Talk:Roswell incident/sandbox
 | This is not a Wikipedia article: This is a workpage, a collection of material and work in progress that may or may not be incorporated into an article. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative. |
 |
'Weather balloon' as cover story for Project Mogul
Beginning in 1978, Jesse Marcel publicly reported that the claims of a weather balloon had been a cover story. In 1991, retired USAF Brigadier General Thomas DuBose corroborated Marcel's admission.[1] In 1993, in response to an inquiry from US congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico,[2] the General Accounting Office launched an inquiry and directed the Office of the United States Secretary of the Air Force to conduct an internal investigation. A 1994 Air Force report concluded that the material recovered in 1947 was likely debris from the then top secret Project Mogul, a military surveillance program employing high-altitude balloons (a classified portion of an unclassified New York University project by atmospheric researchers[3]). Ufologists had previously considered the possibility that the Roswell debris had come from a top-secret balloon. During the final year of World War 2, Japan had launched thousands of paper and silk balloons carrying bombs designed to cause damage and spread panic in the United States.[4][5] In March 1990, Ufologist John Keel proposed that the Roswell debris had been from a Japanese balloon bomb.[6][7] An Air Force meteorologist roundly rejected the theory, explaining a Japanese balloon "could not possibly have stayed aloft for two years".[8]
In 1990, Ufologist Robert G. Todd had first connected Roswell to Project Mogul.[9]
Sheridan W. Cavitt was a Counterintelligence Corps Special Agent for the US Air Force, he is a witness who was corroborated by Marcel to have visited the site. He provided a sworn witness statement that he encountered balloon debris at the site which was included in the first official Roswell Report.[10]
Scholars[11] conclude that the military decided to conceal the true purpose of the crashed device – nuclear test monitoring – and instead inform the public that the crash was of a weather balloon.[12] The balloon had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field a month earlier. It carried a radar reflector and classified Project Mogul sensors for experimental monitoring of Soviet nuclear testing.[13]
Air Force declassification officer Lieutenant James McAndrew concluded:
When the civilians and personnel from Roswell AAF [...] 'stumbled' upon the highly classified project and collected the debris, no one at Roswell had a 'need to know' about information concerning MOGUL. This fact, along with the initial mis-identification and subsequent rumors that the 'capture' of a 'flying disc' occurred, ultimately left many people with unanswered questions that have endured to this day.[14]
Reference scratchpad
1947 Roswell debris = Mogul balloon[15]
1947 Roswell debris most likely = Flight #4[16]
References
- ^ Pflock 2001, pp. 33
- ^ "Los Angeles Times". January 30, 1994. p. 12 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Frazier, Kendrick (2017). "The Roswell Incident at 70: Facts, Not Myths". Skeptical Inquirer. Vol. 41, no. 6. pp. 12–15. Archived from the original on 2018-07-20. Retrieved 20 July 2018.
- ^ Saler, Ziegler & Moore 1997, p. 7
- ^ Matthias, Franklin (10 August 2016). "Japanese Balloon Bombs 'Fu-Go'". Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Japan's latest weapon, the balloon bombs were intended to cause damage and spread panic in the continental United States.
- ^ Gulyas 2016, "Numerous explanations have arisen, ranging from Japanese "Fugo" balloons [...]"
- ^ Gulyas 2014, "[...] from John Keel, who advocated a solution to the Roswell question which credited Japanese Fugo balloons as the 'mysterious craft,' to Nick Redfern, whose Body Snatchers in the Desert [...]".
- ^ Huyghe 2001, p. 133, "Edward Doty, a meteorologist who established the Air Force's Balloon Branch at nearby Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico beginning in 1948, calls the Japanese Fu-Go balloons 'a very fine technical job with limited resources.' But 'no way could one of these balloons explain the Roswell episode,' says Doty,'because they could not possibly have stayed aloft for two years.'"
- ^ Saler, Ziegler & Moore 1997, pp. 27
- ^ Weaver & McAndrew 1995, p. 160
- ^ Including Weaver & McAndrew, Olmsted, and others
- ^ Olmsted 2009, p. 184: Olmsted writes "When one of these balloons smashed into the sands of the New Mexico ranch, the military decided to hide the project's real purpose." In 1994 and 1997, official government reports (Weaver & McAndrew 1995) concluded (p. 9) "... the material recovered near Roswell was consistent with a balloon device and most likely from one of the MOGUL balloons that had not been previously recovered."
- ^ Frazier 2017
- ^ Weaver & McAndrew 1995, p. 316
- ^ Lorem ipsum:
- Frank 2023, p. 551 "The weather-balloon story was indeed a lie. Instead, what crashed on Brazel's ranch was Project Mogul, a secret experimental program using high-altitude balloons to monitor Russian nuclear tests.
