The New Jesse Marcel Interview

Periodically, I’m asked if there is anything new to be found about the Roswell crash. I believe that all the first-hand witnesses to those events in July 1947 have died. The last first-hand witness I interviewed was Stanley Muelling on January 18, 2012 when he was 87 years old.

He made it clear that he had been told to never talk about what he had seen. He said, “If I did, I already forgot about it. I’m supposed to forget.”

At that point, meaning in 2012, we realized that there were very few left who would have been in Roswell at the right time. Although today Muelling would be 100, it is certainly possible for him to still be alive, but I know of no one still alive who could provide a first-hand account that would add to our basic knowledge of the case.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other means of gathering first-hand testimony. Just this week, we learned from David Marler at the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque that Lee Speigel had interviewed Jesse Marcel, Sr. about Roswell in the early 1980s. That interview was recorded and is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC3Ln3-tyds

He asked Marcel about the beginnings of the tale and Marcel provided us the details of how he learned about the crash site and his meeting with Mack Brazel. Marcel gathered Sheridan Cavitt to follow Brazel back to the ranch. This is slightly interesting because Bessie Brazel Schreiber who had talked about accompanying her father into Roswell to report what he had found isn’t mentioned. Bill Brazel has disputed Bessie’s claim and here is Marcel, talking about following Brazel to the ranch, stopping at what he called a shack where the ate beans and rice but no mention of Bessie Brazel being there. That takes her out of the picture and her claims that it was a huge balloon, are negated. I mention this so we don’t get bogged down in a discussion about her role in this and point out that she later repudiated her claim that she was there.

The Debris Field. Brazel took Don Schmitt and me to the top
of the rise and pointed down. You can see that a gouge
should have been visible to Marcel.

And listening to this, I think that Marcel has gotten the timeline wrong. He told Speigel, “And by the time I got back home, my wife, is what happened to you? There’s been a bunch of news reporters out here wanting a picture of you and I said, ‘For what.’’’

There would have been no reporters interested in Jesse Marcel on July 7 when he returned from the debris field. The only people who knew what had been found were Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt. Naturally, when Cavitt returned, he would have notified his superior in Albuquerque since Cavitt’s chain of command was different than Marcel’s. It is probable that Cavitt, out of courtesy, would have told Blanchard, but there was no requirement for that. Cavitt might just have waited for Marcel to return to tell Blanchard about the crash.

The point is, that the press release wasn’t issued until the afternoon of July 8, at which time the reporters would have learned about Marcel. At that point they certainly could have arrived at his house to ask questions. Marcel was in Fort Worth at the time and wouldn’t return until July 9.

Major Jesse Marcel with the balloon debris in 
General Ramey's office in Fort Worth.

   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

In this interview, Marcel reconfirms the size of the debris field being ¾ of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. He suggested there was quite a bit of metallic debris. He talked about filling the jeep carry all with debris and that he, Marcel, filled his Buick as well. He said there was quite a lot of it left behind. The real point here is that a Mogul array, would not have filled the jeep carry all. And, since it is clear from the testimony of Charles Moore, an engineer with the balloon project in Alamogordo, that Flight #4, the culprit in this, did not have rawin targets. The remains of the balloon array would have fit into the Marcel’s car trunk. These facts rule out Mogul.

Marcel said that he sent Cavitt back to the base with a truckload of debris and that he, Marcel, stayed on quite a bit. He then drove home, arriving about eight that evening.

There is one point that I’m sure the skeptics will seize on, if they are paying attention. Asked about when he was getting curious about flying saucers, Marcel said:

On thing I wanted to explore, I wanted to find out if it was an object that hit the ground. And obviously it was not because no scar on the ground anywhere. Something obviously exploded in the air and fragments scattered all over the place… Well, this is what happened. I scoured the ground. I looked all over the place to see if I could see any scare one the ground, if something had fallen our of the sky and hit the ground. But that was not in evidence at all. It was obviously something that exploded while in flight and scattered fragments on the ground as it traveled.

This is in direct conflict with what Bill Brazel told both Don Schmitt and me, as we stood on the debris field. Brazel said it was about five hundred yards long and about ten feet wide at its widest. He said that it took about two years before is was completely grassed over.

Bill Brazel on the Debris Field with Don Schmitt.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

We also interviewed Bud Payne a retired judge who escorted us to the debris field in the early 1990s. Payne pointed to the same areas as had Bill Brazel, telling us about a gouge in the ground.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who flew over the area in the months that followed mentioned two crash sites. He was referring to the debris field near Corona, and another site closer to Roswell. He mentioned seeing vehicle tracks in the area and a gouge, confirming what Brazel had told others several months earlier.

