John Stossel, Wikipedia and Project Mogul

 While looking for YouTube videos to entertain me as I ate breakfast, I found John Stossel’s analysis of Wikipedia’s bias. He, of course, focused more on the political arena than in that of the paranormal, but that got me thinking, “What is their analysis of the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell UFO crash.”

You can watch the Stossel video that started this whole thing here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+stossel+wikipedia

The very first thing I noticed in the Wikipedia entry, under a heading of “Roswell Incident,” was the opening sentence. “In 1947, a Project Mogul balloon NYU Flight 4, launched June 4, crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.”

The problem with that sentence is that it ignores the field notes and later diary entries written by Dr. Albert Crary, who as the project leader. Those documents eliminate a balloon launch on June 4. Dr. Crary wrote, “June 4 Wed. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds [emphasis added].” For some reason, those of the skeptical bias seem to ignore that statement, inventing alternative meanings behind it. I believe it is destructive to the Mogul explanation because, there was no launch of a full array on June 4.

Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the
balloon flights in 1947.

In the chart of what was the New York University balloon project launches, we see there was no data collected for Flight #4. In fact, it’s not even listed as a flight because it was canceled. Flight #5, which flew the next day, has the notation “First successful flight carrying a heavy load.”

Charles Moore, one of the engineers on the project, told me, that Flight #4 was as successful as Flight #5. This is an obvious contradiction to the documentation that is available because, if it had collected data, it would be listed.

To be fair, because I think of this as an investigation and not a debate, I note that, according to Crary’s notes, “Flew a regular sono buoy up in a cluster of balloons and had good luck with receiver on the ground but poor on the plane.”

But the next entry, for June 5, clarifies the situation. Crary wrote, “Up at 4 to shoot two charges for balloon flight. Whole assembly of constant altitude balloons set up at 0500.” That suggests that the cluster of balloons was not a full assembly, contrary to Moore’s claim that there was a Flight #4 and it was as successful as Flight #5.

The New York Times endorsed the idea that there was something extremely unusual about the Mogul arrays. According to that story, “"...squadrons of big balloons ... It was like having an elephant in your backyard and hoping that no one would notice it. ... To the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil. ... photographs of it, taken in 1947 and published in newspapers, show bits and pieces of what are obviously collapsed balloons and radar reflectors.”

First, there weren’t squadrons of big balloons but an array of standard weather balloons, recognizable, even when arranged in a long array. There was nothing about the balloons that would render them unrecognizable.

Second, according to what Charles Moore told me, the mythical Flight #4 was configured exactly like Flight #5. The problem then is that the schematic for Flight #5 contains no rawin targets, which The New York Times described as “the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil.”

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I supplied to him.
Photo by Kevin Randle

Third, the photographs published in the newspapers in 1947 do, in fact, show a rawin radar target, but both Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., and Colonel Thomas Dubose, who are in the pictures, have testified that the material in the pictures was not the material recovered in Roswell. Both said that the real material was switched with that of the weather balloon and radar reflector.

Fourth, I don’t know who those untrained eyes belonged to. The balloon and rawin targets were used by the thousands during the invasion of Okinawa for example, and were later used during the Bikini atom tests. The 509^th and Jess Marcel participated in those tests at Bikini. There simply wasn’t anything that unusual about the balloons and radar reflectors which had been launched by the thousands for weather gathering purposes. They were easily recognizable to the officers of the 509^th, because their weather office used them.

Major Jesse Marcel with part of a damaged
radar reflector. Marcel was later quoted as
saying that this wasn't what he had found
in New Mexico.

One of the facts that is never discussed by the skeptical side of the argument is that Mack Brazel, the rancher who took the samples to the Chaves County Sheriff, George Wilcox, knew what weather balloons looked like. Brazel was concerned by the size of the debris field and wanted to know who as going to clear up the mess.

The second problem is that Flight #4 was allegedly launched on June 4, but Brazel didn’t take samples of the debris to the sheriff until a month later. Descriptions of the debris scattered in the pasture suggest that it was so thick that the sheep refused to cross the field for water. According to Bill Brazel, son of Mack, and Tommy Tyree, a sometimes ranch hand, Mack was in the field at least every other day, meaning that he would have found it on June 5 or 6, if we believe the newspapers story. Given the location of the debris and the water source, Brazel would have reported it with in a day or two. He wanted those responsible for scattering the debris to clean it up. This tidbit of information is just another reason to reject the Mogul explanation.

