I put the following diagram together to make it easy to see how I think the various pieces of balloon technology fitted together. The “Project -X-” is, of course, a placeholder for the (still unnamed) project or operation that ended up (thanks to the magic of plausible deniability) at Roswell in 1947.
There are numerous links between Project Helios and Project Mogul:
- Albert Crary’s journal in February mentions that the Mogul administrators were interested in Project Helios’ June launch (Project Helios planned to make its first manned balloon long on 21st June 1947)
- We see Lt. Harris F. Smith arriving with the NYU team at the launch site as part of the project’s Alamogordo Phase II (28th June 1947 – 8th July 1947)
- Some of the Project Mogul balloons used a Helios cluster balloon configuration
- According to Stratocat’s list of 1947 stratospheric balloons, there was a Project Mogul balloon launch on 5th August 1947 from NAS Lakehurst (which landed in Smyrna, Delaware)
One of the things I’m therefore now trying to get a hold of is all the Project Mogul technical reports and progress reports, which I believe have all been declassified. The McAndrew report presented a curated summary of those reports, but I would expect that many of the things that particularly interest me would have flown over McAndrew’s head (if you’ll forgive the pun).