The Observer Anti-Roswell Article: A Brief Response

 The Observer published an article by Bernie O’Connor suggesting that the story of an alien event in Roswell is a hoax based on the recovery of a Project Mogul balloon. I don’t know why it is so difficult for those on the skeptical side of the fence to realize that the Mogul explanation doesn’t work. Simply put, Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, was cancelled. That is based on the documentation available.

For those interested in the original article, I believe the current issue of The Observer can be seen here:

https://theobservermagazine.substack.com/about?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In the following rebuttal to this claim, and the interview that O’Connor conducted with Colonel Walter Klinikowski which is the source for his report, I provide some additional commentary. As most of you know, I have worked on the Roswell UFO crash story for about thirty years, I thought some of my insights might be helpful in understanding this latest piece. To show that I have been around for a long time, I’ll tell you the Delta pilot reference is Kent Jeffrey, who wrote the Roswell Initiative and later repudiated it. I covered this in an entry in The Roswell Encyclopedia that was published in 2000. Kent’s MUFON article, abbreviated and published with his permission is included in that book.

Kent Jeffrey, Tom Carey and Kent's father in New Mexico. 
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The reason that I, and others did not bother with Colonel Klinikowski, is his statement that he wasn’t in Roswell at the time of the event, though he was assigned to the base at time. According to the base telephone directory, he was assigned to Operations. In July 1947, the Operations Officer was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Briley, who made comments that contradict Klinikowski. But, like Klinikowski, he didn’t see anything himself, but in talking with others concluded that something important had happened. Briley told me that the story of Blanchard’s leave was a cover story so he could go to the crash site without reporters wondering where he had gone. Blanchard would not have gone to the site for what amounted to a weather balloon and common radar reflector.

Klinikowski clearly supported the Project Mogul theory, telling us that the project was highly classified, but the truth is, the ultimate purpose was classified, but the experiments in Alamogordo were not. Pictures of one of the arrays appeared in the Alamogordo News on July 10, 1947. Charles Moore, who worked on the New York University balloon project there told me that he had purchased the step ladder that appears in one of the pictures, linking it to what he insisted on calling the New York University balloon project rather than Project Mogul.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data. Photo by
Kevin Randle.

The ladder to which Moore referred. Picture from the
Alamogordo News, July 10, 1947.

Here’s one of those facts that gets overlooked. Dr. Albert Crary, who was the leader of the balloon project, used the name Mogul at least three times in his unclassified journal and diary notes, proving that they knew about Mogul. Again, the ultimate purpose was not known, but the name, Mogul, was. I’ll note that in the book, Roswell in the 21^st Century, there is a long appendix that covers the whole Mogul tale.

Thanks to Colonel Richard Weaver, who ran the Air Force investigation about Roswell in the 1990s, we have copies of the data collected by Crary’s experiments in New Mexico. The problem here is that Mogul balloon flight in question, No. 4 was not flown. According to the documentation, it was to be launched on June 4, 1947, but was cancelled because of clouds. Charles Moore told me that the next flight, No. 5, was configured exactly like No. 4, and Flight No.5 had no radar targets, an important point. Moore would later claim that they received data from Flight No. 4, but there is nothing recorded for it. They did release a cluster of balloons later in the day, on June 4, that was not a Mogul flight and never strayed from the range.

In his article, Bernie O’Connor wrote: “I [meaning Klinikowski] wasn't even in Roswell when it happened and when I got back to town there was some mention of it. The debris landed on my cousin by marriage's ranch and his name is Dewey Stoke and he never saw this stuff because it was picked up by the Air Force people from the base of Roswell and they took the stuff and shipped it off to Wright Patterson Air Force Base which was the home of what was then called the Air Technical Intelligence Center.”

But here’s part of the problem. The debris landed on a ranch owned by the Fosters and Mack Brazel recovered some of it. He took it to the Chaves County Sheriff (Roswell) and George Wilcox called out to the air base. Jesse Marcel, Sr., responded and did not recognize it as balloon debris though he was familiar with weather balloons and radar targets. Some of that early debris was sent on to Fort Worth Army Air Field where Colonel (later brigadier general) Thomas DuBose had it sent on to Washington, D.C. Dewey Stoke never saw the stuff, so I must ask, “What is his purpose in this tale?”

Bud Payne, who was a New Mexico judge, told Don Schmitt and me, where he had seen the field of metallic debris. It was on the ranch managed by Mack Brazel, and he put us on the same bit of ground where Bill Brazel found some of the metallic debris days and weeks later.

We do have testimony from Bill Brazel who handled debris, and his description of a gouge in the terrain. He provided descriptions that vaguely match some modern material such as fiber optics. Jesse Marcel, Sr. and Jesse Marcel, Jr., provided descriptions that eliminate Earth-based technology.

Bill Brazel in 1989. Photo by Kevin Randle

There are eye witnesses to both the debris field and impact site. General Arthur Exon told me and Don Schmitt that he had flown over the two sites, which would tend to rule out a Mogul flight since it would not have gouged the terrain or been scattered over two separate sites that were miles apart. All of it would have stayed clumped together.

Finally, Bernie O’Connor wrote, “The problem with Roswell, as well as with any other classic UFO cases, is the fact that one small bit of new evidence presented—the offhand comment by an authority figure, or the rediscovered testimony or official document—can upend the whole belief scenario. Humpty-Dumpty could have a great fall.”

If anyone wishes for a little bit of documentation. Major Patrick Saunders was the base adjutant in 1947. On the fly leaf of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Saunders wrote, “This is the truth and I still haven’t told anybody anything!” He signed it, “Pat.” Any yes, I verified the signature with Saunder’s son, using the flight records of the senior Saunders.

