Roswell balloon meteorology…

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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.

Roswell and the modern secrecy silo state…

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“A man is found dead in the desert, next to an open package. How did he die?”

Many will immediately recognise this puzzle format, which became popular for a few years thanks to the 1967 publication of Edward de Bono’s “The Use of Lateral Thinking”. Nowadays, de Bono’s whole “Lateral Thinking” fad is long forgotten, because – in truth – all it really claimed was that not all puzzles yield to linear analysis, so sometimes to get to an answer you’ve got to shake the tree a bit.

Fast-forward now to Peter Senge’s (1990) “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization”, which introduced holistic problem-solving to many. This is the idea that reducing complex systems to individual components can make some problems impossible to solve, because you’re not looking at the big picture. I should also point out that this is oddly reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ book “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” (1987) and its sequels, where seemingly unrelated events turn out to be connected in surprising ways.

But if you’re looking for a funkier, 2020s take on problem-solving under uncertainty that somehow reboots and refreshes these angles, I suspect your search will be in vain. (Perhaps that’s a book I should write?) All in all, the best advice currently on offer for genuinely hard problems would seem to be:

  1. Shake the tree a bit;
  2. Make sure you see the full picture; and (if all else fails)
  3. Ask Dirk Gently.

Roswell as a Lateral Thinking Puzzle

Let’s now lean hard into the witness-centred version of Roswell that appears in Carey & Schmitt’s book “Roswell: The Ultimate Cold Case”, and present that in the same puzzle format:

“A round-ended metal capsule with no engine or life support system is found in the arroyo. It contains three small alien-looking people, two of whom are dead, while the third cannot speak. Two other sites are found a few miles away, one with many shards of paper-thin metal debris, plus fragments of lightweight I-beams with unknown writing on.”

This, I believe, is an (only very slightly) stripped-down version of the puzzle the US Army was faced with in 1947. I further believe that the US Army:

  1. Latched onto a false solution (i.e. that it was an alien spacecraft);
  2. Covered that up as an issue of national security;
  3. Terrorised witnesses and concealed evidence as far as possible; and
  4. Has, ever since then, kept covering up the messes left by its previous coverups.

Why on earth did the US Army act like this? And, moreover, why does it continue to act like this even now? What kind of mad confuddlery is going on here?

The birth of the “Secrecy Silo State”

To me, Roswell is a symptom of something much, much bigger, which in 1947 had only really just begun: the modern US security state. Though this was made official by the National Security Act (enacted 26th July 1947), the ideas behind it – to create a peacetime security state based on the wartime security state – had already started to be put into practice by President Truman, Oppenheimer, Groves, Conant et al.

This took the set of wartime management practices used by the Manhattan Project and similar tech projects, and codified them into a peacetime management toolkit. The heart of this involved using secrecy not as a choice, but as a de facto starting point for everything. The default position was to disclose nothing, and (later) refuse to confirm or deny anything: and, as per the CIA, use plausible deniability. The state gave no transparency, no accountability, no access: the media were controlled, licensed, sanctioned, and quickly leash-yanked back into line if they started to dig in a ‘wrong’ place.

We can see this with Operation Crossroads in 1946: despite being planned very much as nuclear success theatre, many things went wrong (for example, the first test’s [“Able”] bomb [“Gilda”] missed its target by 649m; decontamination was almost impossible; and so on) and journalists proved much harder to force into line than expected. David Bradley subsequently wrote that “the accounts of the actual explosions, however well intended, were liberally seasoned with fantasy and superstition, and the results of the tests have remained buried in the vaults of military security“.

So, secrecy and accountability were immediate casualties of the new security state. But another wartime management practice accompanied secrecy: silos. Secrets were actively held and managed in small local silos – groups, teams, committees, even individuals. There was no global secrecy, just lots of local secrecy.

