David Rudiak's Analysis Against Mogul

 

As anyone who visits here regularly knows, I am not a fan for the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell UFO crash. I have laid out the evidence on several occasions and there is a long appendix in Roswell in the 21^st Century that covers all this in depth.

The reasons begin with the documentation that suggests the culprit in all this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. Yes, I know that it should be designated as the New York University Balloon Project Flight No 4, but that’s rather unwieldy. To counter this, Charles Moore said that the flight was launched a couple hours before dawn, yet the documentation proves it was cancelled at dawn. How do you cancel a flight that has already been launched? … But I digress.

Just recently on this blog, I noted that Charles Moore had said that Flight No. 4 had been configured like Flight No. 5. I hadn’t thought of it then, but in the Air Force report on Roswell, they provided schematics of all the flights that had been flown, including No. 5. There were no rawin radar targets on Flight No. 5, and if Flight No. 4 was configured the same way, you have to wonder where the rawin target that was photographed in General Ramey’s office originated.

I mention all this because David Rudiak provided a rather lengthy comment about it to that blog posting. I thought the analysis was interesting enough to be worthy of its own position on the blog. Following, without my commentary, is David’s analysis in four parts:

Besides Cavitt, another of these old Cold Warrior guys who couldn’t tell a consistent story was B.D. “Duke” Gildenberg, who from 1951-1981 headed balloon operations at Alamogordo base (where the NM Moguls were launched), but also worked on Project Mogul back at NYU in 1947. A large history of the early balloon projects at Alamogordo was written by the base historian, Dr. David Bushnell, and published in Dec. 1958. It is mentioned that Gildenberg was interviewed twice in 1957. In fact, one of the chapters was written by him:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA323170.pdf

THE BEGINNINGS OF RESEARCH IN SPACE BIOLOGY and Biodynamics AT THE AIR FORCE MISSILE DEVELOPMENT CENTER Holloman AFB, NM.

The first chapter covers the period 1946-1952. On page 5, it says the following: “Holloman's first polyethylene research balloon was launched 3 July 1947 by a New York University research team …..” (Footnote 18)

This was Mogul Flight #7. Now check out the Footnote:

(Footnote 18, p. 9). “The FIRST research balloon flight of ANY SORT at Holloman had been slightly earlier, 5 June 1947; this involved a cluster of rubber-type balloons (interview, Mr. Gildenberg by Dr. Bushnell, 18 September 1957).”

This was the real Mogul Flight #5. Notice that this is based on information provided by Gildenberg apparently saying this was the FIRST such balloon, i.e. is the first Mogul launched from Alamogordo. Further notice there is no mention of “another” “first” such balloon flight from 4 June 1947, i.e. the modern-day Mogul Flight #4, invented out of thin air by Mogul engineer Charles Moore and Air Force counterintelligence (AFOSI) in 1994 to debunk Roswell.

But back in 1957, in an official history, the guy who headed the balloon projects there said the first flight was June 5 (Flight #5), which aligns exactly with the official Mogul records (taken from Moore’s files by AFOSI). There is ZERO documentation for another research flight on June 4 like the real, documented Flight #5. In fact, the table of Mogul flights has a big blank for Mogul Flights #2, #3, and #4, which we know from other Mogul documentation were all canceled because of adverse weather conditions.

Now fast forward 50+ years, and what was Gildenberg saying now? He appears in the 1997 AFOSI Roswell crash dummies report saying that Roswell could be completely explained by conventional projects in the area, including 1950s crash dummies, and complaining that he and Charles Moore were being disrespected by Roswell UFO promoters for saying so. Then he began writing Roswell debunking articles for the Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazine. The SI articles are behind a paywall, but you can download the Skeptic magazine article:

https://www.skeptic.com/magazine/archives/10.1/pdf/A-Roswell-Requiem-SKEPTIC-10-1-2003.pdf

In one table that is supposed to “explain” both Roswell and all the flying saucer reports, he writes:

“June-July—UFO reports generated by Mogul balloons from Alamogordo AAF, NM, and balloon clusters out of Colorado.

June 4—Prof. Charles Moore launches Mogul Flight #4.

June 14—Rancher Mack Brazel finds paper, rubber, and foil debris.

June 24—Kenneth Arnold sights unknown objects over Oregon and Washington state described as saucers skipping across water.

—Press coins term “flying saucer” (or “flying disk”).

—Incident touches off the world’s first and most intense flying saucer craze”

Thus, the new “facts” according to Gildenberg is that there WAS a Mogul Flight #4, which would have made it the first such research balloon of “any sort”, not the documented Flight #5. He also suggests most flying saucer reports were caused by Mogul balloon clusters and from another alleged NYU Navy balloon project in Colorado. This would apparently include Kenneth Arnold’s sighting June 24 a 1000 miles from Colorado. (Good luck making that work.)