The Saunder's statement in The Truth
About the UFO Crash at Roswell.

The authority figure is Colonel Klinikowski. However, Colonel DuBose, who was responsible for sending some debris to Washington, D.C., said that the balloon material was substituted for the debris taken to Fort Worth by Marcel. Marcel said that the material in the photographs taken in General Ramey’s office was not what he had taken to Fort Worth. Brigadier General Arthur Exon provided testimony about the material arriving at Wright-Patterson in 1947, including comments about those who examined it saying they could not identify it. Do my authority figures, who were there and handled the debris trump those cited by O’Connor? Does it suggest that there is more to this story than meets the eye?

And I haven’t even mentioned Major (later Colonel) Edwin Easley, the provost marshal on the base who told me that the extraterrestrial path was the correct one to follow. I had asked him if we were on the right path. He asked, “What do you mean?” I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “Let me put it this way. It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley

Please notice here that I have quoted from members of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff who were there and made their own observations of the debris and who were on the sites of the wreck. These are statements they made to me, or to Don, or Tom Carey or that were wrote down.

Butch Blanchard told Chester Lytle that four bodies had been recovered. Given the nature of their friendship and the high-level trust by Blanchard in Lytle, this is a somewhat telling statement. It is difficult to believe that Blanchard would say that to anyone if it was not true. Art McQuiddy, who was the editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch told me that they put wreckage on an aircraft and flew it on to Fort Worth. Not exactly proof positive, but a suggestion that what was found was something more than an off-the-shelf-weather balloon and a somewhat degraded rawin radar reflector.

As can be seen, I was aware of Klinikowski through his conversations with Kent Jeffrey. He had nothing to contribute to the investigation beyond the balloon theory, one that Don Schmitt and I explored early in our investigation and rejected for lack of proof, meaning eyewitness testimony and the documentation of balloon flights that removed Mogul from the equation.

For those interested and who have read The Observer article, there is another problem. Bernie O’Connor reported that Klinikowski said, “Well with two other full colonels and a fellow named Weinbrenner (Col. George R. Weinbrenner) who was the Commander of the Foreign Technology Division and Walter Vitunac (Col. Walter Charles Vitunac) who was the former Director of Collection and then me, who was the Director of Collection.”

The suggestion that Weinbrenner was one of the top officers who did not believe in the alien explanation is repudiated here. Tony Bragalia provided additional commentary at his website. You can read it here:

https://substack.com/redirect/297ee407-8ebb-4cb0-a64b-5446b232dd65?j=eyJ1IjoiZ2ZicmIifQ.fyOy7XcsRMdZdNETog-CMWQrAzIY0u-O58q7WQBlqUU

What all this suggests is that there are far more witnesses, both first and second hand who have come down on the side of an alien event. Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I have talked with dozens of them. To me, the weight of the evidence leans toward the extraterrestrial. All known terrestrial explanations have been eliminated.

David Rudiak's Analysis Against Mogul

 

As anyone who visits here regularly knows, I am not a fan for the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell UFO crash. I have laid out the evidence on several occasions and there is a long appendix in Roswell in the 21^st Century that covers all this in depth.

The reasons begin with the documentation that suggests the culprit in all this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. Yes, I know that it should be designated as the New York University Balloon Project Flight No 4, but that’s rather unwieldy. To counter this, Charles Moore said that the flight was launched a couple hours before dawn, yet the documentation proves it was cancelled at dawn. How do you cancel a flight that has already been launched? … But I digress.

Just recently on this blog, I noted that Charles Moore had said that Flight No. 4 had been configured like Flight No. 5. I hadn’t thought of it then, but in the Air Force report on Roswell, they provided schematics of all the flights that had been flown, including No. 5. There were no rawin radar targets on Flight No. 5, and if Flight No. 4 was configured the same way, you have to wonder where the rawin target that was photographed in General Ramey’s office originated.

I mention all this because David Rudiak provided a rather lengthy comment about it to that blog posting. I thought the analysis was interesting enough to be worthy of its own position on the blog. Following, without my commentary, is David’s analysis in four parts:

Besides Cavitt, another of these old Cold Warrior guys who couldn’t tell a consistent story was B.D. “Duke” Gildenberg, who from 1951-1981 headed balloon operations at Alamogordo base (where the NM Moguls were launched), but also worked on Project Mogul back at NYU in 1947. A large history of the early balloon projects at Alamogordo was written by the base historian, Dr. David Bushnell, and published in Dec. 1958. It is mentioned that Gildenberg was interviewed twice in 1957. In fact, one of the chapters was written by him:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA323170.pdf

THE BEGINNINGS OF RESEARCH IN SPACE BIOLOGY and Biodynamics AT THE AIR FORCE MISSILE DEVELOPMENT CENTER Holloman AFB, NM.

The first chapter covers the period 1946-1952. On page 5, it says the following: “Holloman's first polyethylene research balloon was launched 3 July 1947 by a New York University research team …..” (Footnote 18)

This was Mogul Flight #7. Now check out the Footnote:

(Footnote 18, p. 9). “The FIRST research balloon flight of ANY SORT at Holloman had been slightly earlier, 5 June 1947; this involved a cluster of rubber-type balloons (interview, Mr. Gildenberg by Dr. Bushnell, 18 September 1957).”