And this is, I think, what people often fail to grasp about America since WWII: it’s not that it’s a state that is built on secrets, but it’s a state that is built on lots of silos of secrets, all jealously owned and gatekeeped (gatekept?) by different groups and interests. And which rarely fit together.

The Problem With Silos

You’ve probably already worked out the rest of the arc here, but I’ll be explicit: as Peter Senge highlighted, you really need to see the big picture in order to solve particularly complex problems. And silos full of secrets make that almost impossible to achieve.

Because secrecy silos often isolate problem-solvers from conflicting information and opinions, they can often act as what we now call “echo chambers”, amplifying bad ideas and interpretations, which then (thanks to the way the silo is isolated) can get locked in. My belief is that this is precisely what happened with Roswell: a bad conclusion (about aliens who weren’t aliens) became a gospel truth, one so dangerous that it had to be immediately covered up (and then kept covered up).

Many people have written about the practical issues of secrecy, including Timothy Melley (whose book “Covert Spheres” on this subject I’m currently waiting for). A Professor of English Literature, Melley argues that literature becomes a way that people use to help imagine what the state is “getting up to” inside a secrecy state.

However, I think there’s a big difference between a secrecy state (i.e. one where the state monolithically holds secrets, so that you can talk meaningfully about a ‘government conspiracy’) and a secrecy silo state (i.e. one where lots of silos hold secrets, but not in a joined-up kind of way). For example, The X-Files told stories not only about The Syndicate (an archetypical silo of secrets) but also about lots of other groups holding secrets: yet unless you’re carefully tracking the overall story arc, people often think it’s about a single monolithic government conspiracy, jumpscare lolz, and whether Mulder and Scully are going to finally have sex. So maybe it’s all a bit more complex than the way Melley presents it.

But local silos also lead to disjointed management decisions based on partial (and often incorrect) knowledge, and leadership being forced to make macro decisions based on conflicting reports and opinions. You don’t have to look far into the history of the CIA to to see how this plays out geopolitically – Bay of Pigs, U2 spy plane, etc. I further suspect that bad decision-making built on the culture of secrecy silos played out on even bigger geopolitical stages – weakening Russia so much that it empowered the rise of Putin. But that’s another story.

Roswell 1947

So for me, because Operation Crossroads was in the Pacific, the Roswell Incident seems to have been the very first time that the modern US secrecy silo state was properly tested on US soil, with ordinary people caught in the middle of it all. And the US Army failed every test – they abused human rights in the service of controlling the narrative, covering up something that they didn’t even remotely understand (then or now), simply because that was how the whole modern state apparatus now ‘rolled’.

And as far as I can tell, it is still failing every test to do with Roswell. And you don’t need to be Dirk Gently to figure that one out.

An onion for your thoughts…

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“And you’re 100% sure this won’t be traced back to me?”, the sweaty man asked a little nervously. “I mean, my wife Mandyleen thought I shouldn’t meet you, but tonight’s her Krav Maga club night. Yeah, if you came at her with a knife, you’d get a broken wrist [he snapped his fingers proudly] like that.”

I laughed. “I’ll just pretend it’s fiction. We never really met, did we? And especially not just around the corner from SAPOL? Of course not! That would be far too… fantastical.”

Previously I’d had to endure forty minutes of relentless Ashes sledging from this Les Patterson-styled forensic sararyman, until I finally ‘admitted’ that, yes, the 2025 Aussie bowlers had left me as sad as Joe Root’s mum. And then after that, he’d told me about how he always wanted a son called Hurtle, but had ended up with twins (Hayley and Dayley) at medical school, and that they had creepy-looking doppelganger Japanese boyfriends, both called Ken. He’d shown me the WhatsApps. Which was nice.

To be honest, I had more than a fleeting suspicion that my nervous insider had downed a couple in the arvo before we met up. But I didn’t mind, because the drunker he got, the more it felt as though he was preparing to spill his filthy guts. The floodgates were trembling: I signalled for two more schooners.

