THE SKEPTICS FOR ROSWELL INCIDENT The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul

Dave Thomas

As reported in the January-February 1995 Skeptical Inquirer, a September 1994 Air Force report strongly supported the theory that the "UFO" debris found by rancher Mac Brazel in 1947 northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, was in fact a remnant of a balloon flight launched as part of a top-secret program called Project Mogul. The possible connection between the Roswell Incident and Mogul was first realized by researcher Robert G. Todd, and independently by Karl T. Pflock. Recently, Charles B. Moore, one of three surviving Project Mogul scientists identified in and interviewed for the Air Force report, spoke to the New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) in Albuquerque. He discussed the background of the project, the New York University (NYU) balloon flights, and the Roswell connection. He provided new details that would appear to virtually clinch the idea that the debris Brazel found was indeed from one of the Project Mogul flights that Moore helped launch. What follows is based on Moore's presentation, his answers to audience questions, subsequent meetings and discussions with him, documents he provided, and a monograph he is preparing on these flights. Moore, professor emeritus of physics at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, was a graduate student working for NYU back in 1947. The Mogul project was so classified and compartmentalized that even Moore didn't know the project's name until Robert Todd informed him of it a couple of years ago. The unclassified purpose of the project was to develop constant-level balloons for meteorological purposes. Its classified purpose was to try to develop a way to monitor possible Soviet nuclear detonations with the use of lowfrequency acoustic microphones placed at high altitudes. No other means of monitoring the nuclear activities of a closed country like the USSR was yet available, and the project was given a high priority. One of the NYU tasks was the development of constant-level balloons for placing the acoustic microphones aloft. After some preliminary flights in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in April 1947, which failed due to high winds, the project moved to New Mexico. In June and early July 1947, numerous NYU balloon flights were launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico. Some of these flights consisted of very long trains containing up to two dozen neoprene sounding balloons, having a total length of more than 600 feet. Moore makes a strong case for the hypothesis that NYU Flight #4, which he helped launch on June 4, 1947, was the source of the debris Brazel found on the Foster ranch, and therefore the source of the "Roswell Incident" itself. Many of the materials used in Flight 4 bear striking similarities to pieces of the Roswell debris. A diagram of an earlier, similar flight, Flight #2 (launched April 18, 1947, from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) shows the balloon train. No such diagram is available for Flight 4; since no altitude data were obtained for it, it was not included in formal NYU reports. However, Moore says the configuration for Flight 4 was quite similar to that shown. The large octahedral objects at top left and bottom middle are radar reflectors, which were used for tracking. Several small aluminum rings for handling the lines are indicated; the "payload" (a sonobuoy) was supported by slightly larger rings. The cluster of neoprene sounding balloons extended for hundreds of feet in flight. The debris Brazel picked up--and which was later taken to Fort Worth, Texas, for inspection by Brigadier General Roger Ramey, the Air Force commander there--matches NYU Flight 4 in several different ways. Some of the debris consisted of

patches of a smelly, smoky gray, rubber-like material, which is consistent with the neoprene balloons used in NYU Flight 4. Much of the Roswell debris--sticks, metallic paper, and strangely marked tape--is similar to material used for the radar reflectors. When Warrant Officer Irving Newton saw the debris in General Ramey's office, he recognized it as pieces of a radar target. Moore points out that the Ramey photographs show parts of more than one reflector; Flight 4 contained three Signal Corps ML-307B RAWIN targets.

