I Explain Mogul one LAST Time

I’m going to go through this just one more time so that when this stupid question resurfaces, I can point to this post. Project Mogul is NOT the solution to the Roswell crash. The documentation argues against it; the testimony argues against it and the constant level balloon experiments conducted in Alamogordo in June and July 1947 were NOT classified. Those statements alone should be sufficient to eliminate Mogul, but as I have been told, because this is my claim, I must present the evidence.

Okay. I get it.

The documentation, according to both the field notes and the diary kept by Dr. Albert Crary, the man leading the testing, proves it. According to him, Flight No. 4, the alleged culprit in all this, was cancelled at dawn because of clouds.

List of the New York University balloon flights showing Flight No. 5 as the 
first flight in New Mexico. Table from Air Force report. 

A quick explanation here. These flights were made up of arrays of neoprene rubber balloons. These were off the shelf balloons. The newer, polyethylene balloon didn’t arrive until later. There was nothing about these balloons that would not be easily identified by those who found them whether they were farmers, ranchers or military officers. In fact, one such balloon that included a rawin radar target was found near Circleville, Ohio in July 1947 and everyone knew what it was.

Sherman Campbell's daughter with the rawin
target found on his farm in July 1947. Even the 
daughter recognized it as terrestrial.

We know the construction of Flight No. 4 because, Charles Moore, an engineer on the project, told me that it was configured just like Flight No. 5, which had no rawin targets attached. How do I know? Because in the big Air Force report contained schematics and there were no rawin targets on Flight No. 5. That does mean that the material displayed in General Roger Ramey’s office of the alleged wreckage brought from Roswell was faked because it showed the degraded remains of a rawin target.

The fallback position is that the field notes say they launched a cluster of ballons. However, we do have a schematic for the cluster of balloons, shown on the page next to that for Flight No. 5 and it shows no rawin targets.

Schematic of Flight No. 5 as shown in the Air Force report.

In other words, the documentation provides us with the make-up of Flight No. 4 and the balloon clusters. We find NO rawin targets. This, again, underscores the deceptive nature of the photographs taken in General Ramey’s office.

Here’s another fact. According to the documentation, the rules under which they operated in New Mexico prohibited flights at night or in cloudy weather. The long arrays, approaching 600 feet in length, were considered a hazard to aerial navigation. Crary’s June 4 entry tells us that the flight was cancelled at dawn because of cloudy weather, which means it NEVER flew. The diary entry also tells us they flew a cluster of balloons, which, given the sequence, would have been launched later in the day. Charles Moore, however, tells us, in direct contradiction of this, that Flight No. 4 was launched around 2:30 a.m., in violation of the rules under which they operated.

Why would he say this?

Because, according to the winds aloft data, a launch at dawn, (data which I originally provided to Moore) would NOT have taken the balloons to within 17 miles of the Foster (Brazel) ranch. According to Moore, in winds aloft data he received from a weather station in Orogrande, NM, a front had passed through Alamogordo about dawn (which explains the clouds). He needed data from hours earlier to project a path that would have taken the balloons in the northeastern direction toward the ranch.

Here’s a point that some of the skeptics miss in all this. I had obtained the microfilmed winds aloft data (up to 20,000) from the National Weather Service. Looking at them, I realized any conclusions I drew from them would be ignored. I was in contact with Moore. I sent him copies of the relevant charts. After several days, he asked for additional charts which I sent along. See, I was looking for expert opinions and analysis of those charts. I was in search of the truth rather than a confirmation of my opinion, which, had not been solidified until the Air Force published their report and we had the listing of the balloon flights in New Mexico.

Charles Moore reviewing the winds aloft data I had provided him. 
Photo by Kevin Randle.

I will also note here that both Brad Sparks and David Rudiak, whose backgrounds provided them with the necessary expertise to analyze the data, independently came to the same conclusion. Moore had fudged the numbers to show that Flight No. 4 would have gotten close to the Foster ranch. Their analysis did not support Moore’s projected flight path. This was an analysis of the winds aloft data gathered prior to the front moving through Alamogordo, which caused the cancellation of Flight No. 4.

Let’s recap. Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this was cancelled at dawn, it was not launched hours earlier as claimed by Moore. According to Moore, Flight No. 4 was configured the same as Flight No. 5, which contained no rawin targets. The cluster flight, for which we do have some schematics, do not show rawin targets as part of those earlier flights.

There is one other annoying point here. I keep hearing that Project Mogul was highly classified and that is the reason that the Army worked so hard to cover up the recovery of the material found by Mack (when will these people learn to spell his first name?) Brazel. But what was going on in New Mexico was NOT highly classified. In fact, two days after the Roswell Daily Record announced the Army had captured a flying saucer, newspapers around the country published pictures of these arrays and an explanation of what was going on in Alamogordo. True, the ultimate purpose of Mogul was classified but that classification did not apply to the experiments in Alamogordo as proven by the newspaper.

Alamogordo News on July 10, 1947 showing photos of
the equipment used in the balloon launches. The ladder
in the photo is one that Moore bought in NM for that
purpose. This shows that the experiments in NM were
NOT classified.

I’m going to leave it here. I believe the documentation, the testimonies of some of the participants, and other information rules out Flight No. 4 as the culprit. If it didn’t fly, it left no debris and that explanation for what fell near Corona on the July day in 1947, is rejected. There is other evidence, but this should be sufficient to prove the case.