This is something of a conundrum. According to Brazel, the gouge was obvious, but Marcel doesn’t mention it. He talks about the size of the debris field and says the object exploded in the air. Don, Tom Carey and I have all stood on the raised ground at the beginning of the debris field and from that vantage point, we can see to the point that Brazel indicated was the end of the gouge. I have no idea why Marcel said that he didn’t see it.

There are many other gems in the Speigel interview. He asked Marcel about any personal UFO sightings. Marcel talked about seeing a strange formation of lights prior to the events of July 1947. According to Marcel, he had been called by the provost marshal and told to hurry out to the base. Marcel told Speigel, that this was something that he had never mentioned to anyone.

Marcel said, “And while going out there as fast as my car could run, I saw some lights in the sky, but it was a defined formation. It is a perfect “V” formation.”

He said that the formation was visible from overhead to the horizon, and suggested the formation was moving faster than any aircraft in the military inventory of 1947.

He did mention it to Major Edwin Easley who was the provost marshal at the time. Easley said that some of the boys over here saw that too.

Marcel said, “What it was, I still don’t know.”

One of the other criticisms of the Marcel testimony was his suggestion that he didn’t know what it was but he was sure that while it came to Earth, it was not from Earth. Skeptics wondered how he made this leap because, in 1947, there were tales of spaceships in the Buck Rogers’ comic strip and Flash Gordon was battling Ming the Merciless, but no real suggestion of alien visitation.

An interesting point, but Brazel’s arrival in Roswell was about two weeks after Kenneth Arnold made his sighting. Newspapers of the time were filled with stories about other flying saucer reports, not to mention the Foo Fighters of World War II and the Ghost Rockets seen over Scandinavia in 1946. Marcel, as the intelligence officer would have been aware of all these things so that when he was confronted with metallic debris that was so foreign to him, he recognized none of it and when he saw the size of the debris field, the conclusion that it was something off world wasn’t that radical. Speculations in the newspapers of the time ran the gambit from spots before the eyes, war hysteria, outright hoxes to creatures from Mars and Venus. Marcel didn’t grab the idea out of thin air; it was floating right there in front of him

There are additional questions that need answers in this newly retrieved interview. There are other points that seem to be contradictory. All this must be examined with an unbiased and dispassionate eye. And we need to put it into the context of the time, remembering that some memories fade and others are modified when new information is encountered. Sometimes the witnesses don’t lie, but are telling the truth as they remember it. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes they just want their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

If Marcel was a stand-alone witness on the Roswell crash, we would be right rejecting all that he says as delusion or confabulation. But every member of Colonel Blanchard’s staff we interviewed, with one exception, suggested the extraterrestrial as the ultimate solution. And there were dozens of others who had a small piece of the pie that when added to other pieces suggests something other than a weather balloon. 

TheSneezingMonkey Fails in Debunking Roswell

I am growing very tired of the Internet and the number of people who use it to expose their ignorance. Please note the term ignorance. I am granting them the intelligence to realize their mistakes when speaking about UFOs. When they claim a deep dive, it seems to be into the shallow end of the pool, and I realize my task is greater than I thought.

Let’s talk about TheSneezingMonkey and his latest rant about some things Ufological. It is clear to me, that he just doesn’t bother with the deep dive research he claimed which, in the world today and the Internet, is much simpler than it was even a decade ago. The answers are out there, if you’re smart enough to find them.

Take the analysis by TheSneezingMonkey when he is talking about the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. He grabbed several explanations but he talked about the Flying Wing, suggesting that it might be what Arnold had seen. He did question if there would have been several of them flying in formation.  

He was talking about the YB-35 Flying Wing which did exist at the time. Several of them were being tested at Muroc Army Air Field (later Edwards Air Force Base). What he didn’t find, and what I published more than two decades ago, is that in June 1947, all of them were grounded.

Here’s what I know about that. The YB-35, a full-scale Flying Wing, first flew on June 25, 1946 from Muroc AAF. On September 11, 1946, the YB-35, suffering from gear box and propeller problems was grounded. A full-scale flying program would not resume until February 1948. There were test flights made on June 26, 1947 (two days after the Arnold sighting) but the single aircraft did not leave Southern California. The Flying Wing simply was not available in the numbers or location to be seen by Arnold. It really has no place in this discussion in the world today.

Arnold's original drawing to the Army. It looks nothing like the Flying Wing,
which is probably a better way to eliminated that aircraft as the source

But what really set the tone here was a comment made to the YouTube channel by someone calling himself or herself @RUTHAN667. That comment said, “Rosswell is mostly based on Marcell story and he is proven liar, got his moment of fame, lied to be pilot, lied about that he shoot down 5 planes.. Whole family, started finding diaries and milked story dry.. Later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies.. Brasel imprisonning. Corso cashed on it too.”

