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Article Excerpt
During the last decades of the 20th century the alleged flying saucer crash at Roswell developed into the UFO world's most influential and celebrated myth. After 55 years of commercial exploitation the mythology has reached frenzied heights while serious support from truth-seeking UFOlogists has gradually diminished. During the 1980s and 1990s Roswell became popular culture's archetypal recovered UFO tale--a mythic foundation for all manner of fabulous fictions and conspiracy theorizing that completely eclipsed the facts of the 1947 incident.
The last two decades have seen an explosive growth of Roswell literature. A tangle of sources refer to other sources that question the veracity of still more sources--each group accusing the others of conspiracy mongering. The topics favored by Roswell theorists and critics appear almost designed to sow confusion: coverups, classified projects, hearsay testimony, contaminated memory, and the melding of contradictory claims. The uncertainties are exaggerated by the passage of decades.
Despite the popular books that refer to the event as "the greatest happening of the 20th century," (1) the bottom line is that the "Roswell Incident" was one of the worst candidates ever proposed as proof of alien visitation. The original public announcement (by the Army!) that a real flying saucer had been recovered was headline news, worldwide, for one day... before it was utterly and publicly discredited. The non-story was then justifiably forgotten, ignored, or dismissed by UFO believers, skeptics, and government agencies until it was dredged up by the National Enquirer in 1980 (following a UFO author's 1978 lead). Nonetheless, the Roswell Incident still exerts a powerful hold on the global imagination.
The Long "Who Cares?"
Because most readers have known the Roswell myth for most or all of their lives, one really essential part of the picture has been frequently forgotten or glossed over--for more than 30 years no one anywhere cared about the incident at Roswell. No one. It wasn't part of the UFOlogists' lore, nor was it an issue for critics of the paranormal, nor was it part of science fiction or tabloid entertainment. It was a forgotten footnote, not because it was cleverly concealed, but because it was a lousy case.
Philip J. Klass notes that when "in 1967, longtime pro-UFOlogist Ted Bloecher published Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, whose chronological listing showed a total of 853 UFO reports that had been carried by the news media during the last week of June and the month of July," Roswell didn't make the list of the top 853 cases for the five-week period during which it occurred! (2)
Why wasn't it the star attraction that it is today? The 30-year silence was a direct result of the original descriptions of the Roswell debris by the principal witnesses: whatever it was, it was made with aluminum foil, balsa wood, and scotch tape--hardly the material of a starship!
Although I worked on Project Mogul, the Top Secret government research program that provided the debris on which the Roswell myth was based, I myself was not aware of the incident until its revival, decades after the fact. The Roswell "crash" was not covered in our Blue Book records. Had we heard of it initially my colleagues and I would have simply laughed, because almost every one of the early Skyhook (high altitude) balloon flights generated UFO reports.
1947, and Project Mogul
In 1947, I was involved in exciting work based out of New York University (NYU), where we were developing balloon equipment under contract for a classified U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) research initiative, Project Mogul. Our job was to develop and test the equipment necessary to detect the upper atmosphere acoustic signatures of Soviet nuclear bomb tests or ballistic missiles. Activities associated with Mogul were based in various locations, and in the summer of 1947 part of our university group was launching test flights from New Mexico's Alamogordo Army Air Field (AAAF), about 100 miles west-southwest of Roswell.
The dawning US/Soviet arms race made this research extremely sensitive, and it was secret to such a degree that we did not even know that our own project was called Mogul. Even Professor Emeritus Charles Moore, NYU's Constant-Level Balloon Project Engineer and head of the Mogul work at Alamogordo, was not aware of the tide of the program until 1992! However, our enormous balloon trains were physically visible from long distances, so the official explanation, if anyone happened to ask, was that we were doing vague "balloon research" using weather balloons. (Project Mogul was eventually declassified in 1972, almost a decade before the first stirrings of a popular literature about the Roswell Incident.)
Initially, Mogul actually did employ standard weather balloons, arranged in huge dusters or flight trains up to 600 feet long. These balloons and the more advanced plastic balloons which followed, were often spotted over New Mexico and reported as flying saucers in formation. Below the balloons, radar reflectors (light, kite-like aluminum foil boxes) and assorted other equipment were attached to the lines. The reflectors were a somewhat jury-rigged solution for the technical problem that our balloons were invisible to the marginal radar systems of the period.
Mogul used several variations on the radar reflector theme (as did others encountering the same problem), but they were all foil and balsa constructions designed to be as visible as possible to radar for tracking purposes. Ours were made to order by a New York toy company, which used a distinctive decorative tape printed with purple or pink flowers and other fanciful shapes. These "alien hieroglyphics" were later to be noted by various witnesses to the Roswell debris.
Throughout June and July of 1947, Professor Moore's NYU team launched Mogul balloons from Alamogordo AAF, while another NYU group launched similar balloon clusters out of Colorado (generating more UFO reports). Several of the early Alamagordo 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. (3) Analyzing newly available weather data, and following the lead of Professor Moore, I have also linked a later Mogul flight (launched on July 7th) to the legend. 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. (4)
The Roswell Incident
On June 14, 1947, a rancher named Mack Brazel found a large amount of paper, rubber, and foil garbage scattered across his land--and ignored it. Mogul Flight #4 would then have remained lost forever, had not a "businessman pilot" by the name of Kenneth Arnold sighted the world's very first flying saucers ten days later. While flying over Oregon and Washington State, Arnold spotted and reported several apparent aircraft in a formation "like the tail of a kite," with a motion he described as like that of stones or saucers skipped across a pond. Press coverage of this sighting coined the phrase "flying saucer" (or "flying disk"), and touched off the world's first and most intense flying saucer craze (which reached its hysterical peak on Independence Day). In the space of weeks, almost a thousand flying saucer reports emerged from throughout the nation. Government agencies were at a loss to explain these sightings, or to ascertain what, if anything, was so casually penetrating U.S. airspace. The hype continued to swell, reports came pouring in, and breathless headlines carried the news across the country.
On July 5th, Mack Brazel drove into town, where he heard this news for the first tine. Once he learned that flying saucers were swarming over America, he hurried back to his ranch to reexamine the debris that he had ignored weeks earlier. It was not the first time that weather balloons had come down on his property, but, now that he knew about flying saucers, he wasn't convinced that this was another one. The scattered pieces of silvery foil suggested something more futuristic than a balloon.
He returned to town on July 7th, and reported to the Roswell Sheriff, "kinda confidential like," that he just might have gotten his hands on wreckage from a genuine flying saucer. The Sheriff contacted the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), a facility that was in no way connected to the classified balloon work being conducted out of Alamogordo. From the Roswell base, Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel and Counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt were dispatched to investigate. They visited the impact site, where they gathered more of the unidentified materials. By noon of the 8th,...
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