So, you ask me what I think. I believe that among those of us who have investigated this in depth, that is Stan Friedman, Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, the Air Force and me, we have eliminated all the terrestrial explanations. Does that mean what fell was part of an alien craft? No, it means there is no terrestrial explanation currently available. That suggests something off world, but only suggests it. There might be some super classified file gathering dust in one of those warehouses full of old documentation, but no one has found it. I believe that if something like that existed, when the Air Force investigated the crash back in the mid-1990s, they would have trotted it out. That they didn’t suggests there is no such alternative explanation.

We are left with the literal definition of an “unidentified.” We don’t know what it was, but it was NOT a Project Mogul balloon.

Wikipedia Nonsense and Project Mogul

 

Well, it’s happened again. Just when I thought I could ignore the Project Mogul nonsense, I get sucked right back in. I was attempting to learn something else, when I came upon the Roswell entry in Wikipedia. It showed bias by accepting theory and speculation as if they are established facts. Those alleged facts are simply wrong.

I wouldn’t even bother with this, but the new first sentence in the discussion of Mogul is now filled with errors. It said, “By 1947, the United States had launched thousands of top-secret Project Mogul balloons carrying devices to listen for Soviet atomic tests.”

I suppose I need to point out here that in the past, that first sentence actually claimed, “In 1947, a Project Mogul balloon NYU Flight 4, launched June 4, crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.”

Why the change? Because someone noticed that NYU Flight 4 had been cancelled at dawn. It did not fly and if it didn’t fly, well, it couldn’t drop anything on the Brazel (Foster) ranch, which is not all that close to Roswell.

The second problem is that the statement was too specific. It gives us information that can be checked through documentation on the Internet, the Air Force report The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexican Desert, in Karl Pflock’s book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe and in my book, Roswell in the 21^st Century. In other words, a little research calls the Flight No. 4 explanation into serious question and I have cited both skeptical and positive sources.

So, now we have a more generic opening sentence filled with those fictions I mentioned earlier. In June 1947, the first of the New Mexico balloon arrays were launched from the Alamogordo Army Air Field. Not thousands by 1947, and by September, 1947, there had been only seventeen launches, three of those on the east coast and two that were cancelled.

There were no top-secret Project Mogul balloons in New Mexico in 1947 because there was no such thing and never was a top-secret Mogul balloon. Charles Moore, who was an engineer on the balloon project in New Mexico, made it clear to me that their equipment was off-the-shelf weather balloons, just like those launched several times a day from weather observations stations all over the United States. There was nothing classified about their research. Although he claimed that he didn’t know the name of the project in 1947, the Mogul name appears in Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes and diary showing that the name was known to members of the research team.

The official record of balloon flights in New Mexico in June 1947.

There is another point that is rather subtle but one that is important. What was happening in New Mexico with the NYU balloon flights was not classified. The ultimate purpose, to spy on the Soviets, was classified. We know this because on July 10, the Alamogordo News carried a story about the research going on at Alamogordo Army Air Field complete with pictures of one of the long arrays displayed. Moore told me that the ladder in one of the pictures was a ladder he had bought with petty cash which ties all this together.

Newspaper story about NYU balloon launches in July 1947. A very fully
way to deal with "top-secret" material.

The True Story of Flight #4

The Wikipedia entry told us, “On June 4, researchers at Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico launched a long train of these balloons; they lost contact with the balloons and balloon-borne equipment within 17 miles (27 km) of the ranch managed by W. W. "Mac" [sic] Brazel near Corona, New Mexico, where a balloon array subsequently crashed.”

According to Crary’s notes, the June 4 launch, which is listed as the culprit here, was cancelled at dawn that morning because of cloudy weather. Those in Alamogordo operated under strict government rules because the array trains could be a hazard to aerial navigation. They were required to post a NOTAM warning pilots about that hazard, which underscores the danger of these long arrays.

Crary wrote in his field notes, later transcribed to his diary, “June 4 Wed. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds [emphasis added].” For some reason, those of the skeptical bias seem to ignore that statement, inventing alternative meanings behind it. I believe it is destructive to the Mogul explanation because, there was no launch of a full array on June 4.

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

This is the “real” Flight #4 according to those skeptics including Karl Pflock. Charles Moore claimed that this cluster of balloons was a full array which he claimed was the first successful flight in New Mexico. He said that it had been configured the same as Flight #5 but there was no data recorded from it. You have to wonder how it was launched before it was cancelled and why the documentation tells us the balloon cluster was launched later in the day. But mostly you must wonder if Flight #4 was so successful, why no data was recorded from it.

Charles Moore reviewing the winds aloft data that I had supplied.
Photo by Kevin Randle

Moore told me that Flight #4 was as successful as Flight #5. He told others the same lie. This claim is an obvious contradiction to the documentation that is available because, if it had collected data, it would be listed.

Added to that question is why Flight #5, which did fly the next day, has the notation “First successful flight carrying a heavy load.”?

The next entry, for June 5, clarifies the situation. Crary wrote, “Up at 4 to shoot two charges for balloon flight. Whole assembly of constant altitude balloons set up at 0500.” This underscores that Flight #5 was the first full array launched in New Mexico.

