Yeah,
I know that I said that I wouldn’t say anything more about Project Mogul
because, to me, that explanation simply does not work. There is too much that
argues against it, two of the facts being that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled
and that the early flights in New Mexico did not contain any rawin radar
reflectors as part of the array. If there were no rawins, then the explanation
failed at that point.
However,
I then found a website that devoted a segment to the Roswell case and used an
illustration from New York University that was labeled “Typical radar target
flight train used by the NYU balloon group in 1947.” As you can see, it matches
none of the other illustrations for Project Mogul.
The
website didn’t provide much in the way of a source, but indicated that it came
from the massive Air Force report, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in
the New Mexico Desert. It was included in the section that contained the
interview with Charles Moore but it doesn’t tell us anything else about the original
source of the illustration.
I
have been through, page by freaking page, of the technical reports and other
documentation about Project Mogul and the operations in Alamogordo. I have
seen, literally, dozens of illustrations and photographs of those balloon
arrays launched there in June and July 1947, that this new illustration matches
none of that.
The
only thing I have found that remotely matches is a picture from the Alamogordo
News on July 10 that shows two weather balloons and two rawin targets about
to be launched. Moore told me that the ladder in that picture was one that he
had bought with petty cash. The only copies of that photograph that I have are
poor quality reproductions from a copy machine.
 |
| Center picture shows weather balloons and rawin targets. |
The
question that arises, given all the data that I have seen about Project Mogul,
and all the interviews I had with Charles Moore, not to mention discussions with
James McAndrew and interviews with Colonel Richard Weaver, is where were these
radar target trains launched, and more importantly, when.
I
will note here that had Mack Brazel found one of these, which contained three
to five balloons and three rawin targets (though I don’t know why they’re need
three), he would have been able to pick up the debris in a few minutes. He
wouldn’t have been worried about someone cleaning up the big mess that was the
motivation for the trip into Roswell.
I
will also note that upon landing, there were be no reason for the targets to be
ripped up into pieces as shown in the pictures in General Ramey’s office. In
fact, we do have pictures from a balloon landing near Circleville, Ohio, in
early July and the rawin was recovered virtually intact.
 |
| Daughter of Sherman Campbell holding the rawin target he found in his field |
The
real questions about this illustration is where is the original source, were
there other NYU balloon projects in New Mexico in 1947, and when were these
small clusters of balloons launched? This seems to be one of the many red
herrings (is this now an offensive term for some maligned group?) that have
been floated (pun intended) about the UFO crash in New Mexico.
