Another Mogul Rant (But Deserved!)

Just yesterday, I stumbled onto an interview with a reporter or researcher who knows little about the UFO field but who is now considered some sort of expert. I know that these sorts of things happen in every field and those old cronies, such as me, are often resentful when the new breed shows up with their new ideas and theories. All too often, in this field, those new ideas are just old ideas that are recycled but sometimes it’s just they haven’t bothered to dive deep enough into the rabbit hole.

What inspired this latest rant? Another expert, explaining the history of UFO research, pointing out that 1947 was the big year, sparked by Kenneth Arnold but then the find of the remains of a flying saucer outside Roswell. Of course, the Air Force floated the balloon explanation the next day (Yes, the pun was intended) and that was the end of the Roswell story… at least for a while.

Nearly fifty years later, the cover up was admitted by the Air Force. It wasn’t a weather balloon, but a huge array of balloons known as Project Mogul, a highly classified project with the ultimate purpose of spying on the Soviet Union. They were hiding this because we didn’t want the Soviets knowing that we were creating constant level spy balloons.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Here’s what I know, based on interviews with soldiers stationed at Roswell at the time, including the man in charge of the Counterintelligence Office, Sheridan Cavitt, the base Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, soldiers responsible for the recovery of the debris and civilians Bill Brazel who handled the debris and Charles Moore who was an engineer working on the balloon launches from Alamogordo that are now wrapped in the mantle of Project Mogul.

We also have comprehensive records of the activities of the University of New York people in Alamogordo because Colonel Richard Weaver was able to obtain the rough field notes created by the leader of that project, Dr. Albert Crary and, of course the more formal record of the results of their experiments. These are the keys to my research because they end the Mogul explanation.

Dr. Albert Crary

According to that documentation, not to mention what Moore told me in a series of interviews, the first of the balloon launches in New Mexico was to be Flight #4. There had been earlier flights on the east coast, but the weather and population density made it problematic. They switched their operation to New Mexico in 1947 where the weather was better, there were large areas that were uninhabited, and large military ranges where they could control access. All that made Alamogordo a much better location for what was actually the University of New York Balloon Project.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data.

Given the records, there were only two dates that worked for the Project Mogul explanation to be viable. These were June 4, 1947, which was Flight #4 and July 3 which was Flight #9. There is no recorded data for either of those flights and they are not listed in the official documentation. We do know the existed and we know what happened to them. Other information including interviews and documents provide those answers.

Flight #9 was originally considered the culprit in the debate about what fell. There was no data recorded for the flight. According to Dr. Crary’s diary notes, which are somewhat confusing on this point, linked several flights together. In those notes, Crary wrote:

Balloon tests? 7, 8, 9, and 10 off this week. Test 7, slated for July 1 postponed until 2 July as equipment not ready. 100 tanks Helium obtained from Amarillo Monday evening. Also radiosonde receivers set up by NYU personnel Monday but were not operable. Test 7 at dawn on July 2 with pibal 1 hr first following with theodlite [sic]. Winds were very light and balloons up between A [sic] air base and mountains most of the time. Included cluster of met balloons. Followed by C-54? For several hours & finally landed/in [sic] mountains near road to Cloudcroft. Before gear could be recovered, most of it had been/stolen [sic]. Stations operating at north hangar, Cloudcroft and Roswell (emphasis added). Shots made unfortunately at Site #4 and picked up good from north hangar and from Cloudcroft for awhile. Nothing from Roswell. On Thursday morning, July 3, a cluster of GM plastic balloons sent up for V2 recording but V2 was not fired. No shots fired. Balloons up for some time. No recordings from Roswell as pibal showed no W winds. Balloons picked up by radar WL [Watson Labs] and hunted by Manjak C-45. Located on Tularosa Range by air. Out pm with several NYU by weapon carrier but we never located it. Rocket postponed until 730 Thursday night but at last minute before balloon went up, V2 was called off on account of accident at White Sands. Sent up cluster balloons with dummy load. Balloon flight #10 at dawn on July 5.

