Roswell: reconstructing the Roswell experiment…

Since posting on the problems presented by the Roswell ‘alien’ capsule, I’ve done some more thinking, trying to get inside the head of a 1947 biophysicist planning some kind of unethical human-subject high-altitude experiment, that we might now think of as “the Roswell experiment”. So, here’s my reconstruction…

Physiologically, what was Project Helios trying to learn?

We can glimpse this the 19th May 1947 meeting that basically shut Project Helios down. David DeVorkin quotes (“Race to the Stratosphere”, p. 285) Alan T. Waterman as saying:

A high altitude flight was viewed with increasing importance because only through such a program could a stable platform be maintained at various heights in the atmosphere from which many very important special studies could be made. These investigations could probably not be made in any other manner, and it was this fact that had justified the project originally.

What were these “investigations”? Not the Signal Corps’ “sound propagation experiments” added in Feb 1947 (p.278), which sound to me a lot like what the US Army’s Project Mogul was trying to do. Nor the experiment of dropping missiles from specified heights (which Hoover subsequently kept Helios barely alive to do). Nor even the “restricted” projects run by “agencies interested in ballistic missile guidance research [who] wished to strengthen Helios’s planned sky brightness and infrared horizon visibility studies”. (p.279)

But if we rewind right back to the project start, George Hoover stated that Helios would “collect data for furthering the study of the construction of cockpits for protection of the human element” (p.272). And I think it’s plain as day that this was not just ejector seats, or protection against supersonic flight, but also protection against cosmic rays. So I expect that this would have been proposed by one of the “17 groups [who] had responded positively” to Hoover’s Jan 1947 call for “basic research”.

Hence I believe that the high-altitude human-subject experiment that ended up being dumped just outside Roswell was designed to test the reaction of human subjects to sustained high-altitude exposure to cosmic rays.

What were the constraints on this experiment?

Given the (substantial) ethical problems involved, I can reconstruct a set of technical constraints and political constraints.

Technical Constraints

• Live human subjects being exposed to cosmic rays at high altitude (20km?) for a sustained period
  • (How would the presumed tissue damage from cosmic rays be analysed? Unethically, I suspect.)
• A pressurised environment
  • i.e. a capsule, broadly similar to Settle and Burgess’ “Flying Coffin”, or indeed Winzen’s capsule
• A balloonist
  • Presumably in a pressure suit
• A gondola
• A balloon envelope capable of lifting the balloonist, gondola, and experiment into the stratosphere
• A “lifting gas” (i.e. a gas that is lighter than air)
  • Hydrogen or helium were the only two practical options
    • Hydrogen had much greater lift, but needed better envelope seams, and was explosive
    • Helium was very scarce post-war, and would not have been available for a huge balloon

My guess is that, for ~300kg total weight and a target altitude of ~20km, this would have required the single (i.e. non-Helios-cluster) hydrogen balloon to have a diameter of ~20m, which is pretty huge.

Political Constraints

• Plausible deniability
  • i.e. there should be no paper trail linking the experiment back to the experimenters
  • i.e. there should be no paper trail linking the experiment back to the balloonists
• Cover story
  • There should be a plausible cover story prior to launch.
  • There should also be a plausible cover story in the case of a failed experiment, one that points well away from everyone involved.

What did all those constraints mean in practice?

Currently, my best guess was that the original cover story wasn’t “extraterrestrial” or “aliens”, but “Japanese“. To that end, a Japanese bamboo gondola was used (presumably captured after WWII, and then supplied by NAS Lakehurst), along with the unfortunate Japanese test subjects. (However, when the hydrogen balloon exploded, it shattered the gondola into tiny pieces, leaving the “hieroglyphic” writing as merely a cipher mystery to confound Jesse Marcel and everyone else since.)

Moreover, combining the technical constraints with the political constraints meant (I believe) that the human subjects inside the capsule would have had basically no life support – no food, no water, no toilet, no CO2 scrubbing, no additional oxygen – because the way those things were supplied would have conflicted with the need for plausible deniability.

I of course think that all of this was abominable, despicable, disgusting, horrible and wrong.

But if that’s what happened, that’s what happened.

Balloon flight logistics

OK, so we can see that the experimenters have placed the human test subjects in a pressurised metal (probably formed from 1/8th inch-thick aluminium sheets) capsule. But the lack of insulation means that launching in the July daytime in New Mexico would cause the temperature inside to start at 25 degC or higher and rapidly climb, killing everyone inside within a couple of hours.

Similarly, if the flight was done just after sunset, the temperature would start at around 25 degC and would rapidly drop, giving everyone inside hypothermia within (I guess) three hours.

Hence, the most logical time to launch would seem to have been about two hours before sunrise. (As an aside, stratospheric balloons would have been more effective to launch by night, because colder night air is denser, making the initial lift more pronounced.) Anyway, here are my temperature calculations:

The initial night time temperature in the capsule would be ~20 degC, and by sunrise this would fall to a few degC. This would be cold, but if the subjects were all wearing the kind of silk garment mentioned by witnesses (silk is an excellent insulator, while also being very lightweight), this would be uncomfortable but tolerable. After that, the temperature would start to rise in the early morning sun, yielding a maximum experiment length of roughly five hours. This is also roughly as long as I suspect the occupants would have had before they would all have suffocated from CO2 poisoning.

Sunrise in New Mexico around 3rd July 1947 was at 5.50am, so I estimate the original launch time was around 3.50am. Conversely, I also believe that the balloon never got close to the stratosphere, because no metalclad envelope of that time would have been checked for hydrogen leakage (only for helium leakage). So I would expect that it would have limped upwards, the balloonist quickly using up all the ballast, before coming down less than an hour after launch (i.e. still before sunrise).

This is also why I don’t believe this matches up with any “flying saucer” reports of the time, because none of them I’ve found were round about sunrise.

What happened to the flight?

I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the flight described by ‘Duke’ Gildenberg to Craig Ryan (in the latter’s “The Pre-Astronauts”, pp. 20-21) sounds an awful lot like what seems to have happened here:

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.

If this is the same balloon flight, then what we are reading here also reports the ‘pre-flight cover story’ told to a gullible Duke Gildenberg, i.e. that the “military” (i.e. US Navy) balloonist was aiming to fly his balloon all the way to the east coast “Eastern Seaboard” (presumably most of the way to NAS Lakehurst).

Feel free to disagree.