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

This is a reference to the photographs taken in Brigadier General Roger Ramey’s office on July 8. Ramey was the commanding officer of the 8^th Air Force in 1947 and had ordered, according to various sources, samples of the debris brought to his office. Major Jesse Marcel, who had collected some of the debris on July 7, was the man who brought it forward. Those photographs do show the remains of a neoprene weather balloon and the remnants of a rawin radar target. However, both Marcel and Colonel Thomas Dubose, who are in those pictures, have testified that the material in the pictures was not the material recovered on the debris field. Both said that the real material was switched with that of the weather balloon and radar reflector before being shown to J. Bond Johnson from the Fort Worth Star Telegram who took the pictures.

Jesse Marcel with the wreckage of a rawin radar
reflector. The balloon envelope is the black
mass behind him. July 8, 1947

What we now know is there weren’t squadrons of big balloons as reported in The New York Times, but an array of standard weather balloons, recognizable, even when arranged in a long array. There was nothing about the balloons that would render them unrecognizable. The daughter of Sherman Campbell was pictured in newspapers around the country displaying the remains of a rawin target her father had found on his farm near Circleville, Ohio around the same time. It seems that farmers who had no experience with weather balloons or radar targets was able to identify the remains as such when a trained intelligence officer and the chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force was not.

Newspaper photo of Sherman Campbell's
daughter with a rawin target her
father had found in 1947.

Here's another problem for the Mogul explanation. According to what Moore told me when I visited with him in Socorro, New Mexico, the mythical Flight #4 was configured exactly like Flight #5. The problem then is that the schematic for Flight #5 contains no rawin targets, which The New York Times described as “the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil.”

All of this should render the Mogul balloons as a non-answer. It is, however, the only terrestrial explanation left to explain the debris. The Air Force proved that in their report when they wrote the other alternative explanations had been eliminated. Take it off the table and there is no other culprit.

Mack Brazel, the Rancher Who Found the Debris

One of the facts that is rarely mentioned by the skeptical side of the argument is that Mack Brazel, who took the samples to the Chaves County Sheriff, George Wilcox, knew what weather balloons looked like. In the Roswell Daily Record article published on July 9, Brazel said that he had found weather balloons on other occasions, but this was not like those.

The second problem here is that Flight #4 was allegedly launched on June 4, but Brazel didn’t take samples of the debris to the sheriff until more than a month later. Descriptions of the debris scattered in the pasture suggest that it was so some much debris that the sheep refused to cross the field for water. According to Bill Brazel, son of Mack, and Tommy Tyree, a sometimes ranch hand, Mack was in the field at least every other day, meaning that he would have found the debris on June 5 or 6, if we believe the newspaper story. Given the location of the debris and the water source, Brazel would have reported it with in a day or two. He wanted those responsible for scattering the debris to clean it up because, according to Tommy Tyree, the Proctors, Bill Brazel and Bessie Brazel Schreiber, the debris so densely packed or blowing around that the sheep refused to cross it. Brazel wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess. The neighbors suggested the Army. This tidbit of information is just another reason to reject the Mogul explanation.

Bill Brazel in 1989. Photo by Kevin Randle

Bessie Brazel Schreiber was fourteen years old in 1947 and in an affidavit signed on September 9, 1993, provided her perspective about the events. She said that she and her younger brother, along with her father were on the ranch in July 1947. She said that right around the fourth, her dad had “found a lot of debris scattered over a pasture some distance from the house… None of us was riding with him when he found the material…”

Please note the date. The Roswell Daily Record reported that Brazel had found the debris in the middle of June. Here, Schreiber said that her father found the debris much later than claimed in the newspaper which would eliminate the Mogul explanation.

She said, “there was a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seem to me now to have been about the size of a football field. There may been additional material spread out more widely by the wind, which was blowing quite strongly.”

For those interested, a football field is about the size of an acre. That’s much larger than Cavitt’s claim of about 200 feet and smaller than Marcel’s three quarters of a mile given for the size of the debris field.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the weasel words used by her. She said that the area seemed to have been and there may have been… both statements don’t suggest a strong memory of the event but are probably based on information she heard later, picked up from family and various articles, documentaries and books.

The important point is that she said her father located the debris during the July 4 weekend, which refutes the Daily Record article claiming a mid-June date. The truth here is that I’m reluctant to quote from her affidavit because later, in conversations with her brother, Bill, she reputed it all, suggesting that she might be remembering some other event. I feel obligated to mention her affidavit because it is part of the research and provides information that supports both sides of the argument. To ignore it is to reject part of the story with which I disagree.

Debris Arrives in Roswell

When Brazel went to Roswell to find that assistance for cleaning up the mess, he stopped first at the sheriff’s office. According to Phyllis McGuire, daughter of the sheriff and who was there when Brazel came in, he carried samples of the debris. While McGuire being in the office might seem strange, the sheriff’s family lived in an apartment above the jail. It was early Sunday afternoon when Brazel arrived. She saw the bundle of material.

After Marcel arrived, that debris was taken to the base and then flown to Fort Worth. Colonel Dubose said that, on orders by General Clements McMullen, that debris was flown to SAC Headquarters. Colonel Al Clark, who was the Assistant Chief of Staff for Supply (G4) in Fort Worth, flew the material on to SAC HQ. It is impossible to believe that this debris would pass through so many hands and not be recognized as balloon and rawin debris, if it was that. Remember, Sheridan Cavitt told Colonel Richard Weaver in the mid-1990s, that he recognized it as balloon debris when he first saw it out in the field.

