Kirkpatrick, AARO, Project Mogul and Moore

 

On Friday, on my UFO Update on Coast-to-Coast AM, I mentioned an article written by the former director of AARO, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick who posted something of a rant about his time at AARO. It was clear from his article that he was anti-alien visitation. There is a history of those who have been put in charge of UFO, or in this case UAP, investigation who have had a dislike for the topic and who were predisposed against the idea of alien visitation.

Sean Kirkpatrick briefing senators on UAP and ARRO.

For those who are interested in another aspect of this, I will attach, at the end of my analysis, that of Dr. David Rudiak, who goes into Kirkpatrick’s rather unscientific belief that Project Mogul explains the Roswell UFO debris.

First, we need to examine, briefly, the history of official UFO investigations which is filled with those at the top being radically anti-UFO. It began in the late 1940s when General Hoyt S. Vandenberg refused to accept an intelligence analysis suggesting that some flying saucers were alien craft. After looking at the report, known as the Estimate of the Situation (EOTS), he ordered the document declassified and then burned.

This bothered me. During my career as an Air Force intelligence officer, I dealt with classified material all the time. I destroyed many out-of-date documents that would have created a great deal of clutter in the safe. There is nothing nefarious about this and every intelligence officer, as a matter of routine, has destroyed out-of-date documents.

I also tossed out unclassified documents without needing to document their destruction. The question that springs to mind is why would Vandenberg have ordered the EOTS declassified and then destroyed? The answer is that if it was classified, there would need to be a record of its destruction. It would prove that the document had existed. But, if it was declassified first, then no such documentation would be needed.

Ed Ruppelt of Project Blue Book said that he had seen one copy of it. There wouldn’t have been many created given the nature of the EOTS and its purpose. No more than a dozen and probably fewer. So, one survived for a period and Ruppelt read it. He said that it concluded that some flying saucers were alien spacecraft and Vandenberg didn’t accept that conclusion.

Captain Edward Ruppelt.

That is the first instance of a high-ranking officer deciding that certain information must be kept from the public. I won’t speculated as to why Vandenberg believed that. I will say that we all can figure it out.

And, I will note that if the Chief of Staff of the Air Force didn’t accept the idea of alien visitation, then those officers who valued their careers felt the same way. Once Vandenberg made it clear there were no flying saucers, his subordinates followed his lead. They weren’t interested in finding evidence that contradicted the highest-ranking member of the Air Force.

Ruppelt, when he was appointed as the chief of Project Blue Book tried to make it a proper, unbiased investigation. For a period of 18 months or so, that is what happened. Once he was given a new assignment, the old guard took over. At one-point, Blue Book was made up of very junior personnel. According to Jerry Clark, what followed was a series of men who were rabidly anti-saucer. Not much in the way of investigation took place though sighting reports were gathered and most were “identified.”

In January, 1953, the CIA convened a panel of scientists to review the facts gathered by Project Blue Book. Both Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the scientific consultant to Blue Book and Ed Ruppelt were there. Their testimony was limited. The investigation lasted about five days.

The panel concluded there was nothing to alien spacecraft visitation. It was all misidentified objects, weather and astronomical phenomena, hallucinations and hoaxes. The problem here was that the final report was written before the panel even met. Dr. Michael Swords laid this out in both the International UFO Reporter and in the book he co-authored with Robert Powell, UFOs and Government. I examined this in UFOs and the Deep State. Both books provide footnotes and sources.

Beginning in the late 1950, there was a move by many in both the Air Force and higher levels of government (dare I say, the Deep State here) to get rid of Air Force responsibility to investigate UFO. Documents found in the Project Blue Book files outline all this. Eventually, the Air Force decided to find a university that would make an investigation into the phenomenon. The result was that the University of Colorado accepted a grant to make the scientific study of UFOs. The problem here, as it was in the past, was that the final conclusions written before they began their investigation. This has been documented through the correspondence between the members of what became know as the Condon Committee and the Air Force. I have written about it on this blog and you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/01/moon-dust-robert-hippler-and-project.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/06/condon-committee-negated.html

David Rudiak focused primarily on Kirkpatrick’s Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell case. I would have thought that a scientist, charged by Congress to make an investigation would have been smart enough to make a literature search as he began his quest. While studying for a Ph.D., that was among the very first things I did. I spent days in the various libraries at the University of Iowa, searching through the journals, magazines and sources of information as I worked to define exactly what my research would be and what had gone on and published by others so that I didn’t repeat their research. I used it to define what my research would be. Apparently, Kirkpatrick didn’t bother with that before writing his rant.

