Roswell and the Dog that Didn't Bark

Here’s an interesting revelation. I was watching the recent Unsolved Mysteries report on the Roswell case and Colonel Richard Weaver said something that caught my attention. He was talking about having reviewed a million documents and files and miles of microfilm during his review of the Roswell case. The implication is that they, meaning he and his team, had made a Herculean effort to find evidence and failed do it. His conclusion, based on his investigation, was the correct conclusion but it wasn’t accurate.

Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I had done the same thing, and I could name a couple of dozen others who had followed leads, researched specific aspects of the Roswell case and in the end, there was limited documentation mainly in the form of newspaper stories and the testimony of hundreds of people who had first or second-hand observations. In other words, the documentation was limited, the testimonies were called anecdotal, and we all had searched for documentation and other testimony for nearly forty years for it.

And then I had a thought. I had made a comprehensive search for mention of Roswell and documents relating to it in what could be considered the microcosm of Weaver’s world and search, of Project Blue Book. Although it had officially begun as Project Sign in January 1948, its records begin earlier, even with sightings that pre-dated the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. In fact, the earliest dated case in the Blue Book files is from June 2. When you look at the record of sightings for July 1947, they cover a single-spaced page. The military was investigating what was happening during the summer that preceded the creation of the official investigation in 1948.

When the Army announced, on July 8, 1947, that they had found a flying saucer, it was international news. I will say that nearly every newspaper in the United States covered the story in some form, beginning with the early announcement on the afternoon of July 8 and ending the next day when Brigadier General Roger Ramey announced it was just a weather balloon. Pictures of Ramey, his chief of staff, Colonel Thomas Dubose, and Major Jesse Marcel, holding pieces of the weather balloon, were printed in the newspapers the next day.

BG Roger Ramey and COL Thomas Dubose with
the balloon wreckage that served as a
cover for the real wreckage.

There are stories of crashed UFOs in the Blue Book files in July 1947. The solutions, all legitimate, ranged from advertising gimmicks to small saucers created to fool friends. A report, from Shreveport, Louisiana, even came to the attention of then FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. That caused us a great deal of aggravation as we tried to reconcile a note written on an FBI document by Hoover with that report. It had nothing to do with the Roswell case. The file for that case, dated July 7, 1947, is quite thick. And no, I believe the military was correct in labeling it a hoax.

The point here is that by July 8, the military was gathering sighting reports and there are 47 cases for the month in what are now the Blue Book files. There are alleged crashes, files that are labeled as “Folders,” because of the thickness of the file, and many in which there is a notation for a report but labeled as “case missing.”

What I noticed is several crash reports, comprehensive investigations, and an apparent real effort to determine what was going on. All this happening with the “high profile” cases that were extensively investigated and not a single file dedicated to the Roswell case. Here was the story that probably generated some of the highest interest around the world and there is no file on it. The only reference I can find in the Blue Book files is the third paragraph of a four-paragraph story that mentions, in passing, that the officers at Roswell had received a “blistering rebuke” for their claim they had a flying disk.

Colonel Weaver had access to a great deal more official information than any of the civilian researchers and said that he found nothing. I say, I looked through the Blue Book files, which I’m sure were reviewed by Weaver’s team, and they found nothing there either. It made me wonder why a great deal of effort was expended investigating many reports from July 1947, but there is no reference to what could be called the most important story from July 1947. A single mention in a newspaper clipping buried in another Blue Book file but nothing that referenced Roswell specifically.

Doesn’t my search, of the Blue Book files, mirror the research done in the 1990s by the Air Force? There should have been a rather thick file on the Roswell case that included not only newspaper clippings, but the pictures of three of the principals in that case. True, the balloon explanation was floated (pun intended) within about three hours of the initial story, but it was a story of international interest. Walter Haut, the Public Information Officer in Roswell at the time, told me that he received telephone calls from around the world.

Walter Haut being interviewed.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

But there is nothing in the files except that one paragraph in a newspaper clipping. I did ask Haut about that blistering rebuke and he told me that it never happened. His words were something to the effect that if he’d been called by the Pentagon and chewed out, he would remember it.