Sheridan Cavitt in 1990. Photo by Kevin Randle

Of course, Cavitt told Don and me that in July 1947, he was too busy to be involved in any balloon retrieval. He denied he had gone out to the impact site, despite Bill Rickett telling us otherwise. Rickett said that the site was less than an hour from Roswell and that several of the senior officers were there.

But Cavitt changed the story and told Weaver he had been on the debris field. He didn’t remember if Marcel was there or not, but that he, Cavitt, knew it was a balloon. He didn’t explain why he didn’t mention that to Marcel nor did he explain why he had withheld this important intelligence from Blanchard or the other staff officers in Roswell.

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

Colonel William Butch Blanchard.

Although it is unclear who the “he” is, but the information was relayed to Marcel and not Blanchard. It was Marcel who was stymied and accompanied Brazel back to the ranch with Cavitt of the Counterintelligence Corps. Marcel was not accompanied by Sheriff Wilcox.

It’s here where we run into another aspect of this and that’s the size of the debris field. Marcel told researchers that it was about three quarters of a mile long and two hundred feet wide. Marcel said that it looked as if something had exploded in the air and didn’t mention a gouge. He said that he saw no evidence that anything hit the ground.

Cavitt, however, said the debris field was only about two hundred feet square, which suggests the remains of a Mogul flight. To him there was nothing unusual about the debris field, yet he spent a couple of hours out there. Marcel suggested that Cavitt head on back to the base, while he, Marcel, gathered some of that debris to take back to Roswell.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the debris field in 1989. 
Photo by Kevin Randle

Although Marcel didn’t mention a gouge, Bill Brazel did. He said that it ran down what would have been the center of the debris field. According to what he told Don and me, it was narrow at the beginning, widened out to about ten feet and then narrowed at the far end. It suggested that something had bounced and then gaining flight for another fifteen or twenty miles. I’ll speculate here that Marcel was looking for an impact crater where the object had hit. Seeing the debris field, it was his memory that the object had exploded in the air.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon and the Roswell Case

In one of the more outrageous examples of misinformation, Wikipedia claimed “The book [UFO Crash at Roswell] claimed that General Arthur Exon had been aware of debris and bodies, but Exon disputed his depiction.”

Brigadier General Arthur Exon.

Karl Pflock is probably the source of this information, but Pflock doesn’t actually write that. He wrote, “As we will see, General Exon has quite a different take on what he actually said and intended to convey.”

But what actually happened was the Stanton Friedman made the original allegation against Don and me because Exon talked about an oversight group he identified as “The Unholy Thirteen.” That information, from an actual living source who was there, was in conflict with Friedman’s defense of MJ-12 documents. If the group, as described by Exon existed, that undercut the validity of MJ-12. Friedman said that Exon had told him that we, or more accurately in this case I, had misquoted him.

But that’s not what Exon said originally. In a handwritten letter dated November 24, 1991, Exon set the record on this straight. He wrote:

I’m sorry that a portion of my interview has given you trouble. I will acknowledge that the “quick” quotes does have me saying that my flights later much later [emphasis in the original], varified [sic] the direction of possible flight of the object…

Further, you both likely recall on many occasions during my visits with you in person and on the phone when you wanted me to meet others – that I did not know anything first Hand. Although I believe you did quote me accurately, [emphasis added], I do believe that your writings gave me more credence and impression of personal & direct knowledge that my recordings would indication [sic] on their own! [Emphasis in original]. I felt that throughout the portions where my name was used, the quotes were O,K. but the authoritative emphasis was yours. I want to say that so far your use of my name and discussions have not given me any problem. So let’s leave it at that. I did enjoy your and Donald’s efforts in digging into who knows what!

I’m returning the copy of your books. I’ll be glad to pay for it but would appreciate it being autographed.

For those interested in a more comprehensive analysis of this whole situation, you can find it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-general-exon-quotes-again.html

And here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-havent-wanted-to-turn-this-blog-into.html

And here, you can see a copy of Exon’s letter to me and Greg Sandow’s analysis of the importance of the Exon testimony here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-general-exon-quotes-are-accurate.html

Karl Pflock, in his book, later followed up with that weak sentence in an earlier chapter, with a paragraph. He wrote:

…However, what of the recollections attributed by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt to retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Arthur E. Exon?

When first made public in 1991, it seemed Exon’s memories of the possibility that bodies had been flown from Roswell to Wright Field in 1947 might be based upon firsthand information. If so, this would be highly significant, especially since Exon also seemed to have firsthand knowledge of the debris field and crash site, as well as a shadowy high-level group established to keep the truth about Roswell under wraps. However, in a lengthy September 1992 telephone conversation, Exon told me [Pflock] his comments about bodies and debris at Wright Field were based solely upon rumors he heard from colleagues at Wright Field and nothing more. As for the “control group,” he said he merely was making educated guesses as to who likely would have been selected for such a group. Finally, with respect to his alleged knowledge of the debris field and crash sites, he told me he remembered flying over several sites in New Mexico quite some time after July 1947, on missions that had nothing to do with the Roswell incident. One such location might have fit what he had been told about the crash site by ufologists because it had vehicle tracks running to it.

I find the use of the term “rumor,” to be somewhat reductive. One definition of rumor is, “information or a story that is passed from person to person but has not been proven to be true.”

I can argue that there are elements of what Exon said that are true based on other testimony and documentation. Exon was the source for us, but he was not the only source talking about what he had learned from those who had seen the bodies and who had studied the strange metal that had been delivered to Wright Field.