So why isn’t Flight #4 listed in Mogul records as the “first” Mogul? Well, sayeth revisionist Gildenberg (who seems to have totally forgotten his original 1957 story that it was Flight #5):

“Several of the early Alamogordo flights were preliminary tests, did not carry classified hardware, and were never recovered by Mogul personnel. One such flight, launched in early June, came down on a Roswell area sheep ranch, and created one of the most enduring mysteries of the century. Review of project records has identified that flight, with a very high degree of certainty, as Mogul Flight #4, launched on June 4th. (Ref 3)”

And what was Ref. 3 that identified Mogul Flight #4 “with a very high degree of certainty”? Why, no surprise, that was the AFOSI 1994-95 Roswell Report utilizing Moore as primary witness. This “very high degree of certainty” was based on Moore’s unquestionable 50-year- old memories and a total of one sentence from the diary of Mogul scientist Albert Crary who first wrote they canceled the planned Mogul launch on June 4 because of cloud cover. (Required by CAA regulations governing their work.) Then Crary wrote they sent up a Naval sonobuoy in a balloon cluster to test reception in the air and on the ground. But sonobuoys were utilized on all the early Moguls and were the only possible piece of classified equipment since they might hint at the actual classified purpose of Mogul, which was listening for distant Soviet nuclear tests. (The sonobuoys were identified only as the “payload” on all the engineering schematics suggesting their use might be considered sensitive.)

This was what Moore called a test flight or “service flight”,
which they used to test certain pieces of equipment. They were small
flights, lacked constant altitude control, and would have been
rigged to NOT fly off the White Sands Range into civilian air space,
which would have required them to issue NOTAMs (also required
by the (CAA) of a possible air hazard. Thus there was also no need for tracking gear, such as radar targets to see if the balloons flew
off-range.

The REAL reason these weren’t listed is because they weren’t
constant-altitude flights (the major defining characteristic of a
Mogul flight), not whether they carried classified equipment
or not.

This also means the balloon flights were small, requiring only
enough weather balloons to loft the test payload, not a 600 ft
string of balloons. Lacking constant-altitude control, it would be like a normal weather balloon, rapidly rising to high altitudes
where the balloons would start to pop and everything would rapidly
descend, keeping the balloons on the White Sands Range. They
couldn’t get to the Foster Ranch debris field site, which would
require a real, constant-altitude flight (i.e., a recorded Mogul
flight) to stay up in the air long enough, and couldn’t create a
large debris field, which would again at least require one of
those really long, fully configured Mogul balloon trains, not a small test flight.

And it would require the right winds. Moore did a 1997 mathematical model (published in the Smithsonian Roswell debunking book, “UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth”) to try to “prove” that a Mogul flight on June 4 could make it all the way to the Foster Ranch, but when Brad Sparks and I went over the model 20+ years ago we discovered that he employed numerous cheats with his numbers. In other words, it was a hoax.

I suspect Gildenberg probably knew all this. Among his many
specialties, he was a meteorologist. His bios describe him as
being an expect in predicting where their balloons would fly and where they would come down. He also said in this article: “Analyzing
newly available weather data, and following the lead of Professor
Moore have also linked a later Mogul flight (launched on July 7th) to the legend.”

This was Mogul Flight #11, which crashed about 3 pm on July 7
about 16 miles west of Roswell base, followed 100% of the time by plane and 97% by radiosonde. It was a plastic balloon flight with no
indication (like most of these early Moguls) of radar tracking
(including the published schematic showing no attached radar
reflectors), so it can’t possibly explain the singular radar
reflector or the rubber weather balloon displayed in Ramey’s
office or what Mack Brazel described when taken under military escort for a press interview later that night. At the time #11 crashed, Brazel had already reported the debris field and Marcel and Cavitt had followed him back and were examining it. Although Flight #11
crashed relatively close to Roswell, it was at least 50 miles from the
Foster Ranch crash site, and no indication whether it was
recovered or not, either by Mogul or Roswell base. Certainly not by
Marcel or Cavitt. Likely, since Mogul knew exactly where it came down, if it was recovered it would have been by the Mogul people.

So how exactly did Gildenberg “link” it to the Roswell “legend”? Just more hot air from him.

Gildenberg also briefly discusses the FBI Roswell telegram from the Dallas office sent to FBI director Hoover the evening of July 8, which says one of Ramey’s people (Kirton, an intelligence or CI officer) said it resembled a “hexagonal” radar target suspended from a weather balloon (all described in singular). Gildenberg then says, “The gear KNOWN to have been on this particular flight was described almost exactly in a famous telegram to J. Edgar Hoover, which is quoted without comment in most pro-alien Roswell literature. (Ref 4) Reference 4 is Kevin and Don Schmitt’s book “The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell.” Well, since Flight #11 was made up of PLASTIC balloons, not rubber, and zero evidence of radar tracking or radar targets, how does Gildenberg deduce that it “almost exactly” matches what Ramey displayed and what the FBI telegram describes? And since all that was reported/shown by Ramey and his intel spokesperson Kirton was a SINGULAR weather balloon and radar target, what happened to the rest of that 600-foot Flight #4 that Gildenberg claims explains the Roswell “legend”?