I emphasized that that part of the NYU team was in Roswell to track these flights. Moore told me that they had gone to the air base to ask for assistance, but the officers had refused to cooperate. Instead, the NYU team rented a hotel room and used it as their base for tracking the balloon arrays. Moore was telling me that they had been in Roswell to get assistance for their work, which meant they would have revealed exactly what they were doing in New Mexico. Moore, fifty years later, was still annoyed that the soldiers were unimpressed with what Moore said the officers called “college boy” antics. The soldiers were too busy with important work (and before anyone criticizes the use of soldiers for the men, I point out that in July 1947, there were Army Air Forces but no United States Air Force.)

Moore also gave another example of this lack of cooperation with the military that evolved into the idea that Mogul was highly classified. He said that he another of the engineers had been attempting to recover an array that came down near Roswell. He wrote:

As far as the claim that “Roswell AAF” knew about MOGUL operations prior to July, 1947, I have this to offer. On June 5, 1947, after chasing, in an Alamogordo weapons carrier, NYU Flight #5 to its landing about 26 miles east of Roswell, my vehicle was low in fuel so I drove to Roswell AAF and requested entry to refuel. I identified myself, displayed the Alamogordo AAF motor trip ticket to no avail; after lengthy telephone conversations between the guard at the gate and headquarters and an interview by the Officer of the Day to whom I showed the recovered equipment [emphasis added] from Flight 5, I was turned away and had to go to a commercial gas station to pay for refueling. Admittedly, I did not use the term Project MOGUL to the Roswell OOD because at that time, the term MOGUL, was not known to any of the NYU balloon crew and was never used by anyone in our hearing at Alamogordo. I did tell the OOD about the NYU balloon operations in Alamogordo. I came away with the impression that the Roswell AAF personnel were so impressed with their own operations and security that they had no interest in what else was occurring in their vicinity.

There are a couple of statements here that should be addressed. First is this idea that Moore, in his weapons carrier, was turned away from the gate at Roswell. On May 20, 1947, according to Albert Crary’s diary, “[Crary and Edmondson] Went over to Roswell Army Air Field, filled up with gas.”

Or, in other words, Crary had been able to refuel his weapons carrier on the Roswell base, apparently with no trouble. This was only a couple of weeks before Moore said that he was turned away after “lengthy telephone conversations between the guard at the gate and headquarters and an interview by the Officer of the Day to whom I showed the recovered equipment from Flight 5, I was turned away and had to go to a commercial gas station to pay for refueling.”

According to the records, Flight #8 was launched on July 3 at 303 MST time which suggests it was launched prior to dawn. Unlike its predecessors, it was not a 600-foot array, but according to the schematic, it was about 400 feet long and there were no rawin radar targets on it. The other point is that “entire flight period was accomplished with C-54 aircraft.”

Typical Mogul array with Rawin
Radar reflectors. None were
attached to Flight #4.

There is no other information about Flight #9 in the official record. However, newspaper accounts suggest the accident injured several people and was a late evening launch on July 3. Karl Pflock, in his book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe wrote, “Six years ago [1995] I thought NYU Flight 9 was the Roswell culprit. This Mogul service flight is missing from the Project 93 reports on the NYU team’s July 1947 operations, and it seemed likely to have been one of the flights lofted with the new polyethylene balloons, which I thought could account for Major Marcel’s mystery material. Information recorded in the field diary of Alamogordo Mogul group chief Albert Crary deflated this idea [pun in Pflock’s book].

All this information, once discovered by various UFO researchers including Don Schmitt and me, removed Flight #9 from the possible culprits for the debris recovered by Mack Brazel. The timing simply does not work out.

Then we learn that Flight #10 was launched on July 5. It was the first to use the large plastic balloons. Data were collected, but again, according to the schematic, there were no rawin radar reflectors on it. That alone, would remove it from the list of culprits. Without the rawin targets, there was no such debris to be collected and transferred to the Fort Worth Army Air Field, as shown in the pictures taken on July 8 in General Ramey’s office.

Balloon debris displayed in General Ramey's office
on July 8, 1947. This material was not that
recovered outside of Roswell.

