Roswell: ET vs. Project Mogul: Part Two

Here are some further thoughts about that July 1947 Roswell “flying saucer” that crashed or crashed-landed outside of that town, with some additional emphasis on the prosaic Project Mogul explanation that explains all – not.

Continued from Part One.

The General Ramey Photo-Op: The whole photo-op that was staged in Forth Worth was clearly to reinforce the new official line that Roswell wreckage was just balloon material, and any book about Roswell will contain one or more of the official photographs taken by both civilian photographers and a base photographer. As far as the photographers were concerned, it was an all look but don’t touch quickie session – in and out ASAP. Present were of course Brigadier General Roger Ramey; Ramey’s Chief-of-Staff Colonel Thomas J. DuBose; Major Jesse Marcel (who wasn’t allowed to say one word; just pose and smile for the camera and grin and bear the embarrassment); and Warrant Officer Irving Newton, the base weather officer whose presence was just to confirm for the record that the wreckage displayed was that from a weather balloon.

It should have been sufficient IMHO for General Ramey to just issue a press statement downplaying the Roswell event with the weather balloon cover-up, or cover story, and ordering all other relevant RAAF personnel to back up that weather balloon tale if asked (an order which of course General Ramey, well, so ordered), and thus letting the story quickly fade away as having been explained by something mundane.

Instead, General Ramey goes over-the-top at far greater expense (and exposure) to strut the public stage and demonstrate the (apparent) reality of the weather balloon story or explanation with actual weather balloon materials and actual photographic ‘evidence’ of same. Of course you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that what was photographed in General Ramey’s office may not had any connection whatever with the actual Roswell debris. The photo-op wasn’t really evidence since there was ample opportunity to substitute real weather balloon debris for the Roswell wreckage before-the-fact. You don’t have to watch too many whodunits to realise the numerous ways of the slight-of-hand.

But that exposure wasn’t all positive. If Ramey had not of staged that photo-op there would be a lot less meat on the Roswell bone since it has given the pro-Roswell faction a whole lot of ammo, a whole separate avenue to attack from. Obviously once out of the clutches of the military, Marcel denied that what was photographed in Ramey’s office had anything to do with what he and others found outside of Roswell. It was chalk and cheese. Independent verification for the deception comes from Ramey’s former Chief-of-Staff, Colonel DuBose (who retired as a Brigadier General).  In a signed affidavit (16 September 1991 – after he retired from the military) DuBose stated “The material shown in the photographs taken in Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the [Roswell] material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.” It’s on the public record.

Despite claims to the contrary, if you go with the philosophy that if you weren’t someone who saw and handled the debris then you weren’t a primary witness, then the photographs taken of the ‘wreckage’ in General Ramey’s office is not primary evidence for Roswell = balloon given the chance for substitution of debris materials to conform to the new official ‘weather balloon’ line.

Transport of Roswell Debris: How Much Stuff Was Removed?

For starters, the amount of Roswell material or wreckage according to the original discoverer W. W. “Mac” Brazel, confirmed by Major Jesse Marcel, well Brazel noted that the debris field was about 200 yards wide and 3/4ths of a mile long (or some 240,000 square yards), the entirety of that massive area covered with this stuff that Brazel couldn’t identify and he had previously found a couple of downed weather balloons on the property (of which he was the foreman, not the owner). That Brazel couldn’t identify the stuff was the stimulus that set in train the chain of events that led to him calling the civilian authorise (local law enforcement) hence they in turn alerting the military at the nearby RAAF. And the rest as they say is history! A Mogul balloon train is at best only 600 feet long – assuming that’s the reality behind Roswell. Alas, that’s not hardly sufficient quantity of stuff to account for the size of the debris field as related by Brazel. Okay, once the debris was discovered and collected, it was transported.   

To Fort Worth: A B-29 was half-loaded or half-filled with crated Roswell wreckage, along with a separate satchel for General Ramey and along with Major Marcel transported to Fort Worth AAF for that General Ramey photo-op. A half-filled B-29 amounts to an awful lot of stuff but that’s what Major Marcel claimed to be the case, and he was there. Apparently then the Roswell material was reloaded onto a B-25 and hence continued on to Wright Field with the bulk of the Roswell cargo. Marcel returned to RAAF the following day.

To Wright Field: Both an FBI-telex (evening of 8 July 1947) and statements by Brigadier General Arthur Exon who was stationed at Wright Field in July 1947 and later became the base CO, an officer in a position to know what went on, confirmed that Roswell debris was sent to Wright Field for analysis. In fairness of course neither the FBI nor General Exon actually examined the debris at Wright Field (because of that military and otherwise official policy of ‘need to know’ officially called compartmentation). The flight from RAAF to Wright Field was via a C-54 piloted by Captain Oliver W. “Pappy” Henderson, which, to be honest, doesn’t make Henderson either an actual eyewitness to the debris itself (that ‘need to know’ again). Regarding your need to know, even if you have a need to know you are only given as much knowledge as you need to have in order to do your job – no more, no less. Most people albeit in the loop rarely see the Big Picture.

