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.

More Bad News for Mogul

As I have mentioned before, Robert Hastings has given us UFOs and Nukes and it has provided some very interesting information about the state of UFO research and what the government might know about it. I don’t think he realized by doing that he has also dealt another blow to the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell recovered debris.

Mogul, for those of you who might have been living in a vacuum this last decade or so is the preferred explanation of the skeptics, the debunkers, the Air Force, much of science and more than a few people who would rather let someone else do their thinking. Mogul was an attempt to put an array of weather balloons, radar reflectors and some microphones into the atmosphere at a constant level so that we could spy on Soviet attempts to detonate an atomic bomb.

So, what does Hastings tell us that affects this? According to him, "In September 1947, Army Chief of Staff General Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the Army Air Corps [actually the Army Air Forces] to undertake the Constant Phoenix program, an ongoing series of long-distant flights designed to detect atomic explosions ‘anywhere in the world.’ This high-priority activity was continued by the newly-created U.S. Air Force and, on September 3, 1949, radiation sensors aborad a USAF B-29 flying between Alaska and Japan confirmed the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb - some five years earlier than expected."

What this tells us is that within weeks of the Roswell events, the Army Air Forces were directed to use aircraft in their surveillance of the Soviet Union’s atomic progress and that balloons did not figure into it. Mogul was of no real interest to the military at that point, which might explain why it was compromised by the military in July 1947. Any spying on the Soviet Union would be accomplished by aircraft that could maintain their flight levels for hours on end, which weren’t directed by the wind, and which could carry human observers who could make additional observations. And, as we learned, were not required to penetrate Soviet airspace so there would be no debris lying around for the Soviets to exploit.

Those who struggle to convince us that Mogul was so secret, so important, that finding an array by Mack Brazel had to be covered up to protect the project fail to explain why pictures of Mogul arrays were printed in July 10 issues of various newspapers. They fail to convince us the project name was unknown to the members of the Mogul team as the Air Force’s own investigation proved. And now we learn that plans had been in the works to use aircraft for surveillance before the Mogul launches in New Mexico, and that Army Air Force missions were implemented within weeks of the Roswell discovery.

We can argue about what really fell at Roswell. We can argue about the efforts to recovery it and to hide it but we can now lay to rest the idea that Project Mogul was responsible. Clearly the effort made to keep the secret would not have been made had it been Mogul balloons. We know this because other arrays, that fell in other parts of New Mexico, were left to rot in the sun if recovery was deemed too difficult.

Mogul fails on so many counts. It wasn’t the secret that we have been led to believe it was. There was nothing mysterious about its make-up and the balloons and radar targets were off the shelf items. The officers, pilots, and soldiers at Roswell wouldn’t have been fooled by the debris and, in fact, had been warned by the Mogul team that the flights would be made. And once the events at Roswell began to unfold, Mogul ended up on the front pages of many newspapers complete with pictures of the balloons and some of those who launched them.

This last bit if information, courtesy of Robert Hastings will, I hope, put an end to the idea that Mogul accounts for the Roswell debris. Let’s move on to something else, something that makes sense. Let’s put Mogul back in the bag.

For those interested in more of what Robert Hastings has reported, you can only order UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites at: ufohastings.com

Mogul and Roswell

I was doing a video lap the other day, which is what I call channel surfing. I found a documentary about Roswell and they were conducting an experiment to recreate the Mogul balloon array and then see what would happen when it fell back to earth. They kept the balloons tethered, I don’t think the array was quite as large as those run in 1947, and they shot down the balloons with a pellet gun. Their debris field was small, there were large amounts of twine or rope that held the array together and the radar targets were not particularly degraded.

Or, in other words, it didn’t match the descriptions of the debris or the field given by those who saw it in 1947.

But that wasn’t what annoyed me about this. It was the idea that the Mogul explanation had enough merit that the producers of the show thought that they needed to attempt to replicate it. It was that anyone who was paying attention still thought that the Mogul explanation was viable based on the documented evidence that is available to us now.

Crary on the left.

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

Okay, end of story, semi-colon.

Here’s the deal. Crary made it clear that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled. He said that specifically and the other historical evidence backs it up. The first flight noted in New Mexico was Flight No. 5, and that was recovered. Had there been a Flight No. 4 as successful as Charles Moore claimed it was, (with all his nonsensical but very extensive research conducted in the 1990s using winds aloft data from 1947), it would have been noted as the first flight.

