Lt. John (Jack) Trowbridge and Roswell

In the early 1990s, we, meaning Don Schmitt, Stan Friedman and I were having a debate with John Keel about what had fallen in Roswell. He was suggesting it was a Fugo Balloon, that is, a Japanese Balloon Bomb. Research quickly disproved this, though Keel did hang onto the answer longer than I thought necessary. He did write one thing that was important. In the January 1991 issue of Fate, on page 67, Keel wrote, “I suppose by 1999 there will be thousands of Roswell witnesses from that long-gone era.”

Turns out that Keel was right about this. You might ask yourself, “But why bring it up now, some twenty-five years later?”

It is because, as many of you know, I have just completed a book about the Roswell case as it exists in the 21^st century, and though I tried to get to everything, there is just so much that I missed a few things. One of those was the testimony of

Lt. John P. Trowbridge

the late First Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Colonel) John P. “Jack” Trowbridge. He had been assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in 1947 and in 2007 he said that he was one of the intelligence officers working with Major Jesse Marcel. He claimed that he had handled the “memory metal” debris that some have mentioned in the past.

He also claimed that he had been over at the Marcel’s to play bridge that night in July 1947 but Jesse wasn’t there at the time. It was fairly late in the evening when they broke up the game because Marcel finally had returned. They apparently went outside to see what Marcel had brought home.

He told Greg Bishop and Nick Redfern at their UFO Mystic blog, “It was aluminum in appearance, there were fragments of aircraft-skin or whatever the thing was, and also some girders, with pictures of… hieroglyphic-like things on it. I took them to be… you know… who knows?... [I]t was interesting. I could get my hand on the material. And the material had some peculiar properties… For example they looked like [Hershey bar] wrappings [very thin foil]… But you squeezed it up in your hands as hard as you could, you let it go, and it returned… to the original shape. Instantly!”

He went on to claim that Marcel brought in some of the debris the next day and they all played with it and then went back to work. Later in the day they were told that nothing had happened and they should not talk about it.

According to that article and then to his obituary, he had been the last known survivor to personally have inspected the debris. This was “a secret he kept for 50 years.”

And I say nonsense. It is the proof of Keel’s theory that more and more people would come forward to tell their tales of seeing the alien debris or the bodies of the alien creatures as time passed.

We know, based on the testimony of Jesse Marcel, Sr., Jesse Marcel, Jr., and Viaud Marcel that this bridge game didn’t happen because none of them ever mentioned it. Jesse Jr. told me, as he did many others, that his father woke him up to show him the debris. He never mentioned other people being there that night or seeing the memory metal that Trowbridge mentioned. His mother didn’t report that either and when Jesse Sr. was interviewed by Linda Corley, there was no mention of any of this.

I have searched through the 509^th Unit Histories for the summer of 1947 and I could find no reference to Trowbridge as part of the intelligence section. To be fair, few names were mentioned in those various reports, so it is possible that he was assigned to intelligence but simply not mentioned. I do know that he was assigned to the Headquarters, but then those who had jobs at the group level or in the supporting organizations such as the JAG, or Finance were assigned there for purposes of accounting, pay and the like.

Given the lack of mention of many of the things that Trowbridge claimed, that no one suggested a bridge party on that night, that his account varies from those given by the Marcels, and that he has some of the other facts wrong, I find this account to be unreliable. It is as John Keel said so long ago. There are many people coming forward with their tales of seeing the bodies, seeing the craft or handling the debris, and unless there is some form of corroboration, these stories should be rejected.

Mogul and Roswell

I was doing a video lap the other day, which is what I call channel surfing. I found a documentary about Roswell and they were conducting an experiment to recreate the Mogul balloon array and then see what would happen when it fell back to earth. They kept the balloons tethered, I don’t think the array was quite as large as those run in 1947, and they shot down the balloons with a pellet gun. Their debris field was small, there were large amounts of twine or rope that held the array together and the radar targets were not particularly degraded.

Or, in other words, it didn’t match the descriptions of the debris or the field given by those who saw it in 1947.

But that wasn’t what annoyed me about this. It was the idea that the Mogul explanation had enough merit that the producers of the show thought that they needed to attempt to replicate it. It was that anyone who was paying attention still thought that the Mogul explanation was viable based on the documented evidence that is available to us now.

Crary on the left.

So, let’s just start that whole debate again by saying, there was no Mogul Flight No. 4. Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes and his diary entries are quite clear on the point. Flight No. 4 was cancelled… end of story. Period.

Okay, end of story, semi-colon.

Here’s the deal. Crary made it clear that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled. He said that specifically and the other historical evidence backs it up. The first flight noted in New Mexico was Flight No. 5, and that was recovered. Had there been a Flight No. 4 as successful as Charles Moore claimed it was, (with all his nonsensical but very extensive research conducted in the 1990s using winds aloft data from 1947), it would have been noted as the first flight.

Moore in Socorro.

The second notation for June 4, the date of the cancelled Flight No. 4, was that they had flown a cluster of balloons, with a sonobuoy in the afternoon. Crary only told us that they had good reception on the ground for the radio signal but not so good on the B-17 that was also used in their attempts to detect a signal. But he did tell us what that flight was and it did not have the rawin targets. It was just a cluster of balloons and a sonobuoy.

A cluster of balloons is not the same as a full Mogul array. Crary made the distinction in his field notes about this, when all of that material is reviewed. It is quite clear what happened. There was no Flight No. 4 to drop debris up on the Foster ranch, no Flight No. 4 that would have presented a threat to aerial navigation, hence no NOTAM filed for the flight, and nothing to indicate that the balloons headed off to the northeast, flying over those distinctively named towns that Charles Moore remembered all those years later to prove that Flight No. 4 not

A Mogul launch for the Press.

only existed, but had flown off in the proper direction.

We have been pussy-footing around this for years, allowing those who wish to force their views on us set the ground rules, pick the fight, and then we sit back and listen to what they have to say even when that position is indefensible. The field notes and diary make it clear and I do not understand why that clarity is being obscured nor do I understand why there are those who refuse to understand it…

Well, that’s not true. Without Flight No. 4, Mogul fails as an answer. It cannot account for the debris because it never left Alamogordo. If there was no Flight No. 4, then Moore’s role as the man who launched the Roswell case falters and fails and the Mogul experiments are reduced to an attempt to spy on the Soviets. He doesn’t find his name in the newspapers and he isn’t visited by those researching the case and he certainly doesn’t get to appear on TV or participate in a book.

So, there was no Flight No. 4, and I’m not even going to bother with the argument that Mogul wasn’t all that secret… with pictures of it published in the newspapers on July 10, 1947, and the name being used in all sorts of non-classified publications which eliminates another of the legs for the Mogul explanation.

My point is that we shouldn’t even be dealing with this anymore just as we are no longer dealing with a stray rocket or missile (and yes there is a difference) from White Sands, an experimental aircraft accident, an aircraft accident involving an atomic weapons, or a bunch of other things such as John Keel’s Fugo Balloons that have been ruled out by evidence. Mogul should join those and we just shouldn’t entertain arguments about this any longer.

Mogul is a distraction that does not work. Each time someone proposes it, we should tell them the flight was cancelled and demand they provide evidence that it wasn’t. We should tell them that a cluster of balloons is not a Mogul flight and that the debris found on the Foster ranch was simply too wide spread to be that from Mogul let alone a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy.

We tell them Mogul doesn’t work and if they have no evidence for it, then give it up. Find something that does in fact work, and let us see that evidence.