Just more non-factual BS from Gildenberg. The key point, however, is that Gildenberg drastically changed his story from his original one in the 1950s in an official AF history (the first Mogul flight was #5 on June 5, 1947) once AFOSI and Moore invented the nonexistent Flight #4 in 1994. His attempt to explain why “Flight #4” isn’t listed as the first (allegedly because it lacked classified equipment) is also directly at odds with the facts. There was no Flight #4. The actual documentation shows it was canceled and instead a small test flight of a sonobuoy was sent up instead. It couldn’t have reached the Foster Ranch (Moore had to flagrantly cheat to get it there, in part by creating an actual Mogul constant-altitude flight, which would certainly have been recorded had it existed) and couldn’t explain the large field of debris described or types of debris, which both Moore and AFOSI claimed required a fully configured Mogul balloon (which, again, would have been recorded in Project records).

This dovetails nicely with what I just published. Moore told me about the configuration of Flight No. 4 by telling me that it was configured like Flight No. 5, which contained no rawin targets. David notes that Gildenberg said, in 1957, that Flight No. 5 was the first Mogul flight. Refer to the bold-face, italic noted at the beginning of David’s information.

The schematic of Flight No. 5 published by the Air Force
in their report on the Roswell UFO crash.

This makes me wonder why, if there are true skeptics, they never question that material that is at odds with their favorite theories. Shouldn’t they look at the documentation and the earlier statements of the witnesses and realize there is a real problem with the Mogul flight solution.

I have said, repeatedly, that there was nothing classified with the balloon project in New Mexico. The equipment was off the shelf, information about those flights was published on July 10 that included pictures of the balloons, and contrary to what was being said, those in New Mexico did know the Mogul name. Dr. Crary’s diary contains several references to Mogul. What this means is that Mogul is not the solution and this is the solution offered by the Air Force in the mid-1990s.

Skeptics believe they have the answer to the Roswell UFO crash. I suggest they apply that same skepticism to the Mogul explanation rather than create alibies for its failure. A look at the evidence, a dispassionate look at the evidence, removes it from contention. We are left with no terrestrial explanation for the Roswell debris…

However, that doesn’t take us directly to the extraterrestrial. The circumstantial evidence suggests an off-world source, but it doesn’t prove the case. I just wish the skeptics, the news media and those science writers would be as honest in their assessment about Roswell. They have no solution.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Greg Lawson and His Roswell Book

Greg Lawson was the guest today. He is a former police officer, former soldier, former airman and former sailor. He has been studying the paranormal for decades, and

Greg Lawson

has a special interest in the Roswell UFO case. His book, Roswell: The After Action Report is different from the other books in that he attacks the question as a police investigator rather than as a UFO researcher. It means that he comes at the case from, well, a different perspective. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/47299923

He did surprise me by suggesting that Thomas DuBose, the Chief of Staff for the 8^th Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth in 1947 was a major witness, and maybe the most important of the witnesses. He thought that because DuBose was on both ends of the coverup, whatever the cause of the coverup was, he would have a special insight. Others who fit into that category such as General Ramey and Colonel Blanchard had died prior to the renewed interest in the case. DuBose left some video evidence about what he had seen and done.

We also talked about Jesse Marcel, Sr. and his involvement in the case. I’d just gone through the interview with Bob Pratt done in 1979. You can see Pratt’s notes and transcript of that interview here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/jesse-marcel-sr-bob-pratt-and-interview.html

The pages of the interview are at the end of the posting. You can see Marcel’s words, and the way the notes were taken. That provides some insight into this aspect of the case.

Having gone through that interview again, I was a little disturbed by some of the claims Marcel had made about his military service and his educational background. These have been reported on in the past, including Marcel’s claim about shooting down five enemy aircraft. No record of his claim exists, and as I learned, records of this sort of activity do exist. The Air Force (okay, the Army Air Forces) kept track of that during the war. One sergeant flying as a gunner in a bomber is recorded as having shot down 17 enemy planes. The list begins with those having downed a single enemy craft but Marcel’s name does not appear on the list anywhere.

That and other embellishments would be devastating to the Roswell case if there were not other witnesses to the crash. That means, simply, that if Marcel was stand alone, his testimony about the crash could be dismissed, but there are, literally, dozens of other witnesses to some aspects of the case. That includes the majority of Blanchard’s primary staff, to other officers and enlisted soldiers who participated in some aspect of the recovery and civilians who found debris or witnessed some other aspects of the case. In other words, Marcel’s tale of the UFO crash and the look of the debris is corroborated independently by others.

We eventually got around to Mogul and the Air Force offer of the balloon arrays as the culprit in the recovery. Here, I probably should mention, again, that everyone agrees that something fell near Roswell. It’s the identify that is in question. I’m not going to report the list of reasons that Mogul doesn’t work here again. Those interested can pick up a copy of Roswell in the 21^st Century for a detailed analysis, or just type Mogul into the search engine on this blog and you’ll have more than enough information.

There were many other things that I wanted to explore, but we just ran out of time. The conversation was interesting, at least for me and that’s what counts (well, it’s really the audience interest that counts. My interest is a gauge of that). I’ll have Greg back on the program in the future so that we can hit some of the other points.