“And I expect you want to know all about the Somerton Man? Now, what a shitshow and a half that was.”

The floodgates had opened.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

“Me, I like West Terrace, I’ve got a couple of great-aunts resting eternally there. But the whole exhumation thing? I didn’t care for it, it seemed like a giant barbie for a tiny prawn. But once that Professor guy got politicians on-side, they all wanted a bit of our cold case DNA magic.”

“So, did you do the familial DNA for the Suzanne Poll cold case? And for the North Adelaide rapist?”

“My team did”, he crowed. “Clever buggers, I love ’em all. But…” – he looked down at his empty glass – “that was before ‘Summy M’ came along, and wrecked the show. Wrecked my bloody show.”

I passed him his next schooner of Coopers Pale. “So, what happened? I mean, the exhumation was in May 2021, that seems a long time ago.”

“It was! Everyone else in the office thought it would be a stroll in the park: swab ‘im, stick it in the machines, bonza job, off to the Power at the weekend. I wasn’t so confident, but even I was surprised when nothing – and I mean nothing – went to plan. We’d have had more luck sequencing a Fritz Bung.”

“So what was the problem?”

He took a healthy glug, nearly draining the oddly small glass, and sat back with a wry smile. “It took me a while – probably longer than it should have – to figure it all out, but I reckon you might know already.”

“Nope, no idea.”

He looked across the table, narrowing his eyes. “So tell me: what’s the difference between an onion and a pickled onion?”

I again shook my head.

“One stings your eyes, the other stings your arse.” He laughed, then quickly looked uncomfortable. “Only in this case, the joke was on us. We were the arse. And jeez, it stung like hell.”

= = = = = = = = = = = =

“I’m sorry, I still don’t get it.”

“Look: what do you taste when you bite into a pickled onion?”

“Regret?”

He rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t asking for a punchline. You taste pickle – vinegar. And that not only masks pretty much all the funky sulfury onion-tasting stuff, it also denatures all the proteins. It’s a lot less of an onion after it’s been pickled.”

I frowned. “So, the formaldehyde SAPOL injected into the Somerton Man’s veins, that pickled him too?”

“Actually, formaldehyde fragments DNA, it cross‑links to it and it degrades it. What starts as DNA ends up as nasty, sticky goo. We all knew about this beforehand, but thought: yeah, yeah, we’ll find a way around it. But we never did. The poor bugger was worse than pickled. His closest DNA match was to a gherkin.”

“And that was basically your DNA report that took two years to do?”

“Yup”. He shook his head glumly. “So our bosses now think we’re a bunch of idiots.”

“But what about hair analysis? Nail analysis? Teeth enamel analysis? All that clever stuff you promised at the start?”

“Mate, this is South Australia, not M.I.T. The money was for DNA, and that’s where it went. In the end, we had a bit of cash left over for a forensic odontology report, but that was basically how it all panned out.”

“Hmmm”, I said. “Not heaps good”.

“Yeah”, he said. “Heaps not good at all. Another schooner? I could murder a pickled onion.”

Broken Hill Associated Smelters collection at the University of Melbourne’s archives…

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For context, I’m trying to read the last chapter of Carl Webb’s (the Somerton Man) life, i.e. between 31st May 1947 (the last glimpse of him in the Melbourne small ads) and 1st December 1948 (when he was found dead on Somerton Beach, near Adelaide).

The high levels of lead in his system (found by spectroscopically analysing his hair) now makes me wonder whether he might have been working in or near Port Pirie (140 miles north of Adelaide), which back then had the biggest smelting company in the world: Broken Hill Associated Smelters, Pty. Ltd. There are lots of photos in the archives from 1918:

Much of the BHAS company archives has ended up in the University of Melbourne’s archives as shelfmark [1969.0006], comprising 247 linear shelf metres and 1710 individual units. Filltering the date range to 1/1/1948 to 31/12/1948 yields 242 units: so I decided to grind through those and see what I found.