- Olmsted 2009, p. 184, "When one of these balloons smashed into the sands of the New Mexico ranch, the military decided to hide the project's real purpose."
- Korff 1997, fig. 7, "Unbeknownst to Major Marcel, the debris was actually the remnants of a highly classified military spy device known as Project Mogul."
- Klass 1997a, fig. 3, "[...] the debris was from a 600-foot long string of twenty-three weather balloons and three radar targets that had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field as part of a "Top Secret" Project Mogul [...]"
- McAndrew 1997, "This 1,000-page report methodically explains that what was recovered by the Army Air Forces was not the remnants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien crew, but debris from an Army Air Forces balloon-borne research project code named MOGUL."
- ^ Lorem ipsum:
- Young 2020, p. 27, "[...] launch #4 on June 4, 1947, captured the public's attention when a local rancher recovered the balloon debris. Noting unusual metallic objects attached to the debris and suspecting they belonged to the military, the rancher turned the material and objects over to officers at Roswell Army Airfield (RAAF)."
- Frazier 2017, "The reporter should have told readers what we now know the debris to have been: remnants of a long train of research balloons and equipment launched by New York University atmospheric researchers – specifically Flight No. 4."
- Bullard 2016, "Meanwhile, the Air Force rushed its own investigation and concluded that the wreckage belonged to a Project Mogul balloon array that had disappeared in June 1947."
- Gildenberg 2003, p. 62, "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"
- Pflock 2001, p. 159, "Flight 4 was all but certainly the Roswell crashed saucer."
- Goldberg 2001, p. 214, "What Mac Brazel found was probably test flight balloon #4 from the top secret Mogul Project that was designed to develop a long-range system to detect Soviet atomic detonations and ballistic missile launches."
- Saler, Ziegler & Moore 1997, p. 9, "Flight #4 is a likely candidate to explain the debris later recovered [near Roswell] [...] It now seems likely that Brazel found some of the wreckage from NYU Flight #4."
- Weaver & McAndrew 1995, p. 27, " The material and a ”black box,” described by Cavitt, was, in Moore’s scientific opinion, most probably from Flight 4, a 'service flight' that included a cylindrical metal sonobuoy and portions of a weather instrument housed in a box, which was unlike typical weather radiosondes which were made of cardboard"
Sources
- "Aliens Changed Roswell, Even Without Proof". ABC News. 24 February 2005. Archived from the original on 6 March 2005. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
- Alexander, John B. (2011). UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-4299-9483-5.
- Bara, Mike (2016). Hidden Agenda: NASA and the Secret Space Program. Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press. ISBN 978-1939149749.
- Berlitz, Charles; Moore, William (1980). The Roswell Incident. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. ISBN 978-0448211992.
- Bloecher, Ted (1967). Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 (Report). Washington, D.C: National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena. OCLC 429980.
- Broad, William J. (June 24, 1997). "Air Force debunks Roswell UFO story". The Day, New London, CT. The New York Times News Service. Archived from the original on 3 April 2016 – via Google News.
- Bullard, Thomas E. (2016). The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-2338-9.
- Carey, Thomas J.; Schmitt, Donald (2007). Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-Up. Franklin Lakes, N.J: New Page Books. ISBN 978-1564149435.
- Carey, Thomas J.; Schmitt, Donald R. (2020). Roswell: The Ultimate Cold Case : Eyewitness Testimony and Evidence of Contact and the Cover-up. Newburyport, Massachusetts: Red Wheel/Weiser. ISBN 978-1632651709.
- Clarke, David (2015). How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. London: Aurum Press Ltd. ISBN 978-1781314722.
- Corso, Philip J.; Birnes, William J. (1997). The Day After Roswell. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 0671004611.
- Disch, Thomas M. (Jul 5, 2000). The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780684859781.
- Donovan, Barna William (2011), Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, ISBN 978-0786486151
- Erdmann, Terry J.; Block, Paula M. (2000). Deep Space Nine Companion. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0671501068.
- Frank, Adam (2023). The Little Book of Aliens (Ebook ed.). New York: Harper. ISBN 9780063279773.
- Frazier, Kendrick (16 July 2017). "Roswell myth lives on despite the established facts". Albuquerque Journal. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022. Retrieved 14 September 2020.
- Friedman, Stanton; Berliner, Don (1997) [Originally published 1992]. Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO (Paperback ed.). New York: Marlowe & Co. ISBN 1-56924-863-X.
- Friedman, Stanton (2005). Top Secret/MAJIC : Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-Up. New York: Marlowe & Co. ISBN 978-1569243428.
- Fuller, John G. (1966). Incident at Exeter. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. OCLC 712083.
- Gildenberg, B.D. (Spring 2003). "A Roswell Requiem". Skeptic. Vol. 10, no. 1 – via Gale Academic OneFile.
- Goldberg, Robert Alan (2001). "Chapter 6: The Roswell Incident". Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300132946.