Moore in Socorro.

The second notation for June 4, the date of the cancelled Flight No. 4, was that they had flown a cluster of balloons, with a sonobuoy in the afternoon. Crary only told us that they had good reception on the ground for the radio signal but not so good on the B-17 that was also used in their attempts to detect a signal. But he did tell us what that flight was and it did not have the rawin targets. It was just a cluster of balloons and a sonobuoy.

A cluster of balloons is not the same as a full Mogul array. Crary made the distinction in his field notes about this, when all of that material is reviewed. It is quite clear what happened. There was no Flight No. 4 to drop debris up on the Foster ranch, no Flight No. 4 that would have presented a threat to aerial navigation, hence no NOTAM filed for the flight, and nothing to indicate that the balloons headed off to the northeast, flying over those distinctively named towns that Charles Moore remembered all those years later to prove that Flight No. 4 not

A Mogul launch for the Press.

only existed, but had flown off in the proper direction.

We have been pussy-footing around this for years, allowing those who wish to force their views on us set the ground rules, pick the fight, and then we sit back and listen to what they have to say even when that position is indefensible. The field notes and diary make it clear and I do not understand why that clarity is being obscured nor do I understand why there are those who refuse to understand it…

Well, that’s not true. Without Flight No. 4, Mogul fails as an answer. It cannot account for the debris because it never left Alamogordo. If there was no Flight No. 4, then Moore’s role as the man who launched the Roswell case falters and fails and the Mogul experiments are reduced to an attempt to spy on the Soviets. He doesn’t find his name in the newspapers and he isn’t visited by those researching the case and he certainly doesn’t get to appear on TV or participate in a book.

So, there was no Flight No. 4, and I’m not even going to bother with the argument that Mogul wasn’t all that secret… with pictures of it published in the newspapers on July 10, 1947, and the name being used in all sorts of non-classified publications which eliminates another of the legs for the Mogul explanation.

My point is that we shouldn’t even be dealing with this anymore just as we are no longer dealing with a stray rocket or missile (and yes there is a difference) from White Sands, an experimental aircraft accident, an aircraft accident involving an atomic weapons, or a bunch of other things such as John Keel’s Fugo Balloons that have been ruled out by evidence. Mogul should join those and we just shouldn’t entertain arguments about this any longer.

Mogul is a distraction that does not work. Each time someone proposes it, we should tell them the flight was cancelled and demand they provide evidence that it wasn’t. We should tell them that a cluster of balloons is not a Mogul flight and that the debris found on the Foster ranch was simply too wide spread to be that from Mogul let alone a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy.

We tell them Mogul doesn’t work and if they have no evidence for it, then give it up. Find something that does in fact work, and let us see that evidence.

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.

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.

History's Project Blue Book - What a Disaster...

Last year I took a lot of flak for my suggestion that History’s Project Blue Book wasn’t all that bad. I could separate the fact from the fiction and found the shows enjoyable. They didn’t take too many liberties with the facts and that could be excused in the interest of dramatic storytelling. Can you think of a program or movie that didn’t take some dramatic license to put together a compelling drama that had to play out of a couple of hours?

But the new season has started with a case that is not part of the Project Blue Book record. As I have said, repeatedly, the only mention of the Roswell case is in the third paragraph of a four-paragraph newspaper clipping found in another case file. All it says is that the officers in Roswell had received a “blistering rebuke” for their announcement they had “captured” a flying saucer. In the more than 12,000 cases and the more than 130,000 pages found in the Blue Book files, Roswell makes up such a tiny faction that no one ever noticed.

Jesse  Marcel, Sr.

To take it further, Roswell wasn’t even on the radar of UFO researchers until 1978 when Jesse Marcel, Sr. told Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucer when he was the air intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. Prior to that, references to Roswell were difficult to find and if it was mentioned at all, it was nearly always dismissed as a weather balloon or a hoax.

But now according to History’s latest installment of their not-so-much-based-on-fact- but-more-fiction than-necessary-program we’ve given up on reality. Rather than dealing with the case in 1947, we are stuck in 1952 and the Roswell case has somehow surfaced again. Hynek and Quinn have learned something about it and are on their way to Roswell… and it is at this point, I suppose, I should mention “SPOILERS.”