Many witnesses of the debris described tape with flower designs or hieroglyphics on it. Moore recalls that the reinforcing tape used on NYU targets had curious markings. "There were about four of us who were involved in this, and all remember that our targets had sort of a stylized, flowerlike design. I have prepared, in my life, probably more than a hundred of these targets for flight. And every time I have prepared one of these targets, I have always wondered what the purpose of that tape marking was. But . . . a major named John Peterson, laughed . . . and said 'What do you expect when you get your targets made by a toy factory?'" The radar targets contained small eyelets. Moore showed the NMSR audience a similar target with the eyelets. In an article in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9, 1947, rancher Brazel described the debris as having no strings or wire, but as having eyelets for some sort of attachment. While many UFO proponents claim the wreckage shown in General Ramey's office was just a weather balloon switched for the "real debris," Moore pointed out that the radar targets used by NYU were unlike anything flown in New Mexico before and that "they were not available in Fort Worth to be substituted for the debris in General Ramey's office." Warrant Officer Newton was able to recognize the debris in General Ramey's office because he happened to have used an early version of the same targets while serving as a weatherman in Okinawa. The earlier-model targets Newton used did not have the reinforcing tape with the pinkish-purple flower designs. Brazel's daughter, Bessie Brazel Schreiber, in a 1979 interview conducted by author William Moore (no relation to Charles B. Moore), described some aluminum ring-shaped objects in the debris that looked like pipe intake collars or the necks of balloons. (The mention of the rings appears in William Moore's transcript of the interview, but was not included in his book The Roswell Incident.) She estimated that they were about 4 inches around, and said she could put her hand through them. Charles Moore points out that Flight 4 carried several 3-inch-diameter aluminum rings for assisting with the launching of the balloon train, as well as larger rings used to hold the sonobuoys. These were cut from cylindrical tubing stock, and then chamfered to prevent damage to the ropes. Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC (Counter-Intelligence Corps) officer who accompanied Major Jesse Marcel to the debris field, described a black box in the wreckage. Moore says the NYU crew routinely packed batteries for the acoustic equipment in black boxes. There has been some speculation that the black box might have been a radiosonde, but Moore pointed out that radiosondes are usually white to prevent absorption of heat. On June 4, 1947, Flight 4 was launched, and tracked as far as Arabela, New Mexico, only 17 miles from the location of the debris field on the Foster ranch. Flight 4 was still aloft when the batteries ran down, and contact was lost. Brazel reported that he found the debris on the ranch on June 14, 1947, although most UFO proponents put the time of this discovery as a few weeks later, in early July. Brazel didn't take the debris into Roswell until July 7, 1947, by his own account; this date is disputed as well. Recently, Charles Moore has developed a brand-new line of evidence even further supporting a link between the Roswell Incident and Project Mogul. UFO researcher Kevin Randle recently provided Moore with National Weather Service wind data for early June 1947. Moore, who has lived and breathed atmospheric physics most of his adult life, analyzed this data in detail. His analysis deals with three NYU flights : Flight 4 (June 4, 1947), Flight 5 (June 5), and Flight 6 (June 7). The Weather Service wind data are compatible with what is called a baroclinic weather system moving through the area. As this "trough aloft" slowly passes by, the winds aloft will shift from blowing toward the northeast, then toward the east, and then toward the southeast. At very high altitudes, however, this type of system produces high-level winds in the upper troposphere at cross directions to those at lower levels. Furthermore, the prevailing winds in the stratosphere during the summer months blow toward the west, while those in the transition region just above the tropopause blew toward the northwest during the early part of June 1947. For example, Flight 5 proceeded mainly east as it rose through the

troposphere; when it entered the stratosphere, however, it was carried to the northwest. After some balloons burst and Flight 5 descended, it again headed in an easterly direction until it landed. When Moore used the Weather Service wind data and NYU altitude information to simulate the probable paths of the flights with recorded ground tracks (Flights 5 and 6), his results agreed quite reasonably with the measured balloon paths--Flight 5 drifted mainly to the east, landing near Roswell, while Flight 6 took a more southwesterly route. Moore then extended his analysis to Flight 4, the Roswell candidate. He used the wind data for June 4, 1947, and assumed the flight reached altitudes comparable to those of the subsequent two flights (which were made with very similar balloon trains). Moore's analysis indicates that after Flight 4 lifted off from Alamogordo, it probably ascended while traveling northeast (toward Arabela), then turned toward the northwest during its passage through the stratosphere, and then descended back to earth in a generally northeast direction. Moore's calculated balloon path is quite consistent with a landing at the Foster ranch, approximately 85 miles northeast of the Alamogordo launch site and 60 miles northwest of Roswell. Furthermore, the debris was strewn along the ground at a southwest-to-northeast angle (as reported by Major Jesse Marcel); this angle is entirely consistent with Moore's analysis. Charles B. Moore has been repeatedly criticized in the UFO literature for changing some of his earlier statements. He was interviewed for William Moore's book on the Roswell Incident. After hearing Bill Moore's description of the wreckage (including details of supposed 10-inch furrows running some 500 feet), Charlie Moore responded by saying: "Based on the description you gave me, I think that could not have been our balloon." Balloon trains like Flight 4 were far too light to make large furrows in the ground. The issue is not that Charles Moore said the wreckage couldn't have been a balloon-it's that he said his flights couldn't have plowed the alleged "furrows." On another note, Moore and other Mogul participants originally thought the debris Brazel found must have been from one of NYU's polyethylene balloon flights from early July 1947. He held this opinion until just a couple of years ago. These large, transparent polyethylene balloons were used for the first time ever in the summer of 1947 and would have looked strange even to experienced balloon watchers. However, after seeing the reports and photographs from 1947 for the first time, Charles Moore realized that Flight 4 was a much better candidate for the Foster ranch debris than a polyethylene balloon. So he has changed his opinions on the incident, but only because better data became available.

