People Still Believe in Mogul

Yes, I know we’ve talked about this before but I’m still surprised when there are uncritical statements published about the nonsensical Mogul balloon explanation for the debris found by Mack Brazel. And, while I know it is beating the dead horse because we’ve gone over this multiple times, I just wish to respond to some of those who, without knowing all the details, spout the Mogul line.

The documentation is quite clear. Mogul Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, was scheduled to be launched about dawn on June 4, 1947. According to the records it was cancelled. It was never launched.

That same record, created by the project leader, Dr. Albert Crary, said that they did fly a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy attached. A sonobuoy is basically a radio transmitter and microphone. Its job, in this context, was to pick up the sound of high explosives detonated to test that capability. That was all it was. It had nothing to do with radar which some seem to believe it did.

We know, based on the documentation published by the New York University balloon project (which launched these balloons) that in June 1947, they were not allowed to fly them at night or into clouds. The huge arrays, six hundred feet long, could pose a threat to aerial navigation if hidden by the darkness or in clouds. The June launches were made at dawn or shortly thereafter.

There is no record of any data recovered from a Flight No. 4 and it is missing from the records. The next day, June 5, Flight No. 5 was launched and it is recorded as the first successful flight in New Mexico.

Charles Moore, who claimed the title of the man who launched the “Roswell” balloon, using winds aloft data, calculated the flight path of the mythical Flight No. 4, if it had been launched at about dawn. His calculations, based on that incomplete data, showed the balloon would have moved, more or less, toward the site of the Brazel debris field.

Here are the problems. First, a weather front moved through Alamogordo about dawn, changing the winds aloft data and suggesting a different direction for the mythical flight. To fix that problem, and using data obtained from a weather station near Orogrande, New Mexico that had better winds aloft data because of the proximity of the White Sands Missile Range (or Proving Ground in 1947, which I mention so that the nitpickers won’t harp on this), Moore changed the launch time to three in the morning… even though full arrays were forbidden to be flown in the dark by the rules under which they operated. It was the only way he could force the flight path into something that would move in the proper direction.

What this means is that Flight No. 4 was launched before it was cancelled… and if that was the case, then Crary’s diary and field notes would have mentioned it. Instead the sequence was the flight was cancelled and later in the day a cluster of balloons was flown.

Second, we know what the cluster of balloons was. It was not a full array, but three or four balloons carrying a sonobouy which means that this balloon cluster was relatively short and did not pose a hazard to aerial navigation. It fact, according to a letter written by Moore, they didn’t expect it to get out of the restricted area around Alamogordo. There would be no aircraft flying into it.

Third, we know, based on Flight No. 5, that there had been no rawin radar targets on Flight No. 4 because there were no radar facilities to track it, and a diagram of that array was published in the New York University reports. There was no diagram for Flight No. 4 because there was no Flight No. 4.

Finally, we know that the nonsense about these flights being highly classified is wrong. The name, Mogul, was used by Crary in a number of entries in his diaries and field notes. The ultimate purpose was classified, but the experiments conducted in New Mexico were not. In fact, there were newspaper articles showing the balloons and reporting on the location of the launches published in early July.

It really is time to retire this explanation. It doesn’t fit the facts, it doesn’t explain anything, and it is just a red herring, thrown out to convince people that something mundane fell on the ranch. Say what you will, this is not a viable explanation.