All this is to provide some perspective for my suggestion that Wikipedia’s bias is showing. Every source cited in the footnotes is from a skeptical publication or a writer with a skeptical point of view. Looking at some of the source material used, I can point to repeated errors. Donovan Webster provides us with many examples of this from suggesting the Mac [sic] Brazel was 80 miles from Roswell to reporting, “Seeking answers, he contacted Colonel “Butch” Blanchard, commander of the Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th Composite Group, located just outside of town. Blanchard was stymied. Working his way up the chain of command, he decided to contact his superior, General Roger W. Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas.”

Although it is unclear who the “he” is, the information was relayed to Jesse Marcel and not Colonel William Butch Blanchard. It was Marcel who was stymied and accompanied Brazel back to the ranch with Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Counterintelligence Corps. They traveled out to the ranch. Marcel was not accompanied by Sheriff Wilcox.

Webster also wrote, “On June 21, Navy Seaman Harold Dahl claimed to have seen six unidentified flying objects in the sky near Maury Island in Washington state’s Puget Sound. The next morning, Dahl said he was sought out and debriefed by ‘men in black.’”

I’m not sure why Webster brought this in because it has nothing to do with the Roswell case and it is filled with more inaccuracies than his Roswell information. Harold Dahl was not a Navy seaman but operated a salvage boat. His report was called the dirtiest hoax in UFO history by Captain Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book.

But I digress.

And Webster also wrote, “By early July 1947, Brazel had heard tales of flying saucers in the Pacific Northwest. These sightings spurred him to show his discovery to the authorities, but just one day after the Air Force announced it had come into possession of a flying saucer, Roswell’s morning newspaper debunked the story.”

Except Brazel lived in isolation on the ranch without radio or electricity. He hadn’t heard about the flying saucers and was not “spurred” to show his discovery to authorities by those stories. He was spurred to take samples of the debris to Roswell because he wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess in one of the pastures. His son, Bill Brazel told me that. Brazel’s neighbors and Tommy Tyree also said that.

Bill Brazel (on the left) with Don Schmitt on the debris field near Corona, NM.
Photo by Kevin Randle

The point here is that the story by Webster was not very accurate and I have to wonder why the Smithsonian Magazine, which printed it, didn’t bother to fact check it.

It is also clear that one of Webster’s sources was the July 9, 1947, story in the Roswell Daily Record, “Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He told about it.” I mention this because a big deal is made about rubber sticks, tinfoil and rough paper descriptions that suggest a weather balloon. But according to the newspaper, “Brazel said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not resemble either of these.”

Brazel is quoted as saying “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Except, of course, had it been a Mogul balloon, it would have resemble those because that phantom flight was made up of off the shelf weather balloons and although it was claimed that there had been radar targets with it, according to the records and Charles Moore, there had been no radar targets on that flight.

Once again, I’m dragged away from the point and that is the bias of Wikipedia. Other sources include Kendrick Frazier, one of the leaders of a large skeptical society once known as CSICOP but later as CSI; Lieutenant James McAndrew of the Air Force team that investigated Roswell in the mid-1990s; Kathryn S. Olmsted, who reinforces the Air Force position and William J. Broad of The New York Times who has published skeptical articles about UFOs and Roswell on multiple occasions.

I must wonder why there is nothing from any of us who had interviewed the witnesses in Roswell, done the research in various archives and newspaper files, and have a different point of view. James McAndrew called me on several occasions, attempting to get me to tell him that I was only in it for the money. He refused to listen to testimony that I had gathered, listen to the tapes of those interviews with officers like Major Edwin Easley who suggested that following the extraterrestrial was not the wrong path, or those who had seen the bodies.

It is not necessary to believe that what fell at Roswell was an alien craft, but because there is controversy about it and a large body of eyewitness testimony available on both audio and video tape, not to mention documentation that eliminates Project Mogul as the culprit, you would think that the counter arguments would be addressed. I could point to a several errors in the works cited (and to be fair, there are mistakes on the other side as well), but in the interest of accuracy, shouldn’t those arguments be referenced? Doesn’t Wikipedia have an obligation to get it right?

John Stossel was so put off by the bias displayed in Wikipedia’s unreliable sources for political stories, he decided he wasn’t going to donate to them again. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would suggest that Wikipedia provide a comprehensive report on Project Mogul rather than parroting the words of the Air Force on this… And I didn’t even mention the anthropomorphic dummies dropped in the area some ten years after the crash used to explain the descriptions of alien bodies reported in 1947.

In this case, I’m not arguing that the Roswell crash was alien, but that the comprehensive information gathered from those who were on the scene in 1947 were simply ignored. For a detailed analysis of the Mogul explanation, may I suggest Roswell in the 21^st Century. It contains a great deal of information not mentioned here including footnotes on the sources.

(Author’s Note: This was supposed to be much shorter but I wanted to make the point that this particular entry was biased and does not provide an accurate picture of what happened at Roswell.)