Roswell balloon meteorology…

The starting point here is my personal belief that the Roswell Incident was a (horribly unethical) post-WWII stratospheric-balloon biophysics experiment that went horribly wrong.

However, there is a competing balloon account to consider: B. D. “Duke” Gildenberg told Craig Ryan (reported in pp. 20-21 of the latter’s book “The Pre-Astronauts”) that:

One of the first postwar manned balloon flights sponsored by the military was launched from the Tularosa Basin in 1947 with the intent of crossing the Rockies and landing somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately, the entire flight’s supply of ballast was expended in the crossing of the Sacramento range to the east of Alamogordo and the balloon’s journey ended just short of Roswell. A potential embarrassment, the aborted continental crossing was kept quiet and the pilot’s name never released. “We were naive as hell,” explained one of the NYU scientists.

Gildenberg worked on Project Mogul (though not yet in summer 1947, I believe) and then on Moby Dick, Gopher, Project 7218, Project 7222, Project Manhigh, Project Stargazer and Project Excelsior, which were all stratospheric balloon projects (see here, here, and here). He was also a friend of Charlie Moore. As the civilian meteorologist, engineer, and physical science administrator at AFB Holloman from 1951-1981, his special skill was predicting where a balloon would come down (“Gildenberg Never Brought a Balloon Down More than 1/4 Mile from its Target“). And note that Gildenberg also wrote “Roswell Requiem“, and a guide to how many of the Skyhook balloon missions were mistaken for UFOs. So we shouldn’t take his account lightly.

In the end, though, because balloons are unpowered, meteorology is king. So, what does meteorology have to say about all this? Can it help us choose which of these two balloon accounts is more likely?

The Meteorology of Stratospheric Balloons

There are essentially two key phases to a stratospheric balloon launch. Once you’ve managed to get away from near-earth wind patterns (and note that a proper sized balloon should get you to the stratosphere in half an hour or so), you’re in the realm of very much simpler wind patterns.

Yet, to avoid most of those low-level wind turbulence (most noticeable in the afternoons and near mountains), there’s actually quite a simple hack: launch just before dawn, when the air is densest (and so your balloon’s relative lift is maximised).

As far as the high-altitude weather goes: if you want to go up and not really get blown far away, the place you want to be is right on top of a broad high pressure feature. Conversely, if you want to hitch a fast ride from the Tularosa Basin all the way to the Eastern Seaboard, you’d be looking for bunched up isobars (for speed) going in the direction you want, and well away from a high pressure feature.

Duke Gildenberg also offered the following generalisation in his McAndrew Report witness statement, which I’d note also runs somewhat counter to his Roswell balloon account:

Balloon trajectories in New Mexico below the tropopause, are predominantly towards the east-northeast, when launched from Holloman AFB with the exception of July and August when balloons remained over the Holloman area. At high altitude, above the tropopause, trajectories are generally westerly during the summer and easterly during the spring, fall, and winter.

So I think that gives us a straightforward test as to whether Duke Gildenberg’s balloon account was correct: on 3rd-4th July 1947, where was the nearest high pressure feature?

The Meteorology of Roswell

As an aside, Project Helios had planned to do its first stratospheric balloon launch on 21st June 1947. However, I’m sure that would have been contingent on the launch site being near the middle of a big fat high pressure feature on the day. If not, the actual launch day would have been delayed until such time as the Sky Gods were smiling.

So what did the weather over Alamogordo look like on 1st-5th July 1947? Very helpfully, you can download historical synoptic weather maps from here. Let’s look at the sequence:

1st July 1947:

2nd July 1947:

3rd July 1947:

4th July 1947:

5th July 1947:

What do these tell us?

I think these are telling us that as far as a stratospheric balloon launch from the Tularosa Basin would have gone:

• the 1st July 1947 (Tuesday) was tolerably good
• the 2nd July 1947 (Wednesday) was much better
• the 3rd July 1947 (Thursday) was pretty much optimal
• the 4th July 1947 (Friday) was a little worse
• the 5th July 1947 (Saturday) was worse again

Really, though, all five days seem to have been pretty good candidates for stratospheric balloon launches (with the 3rd July 1947 being the best of the bunch). Conversely, none of the days would have been even remotely good for “crossing the Rockies and landing somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard“. So it seems that, if the dates are correct for Roswell, Duke Gildenberg’s account of the balloon flight was a bit of a busted flush, sorry. Against it sit both the meteorology maps and his own McAndrew witness account (pp. 166-168).

All of which is a bit of a mystery in itself, because there’s no doubt in my mind that Duke Gildenberg genuinely did know his stuff. So why did he get this so diametrically wrong? He claimed in 1992 to Berliner and Friedman that he had been “part of the launch crew” for Project Mogul, but it’s not clear to me that he was there in the summer of 1947. So I think there’s a high chance that his statement to Craig Ryan was based on something reported to him by someone else who was there, probably the same “NYU scientist” who said that “[they] were naive as hell“. Regardless, the balloon part of it seems to have been false.

But then… who was that NYU scientist? And why did they tell Gildenberg a fake / cover story? Really, you might also ask the question of what Project Helios got in return for providing Project Mogul with all the cluster technology.