Figure 3

Atmostpheric physicist Charles B. Moore displays a radar reflector similar to those carried aloft on trains of balloons in Project Mogul experiments he helped launch from Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico in June and early July 1947.

New York University Flight #4 carried three of these reflectors and before being lost was tracked to within 17 miles of the spot where rancher Mac Brazel later recovered debris that prompted the famous "Roswell Incident" case. Moore's presentation included fascinating details on the background of Project Mogul. He noted that the discovery of the acoustic "duct" between the troposphere and the stratosphere came about as a result of a World War II era analysis of globally propagated sound waves produced by the volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. In one of their flights, he said the NYU crew attempted (without success) to detect explosions from the British destruction of German installations on the island of Helgoland (off the north German coast) in April 1948. While UFO proponents allege a lack of contemporary references to "Project Mogul Balloon Flights," Moore says the project was so compartmentalized that such references simply may not exist. Any mention of these flights will instead be labeled as NYU constant-level balloon research. Several UFO authors claim that the wreckage, and possibly alien bodies as well, were secretly flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio for analysis. By coincidence, Moore says he and the rest of the NYU balloon crew stayed over at Wright Field the evening of July 8, 1947, en route back to New Jersey, just as the Roswell story was breaking. Moore says they first learned of the incident while in Dayton, and figured that it was probably caused by one of their recent polyethylene balloon flights. The September 1994 Air Force report indicates that the Brazel debris also made its way to Wright Field. During an Air Force interview of Mogul participant Colonel Albert C. Trakowski, he recalled a July 1947 telephone call from Colonel Marcellus Duffy, who was stationed at Wright Field and was intimately knowledgeable about both Project Mogul and military weather equipment. Duffy told Trakowski that a fellow from New Mexico came to Dayton, woke him up in the middle of the night, and showed him the debris. Colonel Duffy told the fellow, "It looks like some of the stuff you've been launching at Alamogordo." What is the bottom line on the Roswell Incident, NYU, and Project Mogul? In Moore's words, "When the wind information is coupled with the similarities in the debris described by the eyewitnesses--the balsa sticks, the 'tinfoil,' the tape with pastel, pinkish-purple flowers, the smoky gray balloon rubber with a burnt odor, the eyelets, the tough paper, the fourinch-diameter aluminum pieces and the black box--to the materials used in our balloon flight trains, it appears to me that it would be difficult to exclude NYU Flight 4 as a likely source of the debris that W. W. Brazel found on the Foster ranch in 1947."

About the Author

Dave Thomas is a physics and mathematics graduate of New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and is currently a senior scientist at Quatro Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is vice president and communications officer of New Mexicans for Science and Reason.

