....

Nitram said...

CDA reminded himself of the old phrase "A man should never be afraid to change his mind, for it simply shows that he is wiser today than he was yesterday".

Is this why your opinion never changes despite evidence that you could be mistaken?

Many of the intelligent people who believe in the ET explanation have doubts - however they don't have any plausible prosaic explanation either.

DR came up with ten instantaneous type theories - you must think one of them is quite plausible CDA, so what would be your pick of the first three:

1) Mass hysteria by the townspeople and base induced by all the publicity being given flying saucers?

2) A hoax by the townspeople and base to turn Roswell into a tourist attraction?

3) Mass hallucination induced by mind-control drugs in the water supply, developed at Fort Stanton, N.M.?

cda said...

Nitram/Martin:

"Many of the intelligent people who believe in the ET explanation have doubts".

True, many do have doubts - Kevin for one (although he is hesitant to say so as it would mean quite a reversal from all his writings over the last 25 years).

However the majority of ETHers, I surmise, have no such doubts; e.g. I am certain that David Rudiak, Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, Stanton Friedman, Timothy Good and Nick Pope have no such doubts. Going back in history, Keyhoe, the Lorenzens and Walt Andrus likewise. (Here I am referring to UFOs in general, not just Roswell)

Of the three theories you listed (from DR's list), all have a low probability, but I would rate 2 as the most likely of those three and 3 the least likely. I would rate the sum total of all these probabilities as being well below 5 per cent.

Brian B said...

@ CDA

"Of the three theories you listed (from DR's list), all have a low probability, but I would rate 2 as the most likely..."

Maybe a little higher than a 5 overall given that so many first hand witnesses have been found to be gross exageraators with nothing more than an intention of clearly "writing themselves" into hometown history!

KRandle said...

All –

Since it seems to have gone almost unnoticed, when I suggested that the aliens had crashed the craft on purpose, I had my tongue firmly in cheek. That anyone would take this speculation as serious is almost as funny as the idea that the aliens crashed on purpose.

Brian –

I really wish you would stop assigning opinions to me that are based on nothing more than your distasted for an extraterrestrial solution for UFO sightings in general and Roswell in particular. I don’t object to speculations, only those that are based on a single fact such as the Soviets flew a B-29 clone on May 19, 1947, and therefore might be responsible for the Roswell wreckage.

I have been waiting for someone to point out that on December 10, 1947, a joint investigation by the Directorate of Intelligence at Headquarters USAF, and the Office of Naval Intelligence released a top secret document called Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79 called “Analysis of Flying Objects Incidents in the U.S.”

Under the section, “Possible Origin of Unusual Flying Objects, [Hey, that is UFO long before Ruppelt came along], they postulated that the Soviet Union might be the source of these objects. Notice that I now have documentation raising that possibility that no one has mentioned.

The next sections were, “Possible Reasons or Tactics for the Use of Soviet Unconventional Aircraft Over the U.S.,” “To negate, U.S. confidence in Atom Bomb,” “For photographic Reconnaissance,” to “Test U.S. Defenses,” and “Familiarization Flights Over U.S. Territory.”

So, here is an official document that is suggesting Soviet flights over the US, which make the idea that something made by the Soviets crashed more plausible… I will note, however, that since those writing this document had the proper clearances, had the Roswell crash been of Soviet manufacture, it probably would have shown up in here. That it doesn’t argues against the idea that it was Soviet because they would have no reason to hide it from these guys. Had it been Soviet, they would have mentioned it.

Brian B said...

@ Kevin

"That anyone would take this speculation as serious is almost as funny as the idea that the aliens crashed on purpose."

>>> Your comment is perhaps best directed to Tim Printy. He wrote the commentary and I merely referenced it. Unless he's a comedian, I think he meant what he wrote. He would know better than I would however.

"Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79"

>>> I'm aware of it but why bring it up? No one believes the Roswell incident was a Soviet "something" anyway. Some would prefer to believe in aliens without any evidence, while others prefer to insist it was "something Mogul" or nothing at all.

However, like your document, there are other 1947 classified documents that are equally interesting in that they also suggest SOVIET technology based on WW2 GERMAN designs:

THE TWINING MEMO: (the real one not the fake one doctored up by ufologists):

"h. Due consideration must be given the following:-

(1) The possibility that these objects are of domestic origin - the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this Command.

(2) The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these subjects. [Note no confirmation Roswell was an alien episode]

(3) The possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge."