Well, it’s not Rosswell but Roswell and it’s not Marcell but Marcel. From there we move into territory that isn’t as black and white as it seems. While I wouldn’t call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar, the problem is that he made some claims that were less than truthful. He didn’t say he was a pilot, but had flown as a pilot while serving in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces during World War II.

True, I’m splitting a fine hair here, and it seems unlikely that an officer who is not rated would accumulate that much flight time. I can envision him getting some stick time but not 3000 hours. I can say that I flew as a door gunner in Vietnam but I was not rated in that position. I was a helicopter pilot and later an aircraft commander and accumulated just under 2000 hours during that portion of my career. I’m willing to give him a pass on that particular claim because of the way things worked in aviation units. Clearly, Marcel did participate in combat missions during his tour in the Pacific and was awarded two air medals for that.

Kevin Randle in Vietnam in 1969

However, as we break this down, Marcel apparently told Bob Pratt that he, Marcel, had five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft. I got Marcel’s records and the Unit Histories from the units in which he served. There is no indication that he shot down any enemy aircraft. The Army Air Forces kept records of the majority of those who downed enemy aircraft and Marcel’s name does not appear on the list. And yes, that list includes the names of the men who shot down enemy aircraft in all theaters of the war, and those flying as gunners but not pilots. The enlisted man with the most recorded kills shot down 19 enemy planes, but he was not a pilot. I believe it was Richard Bong who holds the American record with 40. Pappy Boyington, I believe shot down 28 (though I think he was only credited with 26).

At any rate, Marcel doesn’t get a pass on this. There is simply no evidence to support his claim of five air medals (though I have the citations for the two he did receive).

There are other things that he said that we can’t verify. His testimony is problematic. I will note, however, where we have additional witnesses and documentation, then what he said was probably accurate. He did travel to the Brazel (Foster) ranch and he did gather up metallic debris. He did escort that material to Fort Worth.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the Debris Field, 1989.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The whole Marcel family did not begin to find diaries. In going through the papers and files handed down from Jesse Marcel, Sr. to his son and then to the grandchildren in 2013, they did find a “Memorandum Book,” which the Army passed out by the thousands. I have two of them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Marcel was the author of the notations and even if he was, there is nothing in that diary to confirm the events of July 1947. The criticism about finding diaries is inaccurate.

The idea that “later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies…” is not an accurate picture either. The trouble was that we had Bill Brazil, the son of the man who found the debris field, showing us where he had picked up some of the strange debris. It is located southeast of Corona, New Mexico. We, that is Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I were able to find witnesses to that field other than just Marcel (and these include Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer who accompanied Marcel out to the field). Bill Brazel took Don and me to the debris field. He parked his truck and said that this was where he had found some of that debris. Others, such as Loretta Proctor and Bud Payne pointed to the same location.

However, during our investigation, we interviewed several officers and senior NCOs who talked about a much shorter trip to the crash site. While it took three hours or more to arrive at the debris field, they talked about a short trip of under an hour. These included Bill Rickett and Chester Barton. Brigadier General Arthur Exon told us about two sites, oriented northwest to southeast that he had flown over in the weeks that followed. Eventually, witnesses to that second site, where bodies were located, were found.

Don Schmitt and me on the Impact Site, 2023. Site was identified by
several eyewitnesses.

The stories were not invented but recovered through careful investigation and corroboration. It is established that there were two sites and we, Don, Tom and I invented nothing. We just went where the testimonies took us and reported accurately what others said. In many cases, it took long contact with the witnesses for them to trust us with the tale, and then, often, only if we didn’t reveal who they were.

Mack Brazel, the man who started this by taking samples of the metallic debris to  Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox, was held at the Roswell Army Air Field. The base Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, told me Brazel had been held in the guest house, which not the same as being in the stockade, but then, if you’re not allowed to leave, what really, is the difference?

We, Don, Tom and I talked to neighbors of Mack, such as Marian Strickland, who told us he complained about being held on the base. Neighbor Floyd Proctor told researchers that he’d seen Mack in Roswell in the company of several Army officers. That suggests that the story about his being held at the base is true even if the cell didn’t have bars... just guards watching.