Special Report The New Bogus Majestic-12 Documents

The new crashed-saucer documents, like their 1987 predecessors, are riddled with flaws. Philip J. Klass
"Majestic Twelve"-better known as "MJ-12"-first achieved international fame in the world of UFOlogy in mid-1987. It was then that UFOlogist William L. Moore and two associates made public three (purportedly) "Top Secret" documents which indicated that President Harry Truman had created a super-secret MJ-12 group forty years earlier to deal with extraterrestrial (ET) visitors. Truman's (alleged) action was prompted by an alleged crashed-ET craft that had been covertly recovered near Roswell in mid-1947. The Roswell crashed-saucer claim had been the centerpiece of a book published seven years earlier (1980) which Moore had coauthored with Charles Berlitz. (Berlitz previously authored a book describing the "mysterious dangers" of the Bermuda Triangle.) Recently, a large batch of additional "Top Secret Majestic Documents" have emerged, provided by another UFOlogist named Tim Cooper, who claims he obtained them from several covert sources. Their authenticity has been endorsed by Robert Wood, a respected, retired McDonnell Douglas scientist and his son Ryan. (Wood is a member of the nine-person Executive Council of Peter Sturrock's Society for Scientific Exploration.) Based on the Woods' assessment, wealthy Silicon Valley software expert Joe Firmage, who recently revealed his conviction that some UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, also endorsed Cooper's documents in mid-1999. However, on November 25 the International Space Sciences Organization (ISSO), which Firmage recently created to pursue his UFO interests, issued a statement that "ongoing research indicates that many, possibly all, the so-called MJ12 UFO documents were officially fabricated as instruments of U.S. covert psychological warfare . . . " (emphasis added). This is ridiculous! The new Cooper documents, like their 1987 predecessors, are so riddled with flaws that they could never fool Soviet or Chinese intelligence experts. Even some long-time pro-UFOlogists have denounced them as obvious counterfeits. One of the original MJ-12 documents released by Moore and his two partners (UFO lecturer Stanton Friedman and TV producer Jaime Shandera) purported to be a memo from President Truman to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, dated September 24, 1947, which authorized the creation of the MJ-12 group. My investigation revealed that the Truman signature was a pasted-on photocopy of a genuine signature-including accidental scratch marks-from a memo that Truman wrote to Vannevar Bush on October 1, 1947 (see "New evidence of MJ-12 hoax," SI 14[2], Winter 1990). A second MJ-12 document released by Moore et al. purported to be a November 18, 1952, briefing for President-elect Eisenhower, prepared by Rear Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter, who had been director of the CIA and, purportedly, was now head of MJ-12. There were numerous flaws in the "Eisenhower Briefing Document" (EBD), the most obvious being its reference to the (bogus) Truman memo of September 24, 1947. Further, the EBD repeatedly used a very unusual date-format-a hybrid combination of civil and military formats with a superfluous comma, i.e., 18 November, 1952. This unusual hybrid date-format was one repeatedly used by William L. Moore in his personal letters - until I pointed out this "curious coincidence" in my first article debunking the original MJ-12 papers (see SI 12[2], Winter 1987-1988). The third of the MJ-12 documents made public by Moore et al. in mid-1987 purported to be a brief memo, dated July 14, 1954, from Robert Cutler to USAF Chief of Staff General Twining informing him of change of date to brief the President on the "MJ-12 Special Studies Project." Investigation revealed that on the date that Cutler allegedly wrote the memo, he was out of the country. Moore claimed that he and Shandera had found the Cutler memo in an unlikely location when they visited the National Archives. The memo, which had been double-folded, could easily have been carried into the Archives in Moore's or Shandera's coat pocket. Less than two years before Moore made public the initial MJ-12 papers-on April 16, 1983-he had confided to then-close friend and UFOlogist Brad Sparks