This was the real Mogul Flight #5. Notice that this is based on information provided by Gildenberg apparently saying this was the FIRST such balloon, i.e. is the first Mogul launched from Alamogordo. Further notice there is no mention of “another” “first” such balloon flight from 4 June 1947, i.e. the modern-day Mogul Flight #4, invented out of thin air by Mogul engineer Charles Moore and Air Force counterintelligence (AFOSI) in 1994 to debunk Roswell.

But back in 1957, in an official history, the guy who headed the balloon projects there said the first flight was June 5 (Flight #5), which aligns exactly with the official Mogul records (taken from Moore’s files by AFOSI). There is ZERO documentation for another research flight on June 4 like the real, documented Flight #5. In fact, the table of Mogul flights has a big blank for Mogul Flights #2, #3, and #4, which we know from other Mogul documentation were all canceled because of adverse weather conditions.

Now fast forward 50+ years, and what was Gildenberg saying now? He appears in the 1997 AFOSI Roswell crash dummies report saying that Roswell could be completely explained by conventional projects in the area, including 1950s crash dummies, and complaining that he and Charles Moore were being disrespected by Roswell UFO promoters for saying so. Then he began writing Roswell debunking articles for the Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazine. The SI articles are behind a paywall, but you can download the Skeptic magazine article:

https://www.skeptic.com/magazine/archives/10.1/pdf/A-Roswell-Requiem-SKEPTIC-10-1-2003.pdf

In one table that is supposed to “explain” both Roswell and all the flying saucer reports, he writes:

“June-July—UFO reports generated by Mogul balloons from Alamogordo AAF, NM, and balloon clusters out of Colorado.

June 4—Prof. Charles Moore launches Mogul Flight #4.

June 14—Rancher Mack Brazel finds paper, rubber, and foil debris.

June 24—Kenneth Arnold sights unknown objects over Oregon and Washington state described as saucers skipping across water.

—Press coins term “flying saucer” (or “flying disk”).

—Incident touches off the world’s first and most intense flying saucer craze”

Thus, the new “facts” according to Gildenberg is that there WAS a Mogul Flight #4, which would have made it the first such research balloon of “any sort”, not the documented Flight #5. He also suggests most flying saucer reports were caused by Mogul balloon clusters and from another alleged NYU Navy balloon project in Colorado. This would apparently include Kenneth Arnold’s sighting June 24 a 1000 miles from Colorado. (Good luck making that work.)

So why isn’t Flight #4 listed in Mogul records as the “first” Mogul? Well, sayeth revisionist Gildenberg (who seems to have totally forgotten his original 1957 story that it was Flight #5):

“Several of the early Alamogordo flights were preliminary tests, did not carry classified hardware, and were never recovered by Mogul personnel. One such flight, launched in early June, came down on a Roswell area sheep ranch, and created one of the most enduring mysteries of the century. Review of project records has identified that flight, with a very high degree of certainty, as Mogul Flight #4, launched on June 4th. (Ref 3)”

And what was Ref. 3 that identified Mogul Flight #4 “with a very high degree of certainty”? Why, no surprise, that was the AFOSI 1994-95 Roswell Report utilizing Moore as primary witness. This “very high degree of certainty” was based on Moore’s unquestionable 50-year- old memories and a total of one sentence from the diary of Mogul scientist Albert Crary who first wrote they canceled the planned Mogul launch on June 4 because of cloud cover. (Required by CAA regulations governing their work.) Then Crary wrote they sent up a Naval sonobuoy in a balloon cluster to test reception in the air and on the ground. But sonobuoys were utilized on all the early Moguls and were the only possible piece of classified equipment since they might hint at the actual classified purpose of Mogul, which was listening for distant Soviet nuclear tests. (The sonobuoys were identified only as the “payload” on all the engineering schematics suggesting their use might be considered sensitive.)

This was what Moore called a test flight or “service flight”,
which they used to test certain pieces of equipment. They were small
flights, lacked constant altitude control, and would have been
rigged to NOT fly off the White Sands Range into civilian air space,
which would have required them to issue NOTAMs (also required
by the (CAA) of a possible air hazard. Thus there was also no need for tracking gear, such as radar targets to see if the balloons flew
off-range.

The REAL reason these weren’t listed is because they weren’t
constant-altitude flights (the major defining characteristic of a
Mogul flight), not whether they carried classified equipment
or not.

This also means the balloon flights were small, requiring only
enough weather balloons to loft the test payload, not a 600 ft
string of balloons. Lacking constant-altitude control, it would be like a normal weather balloon, rapidly rising to high altitudes
where the balloons would start to pop and everything would rapidly
descend, keeping the balloons on the White Sands Range. They
couldn’t get to the Foster Ranch debris field site, which would
require a real, constant-altitude flight (i.e., a recorded Mogul
flight) to stay up in the air long enough, and couldn’t create a
large debris field, which would again at least require one of
those really long, fully configured Mogul balloon trains, not a small test flight.

And it would require the right winds. Moore did a 1997 mathematical model (published in the Smithsonian Roswell debunking book, “UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth”) to try to “prove” that a Mogul flight on June 4 could make it all the way to the Foster Ranch, but when Brad Sparks and I went over the model 20+ years ago we discovered that he employed numerous cheats with his numbers. In other words, it was a hoax.

I suspect Gildenberg probably knew all this. Among his many
specialties, he was a meteorologist. His bios describe him as
being an expect in predicting where their balloons would fly and where they would come down. He also said in this article: “Analyzing
newly available weather data, and following the lead of Professor
Moore have also linked a later Mogul flight (launched on July 7th) to the legend.”