So, we see that @RUTHAN667’s rant contains a single fact about Marcel embellishing his resume, which really is lying no matter how I attempt to sugarcoat it. And there are other things that Marcel said that weren’t true. If Marcel was the single witness to this, we could certainly dismiss it as a tale invented by him. But, every member of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff that we interviewed, with a single exception, verified parts of the story. When we expanded the search to other members of the 509^th Bomb Group, we found many officers and enlisted men who were involved in bits and pieces of the story. They might have seen only some of the metal recovered, or were involved in security at various sites, and even a few who did mention the bodies, the story is not stand alone. Many of them did not approach us. We found them and asked questions about those events.

I’ll note here that Major Easley, told me that the craft was extraterrestrial. Well, it was a little different than that. I asked him if we were following the right path. He asked what I meant by that and I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley in 1947. Photo courtesy
of the Roswell Army Air Field Yearbook.

There is so much more that could be said here. You want to talk about mistakes we made. Sure. We believed that Frank Kaufmann was telling the truth until we found evidence that he wasn’t. We, again Don, Mark Rodeghier, Mark Chesney and I exposed those lies in an issue of International UFO Reporter.

But the only fact that @RUTHAN667 got right was that Marcel claimed five aerial victories and had none. Everything else is misinterpretation of the facts or ignoring body of evidence that has been accumulated, vetted, repaired and reported by us. I would suggest reading Roswell in the 21^st Century and Understanding Roswell that I wrote and Tom Carey and Don Schmitt’s Witness to Roswell to get a better interpretation of the situation. And if you want the other side, I’d recommend Karl Pflock’s Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. I’d especially recommend you read the affidavit section of his book. These affidavits were gathered by several of us over many weeks.

I suggest that you, @RUTHAN667, do a little more research before you shoot your mouth off (and learn to spell) and TheSneezingMonkey, if you’re going to be skeptical and claim a deep dive, do a great deal more research.

If the mood moves me, I think next time I’ll attack the Washington National sightings. I interviewed two of the officers who were in the radar room during some of those sightings, and have transcripts of interviews with one of the fighter pilots who talked about the lights surrounding him during an attempted intercept.

And don’t even get me started on the Pascagoula abduction. Yes, I talked to both Hickson and Parker and TheSneezingMonkey wasn’t even close on his ridiculous analysis. 

True Photos of the Roswell crash site (Taken much later than 1947)

The Internet has been circling pictures that are supposed to be from the Roswell UFO crash site. (Okay, I know it is a human behind in and not the Internet). There are very few people who have been on both sites. Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and me are among that rather small group. This means that I can say, with little fear of contradiction, those pictures are not from the Roswell site. The terrain is wrong.

Both real sites are more open. This is high desert so that isn’t a lot of sand as many people believe. I’m not sure where those pictures were taken, but certainly not on either the debris field or the impact site.

Following are pictures taken on both sites… Long after the events of 1947. I took some of them myself, and others, using my camera took some of them. I mention that only because I’m in some of the pictures.

Tom Carey, center, on the Debris Field as identified by
by Bill Brazel in the early 1990s.

Don Schmitt on the right, Tim Saunders, center and me 
on the other end, standing on the Impact Site. This
gives a somewhat limited view of the site.

Don and me on the Impact Site. You can see the  open
nature of the ground behind us.

You can see for yourselves the wide-open nature of those areas. For those interested, they are either on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land or private property.

As I say, there is so much circulating on the Internet that is inaccurate, I thought I should correct that one small segment. 

Restoring Public Trust through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection - An Analysis

 Well, that was a colossal waste of time. There was nothing there that we haven’t seen before. Oh, don’t get me wrong, a few nuggets dropped, but I don’t think many picked them up.

I’m talking about the “Restoring Public Trust through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” hearing. That long title tells us little about what we witnessed as Congressional representatives, led by Anna Paulina Luna, talked about the importance of transparency and the courage of those who had come forward to tell us tales that are basically unsupported by additional witnesses or evidence gathered through instrumentality such as radar and other sensor arrays.

Just last week, I reported on a man who appeared in the documentary Age of Disclosure. He said that he had seen non-human craft and non-human bodies. One of the representatives at this meeting, Eric Burlison was so unimpressed by this revelation that he mentioned he wasn’t interested in talking with Jay Stratton. I believed that when it as announced that first-hand witnesses would be interrogated at this hearing, we would be hearing from other first-hand sources about their encounters with those non-human aliens and description of close-up examination of those non-human craft.

After having to listen to the opening statements by Luna and Representative Jasmine Crockett, which told us more about her political bias than it did about alien visitation, we got down to the witnesses. Not one of them talked about first-hand experience that involved those non-human aliens. They didn’t talk about seeing the bodies rumored to have been stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, or at the now closed Lowry Air Force Base near Denver. They had personal sightings or some experience in the government that dealt with whistleblowers or George Knapp, who managed to see Soviet and now Russian files on their UFO investigations.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna, committee chair.