It is true, that the information was second hand from Exon but it strains the term rumor as it was applied here. Exon made it clear that he knew those who told him about the bodies and about the metal. It wasn’t gossip he’d overheard in the Officers Club or tales told out of school. These were men he trusted telling him, specifically about the strange metal recovered on the debris field and later from a photographer who told him about the bodies.

The real problem here is that I have published, in several places, the transcripts of what Exon told me and later told Don. I shared those transcripts with both Pflock and Philip Klass. Pflock knew about the letter that Exon had sent to me, but that didn’t stop him from suggesting that we misrepresented Exon. Both the letter and the tone of our book, suggested that Exon was telling us what he had learned from his colleagues and that his first-hand observations were from a flight over the debris field and the impact site. Both Friedman and Pflock knew the truth about the source of the information and both distorted that information for their own purposes.

I will note that Pflock did not supply transcripts of his interview with Exon. He put his spin on it but Exon told me, in his letter what he meant. As I say, this takes it from rumor to  a higher level of information.

I made it clear, in UFO Crash at Roswell, the information was not from direct observation by Exon, but came from discussions with those directly involved. The information rises above the definition of rumor but it is still second hand.

But Exon also talked about two distinct sites, which we have thought of as the debris field near Corona, New Mexico and the impact site much closer to Roswell. As mentioned earlier, Rickett described in detail his trip to the impact site with Cavitt. Contrary to Pflock’s reporting, Exon flew over those sites which makes that first hand testimony with corroborating statements by others. And, importantly, he mentioned two sites and not several different sites. Exon was telling Don and me about two distinct sites.

There is one other interesting fact that has not been mentioned. While we were attacked about what Exon had said and done, the final statement in that segment of the book, Exon said, “Roswell was the recovery of a craft from space.” There is nothing in the notes or interviews by others that this statement is in dispute.

An interesting side note that has some relevance to the discussion is that Exon had a copy of the book. He had read the segments about him and he didn’t challenge any of the statements as inaccurate. He challenged the importance of the quotes he had made, but he wrote that the quotes were accurate and that includes the last one attributed to him. “Roswell was the recovery of a craft from space.”

A Final Word

This has grown much longer than I intended. The original point was to show the bias in Wikipedia about the Roswell crash/retrieval. Nearly every source they quoted was from the skeptical side of the argument. I believe that by correcting some of the mistakes made, I have shown the bias. Even a quarter of a century after we updated the spelling of Mack Brazel’s name, they can’t get it right. Even after thirty years of explaining that the operation in Alamogordo was not highly classified and showing pictures that appeared in the newspapers of the time, we are still told it was highly classified. And in this latest version of the article in Wikipedia, they have printed “facts” that are easily checked but no one bothered with that.

I could even point out that the three thousand dollars offered for proof of a flying disk, some of that information was not widely available until after Brazel had gone into Roswell. A thousand dollars was only available during the July 4^th weekend and the announcement of a thousand from another source wasn’t reported until Monday after Brazel had returned from Roswell.

I don’t suppose that Wikipedia will correct the errors and provide information from the other side of the argument. But I will note one other fact. Much of the information reported in Wikipedia is from published sources that have quoted other sources. The information that Don, Tom Carey and I reported on was gathered in interviews with the participants. We didn’t read a bunch of books and articles; we talked to the people who were there and involved. That should count for something.

Roswell Festival 2026

 

For those interested, I was at the Roswell Festival over the July 4^th weekend. I look at this as an opportunity to connect with other UFO researchers and those who had UFO experiences. This year, among those there were Don Schmitt, Travis Walton, Kathleen Marden, Ben Hansen, Thom Reed, Frank Kimbler, Marc D’Antonio and Dennis Balthaser. Along with the individual presentations, there were panel discussions on the Roswell case and alien abductions.

The International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell.

Ironically, I sat in on the Abduction Panel with Travis and Kathleen. I was there to talk about the Hickson/Parker abduction from Pascagoula in 1973. What had impressed me about this case was there were witnesses to the abduction, four of them named in an Air Force document dated the next day. That underscored the validity of the report.

Kathleen mentioned that there were similar revelations about the Barney and Betty Hill case, meaning additional witnesses, not to mention the radar tracking from Pease AFB and an Air Force investigation that was less then reliable. She didn’t supply the names of the witnesses and I didn’t ask, which I should have.

She also mentioned there had been some updated work on the Marjorie Fish star map model that had been described by Betty Hill. Fish gathered astronomical data about the stars around our sun out to about fifty light years. It was Fish who discovered that the Zeta Reticuli star system might be the home world of some of the alien visitors.

Kathleen Marden

In the past, I had been critical of Fish’s work. It was an exceptional job, but the data she used was now out of date. Star system distances have been updated with some moving in and others moving out of her designed range. She also left out red dwarf stars because there are so many within fifty light years of Earth. Her thinking was there would be no reason to visit those systems, but our latest data suggests some of red dwarf systems are worthy of attention. I mention this here but it didn’t come up during the panel discussion.

One of the things about the festival is that you get to meet many people who have had UFO experiences. Of those, a man of about thirty-five or forty told me about seeing an object come out of the sea, hesitate for several seconds and then climb away at high speed. He was close enough to get a good look at it. He said the UFO was rounded, maybe more egg-shaped than circular and had a blue haze surrounding it.

I also talked with a guy who had seen a triangular-shaped UFO that hovered overhead for four to five minutes, before drifting to the west. As it began to move, an Air Force fighter appeared in the east. I’m not sure if that was coincidence or deliberate, but the presence of the fighter appeared to have caused the rapid acceleration of the UFO.