THE SCHULGEN MEMO: (the real one not the fake one altered by ufologists).

"4. This strange object, or phenomenon, may be considered, in view of certain observations, as long-range aircraft capable of a high rate of climb, high cruising speed (possibly sub-sonic at all times) and highly maneuverable and capable of being flown in very tight formation. For the purpose of analysis and evaluation of the so-called "flying saucer" phenomenon, the object sighted is being assumed to be a manned aircraft, of Russian origin, and based on the perspective thinking and actual accomplishments of the Germans."

There are others too - they all indicated a belief in a terrestrial aircraft of unconventional design using propulsion systems capable of the same flight requirements AND within their current means to replicate. That sounds like a classified advanced human engineered saucer project to me.

Funny that ufologists couldn't accept that and had to ALTER those documents to include ET when it was never mentioned. Then circulate the fake documents in their books (Friedman, Goode, etc).

KRandle said...

Brian -

You wrote about the Air Intelligence Report, ">>> I'm aware of it but why bring it up? No one believes the Roswell incident was a Soviet "something" anyway. Some would prefer to believe in aliens without any evidence, while others prefer to insist it was "something Mogul" or nothing at all."

Because it affects your claim of a Soviet penetration and crash of a TU-4 near Roswell. It is documentation... you, of course, prefer to believe the Soviet explanation with no evidence other than the TU-4 first flew on May 19, 1947... and yes, I know this cuts both ways because it can be argued that here is documentation that suggests nothing spectacular (meaning alien) fell at Roswell but this is a search for the truth rather than a debate in which you ignore the evidence that does not support your point of view.

Going off on your typical tangent, you wrote, "THE TWINING MEMO: (the real one not the fake one doctored up by ufologists)." Please point to a source of this doctored memo by Ufologists. I compared the version in Good's book with that as it appeared in the Condon Committee report, as well as the copy in the Project Blue Book files. They are the same, except the Condon Committee retyped the document and Good published copies of the actual document and the Blue Book files had a copy from 1947.

Of course there are documents that suggested that these objects were of terrestrial origin, just as there were suggestions they might be interplanetary (as opposed to interstellar). Yes, I have the report about the evolution of the flying wing type aircraft which mentions that such craft are inherently unstable and it wasn't until "fly-by-wire" was developed that those stability problems were overcome.

Please provide examples were Good (please not the correct spelling) or Friedman have altered documents... and please note that the AFCIN Intelligence Team Personnel document as published by Cliff Stone has the note about it being a draft removed, and note that while that might be true, it is also true that Moon Dust does (or did) exist and this document is accurate in many of the things it said.

If you wish to point to fake documents that can be laid at the feet of researchers maybe you should use MJ-12... Here there are altered documents and we know who altered them rather than issuing another blanket statement which is basically untrue.

cda said...

Kevin:

For the sake of accuracy, I believe the document you refer to (100-203-79) is dated Dec 10, 1948, not 1947.

Brian:

I do not think either Tim Good or Stan Friedman ever altered documents. They are both honest types, even if they both lean towards fantasy rather than fact.

The Twining memo, to my knowledge, has never neen altered. The Schulgen memo WAS retyped with some altered phrases, c. 1985. The culprit is generally believed to be William Moore. It was Robert Todd who first exposed this fakery.

One mystery about the Twining memo which I have never seen answered, is how the Condon Committee got hold of a copy in 1969 when the actual document was not officially declassified until 1978 (as shown on top of page 1). Did the USAF produce a special 'declassified' copy just for this civilian committee? Strange.

KRandle said...

CDA -

You are correct and this is what happens when you miss the typing class in which they taught us how to touch type numbers. I hit the wrong number.

As for the question about the Condon Committee publishing the Twining letter which had been classified, since Condon had two researchers (or maybe more) who were cleared for "secret," and since they had the run of the Blue Book files, I would guess that the Air Force cleared them to release that document. I do know that in the Malmstrom AFB reports of 1967, they were denied some information because it had an affect on national security. This had to do with the shut down of one of the flights of minuteman missiles which, in 1967, was actually a national security issue. We can argue about the UFO connection, but the denial of the information was based on the shutting down of one flight of missiles.

KRandle said...

Brian -

I accidentally deleted your comment, but I preserved the text so that I am able to recover from that.