All this returns us to Flight #4, set to be launched at dawn on June 4, 1947. According to Crary’s diary and field notes:

Jun 4 Wed. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flights again on account of clouds [emphasis added]. Flew regular sono buoy up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on the ground but poor on plane. Out with Thompson pm. Shot charges from 1800 to 2400.

This should eliminate Flight #4. They cancelled the flight at dawn because of clouds. This would have been a full array. Charles Moore had told Karl Pflock that Flight #4 had been configured just as Flight #2, which had been launched months earlier on the east coast. According to the schematic, Flight #2 had several rawin radar targets on it. This was done for tracking purposes on the east coast where there was good radar coverage.

Moore, however, told me that Flight #4 was configured like Flight #5, which contained no rawin targets. Remove the rawin targets from the equation, then Flight #4 is taken out of the running as the culprit. It was now just a bunch of off-the-shelf neoprene weather balloons, just like those used several times a day by numerous weather stations around the country. In fact, in Circleville, Ohio, a farmer, Sherman Campbell found a weather balloon and rawin target on his farm in early July. He was able to identify it for what it was. When he showed it to the local sheriff, he too, knew what it was.

Where does that leave us?

Much of what has been written about this slice of the New York University balloon project. Much of it is documented and much of it is based on the memories of Moore, gathered nearly half a century after the events. Sometimes the two accounts do not match.

Next is the idea that those on the NYU team in Alamogordo didn’t know the name of Project Mogul. Karl Pflock, in an interview conducted by members of New Jersey MUFON on August 27, 1994, said, “This [Mogul] was a top secret, very, very sensitive project that was being run by New York University for the Air Force’s Watson lab.”

Moore carried on this tradition, not only in the paragraph quoted above, but throughout his writings and statements about the project. According to Dave Thomas, “The Mogul project was so classified and compartmentalized that even Moore didn’t know the project’s name until Robert Todd informed him of it a couple of years ago.” In a handwritten note on a copy of the magazine article sent to me by Jim Moseley (of Saucer Smear fame), Thomas added, “Moore told me this when I met him.”

The problem is that this is entirely false. Crary, in his diary, mentions the name, Mogul, more than once. On December 11, 1946, Crary wrote, “Equipment from Johns Hopkins Unicersity [sic] transferred to MOGUL plane.”

On December 12, 1946, he wrote, “C-54 unloaded warhead material first then all MOGUL eqpt with went to North Hangar.”

On April 7, 1947, Crary, according to his diary, “Talked to [Major W. D.] Pritchard re 3^rd car for tomorrow. Gave him memo of progress report for MOGUL project to date...”

In the letter, dated May 12, 1949, Robert B. McLaughlin was describing, for Dr. James A. Van Allen, who C. B. Moore was. He then wrote “In addition to this, he had been head of Project Mogul for the Air Force.” That might be something of an over statement but shows that there were many in on the great Mogul secret at the time. Again, I point out that the ultimate purpose was highly classified, but the name, Mogul, was known to those in Alamogordo in 1947.

The documentation then, shows that the name was known as early as 1946, and was used by the NYU scientists and engineers in that time frame with little concern about security. Although no longer as important, the name was even used to introduce Moore to Van Allen. Moore did know the name while in New Mexico with the project and that the claimed classification was not about the activities in New Mexico or the balloon flights, but the ultimate purpose which was to spy on the Soviets. That is single point is the fact that Moore might not have known. This might seem like spitting hairs, but the truth is, the activities in New Mexico weren’t classified. They were even published in newspapers around the country on July 10 including pictures.

The Alamogordo News front page story exposing the "Mogul"
balloon launches in New Mexico.

Third, Moore himself said that he showed part of the recovered Mogul array to the Officer of the Day at Roswell, who should have noted the confrontation in his log. It would have been part of the debriefing and should have come to the attention of the Provost Marshal and the Operations Officer. In other words, Moore was confirming that some of the officers at Roswell had seen one of the balloon arrays, this from Flight No. 5. When Brazel arrived with bits of the debris a few days later, they would have recognized it.