This was Mogul Flight #11, which crashed about 3 pm on July 7
about 16 miles west of Roswell base, followed 100% of the time by plane and 97% by radiosonde. It was a plastic balloon flight with no
indication (like most of these early Moguls) of radar tracking
(including the published schematic showing no attached radar
reflectors), so it can’t possibly explain the singular radar
reflector or the rubber weather balloon displayed in Ramey’s
office or what Mack Brazel described when taken under military escort for a press interview later that night. At the time #11 crashed, Brazel had already reported the debris field and Marcel and Cavitt had followed him back and were examining it. Although Flight #11
crashed relatively close to Roswell, it was at least 50 miles from the
Foster Ranch crash site, and no indication whether it was
recovered or not, either by Mogul or Roswell base. Certainly not by
Marcel or Cavitt. Likely, since Mogul knew exactly where it came down, if it was recovered it would have been by the Mogul people.

So how exactly did Gildenberg “link” it to the Roswell “legend”? Just more hot air from him.

Gildenberg also briefly discusses the FBI Roswell telegram from the Dallas office sent to FBI director Hoover the evening of July 8, which says one of Ramey’s people (Kirton, an intelligence or CI officer) said it resembled a “hexagonal” radar target suspended from a weather balloon (all described in singular). Gildenberg then says, “The gear KNOWN to have been on this particular flight was described almost exactly in a famous telegram to J. Edgar Hoover, which is quoted without comment in most pro-alien Roswell literature. (Ref 4) Reference 4 is Kevin and Don Schmitt’s book “The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell.” Well, since Flight #11 was made up of PLASTIC balloons, not rubber, and zero evidence of radar tracking or radar targets, how does Gildenberg deduce that it “almost exactly” matches what Ramey displayed and what the FBI telegram describes? And since all that was reported/shown by Ramey and his intel spokesperson Kirton was a SINGULAR weather balloon and radar target, what happened to the rest of that 600-foot Flight #4 that Gildenberg claims explains the Roswell “legend”?

Just more non-factual BS from Gildenberg. The key point, however, is that Gildenberg drastically changed his story from his original one in the 1950s in an official AF history (the first Mogul flight was #5 on June 5, 1947) once AFOSI and Moore invented the nonexistent Flight #4 in 1994. His attempt to explain why “Flight #4” isn’t listed as the first (allegedly because it lacked classified equipment) is also directly at odds with the facts. There was no Flight #4. The actual documentation shows it was canceled and instead a small test flight of a sonobuoy was sent up instead. It couldn’t have reached the Foster Ranch (Moore had to flagrantly cheat to get it there, in part by creating an actual Mogul constant-altitude flight, which would certainly have been recorded had it existed) and couldn’t explain the large field of debris described or types of debris, which both Moore and AFOSI claimed required a fully configured Mogul balloon (which, again, would have been recorded in Project records).

This dovetails nicely with what I just published. Moore told me about the configuration of Flight No. 4 by telling me that it was configured like Flight No. 5, which contained no rawin targets. David notes that Gildenberg said, in 1957, that Flight No. 5 was the first Mogul flight. Refer to the bold-face, italic noted at the beginning of David’s information.

The schematic of Flight No. 5 published by the Air Force
in their report on the Roswell UFO crash.

This makes me wonder why, if there are true skeptics, they never question that material that is at odds with their favorite theories. Shouldn’t they look at the documentation and the earlier statements of the witnesses and realize there is a real problem with the Mogul flight solution.

I have said, repeatedly, that there was nothing classified with the balloon project in New Mexico. The equipment was off the shelf, information about those flights was published on July 10 that included pictures of the balloons, and contrary to what was being said, those in New Mexico did know the Mogul name. Dr. Crary’s diary contains several references to Mogul. What this means is that Mogul is not the solution and this is the solution offered by the Air Force in the mid-1990s.

Skeptics believe they have the answer to the Roswell UFO crash. I suggest they apply that same skepticism to the Mogul explanation rather than create alibies for its failure. A look at the evidence, a dispassionate look at the evidence, removes it from contention. We are left with no terrestrial explanation for the Roswell debris…

However, that doesn’t take us directly to the extraterrestrial. The circumstantial evidence suggests an off-world source, but it doesn’t prove the case. I just wish the skeptics, the news media and those science writers would be as honest in their assessment about Roswell. They have no solution.

Roswell, Sheridan Cavitt and Project Mogul

 

As I mentioned on Coast-to-Coast AM recently, I found another of those one-off UFO magazines that attempts to capitalize on the interest in alien visitation. I looked at the Roswell entry and noticed they mentioned the Project Mogul nonsense. I have covered this at length on this blog and in my recent books about the Roswell crash/retrieval. I’ll make one quick point here. Well, maybe two…

First, Flight No. 4, listed as the culprit here, that is, this flight was the one that allegedly scattered the debris for Mack Brazel to find was not launched. The documentation tells us that the flight was canceled. I do not understand how this documentation can be overlooked. If the flight didn’t fly, it did not scatter the debris.

There is a second point. According to what Charles Moore, one of the engineers who worked on the project back in 1947, told me, Flight No. 4, was configured just like Flight No. 5. While there is no schematic for Flight No. 4 (reinforcing the idea that it didn’t fly), we have the schematic for Flight No. 5, courtesy of the Air Force investigation of the Roswell case. There were no rawin radar targets on that flight, which raises the question, “Where did the rawin target photographed in General Ramey’s office originate?” It certainly didn’t come from Roswell.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data at the school
library in Socorro. Photo by Kevin randle

Second, the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer in Roswell at the time, carries great weight. However, what Cavitt told Don Schmitt and me when we met him, he wasn’t even in Roswell at the time. Later, he would tell Don and me, that he was too busy with security investigations to be chasing weather balloons.