And I talked to a few people who had multiple sightings. In the Project Blue Book days, they would have been labeled as repeaters and their reports would be automatically rejected. One of the men talked of seeing glowing balls of light in the distance, somewhat reminiscent of the World War II Foo Fighters.

I always thought of the repeaters as being lucky. There was a man, not at the festival, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records had been struck by lightning five times. The very definition of a repeater who proved that some people were in the right place (or in his case the wrong place) to make multiple sightings.

The point here is that it is never proper technique to dismiss a witness or evidence because of a personal bias. Some people have the luck and some don’t. I’ve said that my only possible sighting was a point of light in a polar orbit seen in early 1967. Given the timing, I don’t believe it was one of ours, meaning Earth based, but then it was just a point of light flying from north to south at a steady speed.

There was a panel discussion about the Roswell case but it didn’t dwell on the well-known aspects of it. There was a question about the destruction of classified material during that panel and a fact that was discovered by the search for documents. There is also the question about why documents of historical significance would be destroyed. Although there is talk of a nefarious purpose, I noted that as an intelligence officer, I had destroyed many documents. Most were irrelevant to my mission and others were out of date, requiring destruction.

I did note that those communications and documents created at the highest levels would have been preserved but without a proper name we might never find them. I mentioned a FOIA request I had submitted for a document. I had the name of the document, the name of the author, the name of the organization for which it was created and the date on the document. My request was refused because they wanted more specific information. It was an excuse to refuse releasing the material by fulfilling the requirements of the FOIA law without providing the requested information.

Maria Tellier, the MUFON New Mexico director gave a presentation on the 1964 Holloman UFO landing. The case was the alleged communication between one of the alien races visiting Earth and several high-ranking humans stationed at Holloman AFB. According to information published in UFO’s Past, Present and Future by Robert Emenegger in 1974, “The [base] commander and two officers, along two base Air Force scientists arrive [at the UFO landing site] and wait apprehensively. A panel slides open on the side of the craft.

“Stepping forward, there are one, then a second and a third – what appear to be men dressed in tight-fitting jump suits. Perhaps short by our standards, with an odd gray-green complexion, eyes set wide apart. A large, pronounced nose. They wear headpieces that resemble rows of a rope-like design.”

I mention all this for those who might not be aware of the rumored landing of a craft at Holloman Air Force Base. According to Emenegger, there is film of the landing. While I find the tale wild even by UFO standards, Tellier provided an interesting take on the story.

There were a wide range of other activities, most of which I didn’t attend. The festival has expanded beyond the research aspects of the Roswell case to become a celebration of alien visitation. Many of the businesses have an alien theme and one of the McDonald’s restaurants has a definite flying saucer aspect to it.

The Roswell Flying Saucer McDonal's Restaurant.

There were a costume contest, a 5K race and a parade. Main Street in front of the museum was closed off for vendors who provided a variety of food and other souvenirs. Of course, it was hot out in the street, so I stayed in the museum where there was air conditioning.

Main Street closed and filled with the vendors.

Finally, one comment. During Travis’s presentation, two young men who had a video camera and an agenda, interrupted the show to ask pointed questions. It was clear that they were looking for clicks and while it was Travis’s job to answer those questions, they should have waited until the presentation was over. The audience had no interest in their opinions. Sometimes those playing journalist seem to believe they are owed answers. In reality, they should have been interested in the truth rather than creating a video for clicks.

I had a very good time in Roswell. The staff of the museum was courteous and worked to make sure everything ran smoothly. The one unscripted presentation came when one of the speakers didn’t arrive. Don was asked to fill in, and I suggested we do something together. It had been a long time since we had been on stage together, but it worked well. As Don said later, “Just like old times.”

We have already talked about doing that next year.

And as a commercial message, I have a new UFO book to be published on August 25, called UFO Sightings and Alien Visitation. It is a book that follows my chasing footnotes, providing some solutions to UFO cases and underscoring the reality of others.

Baker Overland "Finds the REAL Roswell Crash Site," or How to Pretend to Investigate the Case

 

Normally, I ignore many of these analyses of the Roswell case. Baker Overland just posted “I Found the REAL Roswell Crash site.” I was interested in the real crash site but all he did was trespass on private property and cross Bureau of Land Management land (BLM) without permission. The real site he found, was the one that Don Schmitt and I located in 1989 with the help of Bill Brazel.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the "Real" crash site in 1989 They are standing

near the spot where Baker Overland stood to make his video. Photo by Kevin

Randle.

Let me back up a moment. He tells us about Mac Brazel, not realizing he was really Mack Brazel. He mispronounces Brazel and Carey, gives us pictures of people who were in Roswell at the time, but the pictures not of those people. We get plenty of video of him driving around in New Mexico that has little to do with the topic. Although he talked of doing a deep dive, it was into the shallow end of the pool.

We get him standing at the northwest corner of the Debris Field. Bill Brazel took Don and me there. Baker Overland talks of it being a crater. His analysis of the size of the saucer based on the size of the crater is utter nonsense. According to Bill Brazel, who was on the site within days of his father reporting it to the Army in Roswell, said there was a gouge. It was narrow at the top, spread out to about ten feet across at the center and then narrows at the other end. In other words, the object skipped along the ground before becoming airborne again. He never made it to the impact site where the craft and bodies were found. He apparently never made it that far in his Internet research.

