"New" Mogul Illustration?

 

Yeah, I know that I said that I wouldn’t say anything more about Project Mogul because, to me, that explanation simply does not work. There is too much that argues against it, two of the facts being that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled and that the early flights in New Mexico did not contain any rawin radar reflectors as part of the array. If there were no rawins, then the explanation failed at that point.

However, I then found a website that devoted a segment to the Roswell case and used an illustration from New York University that was labeled “Typical radar target flight train used by the NYU balloon group in 1947.” As you can see, it matches none of the other illustrations for Project Mogul.

The website didn’t provide much in the way of a source, but indicated that it came from the massive Air Force report, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. It was included in the section that contained the interview with Charles Moore but it doesn’t tell us anything else about the original source of the illustration.

I have been through, page by freaking page, of the technical reports and other documentation about Project Mogul and the operations in Alamogordo. I have seen, literally, dozens of illustrations and photographs of those balloon arrays launched there in June and July 1947, that this new illustration matches none of that.

The only thing I have found that remotely matches is a picture from the Alamogordo News on July 10 that shows two weather balloons and two rawin targets about to be launched. Moore told me that the ladder in that picture was one that he had bought with petty cash. The only copies of that photograph that I have are poor quality reproductions from a copy machine.

Center picture shows weather balloons and rawin targets.

The question that arises, given all the data that I have seen about Project Mogul, and all the interviews I had with Charles Moore, not to mention discussions with James McAndrew and interviews with Colonel Richard Weaver, is where were these radar target trains launched, and more importantly, when.

I will note here that had Mack Brazel found one of these, which contained three to five balloons and three rawin targets (though I don’t know why they’re need three), he would have been able to pick up the debris in a few minutes. He wouldn’t have been worried about someone cleaning up the big mess that was the motivation for the trip into Roswell.

I will also note that upon landing, there were be no reason for the targets to be ripped up into pieces as shown in the pictures in General Ramey’s office. In fact, we do have pictures from a balloon landing near Circleville, Ohio, in early July and the rawin was recovered virtually intact.

Daughter of Sherman Campbell holding the
rawin target he found in his field

The real questions about this illustration is where is the original source, were there other NYU balloon projects in New Mexico in 1947, and when were these small clusters of balloons launched? This seems to be one of the many red herrings (is this now an offensive term for some maligned group?) that have been floated (pun intended) about the UFO crash in New Mexico.