I will note that Representative Luna was not overly impressed with the former head of AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick. She called him a documented liar and believed he dismissed all evidence that might suggest that UFOs were nothing more than Earth-based technology or misidentifications without proper investigation. In other arenas she said that he blocked information and discredited witnesses. She was responding to Kirkpatrick’s claim calling the hearings a parade of “charlatans and grifters.” This suggested a somewhat open hostility by Kirkpatrick to the idea of alien visitation which was the problem with Project Blue Book until it was closed in 1969. That is, a long list of those in charge of Blue Book rejected the idea of alien visitation out of hand with no regard to any evidence presented to the contrary.

The hearing room with the witnesses standing to take their oath.

At this latest hearing, there was Jeff Nuccetelli, who is an Air Force veteran who had a role in the investigation of a mass UFO sightings at Vandenberg AFB beginning in 2003. Yes, he saw a strange craft and he spoke with the witnesses and gathered evidence of the sightings there. His sighting wasn’t particularly impressive but it was a first-hand account.

Alexandro Wiggins, a former Navy Chief Petty Officer, talked about his sighting on the USS Jackson in 2023, that involved all sorts of instrumentality. He saw four glowing objects come out of the ocean and take off into the sky without breaking formation. A somewhat better documented case but didn’t involve a close-up view of alien bodies or those craft that shot out of the ocean.

Dylan Borland, who tells us about harassment by government officials, including the loss of his job as a Geospatial Intelligence Analyst for the Air Force. That was a result of his sighting of glowing triangle that took off from Langley AFB. Although there were no other witnesses because of the late hour, the close approach of the UFO caused his cell phone to fail. After he reported his sighting, his life and career took a dramatic turn. He lost his job and can’t find another in his field of expertise. For those paying attention, apparently his unemployment benefits are going to expire in just a few weeks.

And then there was Joe Spielberger, who was described as the Senior Policy Counsel with the Project On Government Oversight, known as POGO. He wasn’t there to talk about a first-hand UFO sighting or an observation of those rumored alien bodies, but to talk about whistleblowers and the way the government operates when dealing with them. If he had any first-hand knowledge of UFOs (like Representative Burkett, I don’t like UAP) he never mentioned it.

Here’s where the hearing, at least for me, slipped off the rails. Not one of the witnesses had any first-hand knowledge of alien creatures. Those who had seen craft, were talking about watching something anomalous in the atmosphere and not the remains of a wrecked, well, flying saucer. They were witnesses to their own sightings, often without the benefit, for the most part, of corroborating witnesses or electronic data.

It was George Knapp’s talk of his investigations in Russia that caught my attention. I’m not sure if others caught it, but he talked of a Russian colonel who told him about an intrusion at a Russian missile base that knocked out the base’s ability to respond, if necessary, to an attack by another nation. I found this interesting because of the 1967 intrusion on one of the missile fields controlled by Malmstrom Air Force Base. A large glowing disc seemed to knockout one and possibly two flights of missiles. According to the theory of the time, an outside force taking the missiles off-line is something that was supposed to be impossible. Our Air Force claimed that it was some sort of technical glitch such as an EMP, but that would have taken out more than just the missiles. Knapp did mention that the Russians didn’t spring the EMP excuse on him as the source of the problem. It was something off-world.

George Knapp talking about a Russian 
missile site intrusion.

For those might be interested in more about the Malmstrom Air Force Base intrusion, see:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/12/coast-to-coast-belt-montana-ufo-sighting.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2025/06/aaro-uap-wall-street-journal-somewhat.html

There is some duplication of information in these two postings, but they provide a good analysis of those sightings and the activity around Belt, Montana at the time. There are other links embedded in those articles.

The other point is that each of the men telling their whistleblower tales, talked about harassment by government officials, careers that were derailed, loss of security clearances and therefore income, and now having reputations that suggest they are less than reliable keeping them from finding other work.

Okay, much of that was somewhat interesting, but we’ve heard all this before by others. We have heard impressive first-hand reports of UFOs and we have heard about the suppression of the information. Just watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the air traffic controllers ask the pilots of an airliner if they want to report their UFO sighting. They say, “No,” telling us that there is a price to pay for saying they have seen a UFO. I could list several pilots who have found themselves grounded after reporting UFOs and few return to the cockpit. Just ask Captain Kenju Terauchi of JAL 1628 about his experiences after reporting a UFO.