Next up is the long-promised interview with Stan Gordon. We’ll get his take on the Kecksburg UFO crash. And the following week, I’ll talk with Dr. Peter Strassburg about his book, When Einstein Went to Roswell. 

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.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Rob Brun Del Re and UFOs: Proof Positive

 

This week I spoke with Rob Brun Del Re about his book, UFOs: Proof Positive. But before we got to that, we talked about other things. One of the first things that came up was MJ-12 and the Wilbur Smith “Top Secret” report to the Canadian Department of Transportation. In it, Smith had suggested that UFOs were alien craft and he had received this information from Robert Sarbacher. You can listen to the program here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/44916522

I did point out that Sarbacher had seen nothing himself, but had gotten his information from some other, unidentified sources. This made Smith’s data third hand at best, and might be even farther removed from any source of reliable source. This did lead us into a discussion of MJ-12, which rarely goes anywhere. Proving that I’m not very good at promoting my own work, I failed to mention Case MJ-12, a book that I had written examining the story of MJ-12 and that was heavily updated just a couple of years ago. In Del Re’s bibliography he listed four books about MJ-12 but not mine, which does not contain a ringing endorsement of the whole MJ-12 theory.

Rob Brun Del Re

One of the things that did come up, or rather that I brought up, was the information supplied by Brigadier General Arthur Exon and his discussion of what he called “The Unholy Thirteen.” This was not an official name, or nickname, just Exon’s way of describing the group. The membership of it is at odds with MJ-12 and since we can point to Exon as the source, and the MJ-12 documents have no provenance, Exon’s information is more important.

We did discuss the idea that the book, UFO’s: Proof Positive, provided logical arguments about UFOs but no real evidence, it seemed to me that the title was misleading. Rob’s answer was that he was more interested in providing arguments explaining how the skeptics and non-believers were wrong in their thoughts. For example, he argued that because we can’t travel interstellar distances, it doesn’t mean that another race having evolved on another planet hasn’t figured out a way to do it. While I concede that argument, it needs to be said that we don’t have a way of defeating those distances.

We did discuss some UFO sightings. Roswell, of course, entered the conversation, as did the Phoenix Lights and Shag Harbour. I don’t need to provide a list of my writings on Roswell. I think they’re well know and culminate in Roswell in the 21^st Century. I have discussed the Phoenix Lights on past programs including a long discussion with Mike Rogers about his observations.

Next week, I’ll be speaking with Don Ecker who has a long history in the UFO field and has some very interesting insights into what has happened in the past and what is going on today.

Coast to Coast: Mogul and Updates

 

Here’s something that annoys me a great deal. I was reading a list of Conspiracies that people still believe and I think you know where this is going. There list contained things you’d expect – Moon Landings Faked, the Earth is flat and Aztec was a real UFO event.

And then we came to Roswell. I had hoped they would leave it off the list, and if they didn’t, they would have, well, a good excuse for including it. Instead, they trotted out the Mogul balloon explanation.

Mogul array flown in NM.

Yes, we know it was claimed that Mogul was highly classified, and the fact that it was an array of balloons and radar target might have made it look unusual. But the truth is, the culprit in this tale, Flight No. 4, did not fly. It had been canceled due to clouds. CAA regs (FAA in modern times) required cancelation for cloudy weather. These arrays were hundreds of feet long and could pose a hazard to aerial navigation if pilots couldn’t see them. Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes confirm cancelation. Crary was in charge of the balloon experiments in New Mexico at the time.

I do not understand why skeptics will believe documentation except when it conflicts with their beliefs. Crary’s diary is quite clear on the point. For those who say that it also mentions a cluster of balloons being launched and we don’t know the make of these clusters, I say, the documentation tells us. 

And contrary to the Mogul myth, Mogul flights in New Mexico were not classified top secret. Crary even mentions Mogul in his unclassified field notes. The ultimate objective of project, to spy on the Soviets was certainly classified, but this has no relevance to what was happening in New Mexico.

We have an acceptance of this poor and debunked explanation by too many who should be asking questions about it. I have gone over this many times and for those who wish to follow up, you can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/07/project-mogul-and-roswell.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/02/national-geographics-and-ufos.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/moore-knew-moguls-name.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-bad-news-for-mogul.html

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

And if that isn’t enough, just type Mogul into the search engine here and you’ll find more articles discussing Mogul, probably in excruciating detail. I have provided a more cohesive study in Roswell in the 21^st Century. However, it wouldn’t be fair not to mention that Tim Printy, at his Sunlite website, has come at this from the other side of the fence. He believes that Mogul is a viable explanation, as do many other skeptics. I simply disagree with them. As far as I’m concerned, there currently is no terrestrial explanation for what fell northwest of Roswell in 1947. You can find Tim’s website here:

http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/SUNlite.htm

But this report, wasn’t just about what I found on a poorly researched website about long lasting conspiracies. It is about what is happening in the world today. From William Puckett’s website, I found a photo taken on February 8. The witness had taken a photograph of two eagles at the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge near Portland, Oregon. He didn’t see the object, which appears in two of the photographs until he was reviewing them later. The object is a silver-colored, fuzzy oval with some sort of a contrail. The preliminary analysis seems to rule out aircraft. You can see the picture at:

https://www.ufosnw.com/newsite/circular-object-with-tail-found-in-photo-of-eagles/