To Washington, D.C.: That Roswell debris was forwarded onto Washington, D.C. was confirmed by Ramey’s Chief-of-Staff, Thomas DuBose, in DuBose’s affidavit referred to above. DuBose stated that “The entire operation was conducted under the strictest secrecy.” The orders to immediately ship Roswell debris via Fort Worth to Andrews Air Field (Washington, D.C.) was given by the Deputy Commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), Major General Clements McMullen, stationed at the Pentagon. General McMullen’s orders were given directly to Colonel Blanchard at Roswell and also given directly to Colonel Thomas DuBose (Chief-of-Staff to General Ramey) at Fort Worth AAF according to DuBose himself in that 16 September 1991 signed affidavit.  

To Los Alamos: On 9 July 1947 three C-54’s carried Roswell debris from RAAF to Los Alamos, New Mexico via Kirtland Field.

So we have Roswell debris material distributed between four separate locations via six separate military aircraft – that’s a lot of aircraft, especially four C-54’s, to transport the remains of one balloon, even a Mogul balloon. Not even the Roswell sceptics deny that Roswell wreckage was sent to Fort Worth AAF, Wright Field and Washington, D.C. which is all very mysterious if the Roswell wreckage was just run-of-the-mill terrestrial-in-origin balloon stuff.

Why Was Roswell Stuff Transported? We know the Roswell debris was ordered removed from the RAAF premises and ordered transported to Fort Worth Army Air Field; Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson AFB); Los Alamos and Washington, D.C. Why? If the debris material(s) were routine terrestrial balloon and foil type stuff, what was the point? Okay, a satchel full of the material went to General Ramey at Fort Worth for his photo-op PR stunt instead of Ramey going to Roswell AAF (rank has its privileges), but why Wright Field; Los Alamos and Washington, DC?  Of course if the debris wasn’t routine terrestrial stuff but potentially out-of-this-world stuff, well, mystery solved. Wright Field and Los Alamos have the technical labs for out-of-this-world analysis; Washington, D.C. is of course where officialdom has its HQ.  

Timeline Discrepancies: A great deal has been made of some timeline discrepancies given by relevant Roswell witnesses in testimony. I’m not too worried about these slight discrepancies in recollections that constitute a definitive timeline. The Roswell events only seriously resurfaced in 1980, some 33 years after the fact and from those relatively few witnesses still alive. Again, all that testimony was at least 33 years old or greater, often much greater (it’s not always easy to track down witnesses so long after-the-fact). Let’s just say that I’d be hard pressed to recall exact ordering of important/unique events in my life 33 years on. I’d be sure to be slightly off when placing specifics into a broader context.

While on all things fodder for the sceptics, while any one or two facets regarding the Roswell incident can be debated and disputed (other than Roswell personnel confusing balloon material for a crashed disk that’s just too far beyond the pale so that point is not up for debate), there’s collectively just too many bits and pieces when taken together that the total package can not be dismissed or disputed. One quickly begins to butt heads against pure improbability that all facets are pure bovine fertilizer.

Was There A Roswell Cover-Up? Apart from the General Ramey photo-op (which we now know for certain was a cover-up since Roswell has now been ‘explained away’ as a Project Mogul balloon), and because of public pressure for answers to the bona fides behind the July 1947 Roswell event, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress, requested all relevant government records and documentation, especially those RAAF records, only to find and so reported in their July 1995 findings that all RAAF administrative records from March 1945 through December 1949 had been inexplicably destroyed, as had been outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949. These were documents that by law should not have been destroyed, but from the point of view of officialdom, how very bloody convenient they were. And by the way, the GAO document is a publicly available document which any Roswell sceptic can check. It goes under the title Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New Mexico.     

Eyewitness Testimony: UFO skeptics always hammer home the point that eyewitness testimony is about as reliable as a $7 bill. While total rubbishing any and all eyewitness testimony is more than just a slight exaggeration on the part of skeptics that is a valid point as any courtroom lawyer will affirm. In any event, eyewitness testimony regarding points of lights in the sky with no frames of reference is one thing – eyewitness testimony about physical stuff you are actually holding in your hand (like Roswell’s debris) is quite a different matter.

The Nature of the Debris: The eyewitness description of the found and recovered Roswell wreckage doesn’t seem to be at face value something that’s very alien and exotic, not that we collectively have a lot of firsthand experience dealing with alien stuff.

The debris seems to sort itself into three categories. There’s aluminium foil-like stuff that is frequently noted as two-sided; foil on one side; rubberish or leatherish on the other. The anomaly is that this ‘foil’ was extremely strong; it couldn’t be torn or cut; it wouldn’t burn; it wouldn’t permanently crush but would return to its original shape. Then there’s ‘I-beams’ or bamboo-like or balsawood-like sticks. The anomaly is that these had strange hieroglyphic-like or petroglyph-like. Lastly there was a brittle plastic-like stuff, like Bakelite. It doesn’t seem anomalous. All the three categories were lightweight.

Misidentification: There has got to have been tens of thousands of large balloons (weather, secret and other) that have been launched and come back down to terra firma and been found by your average Joe & Mary Citizen, yet there’s only been one Roswell type event where a balloon was allegedly misidentified as a “flying saucer” by not just one but a potful of military officers from the US Army Air Force. If Joe & Mary Citizen don’t ever misidentify downed balloon material for alien spaceships, it’s pretty absurd that military offices in the US AAF would. As we have read from statements by those who actually handled the stuff, there was no chance of a misidentification of the Roswell stuff for balloon materials.

To be continued.