I did ask him, given that the description of the officer who accompanied Jesse Marcel, Sr. out to the debris, meaning he was a West Texas boy who could ride horses, about his denial. He said that it sounded like him, but he insisted that he had not gone to the debris field.

Now, this could be boiled down to me spreading tales, but there is documentation about this. In the Air Force report, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Cavitt’s interview conducted by Colonel Richard Weaver is published. Weaver asked about the incident that happened during the early part of July. Cavitt responded:

We went out to this site. There were no, as I understand, check points or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil… I do not remember if Marcel was there or not on the site. He could have been. We took it back to the intelligence room… in the CIC office.

RW: What did you think it was when you recovered it?

SC: I thought it was a weather balloon.

I always wonder why, if Cavitt had identified the material while still on the ranch, he hadn’t communicated this rather important piece of intelligence to Colonel Blanchard and saved him the embarrassment of telling the world they had recovered a flying saucer… but I digress.

I have a letter, written by Cavitt to Doyle Rees, one time officer in charge of the CIC office in Albuquerque, on December 6, 1989. He was answering a letter from Rees, which I think was generated by the original Unsolved Mysteries show on Roswell that had aired several weeks earlier. I think this because that show is mentioned in the letter.

In the letter, Cavitt wrote, “…Marcel was a smart man; a good friend, a Louisiana Cajun, who was prone to be excitable, and, in this case wrong in that Cavitt had been along on that caper.”

Sheridan Cavitt interview in Arizona with Kevin Randle and
Don Schmitt. Photo by Kevin Randle

I don’t know why Cavitt would lie to Rees, unless had not been the senior officer of the CIC in the area at the time, and therefore, hadn’t been read into the crash when he, Rees, arrived in Albuquerque. The point is that Cavitt told fellow CIC officer, Rees, he hadn’t been there, but then told Weaver that not only was he there, he recognized the debris as that from a weather balloon…

Of course, that still doesn’t explain the picture of the rawin target taken in Ramey’s office, that was published on July 9, 1947, for all the world to see. Where did that debris originate?

Roger Ramey and Thomas DuBose with the remains of a rawin target. Since there
were no rawin targets on the early flights of Mogul balloons, the question
 is where did the rawin originate?

But, of course, that’s fine because we all know that it was really part of Project Mogul…

(Blogger’s Note: For those interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Project Mogul explanation, I recommend Roswell in the 21^st Century. This provides more evidence that Project Mogul was not a part of this story until injected into it in the late 1980s.)

"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.

Roswell Crash Date and Mogul Problem

 

A few days ago, I was asked about the true date of the Roswell crash. It was pointed out that the dates that had been published in the past were July 2, July 4 and July 8. I had settled on July 4 based on what Frank Kaufmann had said and Kaufmann even produced a document with that date on it. When it turned out that Kaufmann had been making up stuff, I rejected the July 4 date because, well, Kaufmann was making up stuff.

In the world today, I believe that Don Schmitt and Tom Carey have landed on the July 2 date. This was the sighting by Dan Wilmot in Roswell of a craft heading, more or less to the northwest. I’m not sure that it’s related to the crash because the coincidence of being close in time and location to the crash doesn’t necessarily mean that what Wilmot saw was what fell.

So, the answer for the question, from my point of view is that I don’t know the exact date, other than the first week in July. But this set me to thinking about the timing of Mack Brazel’s trip into Roswell and what that tells us about the events of early July.

Let’s take a stroll down the timeline for all this and see what we can deduce.

We know that the Project Mogul flight scheduled for June 4, 1947, was cancelled based on Dr. Albert Crary’s diary. We know that they flew what he described as a cluster of balloons sometime later that day and Charles Moore told me that it was launched after the cancellation of the full array. We don’t need to argue about what that means because it is irrelevant for this discussion.

Moore, in his analysis, written after I had interviewed him, reported that the flight was launched “probably around 0300 MST,” and that the flight lasted a “calculated duration: 466 min,” or seven hours and forty-six minutes. Whether it was launched before dawn or sometime later, on June 4, it would have landed on the Brazel ranch (yes, for the purists, I know it was really the Foster ranch) on June 4 either around noon or in the late afternoon. The exact time is unimportant because whatever the time, it was still on June 4.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data in Socorro. Photo by Kevin Randle.

We know, based on the documentation and the newspaper articles, that Major Jesse Marcel, Sr. arrived in Fort Worth on July 8, 1947, with some of the recovered debris. Some of the documentation suggests he left Roswell as early as ten in the morning, while other information suggests it was later in the day. For our purposes here, that doesn’t matter.

We know, and this is based on my experiences driving from Roswell to the ranch, that it takes about three hours to get there. That was on modern roads and routes, which did not exist in 1947. Marcel, in interviews mentioned that they had traveled overland but I’m not sure that would have cut much off the travel time. This means, of course, that Marcel was on the scene on July 7 and returned to Roswell very late on the seventh.

We know, based on what Marcel said, that he had been eating lunch at the Officers Club when Sheriff George Wilcox called him about the debris that Brazel had brought to town. Given the sequence of events then, we know that Marcel, along with Sheridan Cavitt, couldn’t have left Roswell much before four or five in the afternoon and that puts them at the ranch too late in the evening to do anything about the debris or examine the field in which it fell.