Fourth, there is another fact that shows there was nothing unusual about these arrays, or rather nothing that would conceal their nature from those not involved in the project. Crary’s diary for Sunday, June 8, said, “Rancher, Sid West, found balloon train south of High Rolls in mountains. Contacted him and made arrangements to recover equipment Monday. Got all recordings of balloon flights…”

Finally, it should be noted, again and probably should be unlined in bold typeface, that there was no Flight #4. Crary’s diary is not confusing on the issue as Moore would claim. It stated quite clearly that the flight had been cancelled because of clouds, as required by the CAA and their instructions to Crary and his team. The second entry said they flew a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy but said nothing about radar targets or other equipment or that this was the cancelled Flight #4. Moore told me when the flights were cancelled, they stripped the equipment, but let the balloons go because there was no way to get the helium back into the bottles. Sometimes they used them for service flights, but those sorts of flights would not have required a rawin radar target.

There is another point here that demands comment. Flight #4 was to be launched at dawn but was cancelled them. Moore, however, wrote that the flight had been launched earlier than that. How could the flight be cancelled after it had been launched. Moore based this statement on a weather front that moved through the area about dawn, which changed the wind directions. For his calculations to put the balloon close to the Brazel (Foster) ranch, it had to be launched before dawn.

More evidence can be found in a Moore letter dated August 10, 1995. He wrote about the mythical Flight #4 and its cancelation:

The jury-rigged flight #4 of meteorological balloons that we launched as AMC contractors from Alamogordo Army Air field on July [sic] 4, 1947 was no big deal; it was a test flight, the first in a series and there was no announcement of our plans, either on base or to the Army Air Forces authorities. Since we launched from just within the restricted air space associated with the White Sands Proving ground and expected the balloons to rise high above the civil air space, we did not notify the CAA in El Paso. As I remember, we launched before sunrise with only our Watson Laboratories associates and the B-17 crew knowing about the ascent. This flight was not successful due to the failure of the Watson lab radar to track the balloons and the poor transmission of the acoustic data caused by use of out-dated [sic] World War II batteries. The only mention of these flights in 1947 came in the unclassified progress report for June.

There is a very telling point of contradiction in the above statement by Moore. He was saying that it was a jury-rigged flight of meteorological balloons. Later, as he began to really push the idea that Flight #4 was the culprit in the Roswell crash, he said that the flight was as successful as Flight #5 without explaining why Flight #4 was not listed and no data were recorded. That suggests it wasn’t a jury-rigged contraption that was apparently launched before the flight had been cancelled. This is one of many evolutions in Moore’s story as he began to claim that he was the man who launched the Roswell UFO crash. Unfortunately for him, he produced too many written statements and later granted too many interviews. He just couldn’t keep the story straight.

The problem that concerned the CAA about the flights wasn’t the balloons ascent but their descent, as he noted. They expected that the array would rise quickly and reach stability, or relative stability, at a constant level, in a short period. Once the balloons began to fail and the array began its fall back to the ground, it would be expected to drift for a time in the civil airspace, and this was a real hazard to aerial navigation. This was the point at which the danger existed, and it was why the CAA required the NOTAMs.

Moore was being disingenuous here. He is attempting to explain the lack of a NOTAM, if records for June 4, 1947, could be found. He knew that no NOTAM had been filed because of the nature of this alleged jury-rigged flight. It was not expected to leave the restricted area of the range. And he knew that the NOTAMs were only necessary for the constant level balloon flights, not the test flights that would fall back quickly.

The second point is that there is nothing to suggest that radar was a factor in this flight and nothing to suggest that radar reflectors were included on the cluster. The evidence, partially provided by Moore when he told me the configuration matched Flight #5, showed no rawin radar targets attached to the array. There was a cluster of balloons launched later in the day and was used to lift a sonobuoy to test its capability of detecting the explosions.

In fact, there is no evidence that rawin radar reflectors were used in those first flights in New Mexico. According to Crary’s diary on June 9, “Bill Godbee and Don Reynolds went out to Sid West’s ranch south of High rolls and brought back recovered balloons – clock, 2 radiosondes, sonobuoy and microphone and lower part of dribbler.” He mentioned nothing about the radar reflectors. If they are recovering damaged balloons, they surely would have recovered the remains of the radar reflectors.