Again, my point is that a search of the Blue Book files, which were dedicated to gathering UFO information, has nothing about Roswell. It was a case filled with military officers which means it was originally reported officially, but there is no file. Why the emphasis on other reports of crashes and other generic sightings but nothing on what was the biggest UFO story for two days in July? Sure, had it been included in Blue Book, it would have been labeled as a balloon, but that isn’t there. Nothing…

Just as Colonel Weaver found with his inside sources, high-level security clearance and his orders that came, virtually, from the Secretary of the Air Force, no documents relating to Roswell, I found nothing in the declassified Blue Book files. It should have been there, but it was not.

One final comment about all this. For those who would argue that the secrecy was to protect Project Mogul, I point to the newspapers, especially the Alamogordo News, on July 10. There was a long article about the balloon project being carried out at the Alamogordo Army Air Field. Pictures showed a Mogul array (and no, they didn’t call it a Mogul array in the article), explained what they were doing and what it all meant. Charles Moore, one of those working on the project told me that he had bought the ladder that was featured in one of the pictures.

Alamogordo News with pictures of a Constant Level Balloon launch, which
is a Project Mogul balloon launch published on July 10, 1947.

This means, of course, that what was happening in Alamogordo was not highly classified. The balloon launches were conducted by the civilians from the University of New York attempting to create what they called a Constant Level Balloon, meaning it would remain at a certain altitude. Although offered as the solution in 1947, it did not explain what had been found. I have already, many times, explained this about the Mogul solution, the one that the Air Force used to solve the mystery of what fell decades after the fact.

I found Colonel Weaver’s comment on the Unsolved Mysteries show quite telling. There should have been specific documentation that lead to the constant level balloons but not back to Project Mogul. The search would have ended with the balloons from Alamogordo. By the mid-1990s, Mogul was no longer a secret, and several UFO researchers were aware of it. We all had been talking about it for years before the Air Force came up with it as the solution for the Roswell case.

Weaver’s comment, about finding nothing is quite telling. The significant fact, as Sherlock Holmes said in the murder case he was investigating, was that the dog didn’t bark. The significance fact here is as Weaver said he found nothing about the Roswell case in all those files both classified and unclassified. This lack of results screams the problem, because there should have been something given the impact of the original news release and widespread interest in the tale. You might say that this is another example of the dog not barking. *

 

*I thought a note of explanation might be necessary for those who haven’t read the Holmes story. There was a murder committed, and Holmes was investigating. All thought it might be a stranger, but Holmes said that the watch dog didn’t bark. It meant that the murder was someone the dog knew, so it didn’t bark.

Lieutenant Colonel Joe C. Briley and Project Mogul, Again

 

I get so tired of having to repeat the same thing over and over. Those writing on various UFO related subjects just don’t bother to find the latest and best information available. They find what they want and go no further. Just the other day, in a 2021 publication, I read about Mac Brazel. It has been two decades or more since Tom Carey and Don Schmitt discovered that Mac Brazel was actually Mack Brazel. Trivial? Sure, but it’s not all that difficult to find the proper and current information.

As I was doing some research on Lieutenant Colonel Joe Briley, who, in 1947, was the Operations Officer for the 509^th Bomb Group, when I found a relatively new posting about him and the Roswell UFO crash. As I read the information, I saw that someone, in this case Patrick Gross, had reviewed the case and formed a number of conclusions based on his research.

At the bottom of the rather and complex posting, Gross wrote, “Joe Briley was probably a Lieutenant, not a Lieutenant Colonel, at the time of the incident, and was probably a Lieutenant Colonel when he retired from the Air Force.”

I don’t know why he would have thought this. If he had bothered to search out a page from the 1947 Yearbook that Walter Haut prepared in the summer of 1947, and which was published in November of that year, he would have seen a page devoted to “Staff Officers,” with a picture of Lieutenant Colonel Joe C. Briley listed as the Operations Officer. Copies of that picture are available on the Internet and can be found with little effort. And, of course, it proves that Briley, in 1947, was a Lieutenant Colonel.

