High-altitude balloons, the Roswell ‘alien’ capsule, Carlo Ginzburg, and ethics…

It’s easy to explain away a heap of lightweight debris in a scraggy field in the middle of nowhere as, oh, it’s just a weather balloon (as the US Army tried in 1947) or possibly as oh, it’s just a Project Mogul balloon (as they also tried, decades later), even if the resemblance was only superficial at best. But, as Walter Haut’s affidavit makes clear (Witness To Roswell (2009), p.285), the task was to explain away that, rather than draw attention to the other thing:

“Gen. Ramey proposed a plan which I believe originated with his bosses at the pentagon. Attention needed to be diverted from the more important site north of town by acknowledging the other location.”

To be honest, General Ramey’s diversionary plan has been doggedly followed for decades, to what looks like resounding success. Moreover, the ‘alien capsule’ crash site side of the whole Roswell narrative has been so comprehensively rubbished and yet so inflated with unattributed / confabulated accounts all at the same time that onlookers can’t figure out which mad extreme to believe; and so typically end up believing neither. Tongue only slightly in cheek, it would be easy to trace the roots of corrosive modern political discourse back to this metallic capsule.

The Cheese and the Worms

Was the Roswell Incident a real thing, or is it no more than a story that people with nothing better to do with their time (*cough*) like to garnish a historical nothingburger with? It seems that half of the academic papers on the Roswell Incident now treat it simply as a ‘modern American folk fable’, rather than a bitterly contentious event wrapped by a hundred layers of partisan spin and misinformation. One might argue that the one thing that definitely died that day in 1947 was any kind of respect for the truth.

As an aside, Carlo Ginzburg’s fascinating book “The Cheese and the Worms” (1976) lays out how a sixteenth century Friuli miller called Domenico Scandella went on trial for his heretical belief:

I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.

But frankly, the notion that an otherwise-empty rounded-end aluminium cylinder with a bunch of dying tiny ‘aliens’ in it – modern-day ‘angels’ who appeared ex nihilo, like worms in Scandello’s cheese – just appeared North of Roswell NM surely seems every bit as ludicrous here in the 21st century. And yet people have been feasting on this whole poisoned cheese ball for decades now. But… I digress.

The Problems with the Roswell ‘Capsule’

Anyhoo, if you accept the witness statements on the ‘alien’ capsule to any degree, it seems hard not to at least accept that something ended up in the scrubby ranchland outside Roswell. But if you think a balloon carried the (non-alien) capsule there, then you rapidly run into a whole load of issues… with the capsule itself, that is:

• No CO2 scrubbing (e.g. soda-lime), no heating (e.g. cold management)

Given that the sealed capsule had no CO2 scrubbing, the CO2 levels inside would have quickly climbed, causing dizziness, loss of consciousness, and death. If the capsule was (as asserted) roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, my back-of-envelope calculations imply the occupants could have had no more than five hours at most (and highly unpleasant ones at that) before they started dying. Your mileage may vary.

• No life support, no water, no food

Even if some of the occupants did manage to live (and there was talk of most of them ending up dead), there was no reported sign that their lives were really being supported in any way. Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to conclude that their survival was a priority in any way to those behind it all.

• No engine, no energy, no motive power, no controls, no anything

It was a “vessel” only in the sense that a flimsy plastic flower pot is a vessel, just strong enough for you to get your pansies home from the garden centre. Bear in mind that the few previous stratospheric gondolas all had complicated mechanisms to allow the balloonist inside the gondola to interact with the balloon above: but I believe there was no obvious sign of that here. As a corollary, it would seem that if there was a balloonist / pilot involved in this, they were outside this capsule, not inside it.

• No parachute, no cushioning, no heat shields, and dropped from a low height

The capsule was dinged, but it wasn’t so wrecked that its basic shape was unrecognisable. So: my best guess is that it was dropped from a low height (say, ten to twenty feet?), but not really any higher.

• If the capsule was lifted by a balloon, that would have needed to be a sizeable balloon

Project Mogul used trains of helium balloons, before moving to Helios-style clusters of helium balloons: and that was for a relatively small payload. (Trying to achieve constant-altitude flights, which was the point of that missions.) If this capsule had been intended to get to any height at all, it would have needed to be carried by a sizeable balloon: and that was something way beyond Project Mogul’s paygrade.

• Not a civilian balloon

In 1947, there wasn’t any civilian ballooning in America. Don Piccard had (famously) taken his balloon pilot’s licence in Feb 1947 using a captured Japanese Fu-Go balloon held at NAS Lakehurst, but the wave of non-military ballooning he later inspired and drove was still many years away. And even Charles Moore’s improvised balloon trip under a polyethylene balloon still hadn’t happened yet.

Nick’s Thoughts On All This

In some ways, using a sizeable, metalclad, US Navy balloon as the core of explaining what happened here might seem to be problematic, because that would imply that this inhumanity was deliberate. Had a truly horrible suspension of ethics happened here? Were the people (Americans, surely?) behind all this no better than the Nazi physicians who were (as of mid-1947) being tried at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial?

Even if you disagree with many of Nick Redfern’s “Body Snatchers in the Desert” details, this is essentially the dark heart of his argument: that the whole point of the Roswell ‘alien’ story was to divert everyone’s attention towards the curious metallic balloon debris in the New Mexico scrubland, and away from the inhumanity and (what you’d have to say looks a lot like) human experimentation going on in the capsule.

My current opinion – which may change, of course – is that I suspect the experiments were constructed aiming more for deniability than for deliberate mythopoiesis. If the capsule were to be discovered (as indeed it was), I think the basic plan was for it to be an unlabelled mystery (i.e. one without any external reference points), and perhaps even a mystery that in the end vaguely pointed more towards Japan than, say, Oak Ridge. But the US Army wasn’t in on that whole insider gag, and the idea that this was in fact an “alien spaceship” took hold, with grotesque (and far-reaching) consequences. Such as the Netflix series.

In many ways, ‘aliens‘ was the one story pretty much everyone wanted to be true here. Don’t you think?