As I say David Rudiak examined what Kirkpatrick had written and provided a commentary on it. Rudiak provided a link to an interview concerning this and then wrote:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Episode-38-Is-The-Pentagon-Really-Hiding-Crashed-Alien-Spaceships-Podcast/B0BZ29R9CH?clientContext=130-5774271-3870223&loginAttempt=true

(See 20 min. in)

Sean Kirkpatrick, "retired" director of AARO, allegedly declared in aninterview with CNN's Peter Bergen Jan. 23, that AARO "dug deep into Roswell".  Bergen then states that in the late 1940s and 50s there were "a lot of strange things" happening near Roswell.  "There was a top secret spy program called Mogul which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic spy balloons into the air.  At the same time the US military was conducting tests with other high altitude balloons that were carrying human dummies and there was at least one military plane crash with 11 fatalities.  Kirkpatrick and his team at AARO concluded that crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve crashed test dummies, and glimpses of the aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single narrative, a narrative matching the mood of the country at that moment."

Then Kirkpatrick actually speaks: "...there was this fear coming out of World War II, everybody's still raw from the War and there's lots of technological issues that people were trying to wrap their mind around. And that affected what people saw and how they reported.  I think the same thing is true today."

So basically Kirkpatrick and AARO's supposed "deep dive" into Roswell (at least according Bergen's narration) is really just a complete regurgitation of AFOSI's 1995 Mogul balloon and 1997 crash dummy reports (which included the plane crash), combined with the latter's "time compression theory" that dummy tests from the 50s were confused with the events of 1947 to become alien bodies.  Thus we learn that these events really all occurred "at the same time" as Roswell and were somehow combined by the public into just one event because they were still traumatized from WWII. (The trauma apparently gave the public precognitive abilities so that they were aware of plane crashes and crash dummy tests from the future.)  We also learn that Mogul consisted of "oddly shaped metallic spy balloons".  So apparently the foil radar targets were also compressed with round rubber balloons to create these oddly shaped metallic balloons that people thought were flying saucers. Psychological trauma does really strange things with people's minds.

Why didn't I figure this out?  Brilliant sleuthing Kirkpatrick and AARO.  Case closed!  Time to hang up my spurs and try to sell my tin foil hat on eBay.  You too Kevin.

I received a call last week and was tipped off by a science reporter that Kirkpatrick was going to try to debunk Roswell as a Mogul balloon and was looking for rebuttal material, which I provided him.  I didn't realize just how bad and inaccurate it was going to be.  Kirkpatrick has always struck me as a slimy tool, but Bergen was even worse. The whole episode is dripping with condescension and ridicule, not to mention being highly inaccurate with even basic facts. What ever happened with real journalism that tried to stick to facts and play it straight?

We also learn that UFOs can be explained as our new technology that the public is unfamiliar with or spy technology of foreign adversaries. Isn't that more probable than aliens coming here?  I ask you.  Really!

Another interesting angle here came from an interview by skeptic reporter Steven Greenstreet of the NY Post.  He interviewed Brandon Fugal, who bought the Skywalker Ranch in 2016.  Fugal told him that in 2018 he was invited to give a briefing to Senate staffers of the Armed Service and Intelligence committees, but just as he was about to start, the person at the head of the table said words to the effect: "Before we proceed any further, I want to establish an understanding.  All the gentleman here, Mr. Fugal, that you're presenting to are all very well aware of the reality of UFO phenomena. So please dispense with any part of your presentation that would seek to convince us of the reality because we already know."

Greenstreet then asks, "Who said that?" Fugal responds, "One of the individuals leading the discussion." He doesn't say who.