At one point in this bizarre chronology, the military is on high alert, with the suppression machine in full operation. The town is sealed off with no one allowed to arrive or depart. Roads are blocked by armed guards who do not know what they are doing… I say this because as Hynek and Quinn drive up, someone begins to take shots at them… guards, Hynek, Quinn, their jeep, barrels, whatever. The guards immediately desert their post to chase the sniper. They abandon it completely so that Hynek and Quinn can continue their journey. I suspect the guards were punished, off-screen, for their dereliction of duty.

Sure, I’ve skipped some of the nonsense. Quinn and Hynek going out to talk to a witness, knock on the door, which opens because not only wasn’t locked, it wasn’t even latched. Even though the owner isn’t there, they walk in anyway. They find evidence laid out nicely for them and then Hynek finds a fake saucer in the backyard as the owner returns.

Meanwhile in Ohio, Mimi Hynek is joining some UFO group and convinces the leader to “loan” her his private notes… I don’t know if he ever gets them back, but he does show up at her house.

We have a flashback to dozens of people walking the debris field in 1947 picking up souvenirs, even though in real life, the field is isolated and Mack (they spell it “Mac”) Brazel tried to convince his nearest neighbors to take a drive down to it. Loretta Proctor told me that tires cost money and gas cost money, and even though Brazel showed her a piece of debris, she and her husband, Floyd, just didn’t want to go out to look at the field. (Sure, this is a little confusing, but just remember that was a flash back to 1947 from the perspective of 1952).

They got so many little things wrong, it seemed that they just gave up and filmed whatever pleased them. Uniforms wrong, a camouflaged jeep that should have been painted blue, and, of course, the conflict between Hynek and Quinn and the brass hats running the cover up. Worst of all, they suggest the rancher was beat up while in military custody… this is an outrageous idea. There is no evidence that any one was harmed by any military personnel in 1947… of course, I will note that several of the witnesses suggested they were threatened if they talked about what they had seen. Not really the same thing. Threats that were never carried out then or now.

At the end of the show, they bring up Mogul as the solution for the debris and this is what really annoyed me. They made the debunked claim that Mogul was highly

Mogul array in flight in 1947.

classified. The problem is that while the purpose was classified, the experiments going on in New Mexico were not. Dr. Albert Crary, leader of the New York University study in New Mexico, as well as others on his team, knew the code name, Mogul. Crary mentions it in his field notes. Pictures of a Mogul array appeared in newspapers on July 10, 1947. And, Mogul was off-the-shelf weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors that had been in use for years. Nothing to fool anyone even if they were strung together.

The capper here, however, is the fact that Mogul Flight No. 4, the alleged culprit for leaving debris on the ranch managed by Mack Brazel, NEVER flew. Dr. Crary’s field notes, written at the time, said the flight was cancelled due to clouds at dawn. Charles Moore, who made the claim that Mogul balloons were responsible, and who, using winds aloft data, showed that Flight No. 4 got with in 17 MILES of the ranch, lied about the launch times. He had to or the winds aloft data proved that the balloons didn’t even get that close. But hey, close counts in hand grenades, dancing and atomic weapons.

According to the written records, as opposed to the fifty-year-old memories, the launch would have taken place around 5:20 in the morning, but as I say, it was cancelled. They flew a cluster of balloons later in the day, but a cluster of balloons does not make a Mogul array. To make this work, however, Moore had to keep pushing back the time of the launch until it came in the dark, which was in violation of the regulations they worked under. You can read about all this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/08/there-was-no-flight-no-4.html

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

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/07/mogul-and-roswell.html

There are other articles there as well, but I think these cover the point. Just type Mogul into the search engine and all the articles that reference Mogul will appear. I’ll suggest that you can also use Google and again, type in Mogul to receive additional information, much of it supporting the Mogul theory. I disagree with those, obviously, but for a complete understanding, it is always good to look at opposing points of view.

So, this is where I climb off the band wagon. This episode has done a real disservice to UFO research. There is nothing that actually relates to Project Blue Book other than the name Hynek. Everything else in here has nothing to do with reality.

And yet, I’ll watch next week because one of the actors, Neal McDonough, is in the show… not to mention Littlefinger as Hynek. Yeah, this has nothing to do with the quality of the program. I just thought I would mention it.