Moore supplied an illustration for Flight #5, dated June 5, 1947. There are no radar reflectors on this flight. Given that the balloons sent aloft on June 4 were referred to as a cluster carrying a sonobuoy, there is no reason to believe there were rawins on jury-rigged Flight #4. In other words, Flight #4 would have been configured just as was Flight #5, which contained no radar targets, and if there were no radar targets, then one aspect of the Mogul theory for the Roswell debris has been eliminated. There is no mention of radar tracking until Flight No. 8, launched on July 3. An illustration for Flight No. 2, which provided no data, did contain radar reflectors, but again, there is no evidence they were used until later. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but this aspect rules out Mogul and tells us that the material photographed in General Ramey’s office on July 8 was not recovered near Roswell.

As with the cluster of balloons on June 4, there was no mention of any radar targets with the recovery at Sid West’s ranch. There is almost no mention of radar for the tracking of the balloons, though Moore suggests that the Flight #4 proved that the radar wouldn’t work so they changed the array. This does not seem to be accurate, based on the records that available. The only suggestion of radar in these first flights was based on Moore’s memory of the targets being included but not from the documentation available now or to the records of the recovered flights.

Moore himself provides some answers to the questions. In the final report on NYU’s balloon activities there is a tabulation of all the flights. Both Flight #4 and Flight #9 are missing. This tabulation also notes about Flight No. 5, “First successful flight carrying a heavy load.” This is just another indication that there was no Flight #4.

That would seem to suggest that the cluster of balloons was not a full Mogul array. Moore, however, with no documentation to support the conclusion, wrote, “I think that Flight #4 used our best equipment and probably performed about as well as or better than Flight No. 5.”

The logical question to be asked is if Flight No. 4 performed as well as or better than Flight No. 5, then why was it not listed in the tabulation. It would have been the first successful flight, unless, of course, it wasn’t a full Mogul array.

Given the time it took to build the full array and prepare it for launch, it would not have been possible to build a new array for Flight #5. Crary’s diary is clear on the point. Flight #4 was delayed by weather. Flight #5 was, in fact, Flight #4, redesignated and launched on June 5. That flight was recovered, as Moore noted.

Finally, if the June 4 flight was just a cluster of balloons launched only with a sonobuoy, then it would not have been a constant level balloon and speculation about its flight path is just that… speculation. If it didn’t reach the altitude that Moore claimed, then its flight dynamics would have been different. It would be impossible to provide any flight path for it simply because the data don’t exist.

Winds aloft data, as measured in 1947, only reached from the surface to 20,000 feet. Anything above that was not measured and certainly not recorded except for a weather station in Orogrande, New Mexico. They measurements reached 50,000 feet. In addition, the reporting of the winds aloft data was erratic. Some stations missed many reports over the few days in early June. These data are incomplete.

Moore himself indicated that if he had changed one number in his assumptions, the balloons could have landed as much as 150 miles away. On page 93 of his book, he wrote, “If the balloons had not entered the stratosphere but had continued in the upper troposphere, they would have passed 17 miles south of the actual landing site and would have landed more than 150 miles to the east at the end of the [assumed] 343 minute flight.”

But, of course, there were no data for this flight, so the height, distance and performance were all speculation built around Moore’s memory of the event. That memory is in direct conflict with the written record about the flight, a flight designed for one thing and that was to test the sonobuoy.

The evidence proves that Flight #4 was cancelled. The evidence suggests that a cluster of balloons lifted a sonobuoy up for testing but was not a full Mogul array. Moore himself referred to this as “jury-rigged” which in and of itself tells us it was something thrown together for a specific limited test of short duration. There are no indications that it left the restricted areas around Alamogordo, no evidence that it carried the materials necessary to create the debris field, no evidence that it was what Mack Brazel found, and no evidence that Mogul was so secret that very few knew the name. As Moore said, repeatedly, there was no project Mogul in New Mexico. There was only the New York University Balloon Project.