- Greer, John Michael (2009). The UFO Phenomenon: Fact, Fantasy and Disinformation (First ed.). Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Worldwide. ISBN 978-0738713199.
- Gulyas, Aaron John (2014). The Chaos Conundrum: Essays on UFOs, Ghosts & Other High Strangeness in Our Non-Rational and Atemporal World. Luton, United Kingdom: Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 9780991697588.
- Gulyas, Aaron John (2016). Conspiracy Theories: The Roots, Themes and Propagation of Paranoid Political and Cultural Narratives. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 9781476623498.
- Huyghe, Patrick (2001). "Chapter 24: Blaming the Japanese for Roswell". Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat (Second ed.). New York: Paraview Press. ISBN 9781931044271.
- Harding, Susan; Stewart, Kathleen (2003). "Chapter 9: Anxieties of influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America". In West, Harry G.; Sanders, Todd (eds.). Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Duke University Press. ISBN 082238485X.
- Jacobson, David J. (1948). The Affairs of Dame Rumor. New York: Rinehart. OCLC 550598.
- Joseph, Brad (2008). "Beyond the textbook: studying Roswell in the social studies classroom". Social Studies. 99 (3). doi:10.3200/TSSS.99.3.132-134. S2CID 145375518.
- Klass, Philip (January 1997a). "The Klass Files" (PDF). The Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Vol. 43. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Archived from the original on 2013-04-19. Retrieved 2013-02-06.
- Klass, Philip J. (1997b). The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-164-5.
- Klass, Philip (January 1998). "The Klass Files" (PDF). The Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Vol. 49. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Archived from the original on 2013-12-24. Retrieved 2015-04-07.
- Klaver, Elizabeth (2012). Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0791483428.
- Korff, Kal (1997). The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know (First ed.). Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1573921275.
- Kottmeyer, Martin S. (2017). "Why Have UFOs Changed Speed Over the Years?". In Grossman, Wendy M.; French, Christopher C. (eds.). Why Statues Weep: The Best of the "Skeptic". Oxfordshire, England: Routledge. ISBN 978-1134962525.
- Lewis, James R. (1995). The Gods have landed: new religions from other worlds. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-2329-5.
- Lavery, David; Hague, Angela; Cartwright, Maria (1996). Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815627173.
- Levy, Michael M; Mendlesohn, Farah (2019). Aliens in Popular Culture. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781440838330.
- May, Andrew (2016). Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Switzerland: Springer International. ISBN 9783319426051.
- McAndrew, James (1997). The Roswell Report: Case Closed (PDF). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. ISBN 9780160490187.
- Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2009). "Chapter 6: Trust No One: Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories from the 1970s to the 1990s". Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199753956.
- Partridge, Christopher Hugh (2003). UFO religions. Oxfordshire, England: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-26323-8.
- Peebles, Curtis (1994). Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 1-56098-343-4.
- Pflock, Karl (2001). Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1573928946.
- Printy, Timothy (1999). Roswell 4F: Fabrications, Fumbled Facts, and Fables. Timothy Printy. Archived from the original on January 20, 2013. Retrieved February 5, 2013.
- Randle, Kevin; Schmitt, Donald (1991). UFO Crash at Roswell. New York: Avon Books. ISBN 978-0380761968.
- Randle, Kevin; Schmitt, Donald (1994). The truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell (Hardcover ed.). New York: M Evans. ISBN 0-87131-761-3.
- Redfern, Nick (2014). Body Snatchers in the Desert : the Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 978-1-4165-1016-1. OCLC 893101680.
- Rodeghier, Mark; Whiting, Fred (June 1992). "Gerald Anderson, Barney Barnett, and the Archaeologists". The Plains of San Agustin Controversy, July 1947 (PDF) (Report). Center for UFO Studies. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 October 2023.
- Saler, Benson; Ziegler, Charles; Moore, Charles (1997). UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 978-1560987512.
- Smith, Toby (2000). Little Gray Men: Roswell and the Rise of a Popular Culture. University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0826321213.
- Thomas, Dave (2009). "Roswell update: fading star?" (PDF). Skeptical Inquirer. Vol. 33, no. 1.
- Weaver, Richard; McAndrew, James (1995). The Roswell Report: Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (PDF). United States Air Force. ISBN 016048023X. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2013-02-16. Retrieved 2013-07-28.
- Weeks, Andy (2015). Forgotten Tales of Idaho. Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press. ISBN 9781625852465.
- Wright, Susan (1998). UFO Headquarters: Investigations On Current Extraterrestrial Activity In Area 51. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312207816.
- Young, James Michael (2020). "The U.S. Air Force's Long Range Detection Program and Project MOGUL". Air Power History. 67 (4).
- Zeller, Benjamin E. (2014). Heaven's Gate: America's UFO Religion. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 978-1479803811.