In keeping with the trend of UFOs with contrails, there was a sighting from Florida on April 23. The witness, who had gotten up for morning coffee saw a bright object that was too small to be the sun and too large to be a star. I mention this sighting, not because it was a UFO, but it was identified as the Space X Falcon Rocket and the booster that had been launched at the time. I thought it important to point out that we all receive many UFO sightings and most of the time they turn out to be mundane craft. This is one of those times that follow up research provided a plausible explanation for what might be considered an implausible sighting.

And, moving back to Oregon, the witness said that she saw an object about dawn. She thought it looked a bit like a shooting star. She attempted to catch her husband’s attention and when she looked back the UFO was lower, larger and had changed direction. She described the object as a long, cylindrical object with round lights on the underbelly. She reported that there was no noise. She went back inside to get her husband and when she came back out, the UFO was gone.

The Bob Pratt, Jesse Marcel Interview

 

It has come up, in one of the comments on this blog, that someone wondered when the Pratt interview took place. I thought this was the best way to respond. The best answer I can find is December 8, 1979 and the information was published in the National Enquirer on February 26, 1980. The transcript of that interview is rather confusing. Karl Pflock, in his book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to

Believe, cleaned it up but there are areas for interpretation. In one place, the insertion of a comma changes the meaning. In the Pratt interview, there is no comma, so Pflock has put his best interpretation on it.

For those who wish to see the transcript of the Pratt interview, I have published it on this blog. You can see and read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/jesse-marcel-sr-bob-pratt-and-interview.html

For additional information, you can take a look at Roswell in the 21^st Century, or you can type Jesse Marcel or Bob Pratt into the search engine. The topic of the interview and some of the discrepancies between what is in that interview and the facts as they have been developed can be seen by looking at some of those earlier articles.

To get a good chronology of the Marcel appearances in the world of the UFO, the best source is Curt Collins. You can read his posting here:

https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com/2020/12/roswell-majors-testimony.html

There is more about Marcel that is important. Much of what was written by the debunkers is not as precise as it could be, and I fear some of them have no real knowledge of the way the military operates. On the other hand, some of what Marcel claimed in various interviews can only be described as inaccurate… some the result of confabulation and some just old fashioned “war stories.” In other words, there was some embellishment. It really all comes down to what you want to believe.

The Roswell Festival Interviews - 2019

This is the first of the interviews that I conducted while in Roswell. We had trouble with setting it all up so that Frank Kimbler, who would have been first, didn’t make it. I’ll get with him in the near future and get that accomplished. The first then was with Don Schmitt. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18473394

This was more of a conversation that ranged over a number of topics with Roswell taking the center stage, quite naturally. There are a couple of interesting points made about the case. For those interested in the current state of the Roswell

Don Schmitt

investigation, why, I’ll recommend my book, Roswell in the 21^st Century. I’ve removed all the hyperbole and tried to distill the case to its essence.

Next up is Alejandro Rojos of Open Minds. Caught up with him in Roswell as well. We talked about the show Unidentified and some of the trouble with establishing the credentials of Luis Elizondo. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18478724

I talked to Kathleen Marden on the last day of the Festival. Naturally, we talked about the Barney and Betty Hill case. I did mention the problems with the Star Map. Some of the data about the stars had been changed over the years based on better techniques and equipment. Kathleen addressed that. We also talked about some terrestrial explanations for the claims of alien abduction. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18485747

The last was a retrospective of what had gone on in Roswell during the Festival and other topics that crossed my mind at the time. Since it was recorded right after the completion of the interview with Kathleen, it wasn’t as organized as it could have been, but does provide some insight to the whole Festival idea. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18485805

That ended the interviews and shows recorded in Roswell. I had wanted to get a couple more, but as I have said, the gods worked against us on that. There were some interesting insights gained during the interviews.

Tom Carey will be the next guest, but this will take place in August, long after we all returned from Roswell. Given everything going on, I didn’t have the opportunity to chat with him there in front of the microphone. We’ll delve into quite a bit, including the Mexico City presentation of a couple of years ago.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - James Carrion

In a two-hour special edition of the radio version of A Different Perspective, I talked with James Carrion, author of The Roswell Deception. This is the theory that the “Saucer Summer of 1947,” as he calls it, was a deception created by American military forces as a way of convincing the Soviets that we had a spectacular aircraft that could deliver atomic weapons deep into the Soviet Union. You can listen to the first hour of the discussion here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/16732614

And the second hour here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/16732644

In the course of the discussion, we covered the events at Maury Island, a well-known hoax that Carrion believed to be part of the deception, the Arnold sighting, a key component of the deception, and the Roswell crash, which was designed to

James Carrion. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

keep flying saucers in the public arena. We might have gotten a little deep into the weeds on some of this, but I believe the information is interesting.