Greenstreet's video then shows a photo of Sean Kirkpatrick and comments, "A source familiar with this meeting told me this was Sean Kirkpatrick."

https://twitter.com/MiddleOfMayhem/status/1648428449663717376

So if this is accurate, and I strongly suspect it is, Kirkpatrick knows better and is just another government disinformation agent. It also seems that AARO's investigations are basically a farce. But we already strongly suspected that as well.

There are several points that Rudiak didn’t mention. The balloon launches from Alamogordo in 1947 were conducted by New York University and were not classified. The culprit in this was the balloon array scheduled to be launched on June 4, 1947 but, according to the field notes and other documentation created at the time by Dr. Albert Crary, confirmed that the launch had been cancelled. It could not have dropped "oddly shaped metallic spy balloons.”

Based on my interviews with Charles Moore, one of the engineers working in New Mexico in 1947, when a flight was cancelled, they couldn’t put the helium back in the bottles. They sometimes conducted other experiments with a cluster of balloons, which were did not involve the whole array. One such cluster was launched later in the day on June 4, but did not contain any rawin radar targets, that is the “oddly shaped metallic spy balloons.”

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I supplied.
Photo by Kevin D. Randle in Socorro, NM.

It should also be noted that, according to the records available, the first launches in New Mexico, which began with the attempted Flight #4, did not include any rawin targets. We know this because Moore told me that Flight #4 was made up the same way as Flight #5 and it contained no rawin targets. The documentation exists to prove this. Flight #5 was the first successful flight launched in New Mexico.

And, I will note that Moore, in his report on this controversy said that Flight #4 had actually been launched at two or three in the morning in violation of the rules under which they operated. Not to mention that according to Crary, the flight was cancelled at dawn. So, according to Moore, the flight was launched before it was cancelled.

I could go on with this but I have reported on it in Roswell in the 21^st Century and Understanding Roswell. I have also posted several blogs on this. You can access them all by using the search engine on the left side of the blog. Here are a few of the more relevant postings:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-end-of-project-mogul.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-project-mogul-double-standard.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/02/oncein-while-okay-more-often-than-that.html

As I say, just type Project Mogul into the search engine and it will bring up all the articles and discussions concerning Mogul. There are, or course, redundancies, but that is for the convenience of the reader so that he or she doesn’t have to search through earlier comments to understand the situation.

I mention all of this for the perspective on Kirkpatrick’s rant. He said that he had been charged by Congress to bring science-based clarity and resolution to the long-standing mystery of credible observations of UAP.

This is the same claim made by H. P. Robertson in 1953 and by Edward Condon in 1969. It is the same claim made by the Air Force throughout the 1950s and 1960s. But we have been subjected to the same anti-UFO sentiments and misleading comments for years, all made by credible sources who have a particular agenda. It wasn’t to provide the truth or an unbiased look at UFOs and now UAP. It was always about hiding information and attempting to head off independent research. I see nothing here that suggests a transparent investigation but more of the same sort of duplicity.

Kirkpatrick is annoyed that his efforts were derailed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence. I can say the same things about his investigation made behind closed doors that ignored contradictory evidence. His investigation was limited to official sources. This is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Had he asked, I certainly could have supplied some of the evidence that he told us didn’t exist.

He said that no record exists of any president or living member of the intelligence community having knowledge of any highly classified program and that someone at the top of the government would have been briefed at some point. He found no record of that. I pointed many of those sorts of records in UFOs and the Deep State.

I’ll note the qualification which is living member. There are examples of several highly placed people talking about secret programs. General Bolender said sightings involved with national security were not part of the Blue Book system. Allen Hynek said the really good cases never made it to Blue Book and we know that his investigation into the Socorro landing was cut short when he wanted to continue the research in New Mexico.

And I, as well as many others, can point to sources, no longer with us, who provide good insight into the UFO phenomenon and the Roswell case. This would include Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, Brigadier General Arthur Exon, Colonel Edwin Easley and Colonel Patrick Saunders to name but four who had inside and intimate knowledge of the Roswell case. Their testimonies are available on audio and video tape.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon.
Photo courtesy of Tom Carey.

I could go on in this vein, but this is already longer than I had intended. It just provides a counter to Kirkpatrick’s rant. I doubt those in power want the counterpoints. It interferes with their message which is there is nothing to see here. Go on home.