Since Marcel was clearly in Roswell on July 8 and since he left for the Brazel ranch late in the afternoon and remained there overnight, Brazel had to have arrived at the sheriff’s office on July 6. It was too late on the July 7 for them, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt to have driven out to the ranch, examined the debris found by Brazel and returned to Roswell that night. The only scenario that makes sense was that Brazel had driven to Roswell on July 6.

The debris field identified by Bill Brazel for Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt.

Of course, there is the newspaper account that said Brazel had driven into Roswell on July 7 to sell some wool. That simply does not track with the timing of the drive back to the ranch, the examination of the field and the return to Roswell. Marcel and Cavitt would have been required to make their inspection in the dark. And, although Cavitt claimed that they didn’t remain there overnight, Marcel did make such a claim. In my discussions with Cavett, it was clear that he, along with Brazel and possibly Marcel, was there in the daylight.

But the point is irrelevant to the present discussion because, no matter what date Brazel drove to Roswell and what date Marcel and Cavitt followed him back the to ranch, it all happened in early July. The three days, the sixth, seventh or eighth, are the real markers here and, as I say, the exact date doesn’t matter for this discussion.

There is another point to be made here. Overlooking the fact that Brazel brought in samples of the debris, which would have negated the need to drive out to the ranch, if that debris was part of Project Mogul and if part of Mogul, it would have fallen on June 4. In other words, it would have laid out, in that field, for more than a month. We know, based on the testimony of Bill Brazel, and later that of Tommy Tyree, the sometimes ranch hand, that Mack Brazel was in that particular field every other day if not every day. The question becomes, why did it take him a month to call in the military?

Here's the rub. Had the debris been the remains of a Project Mogul balloon array, it wouldn't have taken Brazel long to clean it up. Had it been a Project Mogul balloon array, there would have been a reward card attached which would have directed him to Alamogordo rather than Roswell. Moore talked about these reward cards but said that not all the balloon arrays had them. This, of course, makes little sense. Why wouldn’t all the arrays have had the reward cards?

We were told by neighbors and by Bill Brazel, that Mack wondered who was going to clean up the mess he had found. That suggests something much more robust than the remains of a few weather balloons and some string. There is no evidence that rawin targets were involved. Flight No. 5, the “first successful” flight in New Mexico, had no rawin targets and Moore had suggested to me that the make-up of Flight No.5 was the same as Flight No. 4. Later, he claimed that it was closer to Flight No. 2 which did have rawin targets on it. But it was flown months earlier on the East Coast and the documentation in New Mexico mentions nothing about rawin radar targets until later in July.

We know when Mack Brazel reported the debris to the military based on the timing of the situation. That would have been on July 6, so the crash took place in the days prior to that based on the need to water the livestock.

Given what we know, whatever it was, fell in the days prior to July 6, most probably on July 4 or 5. If we accept the July 7 date for his trip to Roswell, then the craft, whatever it was, fell on July 6. I can’t narrow it down any more than that because we have nothing to tell us the exact date of the crash. However, we know that it wasn’t the Mogul array launched on June 4. Brazel would have found it in the days that followed and would have reported it to those in Roswell in early June. It was too far to make such a trip unless there was a compelling reason to do so. That would have been the amount of debris that suggests that he would not have been able to clean it all up quickly. Instead, he drove into Roswell for the assistance of the military. As I say, he could have picked up the remains of a Mogul balloon array in a matter of minutes and not needed to go to Roswell. In fact, he could have loaded it all into his pickup truck and taken to Roswell to show them. There would then be no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to travel out to that field.

This is just one more reason to reject the Mogul scenario. It doesn’t fit the timing, doesn’t fit with the facts, and fails to explain why Brazel felt the need to go to Roswell. He could have picked up the debris and that would have been the end of it. Instead, he reported the debris to the Army and began a mystery that continues after three-quarters of a century.

Charles Moore and the Array, New Mexico, UFO Sighting

 

Dr. Abraham Loeb, he of Harvard and the Galileo Project, is beginning research to identify alien objects passing close to Earth that originated outside our Solar System. He is looking up, into the sky, rather than down, at the ground. As he said to me, he is uninterested in UFO reports from the past, suggesting, with some justification, those sighting reports have been poorly collected and are absent of scientific objectivity. The past is cluttered with hoaxes and hallucinations and

Dr. Avi Loeb

delusions. This renders much of the information as unreliable in the eyes of the scientist and of no interest to him and those working at the Galileo Project.

That attitude seems to have changed, slightly, in the past few weeks. Loeb has invited a number of those associated with the UFO community to join his consulting team. These include Lue Elizondo, Kevin Knuth, Chris Mellon, Nick Pope, Robert Powell and Gary Voorhis, who is the founder of something called UAPsx and is a first-hand witness to tic-tac incident on the USS Nimitz in 2004. Most importantly, Loeb has now added Jacques Vallee to his consulting team as well.

 I will note here for no reason, that nearly everyone on this list has some connection into a government agency. I have to wonder if this has something to do with having had government security clearances in the past. I have been approached by others whose first question to me has often seemed to be if I still had my top-secret clearance.

Anyway, while Loeb’s criticism about the gathering of UFO data being less than scientific, that doesn't hold true for all UFO reports. Charles B. Moore, yes, the Roswell balloon guy, made a UFO report to Project Blue Book. His sighting was labeled as "unidentified," by the Air Force investigators. The sighting, made near Array, New Mexico, on April 24, 1949, isn't very spectacular, except that it is

Charles Moore

multiple witness and used instrumentality to observe the object. Moore, along with a crew from General Mills, identified as Akers, Davidson, Fitzsimmons and Moorman and a Naval officer Douglas C. McLaughlin (also identified as Robert or "R" McLaughlin in some reports) were launching the balloons. Brad Sparks has suggested that McLaughlin was not physically at the site, but in the Public Information Office.