We were treated to another video was what has been called a drone flying near US Naval vessels. That drone was attacked by a hellfire missile and we see the impact but moments later, the drone, apparently undamaged flies away at highspeed. An interesting bit of video that was kept under wraps for months and tends to support the theory of alien technology. This was not the first report of an attempted intercept that failed. At one point, orders had been issued to fighter pilots to shoot down a UFO.

One frame from the video showing the UFO after it
had been hit by a hellfire missile.

Even with that video, I was disappointed because I thought we might get to learn who some of those first-hand witnesses to alien bodies might be. David Grusch talked about them months ago but we still don’t know who they are. (I was going to say that we have no clue, but I believe I do have clues about who they are.) You can see my long list of Grusch’s sources here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/04/david-grusch-and-his-ufo-crashes.html

I will note one other thing. I reported last week on Coast-to-Coast AM that Eric Burlison was unimpressed with Jay Stratton, who claimed to have seen non-human bodies. Burlison made a couple of comments that suggested he was pretending to have an open mind on the subject but it was clear to me he was on the far side of the fence. Apparently, he didn’t want someone who would claim to have seen non-human bodies to testify in front of a congressional committee. That might be a reason that the Roswell case was ignored.

And I can’t close this rather limited and quick analysis without making one other comment. “Roswell.” Here is the case that would break this all wide open. Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I have spoken with many first-hand witnesses to the alien nature of the crash, we have gathered some interesting written evidence, and have statements from the children of the witnesses, including Jesse Marcel, Jr., whose father was the Air Intelligence Officer at the Roswell Army Air Field during those days in early July 1947. That’s not to mention that Marcel had talks with his father about what he had seen. Jesse Jr. also handled some of that strange metallic debris collected by his father. Yes, those witnesses have passed, but we have written and audio and videotaped interviews with those claiming first-hand knowledge of non-human entities and craft.

My take away from this hearing was that nothing has changed. Here we are, years down the road, and while Congress is expressing an interest in the topic, they have had yet to get to the heart of the matter. Sightings by sincere witnesses who have nothing other than their tales of seeing the unusual craft. Stories of government harassment to keep them quiet and a still somewhat skeptical press that refuses to spend any time digging for more information… Sorry, George, I don’t include you in with those who wink at the tales of alien visitation. You have put in the work.

The point is, we are now decades down this road and we are doing the same thing we have done before. We even had a “scientific” study of UFOs by scientists at the University of Colorado, who fifty years ago told us there was nothing to UFO sightings and it was a waste of time and money to continue the investigations. This was accepted as gospel. This latest round of interest in UFOs proves that their conclusions were wrong.

How long will this charade last? Are we really on the road to Disclosure, or are we being set up for another eventually conclusion there is nothing alien about UFO sightings? We can then spend another fifty years wondering about the truth because we don’t have it yet.

Roswell and the Dog that Didn't Bark

Here’s an interesting revelation. I was watching the recent Unsolved Mysteries report on the Roswell case and Colonel Richard Weaver said something that caught my attention. He was talking about having reviewed a million documents and files and miles of microfilm during his review of the Roswell case. The implication is that they, meaning he and his team, had made a Herculean effort to find evidence and failed do it. His conclusion, based on his investigation, was the correct conclusion but it wasn’t accurate.

Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I had done the same thing, and I could name a couple of dozen others who had followed leads, researched specific aspects of the Roswell case and in the end, there was limited documentation mainly in the form of newspaper stories and the testimony of hundreds of people who had first or second-hand observations. In other words, the documentation was limited, the testimonies were called anecdotal, and we all had searched for documentation and other testimony for nearly forty years for it.

And then I had a thought. I had made a comprehensive search for mention of Roswell and documents relating to it in what could be considered the microcosm of Weaver’s world and search, of Project Blue Book. Although it had officially begun as Project Sign in January 1948, its records begin earlier, even with sightings that pre-dated the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. In fact, the earliest dated case in the Blue Book files is from June 2. When you look at the record of sightings for July 1947, they cover a single-spaced page. The military was investigating what was happening during the summer that preceded the creation of the official investigation in 1948.

When the Army announced, on July 8, 1947, that they had found a flying saucer, it was international news. I will say that nearly every newspaper in the United States covered the story in some form, beginning with the early announcement on the afternoon of July 8 and ending the next day when Brigadier General Roger Ramey announced it was just a weather balloon. Pictures of Ramey, his chief of staff, Colonel Thomas Dubose, and Major Jesse Marcel, holding pieces of the weather balloon, were printed in the newspapers the next day.

BG Roger Ramey and COL Thomas Dubose with
the balloon wreckage that served as a
cover for the real wreckage.