What I found

The first thing to note is that this archival set appears to have been reorganised and culled a number of times over the years: and the final indexing appears incomplete (where are units 1080, 1093, 1095, 1100, 1102, etc?) or sometimes duplicated (there are closer to 200 unique units than 242). So it’s far from clear to me how much employee identification has managed to survive those purges.

Still, the units that seem most promising for a snapshot into BHAS employees in 1948 are:

  • Unit 1089 (staff / general)
  • Unit 1098 (engineering applications)
  • Unit 1114 (accident fund)
  • Unit 1112 (dental clinic)
  • Unit 1076 (overtime)
  • Unit 1087 (complaints)

The full list of 1948 employee-related Units

  • Unit 0848 Group 5 – company papers – welfare – employees: general; housing
  • Unit 0886 Port Pirie Plant – applications: clerks numbers 1-3. Previous control number 32
  • Unit 1075 Port Pirie Plant – employees general: 30.1.15 suggestion 6 March 1947-25 November 1952; 30.1.21 Citizens’ Military Force 8 December 1948-17 April 1953; 30.1.23 hostels general 20 September 1949-30 January 1953. Previous control number 217
  • Unit 1076 Port Pirie Plant – employees general: 30.1.4 applications tradesmen 17 January 1951-4 February 1953; 30.1.10 overtime 4 October 1946-10 February 1953; 30.1.14 refrigerator purchase scheme 6 February 1947-2 September 1953. Previous control number 216
  • Unit 1078 Port Pirie Plant – employees education: 30.2.1 general 23 July 1947-22 January 1953; 30.2.3 apprentices general 6 November 1946-26 June 1950; cadets applications 1948-30 January 1953. Previous control number 218
  • Unit 1079 Port Pirie Plant – employees education: 30.2.11 supervision/management training 1 June 1947-24 November 1950; 30.2.12 apprentices applications 1948-23 November 1950. Previous control number 221
  • Unit 1081 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff trips: 30.5.29 Hopkins, John 1 January 1947-1 March 1950; 20.5.30 Ball, A.C. 1 January 1947-12 October 1948. Previous control number 242
  • Unit 1082 Port Pirie Plant: 30.2.16 staff training general 11 February 1947-11 November 1948; 30.2.18 employees – metallurgical cadets 1 January 1952-28 February 1953; 30.2.19 employees – metallurgical cadets scheme 1 June 1951-28 February 1953; report – J.G. McMaster, Diploma course at Port Pirie Technical School 11 October 1950. Previous control number 223.
  • Unit 1083 Port Pirie Plant – employees – safety first: 30.3.11 clothing 1 January 1947-16 February 1952; 30.3.12 equipment 1 January 1947-29 August 1952; 30.3.13 general 1 January 1947-1 December 1952. Previous control number 225
  • Unit 1084 Port Pirie Plant – employees – hygiene: 30.3.1 safety general 1 January 1947-28 November 1952; 30.3.2 diseases 1 January 1947-6 May 1952; 30.3.8 general 1 January 1947-18 August 1952. Previous control number 224
  • Unit 1085 Port Pirie Plant: 30.3.14 employees – safety first minutes of meeting. Previous control number 226
  • Unit 1086 Port Pirie Plant – employees – labour matters: 30.4.1 general 1 January 1947-4 October 1950; 30.4.15 complaints, reprimands 1 January 1947-14 October 1952; wharf labour 1 January 1947-8 November 1951. Previous control number 227
  • Unit 1087 Port Pirie Plant – employees: 30.4.18 labour matters labour force 27 August 1951-28 February 1953; 30.4.19 labour matters Wardang Island 1 January 1947-31 March 1950; 30.4.30 industrial metal trades award 1 January 1947-30 June 1953. Previous control number 229
  • Unit 1089 Port Pirie Plant: 30.5.1 employees – staff general. Previous control number 231
  • Unit 1090 Port Pirie Plant: 30.4.23 employees – labour matters basic wage rate. Previous control number 230