All -

This is Brian's comment:

@ Kevin and CDA:

Unnoticed by both of you perhaps, a faked version of the "Schulgen Memo" first surfaced in 1987 and was reported by Robert Todd, a man who apparently had a strong distaste for Kevin's investigative conclusions regarding the Roswell incident.

A full report on the fakery he discovered can be seen at the website below:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/FOIA/SchulgenMemo.htm

Todd and many skeptics (including other ET groups like Citizens Against UFO Secrecy) demonstrated that a faked (altered) version of the original document was used by ufologists to divert attention away from a Soviet-German connection AND to emphasize an alien one.

Sounds like a familiar gimmick to produce "irrefutable evidence" which is why I highlighted it.

And.....I never said Good, Friedman, or even Kevin "faked" the document (that's YOU 'extrapolating' false accusations). It's a frequent complaint of yours Kevin, and yet a commonly used 'tactic' you also employ none-the-less. Double standard?

Because of the memo's inclusion in popular books such as Above Top Secret and Beyond Top Secret (Good's books), and the typical endorsement you'd expect from MJ-12 supporting Friedman, there are people out there today who think the faked memo is the original; that its fraudulently added comments are 'proof' of conspiracy.

You can view the original Schulgen FOIA document below and the altered pages in the faked version further down:

The Real Memo:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/pdf/TheRealSchulgenMemo.pdf

The Faked Memo:

The faked version modifies portions of the original to make it look as though officials knew that "interplanetary craft" were the cause of all saucer sightings.

Go figure...no surprise here.

And where has it been altered? All over of course. One of the major alterations occurs on page three. You can download images of the faked pages here:

Page One:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/images/SchulHoaxPg1.jpeg

Page Two

http://www.roswellfiles.com/images/SchulHoaxPg2.jpeg

Page Three

http://www.roswellfiles.com/images/SchulHoaxPg3.jpeg

Page Four

http://www.roswellfiles.com/images/SchulHoaxPg4.jpeg

Page Five

http://www.roswellfiles.com/images/SchulHoaxPg5.jpeg

Page Six

http://www.roswellfiles.com/images/SchulHoaxPg6.jpeg

The falsification and fakery of the Twining memo has to do with its interpretation by ufologists and all the reasons they claim it hints at something while hiding something. Well it doesn't.

KRandle said...

Brian -

Robert Todd had a strong distaste for anyone who disagreed with him and resorted to name calling, incredibly nasty letters, accusations that were almost accurate and sometimes completely untrue. He is one of the "heroes" of the Air Force massive report and he is the only person that I know who was visited by James McAndrew... but none of that really matters.

You wrote, "And.....I never said Good, Friedman, or even Kevin "faked" the document (that's YOU 'extrapolating' false accusations). It's a frequent complaint of yours Kevin, and yet a commonly used 'tactic' you also employ none-the-less. Double standard?"

Nope... left out the word published. My comment should have read, "Please provide examples were Good (please not the correct spelling) or Friedman have PUBLISHED altered documents." I wanted to know if you had actually checked or if you were just spouting what someone else claimed... and yes, I know the answer.

And sorry, you cannot call the interpretation of the Twining memo as falsification and fakery because no one has altered anything, though that seemed to be your original point. The important fact about that letter is that the conclusions were drawn based on the information supplied by Major George Garrett for analysis and that it exactly what he (and his boss, Brigadier General George Schulgen) got. You might disagree with the interpretation but it is not falsification or fakery.

But once again, you have dragged the discussion off the rails, which originally was about the Soviets making a flight of a TU-4 over the US and crashing near Roswell. You have present no evidence that this is the case, only your idea that they had the (barely) capability to do so. These other issues are irrelevant to this discussion.

Oh, and it appears that we don't have "ufologists" altering documents, we have one man doing it and he is largely responsible for a whole host of faked and altered documents... sort of like skeptics who fake UFO sightings by launching flares attached to balloons to prove that UFO researchers are credulous and when they don't get the results they want, lie about what they had observed.


cda said...

Kevin:

Just to clarify:

The person who retyped the Schulgen memo of Oct 1947 was almost certainly Bill Moore (at least he is the one under suspicion). A few sections had their wording altered, the intention being to persuade ufologists that ET was suspected at official levels as early as 1947. It backfired because Todd exposed it by locating the original, which had a different typeface, stampings and different phraseology in the vital sections.