There are stories of crashed UFOs in the Blue Book files in July 1947. The solutions, all legitimate, ranged from advertising gimmicks to small saucers created to fool friends. A report, from Shreveport, Louisiana, even came to the attention of then FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. That caused us a great deal of aggravation as we tried to reconcile a note written on an FBI document by Hoover with that report. It had nothing to do with the Roswell case. The file for that case, dated July 7, 1947, is quite thick. And no, I believe the military was correct in labeling it a hoax.

The point here is that by July 8, the military was gathering sighting reports and there are 47 cases for the month in what are now the Blue Book files. There are alleged crashes, files that are labeled as “Folders,” because of the thickness of the file, and many in which there is a notation for a report but labeled as “case missing.”

What I noticed is several crash reports, comprehensive investigations, and an apparent real effort to determine what was going on. All this happening with the “high profile” cases that were extensively investigated and not a single file dedicated to the Roswell case. Here was the story that probably generated some of the highest interest around the world and there is no file on it. The only reference I can find in the Blue Book files is the third paragraph of a four-paragraph story that mentions, in passing, that the officers at Roswell had received a “blistering rebuke” for their claim they had a flying disk.

Colonel Weaver had access to a great deal more official information than any of the civilian researchers and said that he found nothing. I say, I looked through the Blue Book files, which I’m sure were reviewed by Weaver’s team, and they found nothing there either. It made me wonder why a great deal of effort was expended investigating many reports from July 1947, but there is no reference to what could be called the most important story from July 1947. A single mention in a newspaper clipping buried in another Blue Book file but nothing that referenced Roswell specifically.

Doesn’t my search, of the Blue Book files, mirror the research done in the 1990s by the Air Force? There should have been a rather thick file on the Roswell case that included not only newspaper clippings, but the pictures of three of the principals in that case. True, the balloon explanation was floated (pun intended) within about three hours of the initial story, but it was a story of international interest. Walter Haut, the Public Information Officer in Roswell at the time, told me that he received telephone calls from around the world.

Walter Haut being interviewed.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

But there is nothing in the files except that one paragraph in a newspaper clipping. I did ask Haut about that blistering rebuke and he told me that it never happened. His words were something to the effect that if he’d been called by the Pentagon and chewed out, he would remember it.

Again, my point is that a search of the Blue Book files, which were dedicated to gathering UFO information, has nothing about Roswell. It was a case filled with military officers which means it was originally reported officially, but there is no file. Why the emphasis on other reports of crashes and other generic sightings but nothing on what was the biggest UFO story for two days in July? Sure, had it been included in Blue Book, it would have been labeled as a balloon, but that isn’t there. Nothing…

Just as Colonel Weaver found with his inside sources, high-level security clearance and his orders that came, virtually, from the Secretary of the Air Force, no documents relating to Roswell, I found nothing in the declassified Blue Book files. It should have been there, but it was not.

One final comment about all this. For those who would argue that the secrecy was to protect Project Mogul, I point to the newspapers, especially the Alamogordo News, on July 10. There was a long article about the balloon project being carried out at the Alamogordo Army Air Field. Pictures showed a Mogul array (and no, they didn’t call it a Mogul array in the article), explained what they were doing and what it all meant. Charles Moore, one of those working on the project told me that he had bought the ladder that was featured in one of the pictures.

Alamogordo News with pictures of a Constant Level Balloon launch, which
is a Project Mogul balloon launch published on July 10, 1947.

This means, of course, that what was happening in Alamogordo was not highly classified. The balloon launches were conducted by the civilians from the University of New York attempting to create what they called a Constant Level Balloon, meaning it would remain at a certain altitude. Although offered as the solution in 1947, it did not explain what had been found. I have already, many times, explained this about the Mogul solution, the one that the Air Force used to solve the mystery of what fell decades after the fact.

I found Colonel Weaver’s comment on the Unsolved Mysteries show quite telling. There should have been specific documentation that lead to the constant level balloons but not back to Project Mogul. The search would have ended with the balloons from Alamogordo. By the mid-1990s, Mogul was no longer a secret, and several UFO researchers were aware of it. We all had been talking about it for years before the Air Force came up with it as the solution for the Roswell case.

Weaver’s comment, about finding nothing is quite telling. The significant fact, as Sherlock Holmes said in the murder case he was investigating, was that the dog didn’t bark. The significance fact here is as Weaver said he found nothing about the Roswell case in all those files both classified and unclassified. This lack of results screams the problem, because there should have been something given the impact of the original news release and widespread interest in the tale. You might say that this is another example of the dog not barking. *

 

*I thought a note of explanation might be necessary for those who haven’t read the Holmes story. There was a murder committed, and Holmes was investigating. All thought it might be a stranger, but Holmes said that the watch dog didn’t bark. It meant that the murder was someone the dog knew, so it didn’t bark.