The "Staff Officers" page from the 1947 Yearbook, as it appears
on the Internet.

From there we move to Project Mogul. There are some other speculations by Gross about the Mogul team visiting the Roswell Army Air Field. I’m going to ignore most of them because I covered this in depth in Roswell in the 21^st Century (which he apparently read). I will note, however, that those on the Mogul team, including Dr. Albert Crary, visited the base in June and July, 1947, as they recovered, or attempted to recover, the remains of their Mogul flights. On one occasion they stopped there to refuel the weapons carrier they were driving because it was issued to them by the military in Alamogordo. That simply means they could draw fuel from another base as needed. According to Crary, they had no trouble entering the base and drawing the fuel, not to mention that the remains of a Mogul flight were in the back of the weapons carrier, in plain view.

There is something else that should be pointed out. It is something that the supporters of the Mogul theory overlook, and that is that Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, never flew. Crary’s diary, field notes and the typed transcript of those notes, all show that the flight had been cancelled due to clouds. By agreement, or CAA (FAA) regulation, they were not allowed to launch the arrays at night or in cloudy weather because the arrays were a hazard to aerial navigation. Charles Moore, who was on the Mogul team in 1947, reported that Flight No. 4 was actually launched at 2:30 or 3:00 a.m., in violation of those rules. And, if we believe Crary’s diary, it was then cancelled because of clouds after it was launched. At least that it what Moore would have us believe.

The real problem with Mogul is the misleading claim used by the Air Force and the skeptics. They say these launches were somehow so secret that those in New Mexico, meaning the men of the 509^th, wouldn’t have known about them. The problem here is that those same regulations that prohibited flights in the clouds and at night also required that NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) be filed announcing the launches because of that threat to aerial navigation. Even if you wish to claim that those at Roswell wouldn’t have known about the flights from the Mogul team, they would have learned about them from the NOTAMs, which were provided to all civilian and military airfields.

Even worse for these arguments is that what was happening in New Mexico wasn’t highly classified. It wasn’t even classified at all. True, the ultimate purpose of Mogul was classified but the balloon flights in New Mexico were not. The equipment being used was off the shelf, meaning, of course, that the neoprene balloons and the rawin radar targets were nothing special, had not been created for Mogul, but had been adapted from other purposes like weather observations. In other words, weather stations around the country routinely launched these neoprene balloons and rawin radar targets in their observations of winds aloft conditions. The material was easily recognized by all sorts of people including farmers and ranchers who often found them in their fields.

In fact, the Mogul operation in New Mexico, was used in 1947 to cover the recovery of the material found by Mack Brazel. On July 10, 1947, in a number of newspapers, were pictures of the Mogul array, on the ground, and a description of the operation. In one of the photographs is a ladder, which I mention only because Charles Moore told me that he had bought the ladder with petty cash in Alamogordo.

Front page of the Alamogordo News for July 10, 1947. The pictures are of
the Mogul team and their project. The ladder in the center pictures is
the one that Charles Moore bought in Alamogordo.

Finally, there is a criticism that the whole transcripts of the interviews with Briley hadn’t been published. In a point that is labeled, “What he allegedly said,” there were quotes, but not the whole thing, suggesting that the quotes were cherry-picked to provide evidence for a specific point of view. While it is true that I haven’t published the transcripts, there is nothing in them that hasn’t been accurately related and by reading the whole transcripts, the conclusions don’t change. But the truth is that there is no allegedly said about it. This is what he said in the context of my interviews with him.

These are just a few of the problems with that analysis of what Joe Briley said. We move from deciding that he hadn’t been a Lieutenant Colonel in 1947, with no reason to suspect that and evidence to the contrary to the assumption that the quotes attributed to him haven’t been fully revealed. There is no reason to assume that they haven’t been honestly reported, other than a desire to reduce the importance of what he said. Had there been some evidence to show that the information has been manipulated, that would be one thing. But to assume that because Gross hadn’t seen the whole transcripts or notes from the interviews that there is missing information is another. The quotes that I have attributed to him are accurate and in context and I know because I conducted the interviews. Everything else suggested by Gross is speculation without evidence.