One thing I do want to say is that Carrion’s comments about a fellow named David Johnson are quite interesting and put Arnold’s involvement in the beginning of the US saucers sightings into, dare I say it, a different perspective. As you listen to the program, or as you read the book, look and listen for his name to appear…

And if you need to understand the Roswell case in greater detail, take a look at Roswell in the 21^st Century. I believe I distilled all that has come and gone about Roswell in the book, and it provides the best look at what happened there. As they say, “A little self-promotion never hurts.”

I won’t go into great detail here simply because you can listen to the whole discussion yourself. I believe his aerial deception to be an interesting theory but fails because of a lack of supporting documentation that outlines and confirms the deception. Carrion’s book, however, provides loads of circumstantial evidence, biographies of some of the key players, and an insight into the paranoia that gripped the post-Second World War world. You can read the book, for free here:

http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Books/Other/Carrion,%20James%20-%20The%20Roswell%20Deception.pdf

For those interested, I will be posting a longer review of the book in the next few days. Before I posted it, I wanted the opportunity to raise some of the points with Carrion and to clarify some of the points that I didn’t fully understand. That should spark some interesting commentary.

Latest MJ-12 Documents: A Final Look

For those of you who tuned into Midnight in the Desert to listen to me discuss the latest MJ-12 document release, well, I was bumped early in the evening because Heather Wade had “overbooked the show.” At least I wasn’t dragged off by security for refusing to give up my place at the microphone… which couldn’t have happened since I was at home and she controlled the telephone system anyway.

But I did listen to the beginning of the program because like so many others, I wondered what Stan Friedman would say about the authenticity. Like many of us, he was interested in the source of the documents. They had seemed to excite him in earlier statements, but he now was somewhat more neutral though a careful reading of them should have given away the false nature of them... The mere mention that the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was involved should have been a huge red flag. The IPU has been identified and it has nothing to do with aliens or UFOs or anything of the nature. For more about the IPU see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=IPU

I found one point hilarious and which nearly everyone has failed to mention. The first page says, “READ-AND-DESTROY. I have to wonder how the document survived with that instruction on the first page, which also argues against authenticity. I will note here that a top secret document’s destruction must be documented saying that it has been properly destroyed. Whoever “stole” this one would have had to violate that rule because he would have had to sign the destruction form.

Heather wouldn’t name names, and in one respect I understand that but that also tends to undermine the validity of the documents. She did say that the person who “stole” them originally had died so that he or she can’t be questioned about how he or she gained possession of them.

Heather hadn’t received the originals either. They had come to her in a .pdf file, which, as I have noted in the past, does not allow for much in the way of a forensic analysis of the paper, ink or anything else that might be gained by examination of the originals. We are left with a study of the format, the font, if the documents conformed to others created at the highest-levels of the government and if the documents fit into our current understanding of the situations being discussed in them.

Instead of analysis of these latest documents on the show, we were treated to another waltz down MJ-12 memory lane from the alleged moment the original documents first arrived at Jaime Shandera’s house in 1984 to the point we have reached now. There was nothing new here, other than listening to Stan talk about all his visits to archives, and he enjoys to do so (and hey, that is fun going through all this material, looking for that single and often elusive nugget) and things he had learned about the men who were named to the original MJ-12 committee, all of which was irrelevant to understanding these new documents.

For those who haven’t looked at them yet, though they can now be accessed through a variety of websites including that for Midnight in the Desert. You can still find them here if you are still interested:

http://midnightinthedesert.com/exclusive-ultra-top-secret-assessment-situation-statement-position-ufos/

I have outlined some of the many mistakes in these documents already and find it difficult to believe that something created at this level would be so riddled with errors. I am sorely tempted to enumerate the errors in the Roswell section but will refrain from doing that. Anyone interested can take a look at Roswell in the 21^st Century (or almost any of the other Roswell books) and compare the information there with that in this document. The errors will be apparent and we have to think that anyone who was far enough inside of the loop to be writing this document would be cognizant of the facts of the case.

I’m going to move onto the Aztec case which was covered in depth here. Stan had made a big deal out of the research in Scott Ramsey’s book while he was on Midnight in the Desert and how careful and meticulous it has been. But this document is at a wide variance with what Ramsey published. This sets up a conundrum… if the document is accurate, then Ramsey is wrong but if Ramsey is right, then the document is fake and I haven’t even mentioned the possibility that both are wrong and Aztec is a hoax.

According to the document, on March 25, 1948, the craft was watched on three radars “belonging to the recovery network of the White Sands Test Range and located in classified areas of southwest New Mexico.” In 1948, it was the White Sands Proving Ground, and if the radars were in southwest New Mexico, that would have prevented tracking of the object to low altitudes in northern New Mexico because the mountainous terrain would have been in the way. In fact, once you get very far north of White Sands, their radars aren’t much good for an object below 10,000 feet. Radar is line of sight.