that he was contemplating creating and releasing some hoax Top Secret documents-as first revealed in the March 1997 issue of my Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Moore explained to Sparks that he hoped such bogus documents would encourage former military and intelligence officials who knew about the government's (alleged) UFO coverup to break their oaths of secrecy. Sparks strongly recommended against the idea. It was not until nearly seven years after release of the original MJ-12 documents that a new "MJ-12 document" surfaced on March 14, 1994. On that date, Don Berliner, a long-time pro-UFOlogist, received in the mail an undeveloped roll of 35 mm film from an anonymous source. When the film was processed, Berliner found photos of what purported to be copies of pages from a "Top Secret/MAJIC/Eyes Only" special operations manual (SOM 1-01) intended to inform military crews how to recover crashed saucers and their ET crews. SOM 1-01, purportedly printed in April 1954, contains many flaws. For example, it stated that crashed ET craft should be sent to "Area 51 S-4" in Nevada. But that portion of Nellis Air Force Base was not given the name "Area 51" until several years after SOM 1-01 allegedly was printed. As a result of numerous flaws in SOM 1-01, a statement denouncing it as counterfeit was released on March 14, 1999. It was signed by Berliner and several other prominent pro-UFOlogists. By this time, a new batch of more than a dozen Majestic documents obtained from Tim Cooper had recently been made public by Robert Wood and his son Ryan at a UFO conference in Connecticut. They had strongly endorsed the authenticity of the documents, although Wood admitted that there were flaws in them. But he claimed that these anomalies "tend to indicate authenticity. . . . [Document] hoaxers generally try to make sure they are perfect." No mention was made by Wood that his long-time good friend, UFO lecturer Friedman - who remains one of the staunchest supporters of the original MJ-12 documents - had earlier investigated several of Cooper's documents and concluded that at least one was counterfeit. Friedman had reported his findings and suspicions about other Cooper documents in his book Top Secret/MAJIC, published three years earlier. British UFOlogist Timothy Good, who in 1987 had strongly endorsed the authenticity of the original MJ-12 documents in his best-selling pro-UFO book Above Top Secret, has more recently characterized them as bogus, largely on the basis of the phony signature on the Truman memo of September 24, 1947. But in the early 1990s, prior to Good's disavowal of the original MJ-12 papers, he began to receive some of the "new" Majestic documents from Cooper. Good's suspicions about the new Cooper documents were aroused by some factual anomalies in their content. More important, Good noted that mechanical flaws in the typewriter Cooper had used to write two letters on October 4 and October 7, 1991, resembled those of the typewriter used for one of his Majestic documents, allegedly typed in 1952. At my request, Good provided me with copies of Cooper's two letters for analysis. Cooper's two 1991 letters to Good not only had the same typeface as the (purported) 1952 Top Secret MJ-12 Annual Report, but more importantly the upper-case (capital) G and N were slightly elevated relative to the adjacent lower-case letters. However, an experienced questioned document examiner informed me that it was conceivable, though unlikely, that both Cooper and the 1952 document typist might have failed to depress the "shift key" to its lowest possible position when typing G and N.

Figure 1. "Elevated 8" in Cooper's letters and in one of his "MJ-12 documents." Top: Cooper's letters of October 4 and 7, 1991 (enlarged slightly) Bottom: From Cooper's "MJ-12 Annual Report" (enlarged slightly)

However, both Cooper's letters and the 1952 document also have an "elevated 8"-which does not require the use of the typewriter's shift-key (see figure 1). This curious coincidence was reported in the November 1999 issue of Skeptics UFO Newsletter, a copy of which was provided to Wood. His response of December 13 (via e-mail) was: "The question is whether that ["elevated-8"] is a characteristic of that typewriter design as distinguished from any particular machine serial number. We need other examples from the same typewriter design and I would hope to find some." In other words, Wood suggests that this mechanical flaw was a possible uncorrected characteristic of all of the typewriters produced by this manufacturer for at least several decades. Nothing further has been heard from Wood on this key issue since mid-December 1999. Meanwhile, Tim Cooper posted a lengthy treatise on the Internet on December 30, offering his assessment of his "new Majestic documents." Highlights of Cooper's views are quoted below: The question of whether they [Cooper's documents] are genuine, authentic, or real is not the issue here. The important point . . . is the information contained in the documents themselves. . . . In my own humble opinion, the Majestic documents are basically reliable as far as content is concerned with the exception of the questionable hypothesis that there are other intelligent, thinking, machine building cultures visiting planet earth on a regular, day to day basis [emphasis added]. Yet the opening page of the Web site that the Woods have created to promote MJ-12 states: "The Majestic Documents: Evidence That We Are Not Alone. Curious about the documentary record of military and government participation with UFOs, wreckage retrieval, and extraterrestrials? This site is all about it! The documents, the forensics, the military and intelligence history, and stunning validating evidence. Join us on a journey into the beyond Top Secret world that a government cabal has been hiding since 1941." (One of Cooper's documents claims a crashed saucer was recovered in the spring of 1941 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, six years before the alleged Roswell Incident. If true, the Eisenhower Briefing Document completely forgot to mention this historic event.)

About the Author

Washington-based aerospace journalist Philip J. Klass is author of numerous books critically evaluating UFO claims, chairman of CSICOP's UFO Subcommittee, and editor of Skeptics UFO Newsletter.