We agree that the Twining memo (i.e. the one the Condon committee got hold of years before its official declassification) was NEVER altered by anyone, but was interpreted differently by some ETHers. Stan Friedman insisted that because it was only a 'Secret' and not 'Top Secret' memo, it was invalid as an anti-ETH document. In other words, anything even hinting at ETH would automatically be 'Top Secret' (according to Stan) and thus still hidden from the public. As far as I know, nobody, apart from Bill Moore, has ever been suspected of the fakery behind the Schulgen memo, which looks like it was a 'trial run' prior to the release of the phony MJ-12 papers in 1987.

Other ufologists HAVE altered documents, but I don't have the details. Maybe Tim Cooper, maybe Clifford Stone, my knowledge does not extent that far.

The original Schulgen memo does mention Russian-made aircraft as possible UFOs, as well as the Horton 'flying wing' I believe (captured from the Germans at the end of WW2).

KRandle said...

CDA -

I have little doubt that Bill Moore retyped and altered the Schulgen memo. He retyped the original Aquarius Telex which included the line about MJ-12. When we look at all of this in context it does seem to come back to Moore... and comes back to one ufologist altering documents.

BTW it is Horten brothers...

Friedman's claim that because the Twining memo is only classified secret and therefore couldn't contain top secret material is correct but that's not the reason that there is no mention of any crash recovered debris. If you know the history of that document, you know that it was a response to the information sent for analysis by Schulgen and only that data was used to draft the response. Nothing was added by those at AMC to the mix and since the source material contained no information about any crash recovered debris, the line about the lack thereof was inserted. This is not to say there wasn't some kind of back channel communication between Twining and Schulgen, only that the memo, actually written by Howard McCoy merely used the data contained in that document and added nothing else to it... not unlike a legal situation where evidence is known to exist but is not admissible for a variety of reasons... the lawyers know but the jury doesn't and makes its decision based one what has been presented.

I have a document dated 21 January 1948 entitled "Unconventional Aircraft," discusses the Soviet plan to built 1800 Horten VIII six-engine pusher flying wings which we all know now never happened. It was the Soviet attempt to build a long range bomber. It contains "Intelligence Requirements - Unconventional Aircraft," which seems to be the same document that Todd and others associated with a Schulgen memo but does not have his name on it.

Oh, and I don't think of Tim Cooper as a ufologist... and yes, here we dip into semantics.

Brian B said...

Kevin -

"But once again, you have dragged the discussion off the rails, which originally was about the Soviets making a flight of a TU-4 over the US and crashing near Roswell."

No, it's about "Soviet Aerial Reconnaissance and Roswell" which is the title of your blog topic. The TU-4 is not a recon aircraft (as you know). You just wanted to discredit my speculative theory by associating it with recon flights that never occurred. I never once said anything about Soviet recon flights with the TU-4.

Plus, you keep asking for "proof" it was a TU-4 when I have said clearly several times it's a "speculative conjecture" that coincides with Barton's testimony and can account for most if not all of the claims Roswellians have made about the incident.

I pointed out that if it was a TU-4 then silly Roswellians could have their 'cake and eat it too' (less the alien frosting though).

Oh, and I don't consider reinforcing a speculative theory by citing two period documents that mention Soviet flying saucer concerns as as a problem or lack of evidence.

Just as CDA wrote;

"The original Schulgen memo does mention Russian-made aircraft as possible UFOs, as well as the Horton 'flying wing' I believe (captured from the Germans at the end of WW2)."

But why be so concerned? Why be dismissive?

Period documents don't prove Roswell was an alien event either!

I've never seen any documents like that, have you? And if they did exist, the USAF would have found them, right? Just like you told me.

So, even if you know of documents that are remotely suggestive of an "interplanetary craft", your ongoing conclusions Roswell was an alien crash would be incorrect. According to your standards, it would rest purely on conjecture - the very same type of 'conjecture' you accuse me of!

Oh, and you can't use Haut's press release as proof either. ET'ers on this blog have already stated the press was prone to getting the message wrong and only cared about selling newspapers.

Unless of course you believe the only thing they ever got right was a story about a 'captured flying disc'.

Finally, while ufologists are quick to dismiss the Horton brother's, they forget the two weren't that successful.

Roswellians selectively forget the hundreds of German engineers employed under "Paperclip". That includes Lippish who died in your home state of Iowa.

X-plane concepts more advanced than anything the Horten brothers proposed were developed by Gothe, BMW, Dornier, Focke-Wulf, and Arado.

That includes designs for supersonic aircraft, ramjets, chemical propulsion, and a suborbital bomber.