Again, according to the document, the crash site was secured by 10:45 p.m. that night, which meant that no civilians would have been gathered at the site on the morning of March 25 to watch the military arrive because the object had yet to crash according to these new documents. And, if the civilians were on hand to see the military to arrive, it would have had to be on the morning of March 26, but then the site was already secured and the civilians would have been prevented from getting near.

We are treated to a reference to the base at Flat Rock, Nevada, which, of course, was the scene of much of the action in The Andromeda Strain. We learn that the Blue Berets (whoever they are… no, they don’t exist) came in disguised as National Guard, but I’m not sure how you pull that off since the uniforms worn by the National Guard are the same wore by those on active duty with the Army. I suppose they removed their Blue Berets and wore regulation headgear.

Stephen Bassett

But there really doesn’t seem much reason to drag this out. The documents are faked. I spoke with Stephen Bassett yesterday afternoon, and almost the first thing he said to me was that he too thought the documents faked. We discussed some of the bloopers in text, the problems with the classification markings, and all the other errors. Bassett said that he didn’t think these were disinformation, but more likely just someone outside the government who had too much time on his hands. I’ll add someone who didn’t actually know much but who had gotten his hands of William Steinman’s book UFO Crash at Aztec.

What we need to do now is place these documents in the same file folder with the Roswell Slides, the alien autopsy and little grey men who like strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music. Footnotes in the great journal of UFO information, or maybe, even better, have them all deleted from anything to do with UFO research because they have only distracted us. They have added nothing to our knowledge.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Nick Redfern, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy

Nick Redfern. Photo by
Kevin Randle.

This week I talked with Nick Redfern about his new book The Roswell UFO Conspiracy: Exposing a Shocking and Sinister Secret because it would let people know about his new book, open up a discussion about an alternative explanation for the Roswell crash and it would give me a chance to promote my book, Roswell in the 21^st Century. Although I had suggested that his book was an update of his Body Snatchers in the Desert, it is actually more than just that, and it provides more information about some aspects of American history that are, for the lack of another term, rather disgusting. You can listen to our discussion here:

http://differentperspective.rnn.libsynpro.com/a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-ep-42-guest-nick-redfern-the-roswell-shocking-and-sinister-secret

(There have been some reports that the link is broken... if it doesn't work, try going to YouTube and type A Different Perspective Nick Redfern. That should take you to the program.)

Given the way things are in the world today, when people begin to talk about anonymous sources and don’t provide names, I begin to worry about the information. Nick pointed out that some of his sources weren’t actually anonymous but they were unnamed which, according to him is not quite the same thing. It means that while they’re not named, Nick knows who they are. I understand the necessity for these unnamed sources, some of it the responsibility of the publishers who now require that we all provide permission slips signed by the subject of interviews, often with the caveat that they had no objection to their names being used. The problem isn’t that Nick has refused to name them, the publisher wants to make sure that they agreed to being named because if they didn’t… lawsuit.

I know from my own experience that sometimes an overzealous researcher will want to verify the information that I have reported. They call the witness to ask their own questions, and I understand that. I want to be able to verify the information published by others myself… to see if it is accurate, if the witness has something else to say, or if the comments were taken out of context and the witness actually meant something different. I have found problems with some of those interviews conducted by others when I asked the questions, so I do get it.

But the flip side of that is something that I have run into and that is drunks, as a single example. As I mentioned on the program, Bill Brazel told me that drunks, making bets in bars, had called him on several occasions to ask if the information published about him was true… and not just at a descent hour but at two or three in the morning… I hesitate to subject people to that sort of harassment… or to those who don’t like the information and who want to argue the point with the witness.

One way around that is documentation and I pressed Nick on that when he began to speak about Unit 731, which had, according to him, conducted experiments on humans that can be called little more than torture. And this is where we slide off into another dark side of American history. Starting not long after the Japanese invasion of mainland China, they built a concentration camp where they performed experiments, many on Chinese men, women and children, but also on Russians and prisoners of war. These experiments included cold weather exposure to see how the body reacted to extreme temperatures, injecting live bacteria into humans to map the progress of deadly disease, amputating limps and attempting to reattach them, sometimes on the other side of the body, and the vivisection of living, conscious subjects because they didn’t want the normal decay of the diseased organs after death to color the results. They wanted to see exactly what was happening on the living organs.

Okay, that’s really enough of that. As the war wound down and it was clear that Unit 731 was about to be overrun by the Russians, the Japanese ordered everything destroyed, the buildings burned and ordered those who had participated to never say a word about it. I think the Japanese understood the concept of war crimes and they were hiding the evidence… which means that there was little in the way of documentation. Nick had mentioned a project like Paperclip that had brought the captured Nazis to the US to help build our space program. There was a similar project for the Japanese… or so he said.

Very little research on my part was able to confirm this, though I don’t know if any of the Japanese actually made it to the US. But Japanese who had participated in these “experiments” were questioned about it by American authorities and were told that anything they said would not be used in war crimes trials. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was the senior officer to approve this because the information about the progress of some diseases, and effects of extreme cold, and other experiments did provide valuable information. The thinking I suppose, was that the data had been gathered and there was no reason to destroy it. The damage had been done, the subjects were dead and the information might be used for the benefit of others.