The Bermuda Triangle Mystery, Solved -- Again

 In recent days I have come across a series of articles in various newspapers letting us know that an Australian author, Karl Kurszelnicki, has solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. He began his research in 2017 and has concluded that, based on his research the incidents attributed to the Bermuda Triangle are not anomalous but simply the result of probabilities, navigational challenges, natural hazards, weather, and human error.

Well, color me surprised. I had no idea.

First, a little personal background. I was introduced to the concept of the Bermuda Triangle in a book, This Baffling World by John Godwin, published in 1968. He had a chapter entitled, “The Hoodoo Sea,” which was about the Bermuda Triangle. It wasn’t a very comprehensive analysis and incorporated shipwrecks that were nowhere near the Triangle.

In 1974, I attended a UFO conference in Denver, Colorado. Jim Lorenzen was there and he spoke about the Bermuda Triangle, noting that five Navy Avenger Torpedo Bombers, on a training mission and flying in formation, all disappeared at once. His question was how do five aircraft, flying in formation, just disappear without a trace. (Hint: Based on the official documentation, they did it on order from the flight leader.) And a rescue aircraft, sent out in search of those torpedo planes, also disappeared, without a trace. (It was seen to explode not long after take-off.)

In fact, I blogged about the idea that the Bermuda Triangle was solved years ago. You can read it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-bermuda-triangle-new-programming.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/06/editorial-comment.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-bermuda-triangle-flight-19-and-josh.html

I had always thought the best way to defeat the skeptical arguments, was to read their arguments and analyze their research. That’s why I picked up a copy of Lawrence David Kusche’s The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved published in October 1975. That book answered the questions about those disappearances and provided the source material. Some of those original sources explained what exactly what had happened, but later writers simply repeated what others had written without following all the information to its original source. Kusche did that and came up with the answers and this is why I sometimes chase footnotes.

I was in a unique position to answer one of the Triangle disappearances. I was the group intelligence officer of the 928^th Tactical Airlift Group, which was a subordinate unit to the 440^th Tactical Airlift Wing, which was based in Milwaukee. In June 1965, a C-119 from the 440^th disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and is listed in those various books and articles about the Triangle. I covered this in depth several years ago. You can read it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2006/09/disappearing-aircraft-part-3-bermuda.html

Here’s the point. The answers to the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle have been around for decades. I covered some of it myself with my connections to the 440^th. As I noted, while I was attending a staff conference in Milwaukee, they even showed me parts of the recovered wreckage. For some reason I didn’t bother to photograph the wreckage but some of it was clearly labeled with the aircraft number. It didn’t disappear without a trace. It crashed into the ocean.

C-119 cargo plane like that crashed in the Bermuda Trianglw.
Picture courtesy 440th Tactical Airlift Wing.

Too often, reporters simply don’t have time to do the proper research with daily deadlines pressing them for the constantly shifting stories. Book authors do have the time, but their personal bias often get in the way. I communicated with Charles Berlitz about his book about the Bermuda Triangle. It was clear from his response that he wasn’t interested in answers. He was interested in spreading the mystery with half-baked research and ignored fact.

I had a confrontation with an author about a book he’d published on another topic. I noted some of the errors in the books and provided the sources for verification. He wasn’t overly interested, saying, “I have a book to protect.”

Peter Robbins, on the other hand, learned the truth about his book written in collaboration with Larry Warren, Left at East Gate, announced that his book was filled with inaccurate information, largely supplied by a single, unreliable source. On learning the truth, and to his credit, Peter provided a retraction for the book and gave the reasons for it. You can read about that here:

http://www.kgraradio.com/peter-robbins-deception-a-review-and-critical-analysis-of-the-book-encounter-in-rendlesham-forest/

Peter Robbins at a MUFON Symposium.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The real take away here is that another author, Kurszelnicki, made an independent study of the Triangle and came to the same conclusions that many of us did decades ago and yet we are still bombarded with TV documentaries suggesting there is something to this “mystery.”

A final note on this. A few years back, after one of those Triangle documentaries, I talked with some of the men in Florida who have doing in depth research on that very subject. What they told me is quite interesting and I did interview them on the A Different Perspective radio show/podcast. You can listen to it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Flight+19#google_vignette

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/05/flight-19-last-post-probably.html

I find nothing mysterious about the alleged Bermuda Triangle. I do watch out for material about it because I hope they find the five Navy aircraft at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, so that we can put that mystery to rest. That should mark the end of the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle but I fear until that happens, we are going to have more half-baked theories about this manufactured mystery.

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.