He travels over to the VLA, the Very Large Array, radio telescope facility. He hints that it might have been built in New Mexico because of the Roswell crash… no, it was the isolation of the area and the terrain that helped isolation that was the reason for the location of the VLA. Nice pictures but it has nothing to do with Roswell.

The VLA near Magdalena, New Mexico. Photo by Kevin Randle.

He mentions Mogul, telling us the ultimate purpose of it but fails to mention that what was going on in New Mexico was unclassified. The balloon arrays were long but there was nothing on them that would have fooled anyone. And, the culprit in this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. It never flew.  Charles Moore, one of the engineers on Mogul, told me that Flight No. 4 was configured the same as Flight No. 5, but there were no rawin targets on Flight No. 5. I suppose this is somewhat confusing, but I’ve made this argument on this blog several times and in one of those posts, are reference to several of the others. You can access that information here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/coast-to-coast-mogul-and-updates.html

Charles Moore, champion of the Mogul theory. His analysis of the
information is a complete invention not based on the facts of the case.
Photo by Kevin Randle 

I guess the point is that he didn’t find the Roswell crash site because Don and I had already located it with the help of Bill Brazel. He provides a brief history that is untrue. Had he tried a little harder he would have learned more about the case. He never made it to the impact site, though Don and I were there in 2023 when Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries spent an hour on the case. He brought in a lot of material that wasn’t even good speculation. It was one of the worst examples of putting Roswell in the title as click bait, implying he had found the real site, but Don and I had been there decades earlier.

Don and me on the impact site about thirty miles southeast of the Debris
Field, the real crash site. Photo taken in July 2023 for the Netflix Roswell story.

This is the problem with the Internet. There is a great deal of information on about any topic you care to research. But this also takes time to understand how that information fits together. This was just a reason to use Roswell in the title and spend a little time in New Mexico. Real research requires due diligence. That didn’t happen here.

Why Jesse A. Marcel Dropped out of the Investigation

People occasionally ask me why Jesse Marcel, Sr. was left out the investigation once he had returned from the Debris Field with samples of the strange, metallic material. They say that you don’t leave your Intelligence Officer out of the investigation.

Good question and interesting point.

Fran Ridge and I were discussing who ran security at the Impact Site, he mentioning Robert T. Darden and me saying it was Major Edwin Easley. The documentation seemed to be on my side in this, but that doesn’t matter here. The point was that it caused me to review the transcripts of the separate interviews with Bill Rickett conducted by Don Schmitt and Mark Rodeghier. Turns out there was a clue about why Marcel disappeared from the event after he had gone out of the Debris Field.

Rickett, in describing his trip to the Impact Site, mentioned that they had expected Marcel to be there, but he wasn’t. Given the time line, the reason was that Marcel had been sent to Fort Worth with samples of the debris. While the investigation was continuing in Roswell, and had shifted to the Impact Site where the craft and bodies were found, Marcel was in Fort Worth meeting, first with General Ramey and later with the press. Although Marcel had been ordered not to say anything to reporter J. Bond Johnson, who took six photographs of the balloon debris, he was later quoted in the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph about what he had seen.

Don Schmitt and me on the Impact Site. It was much closer
to Roswell than the Debris Field near Corona.

By the time that Marcel returned from Fort Worth, the clean up on the Impact Site had been completed, the material taken to the base and stored in a hangar there.

Marcel was out of the loop for two reasons. First, he had been identified in the press release, which made him a target for reporters. That wasn’t a problem, because, he was in Fort Worth while the investigation and clean up continued in Roswell. Once Ramey declared it was a weather balloon, the reporters disappeared. Second, by the time he returned, the investigation, such as it was, had been completed in Roswell. If the craft was alien, the information about it would have been classified as top secret. There was no reason to expose Marcel to what had been learned while he was in Fort Worth. There was nothing he could add to the discussion at that point.

Did Marcel know about the recovery of the bodies? I would say, based on my experience as an Intelligence Officer, probably. But he hadn’t seen them. He had heard about them but he was uncomfortable talking about something that he hadn’t seen with his own eyes. He had seen the debris field and tested some of the debris. He said that it was from something that had not been made on Earth. He had not seen the bodies. As I say, I suspect that he had heard the rumors, but to him they were only rumors. He didn’t mention them for that reason.

It was Rickett’s statement about Marcel coming out to the Impact Site that sort of triggered these thoughts. You don’t expose more people to the secrets than are necessary. With the cleanup complete, there was no reason to bring Marcel into the event. It was over.

In fact, it seems that Marcel had asked Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC OIC in Roswell about a report he had written. Cavitt refused to show it to him, suggesting again, that Marcel had no need to know. The event was over.

And Ben Franklin had said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. You simply did not provide information to someone who had no need to know, and by the time Marcel returned from Fort Worth, he had no need to know.

Okay, let the firestorm begin… I just handed in the book manuscript that I have been working on these last several months and am between projects. For those keeping score at home, I’m about to begin another of the Vietnam Ground Zero books written by “Eric Helm.” 

The Last of the Gilles/Randle Debate

Quick note... This is the last of this argument because, as I say at the end, Gilles refuses to listen, rejects facts and endorses unverified testimony.

Greetings Kevin (Galileo, I suppose?)

I made you "Chess and Mat", whatever your new post concerning the question I previously adressed to you.