They had "released 350-gram balloon about 1020 MST and were following it with a standard ML-47 David White Theodolite." Moore made a reading at 10:30 a.m. and then took over at the theodolite.

His report, originally classified as “secret” but later downgraded to “restricted,” (and proving that some of the UFO sightings were classified) was made to what was then known as Project Sign. He wrote that he had looked up to acquire the balloon with the unaided eye and spotted what he thought was the balloon. Moore later wrote:

We thought we had the balloon when we picked up a whitish, spherical object right along the direction the theodolite was pointing… The object was drifting east rapidly… but we had thought to encounter similar balloons. When the distance between the theodolite and the supposed balloon became apparent, I took over the theodolite and found the true balloon still there, whereupon I abandoned it and picked up the object after it came out of the sun. The object was moving too fast to crank the theodolite around; therefore, one of the men pointed the theodolite and I looked. The object was ellipsoid... white in color except for a light yellow of one side as though it were in shadow. I could not get a hard focus on the object due to the speed at which the angles changed. Therefore, I saw no good detail at all.

"The object," according to Moore, "was not a balloon and was some distance away. Assuming escape velocity, a track is enclosed which figures elevation above the station of about 300,000 feet over the observed period. If this is true, the flight would have probably gone over the White Sands Proving Ground (later White Sands Missile Range), Holloman Air Force Base, and Los Alamos."

They lost sight of the object in the distance, after watching it for about 60 seconds. They had made measurements using their equipment and a stopwatch but took no photographs.

Moore’s statement isn’t the only one available. In March, 1950, True, published an article by Commander Robert B. McLaughlin (which means this is in conflict with the Blue Book file that mentions Douglas McLaughlin). According to him, an accurate plot of the UFO’s course was made and that he, McLaughlin, at least, saw the object in cross section, reporting that it was elliptical in shape. He definitely believed that the object was 105 feet in diameter and that it was about fifty-six miles high, which is just a shade under 300,000 feet. Although this seems to be a first-hand account by McLaughlin, Sparks suggested it was written in a way to give that impression or changed by an editor to provide additional credibility.

Document from Blue Book Showing the original
classification as "Secret" and later down
graded to "Restricted."

McLaughlin, or those with at the site, calculated the speed as five miles per second and that, at the end of “its trajectory, it served abruptly upward.” He wrote that this resulted in an increase in altitude by twenty-five miles in about ten seconds and would have had more than twenty times the force of gravity.

In an interesting note, McLaughlin wrote, “Close questioning of the observers prior to the official report that went to ‘Project Saucer’ [the public name of Project Sign] at Wright-Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio, produced an almost unanimous judgement that the object was discus-shaped and that it was a flat white color. High-powered binoculars showed no exhaust trail, no stream of light or other evidence of a propulsion system. And no sound.”

There is another point that must be made. In a document found in the Blue Book file, Major Joseph O. Fletcher, the Director, Base Directorate for Geophysical Research wrote, “It is felt that although the theodolite and stop-watch were of great assistance in making estimates, the principal factor responsible for the unusually specific information contained in this report, is that Mr. (name redacted, but is Moore) was made aware of in advance what factors should be observed in case such an object was sighted. Therefore, it is urged that your office issue advanced observation instructions to people who might be in a position to make observations and turn in reports.”

These two sentences suggest that someone had briefed Moore on what to do if he saw something strange while conducting his experiments, and that others should be briefed on this as well. Someone believed that flying saucers would be seen around the White Sands area and that proper observations must be made. In other words, they were actually planning for the event.

Dr. Donald Menzel, he of Harvard at the time, later did what the Air Force couldn't in their investigation in 1949. He identified the object seen by Moore and his crew. According to Menzel, the object was a mirage. That is, Menzel believed it to be an atmospheric reflection of the true balloon, making it appear as if there were two objects in the sky instead of one. He was so sure of this that he told Moore about the solution.

Moore, however, was an atmospheric physicist. He was as qualified as Menzel to discuss the dynamics of the atmosphere, and, according to him when interviewed on El Paso radio station KTSM in March 1995, the weather conditions were not right for the creation of mirages. Since Moore was on the scene, and since his training qualified him to make judgments about the conditions of the atmosphere at the time of the sighting, his observations are more important than Menzel's wild speculations.

When Moore spoke to Menzel, the Harvard professor, would not listen to what Moore had to say. Menzel had found, what to him was a satisfactory solution for the sighting, and he didn't want to discuss it seriously, or have his conclusions challenged. Air Force investigators, however, left the sighting labeled as "unidentified."

This boils down to a lesson for all of us. We learn here about the mental gymnastics used by some to explain any sighting regardless of the facts. Here was a case where a trained scientist, technicians and military personnel saw something strange, tracked it, and used their instruments to gather data. The object was measured to be 300,000 feet in the air, moving rapidly. They knew it wasn’t a balloon and described a craft with an elliptical shape.

Given the nature of the data gathered, given that the UFO was seen through “high-powered” binoculars, given that the angles and trajectories were measured using the theodolite, and that the sighting was timed, lasting more than a minute, this should be the sort of scientifically gathered information that Dr. Loeb would want. While it certainly doesn’t fit into the Galileo Project, meaning the UFO was inside the Earth’s atmosphere instead of flying through space beyond it, the case does provide some insight into the phenomenon and might provide clues about what to look for in the future. It merely suggests that some UFO reports might be useful as the search for other extraterrestrial objects continues.