The point here is that Nick had been correct in what he had said about Unit 731 and its horrendous past. Many of the Japanese involved were identified and were not tried as war criminals so that the data would not be lost. That doesn’t take us to the crash of that alleged experimental craft in New Mexico in 1947, but it does get us a little closer.

Personally, I’m a little disgusted with these secret agreements that were made at the end of the war. I’m disgusted that the US government, and the US military seemed to think there was a higher purpose there and the horror could be overlooked for the value of the data collected…

Anyway, I’m finished with this rant. I bring it up merely because Nick had talked of Unit 731, had few names and it seemed even fewer documents to support all of this and how it ended up in New Mexico two years after the Japanese surrender. I bring it up so that we see that there is something to be said for Nick’s theory here and there is independent support for some of the information he used in his book and what we discussed on the program. It doesn’t mean that the object that crashed was of terrestrial manufacture and that this theory is the correct one, only that there is some information to support the theory and that more research is required.

Hangar 1 and the Roswell Case

By a somewhat strange coincidence, I happened on an episode of Hangar 1 just a couple of weeks after I had interviewed Jan Harzan, MUFON Executive Director. I hadn’t realized that the opening of the show made such a big deal out of “MUFON’s Archives” stored in this huge warehouse-like hangar. Harzan told me that when the producers arrived, they asked where the files were and the current director said, “Over there in Hangar One,” and a title was born. Many of MUFON’s files are

no longer in a hangar… and the hangar shown on the beginning of the program does not exist as a MUFON warehouse.

Yeah, that’s splitting a hair because television is a visual medium and the producers of television shows are in need of stunning visuals which that hangar is. I can live with that as long as we all understand that Hangar 1, as described, does not exist.

But then they delved into the Roswell UFO crash and fell badly off the rails. It started with the mispronunciation of Mack Brazel’s last name and continued on to invented quotes for Jesse Marcel. The Chaves County sheriff, George Wilcox, did not go out to the ranch managed by Brazel and upon his return alert the intelligence officer at Roswell. Instead, Brazel brought some of the debris into the office in Chaves County and the sheriff then called the base alerting, indirectly, Major Jesse Marcel. The sheriff did not go out because the Brazel ranch was in Lincoln County.

Hangar 1 brought in General Nathan Twining, who, in 1947, was the commanding officer of the Air Materiel Command, and later the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They point out that Twining had created the first official UFO investigation and cloaked it in secrecy… but failed to mention that in the letter in which he calls for the creation of that study, he also cited the lack of crash recovered debris.

They talked about Glenn Dennis’ missing nurse, never revealing that the search for her failed and upon that point Dennis then changed the story about her, her name and why he had given us the name he did. They showed a drawing of the alien creature claiming it was made by the nurse but, of course, it wasn’t. The drawing was made by Walter Henn under Dennis’ direction. I happen to have the original

drawing, with includes a couple of changes made by Don Schmitt, also under Dennis’ direction. (Given the circumstances, I might own the copyright on it.)

The drawings made under the direction of Dennis, original artwork by Walter Henn,.

Then, in what I found outrageous, they begin to cite the secret or shadow government that was created at that time, July 1947, under the name MJ-12. They mention in passing that it is somewhat controversial but we all realize that is just a way to dismiss the claim of controversy. They suggest that everyone knows that it is real. This is where they completely lost me because the consensus seems to be that MJ-12 is a hoax. I laid all this out in Roswell in the 21^st Century, in which I devote the massive Appendix A to a comprehensive analysis of the whole sorry episode. I have found what I believe to be the fatal flaw which brings down all of MJ-12. For those who haven’t figured it out yet, MJ-12 is a hoax that began in the 1980s.

And we must never forget the Hangar 1 report of the “star soldier,” who claimed to have been abducted at 17, served for twenty years fighting the alien enemy on Mars, only to be returned to his bed 15 minutes after he left. This wasn’t part of the most recent episode I watched, but it is part of the series. This is fiction complete and total and to suggest any sort of reality to it makes the whole field of UFO research look bad.

Don’t get me wrong (though I know that many will), I don’t object to this show on principle, but only because they “report” everything as if it is a foregone conclusion for reality. They pay lip service to some of the criticisms of various investigations and sightings, but ignore most of that criticism. While this is supposed to be a documentary, remember what Jan Harzan told me during our discussion of it, “Television is not a documentary.” This is all television and they, MUFON, have no real control over what the producers say or do.

Or, in other words, it’s not their fault.

Here’s now what we know, based on some of what Harzan said. The show wasn’t really a documentary. You couldn’t do justice to the five or six cases examined in each episode, but it was good for business with more sightings being reported and more people joining the organization. They aren’t above running with a story that nearly everyone knows is complete fiction. I suppose we could deduce he was saying was that they did it for the membership gains and the money it brought in.