You didn’t have Check and Mate, except in your own mind. And what about the questions that I asked you? You seemed to have missed those.

Tom Carey, center, on the Debris Field. Please note the terrain.

It is the same concerning "the flakes" question:Read Sunlitle 4-4.

Same when I'm correcting you regarding fight#5,then #4...

Same as Mann reusing the tape,

Same as you not presenting Dubose's statments in Pflock's book to your readers...

Well, let’s see… you ask questions but refuse to answer mine. This should be a two-way street, not just one in which you stand on the corner and shout insults.

I am truly sorry that you are incapable of understanding my responses. I tell you again, Flight #4 was cancelled. There was a cluster of balloons launched later in the day, but the documentation in various reports, all available thanks to the Air Force in their big book about Roswell confirm this. We learn what these clusters were and they were not numbered Mogul flights. Charles Moore said that Flight #4 was configured the same way as #5, and that it performed as well as #5, if not better. That makes no sense, since there was no data recovered because it was cancelled… and if it was cancelled, then it couldn’t have dropped debris on the ranch. How hard is that to understand?

I have explained to you that in the early 1980s, Johnny Mann believed the important case was the Pascagoula abduction and saved the raw footage. However, the tape of Marcel that was used in the broadcast was SAVED, and he was quite clear on what he had seen and his conclusions based on those observations. So, your point is misleading… and I remind you that Mann said that at the time of the interviews Pascagoula was more important than Roswell because Roswell had not been fully investigated. I now expect you to take that statement out of context, since that seems to be your technique… He told me that reusing the raw footage tape had been a mistake. Get it? Given the timing and the situation when he conducted those interviews, the world vision was different than it is today.

I did not use Shandera’s statements as published in Karl’s book because that information had been debunked. Shandera did not record his interview, nor did he take notes. If you know otherwise, please provide links to that evidence. Please note this is the same situation in which I found myself with Mann. You reject it because of no taped interviews. Why do you accept Shandera’s claims, which have been contradicted by several others but reject Mann’s, which in the larger context is, more or less irrelevant.

We have Dubose on tape; he told others that the material was switched. What you probably don’t know, and probably will not care about, is that Shandera and Bill Moore were touted their new witness, J. Bond Johnson, who took six of the photos in Ramey’s office. Although they interviewed Johnson, it was after I had located him and conducted two or three hours of interviews all on tape. Johnson told me, that the material in Ramey’s office was a weather balloon… but, after Shandera and Moore interviewed him, the story changed and the debris in the pictures was the real stuff and because of that, they needed Dubose to say that it hadn’t been switched. Given all that, and that I had tapes of Johnson saying six or seven times that the stuff was the weather balloon, they needed Dubose to change his story. So, all we have is Shandra’s statement, without benefit of tape saying the opposite. Since I know that the information is invalid, I saw no reason to confuse the issue with it.

I did notice that you didn’t bother reading Dubose’s affidavit about what transpired in Ramey’s office, which, by the way, confirms my version of events in Ramey’s office suggesting that it was not the real stuff. So, why don’t you mention the affidavit? Isn’t that more egregious than me not bothering to repeat the lies you are so fond of in Karl’s book? Shandera has nothing and I have Dubose’s affidavit (not to mention the tapes and other witnesses again) … Aren’t you obligated to mention all that?

How do you make the decision about what to believe? You reject Johnny Mann because I didn’t tape the interview but you accept Jaime Shandera’s claim, which were not taped. Double standard.

Don Schmitt and me on the Impact Site closer to Roswell. Please note the
difference in the terrain. If there were two site, then Mogul is eliminated.

Well, if a Alien (ET) crash in Roswell is still your Cup of Tea. Your belief is yours, the facts NOT.

My true belief is that there is currently no viable explanation for the material recovered by Brazel on the ranch, nor the evidence that was found on the second site. I have said that it does not take us directly to the extraterrestrial and I would like some additional evidence. I’m just not going to push a balloon explanation when the documentation, testimonies and other evidence argue against it.

You also wrote: "the experts claimed something but we later learned they had it wrong". And you are comparing you to Galilleo!

This is absolute bullshit… I was suggesting only that once rigidly held beliefs were changed when new and better information was found. I could use several other examples and I thought the mention of the Coelacanth would have demonstrated that. When the first was caught in 1938, the majority of the scientists rejected it because everyone knew the Coelacanth had been extinct for 75 million years… when a second was caught, they began to realize that they still existed and the tone of the argument changed.

Or you could tell me that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge meteor impact and you could point to some scientific evidence for that. However, new information tells us that some dinosaurs survived that catastrophe and evolved into birds. Just shows that scientific thought evolves and only those with closed minds reject new information when it becomes available. This is apparently a concept that confuses you.

Excepted you are one of the "past" expert, here.

I'm very sad how you have turned, but cause Roswell you have so time and ressource devoted: it is normal when chess and mat, you are summoning special card "Galileo"

I’m am very sad that you are unable to grasp simple facts, that you reject evidence that doesn’t fit your narrative without evidence to back up that rejection and that you often resort to insults… Oh, and you never answer any questions, just throw out more nonsense.

BTW: I am concluding this conversation at this point because it is a waste of time with someone who simply can’t understand the facts. I have provided accurate information, notes on sources, and documentation but you rely on debunked material, misconceptions about events in Roswell and Alamogordo, and change facts to suit your narrative. And as Mark Cuban would say, “For those reasons I bow out of this conversation.”