Lieutenant Colonel Joe C. Briley and Project Mogul, Again

 

I get so tired of having to repeat the same thing over and over. Those writing on various UFO related subjects just don’t bother to find the latest and best information available. They find what they want and go no further. Just the other day, in a 2021 publication, I read about Mac Brazel. It has been two decades or more since Tom Carey and Don Schmitt discovered that Mac Brazel was actually Mack Brazel. Trivial? Sure, but it’s not all that difficult to find the proper and current information.

As I was doing some research on Lieutenant Colonel Joe Briley, who, in 1947, was the Operations Officer for the 509^th Bomb Group, when I found a relatively new posting about him and the Roswell UFO crash. As I read the information, I saw that someone, in this case Patrick Gross, had reviewed the case and formed a number of conclusions based on his research.

At the bottom of the rather and complex posting, Gross wrote, “Joe Briley was probably a Lieutenant, not a Lieutenant Colonel, at the time of the incident, and was probably a Lieutenant Colonel when he retired from the Air Force.”

I don’t know why he would have thought this. If he had bothered to search out a page from the 1947 Yearbook that Walter Haut prepared in the summer of 1947, and which was published in November of that year, he would have seen a page devoted to “Staff Officers,” with a picture of Lieutenant Colonel Joe C. Briley listed as the Operations Officer. Copies of that picture are available on the Internet and can be found with little effort. And, of course, it proves that Briley, in 1947, was a Lieutenant Colonel.

The "Staff Officers" page from the 1947 Yearbook, as it appears
on the Internet.

From there we move to Project Mogul. There are some other speculations by Gross about the Mogul team visiting the Roswell Army Air Field. I’m going to ignore most of them because I covered this in depth in Roswell in the 21^st Century (which he apparently read). I will note, however, that those on the Mogul team, including Dr. Albert Crary, visited the base in June and July, 1947, as they recovered, or attempted to recover, the remains of their Mogul flights. On one occasion they stopped there to refuel the weapons carrier they were driving because it was issued to them by the military in Alamogordo. That simply means they could draw fuel from another base as needed. According to Crary, they had no trouble entering the base and drawing the fuel, not to mention that the remains of a Mogul flight were in the back of the weapons carrier, in plain view.

There is something else that should be pointed out. It is something that the supporters of the Mogul theory overlook, and that is that Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, never flew. Crary’s diary, field notes and the typed transcript of those notes, all show that the flight had been cancelled due to clouds. By agreement, or CAA (FAA) regulation, they were not allowed to launch the arrays at night or in cloudy weather because the arrays were a hazard to aerial navigation. Charles Moore, who was on the Mogul team in 1947, reported that Flight No. 4 was actually launched at 2:30 or 3:00 a.m., in violation of those rules. And, if we believe Crary’s diary, it was then cancelled because of clouds after it was launched. At least that it what Moore would have us believe.

The real problem with Mogul is the misleading claim used by the Air Force and the skeptics. They say these launches were somehow so secret that those in New Mexico, meaning the men of the 509^th, wouldn’t have known about them. The problem here is that those same regulations that prohibited flights in the clouds and at night also required that NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) be filed announcing the launches because of that threat to aerial navigation. Even if you wish to claim that those at Roswell wouldn’t have known about the flights from the Mogul team, they would have learned about them from the NOTAMs, which were provided to all civilian and military airfields.

Even worse for these arguments is that what was happening in New Mexico wasn’t highly classified. It wasn’t even classified at all. True, the ultimate purpose of Mogul was classified but the balloon flights in New Mexico were not. The equipment being used was off the shelf, meaning, of course, that the neoprene balloons and the rawin radar targets were nothing special, had not been created for Mogul, but had been adapted from other purposes like weather observations. In other words, weather stations around the country routinely launched these neoprene balloons and rawin radar targets in their observations of winds aloft conditions. The material was easily recognized by all sorts of people including farmers and ranchers who often found them in their fields.

In fact, the Mogul operation in New Mexico, was used in 1947 to cover the recovery of the material found by Mack Brazel. On July 10, 1947, in a number of newspapers, were pictures of the Mogul array, on the ground, and a description of the operation. In one of the photographs is a ladder, which I mention only because Charles Moore told me that he had bought the ladder with petty cash in Alamogordo.

Front page of the Alamogordo News for July 10, 1947. The pictures are of
the Mogul team and their project. The ladder in the center pictures is
the one that Charles Moore bought in Alamogordo.

Finally, there is a criticism that the whole transcripts of the interviews with Briley hadn’t been published. In a point that is labeled, “What he allegedly said,” there were quotes, but not the whole thing, suggesting that the quotes were cherry-picked to provide evidence for a specific point of view. While it is true that I haven’t published the transcripts, there is nothing in them that hasn’t been accurately related and by reading the whole transcripts, the conclusions don’t change. But the truth is that there is no allegedly said about it. This is what he said in the context of my interviews with him.

These are just a few of the problems with that analysis of what Joe Briley said. We move from deciding that he hadn’t been a Lieutenant Colonel in 1947, with no reason to suspect that and evidence to the contrary to the assumption that the quotes attributed to him haven’t been fully revealed. There is no reason to assume that they haven’t been honestly reported, other than a desire to reduce the importance of what he said. Had there been some evidence to show that the information has been manipulated, that would be one thing. But to assume that because Gross hadn’t seen the whole transcripts or notes from the interviews that there is missing information is another. The quotes that I have attributed to him are accurate and in context and I know because I conducted the interviews. Everything else suggested by Gross is speculation without evidence.