Project Mogul, UFOs and Soviet Nuclear Detonations

There has been a rumor circulating about the success of Project Mogul. It has been said that Mogul did detect some American atomic testing and it was successful in detecting the first Soviet nuclear test on August 29,1949.

I was dubious.

I have, in the past, read through all the massive information published about Mogul and the tests. My interest, naturally, centered around the June and July, 1947 flights in New Mexico. These are at the heart of the Roswell controversy. From all that I had read or seen, Mogul was never deployed. It was too expensive and wasn’t all that reliable, though in later years they were very successful on some very, long-range flights.

I also believed that the first Soviet nuclear test had been detected through atmospheric monitoring and seismic recordings. Radiation from the test drifted over monitoring stations and the seismic readings allowed intelligence agents (well, the scientists who monitored such things) to pinpoint the location. I found nothing about Mogul being used.

Tony Bragalia in an email to me, mentioned that Mogul had been successful in detecting that first Soviet test. I asked for the source and he pointed me to an Internet report by Richard A. Muller, who is a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

That web address if fairly long. It is:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8F__2Z3Ne9kJ:muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/old%2520physics%252010/chapters%2520(old)/9-SecretsofUFOs.html+%22project+mogul+and+the+%22lying+disks%22%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

I emailed Dr. Muller and frankly, expected no response. I mean the guy has published books, does television shows and teaches classes. His website is quite complex and interesting. I figured that he would be too busy to answer my question about the source and I was afraid my name might annoy him. I am, after all, on the other side of the debate.

Dr. Muller responded within a couple of hours, and given the time (early morning) I sent my email, I was surprised. He was quite courteous in his reply, and supplied what information he could.

He wrote, "I am afraid that I don’t have a hard source for that information; it was something that I was told, and I’m not sure by whom... I don’t have a hard reference for that. Sorry."

In the grand scope of Roswell research, this means very little. Even if Mogul had eventually worked, it doesn’t change what people believe about the Roswell case. All this does is suggest that reports of Mogul success are little more than rumors.

If someone has better information than this, I’m sure that he or she will let me know. But, until we can verify it, the fact is that there is no hard source for the suggestion that Mogul worked (which means in this context, that it didn’t detected the Soviet test).

There Was No Flight No. 4

As many of you know, I have been arguing against the Project Mogul explanation for what fell at Roswell from the moment that it was first proposed. I have never believed that it adequately explained the debris, descriptions of the field where it allegedly fell, or all of the witness testimony. When we cherry-pick what we want, then Mogul can be viewed as acceptable but, when we remember the words of Charles Moore, one of those associated with the project, we see its failure. Moore said that the balloons would not have gouged the terrain, and if there was a gouge, then Mogul is not the answer (and no, I’m not going to go through the eyewitnesses who talked of a gouge here).

We know what Sheridan Cavitt had to say about it because it is repeated as gospel. Those who champion his testimony have forgotten that Cavitt lied about his whereabouts in 1947, lied about his assignment, said that he never went on any balloon recovery and then, in 1995, changed all that. He was there and recognized the material as balloon remnants immediately. He could not explain why he hadn’t mentioned this to either Major Jesse Marcel or to Colonel William Blanchard.

And even after he had told the Air Force investigators that he recognized it as a balloon, he still told me that he hadn’t gone out to the site. He was at a loss as to why both Marcel, and Cavitt’s own NCOIC, Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett would say that he had.

But the balloon explanation has held because of those who wish to believe that Roswell is easily explainable. It may be many things, but it is not so easily dismissed.

So, why bring this up now... and again. Well, I think an examination of Dr. Albert Crary’s (seen here) diary, which provides us with the only record for Mogul Flight No. 4, the culprit identified by so many, needs to be examined carefully. By doing so, I believe that Mogul is eliminated from the list of candidates.

First, let me point out that Charles Moore prepared detailed report on Project Mogul Flight No. 4 using his expertise and winds aloft data that I supplied to him. As I have mentioned before, that data only went to 20,000 feet and it was often incomplete with several stations either not reporting or reporting only partial data. Even the layman, looking at these data see that the winds are wildly variable and often blowing in nearly opposite directions from one altitude to the next.

Second, let’s look at what Crary wrote about those early June, 1947, launches that included Fight No. 4. He said, "June 4, 1947. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds. Flew regular sonobuoy up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on ground but poor on plane. Out with Thompson pm. Shot charges from 1800 to 2400."

So we have contradictory accounts here in the only documented source. Charles Moore, wrote:

"Crary’s diary entries for June 4 are puzzling because they are contradictory.My examination of his original handwritten entries suggests that he copied from other notes; the entries from June 2 through the first half of June 5 appear to have been written in one sitting with the same pencil and without any corrections or false starts. During the hectic operations in June, he apparently used field notes to record events as they occurred and then transcribed them later into his diary. This is evident in some later entries where the events of an entire week were lumped together. ...One interpretation of the June 4 entry is that the launch scheduled for making airborne measurements on Crary’s surface explosions after midnight was canceled because of clouds but, after the sky cleared around dawn, the cluster of already-inflated balloons was released, later than planned. The initial cancellation and later launch were recorded sequentially, as they occurred, in his field notes which he later transcribed into his permanent diary without elaboration."

And another interpretation, based on earlier entries is that there was no flight No. 4. Crary’s diary for the trip to New Mexico notes on June 3, "Up at 2:30 AM ready to fly balloons but finally abandoned due to cloudy skies. I went out to Tularosa Range and fired charges from 6 on to 12. (Mogul detonation seen here). Missed 5:30 shot - trouble getting ordnance men."

On June 4, "He wrote that there was no balloon flight..."

That seems to eliminate Flight No. 4. It is not recorded in the final documents associated with Project Mogul. Remember, Moore himself noted that Crary had copied over his field notes in one sitting so there is the distinct possibility that he copied them incorrectly so that we have an impression that there was a later flight of balloons on June 4 which would have been Flight No. 4. But we have no real record of it. Instead we have Flight No. 5 the next morning, the first of the recorded New Mexican flights. Something else the skeptics fail to mention.

Instead, we’re treated to Moore’s (at the time of the report) fifty-year-old memories. We are cautioned by the skeptics to be dubious of these long ago memories but, of course, they accept Moore’s as reliable. Moore wrote:

I have a memory of J. R. Smith watching the June 4th cluster through a theodolite on a clear, sunny morning and that Capt. Dyvad reported that the Watson Lab radar had lost the targets while Smith had then in view. It is also my recollection that the cluster was tracked about 75 miles from Alamogordo by the crew in the B-17. As I remember this flight, the B-17 crew terminated their chase, while the balloons were still airborne (and J.R. was still watching them), in the vicinity of Capitan Peak, Arabela and Bluewater, NM. I, as an Easterner, had never heard of these exotically-named places but their names have forever been stuck in my memory. This flight provided the only connection that I have ever had with these places. From the note in Crary’s diary, the reason for termination of the chase was due to poor reception of the telemetered acoustic information by the received aboard the plane. We never recovered this flight and, because of the sonobouy, the flight gear and the balloons were all expendable equipment, we had no further concern about them but began
preparations for the next flight.

Moore, as have so many other skeptics, quotes the Brazel description of the debris he found that appeared in the newspaper. "When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches think, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 to 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds."

But Moore, as like all the other skeptics before him, fails to report that Brazel said that he had found weather observation devices before but this was nothing like them. But if it was Mogul, then it would have been recognizable as a weather observation device because Mogul was made up of regular weather observation devices. So what was so strange about it that it induced Brazel to drive into Roswell to report it? Why did the military then wish to accompany him back out to the ranch to see where it was found? And if it only weighed five pounds, what is all that other stuff that was supposedly scattered in the high desert around the ranch?

And here is something else that the skeptics fail to report. Moore told me that he and a couple of the others on the Mogul team went to Roswell to ask for their help in tracking their balloons. The officers at Roswell didn’t have the time to deal with "college boys." This means, of course, that the officers at Roswell knew about Mogul and what it would be like.

Further, because they were launching balloon arrays that could foul up air traffic in southern New Mexico, they were required to post a notice to airman (NOTAM) about the launches. So, while the purpose of Mogul was a secret, they fact that balloon arrays were being launched in southern New Mexico was not.

The point here is that Mogul just doesn’t make a very good solution for the case. The facts don’t add up and the skeptics tend to forget those parts that point in another direction. They can’t even prove there was a Flight No. 4, and if there wasn’t, then Mogul explains nothing. It merely clouds the issue, as so much else has.

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.