  • Unit 1091 Port Pirie Plant – employees: 30.5.3 staff housing Risdon Park 10 July 1951-18 June 1952; 30.5.6 Staff Club 1 January 1947-28 February 1952. Previous control number 233
  • Unit 1092 Port Pirie Plant: 30.5.3 employees – welfare housing Balmoral Estate. Previous control number 232
  • Unit 1094 Port Pirie Plant: 30.5.7 employees – staff – staff trips general. Previous control number 234
  • Unit 1096 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff trips: 30.5.9 F. Whitworth 1 January 1947-31 December 1947; 30.5.10 Frank Greene 19 July 1937-4 October 1952. Previous control number 236
  • Unit 1097 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff applications: 30.5.12 accounting and secretarial 4 August 1948-4 July 1951; 30.5.13 stenographic 1 January 1947-28 February 1952. Previous control number 237
  • Unit 1098 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff applications: 30.5.14 technical 14 January 1949-4 January 1951; 30.5.15 engineering 1 January 1947-18 April 1952. Previous control number 238
  • Unit 1099 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff applications: 30.5.16 draughtsmen 5 January 1949-31 May 1950; 30.5.17 filing officer 1 January 1947-7 July 1947. Previous control number 239
  • Unit 1101 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff: 30.5.27 appointments – construction shift superintendents 1 January 1947-30 December 1947; 30.5.28 executive trainee 5 January 1945-22 October 1952. Previous control number 241
  • Unit 1103 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff: 30.5.33 Young R.G.; 30.5.35 Messrs. Murie and Haney. Previous control number 244
  • Unit 1104 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff: 30.5.31 appointments personnel assistant; 30.5.32 trips R.J. Hopkins and D.R. Blaskett. Previous control number 243
  • Unit 1105 Port Pirie Plant – employees: 30.5.39 staff Ms. Norris (correspondence); 30.5.42 staff trips – Messrs. McDonald and Butcher. Previous control number 246
  • Unit 1106 Port Pirie Plant – employees: 30.5.36 staff appointments assistant works metallurgist; 30.5.37 staff housing. Previous control number 245
  • Unit 1109 Port Pirie Plant – employees – welfare: 30.6.1 general; 30.6.6 cooperative council general; 30.6.7 cooperative store general. Previous control number 250
  • Unit 1110 Port Pirie Plant – employees – staff trips: 30.5.48 Mr. Haney and March; 30.5.49 Mr. White and Whitworth. Previous control number 249
  • Unit 1112 Port Pirie Plant – employees – welfare: 30.6.8 dental clinic general 1 January 1947-28 February 1953; 30.6.9 Port Pirie Cooperative Community Society 13 March 1945-7 June 1950. Previous control number 251
  • Unit 1113 Port Pirie Plant – employees – welfare: 30.5.11 eyesight conservation; 30.6.12 housing – assistance general; 30.6.14 cooperative council accounts. Previous control number 254
  • Unit 1114 Port Pirie Plant: 30.6.10 – employees – welfare – accident fund general. Previous control number 253

Somerton Man, hair, arsenic, splenomegaly, leukemia, and Fowler’s Solution…

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Every fule kno that plucky professor Derek Abbott somehow (let’s not dwell on the details) got hold of a hair embedded in a plaster cast made of the Somerton Man, and then got his students to laser-zap it, revealing a spectroscopic timeline for the last fortnight or so of his life. The most headline-grabbing graph was for lead (which looked as though he had suffered a lead poisoning event some two weeks before his death. But the arsenic graph may also have an interesting tale to tell…

Arsenic and Old Lace

The Somerton Man’s arsenic graph appears on p.20 of Professor Abbott’s students’ “Final Report“:

Even though arsenic has long been known as a poison (it was used to kill people in Roman times, and also by the Borgias, charmers that they were), it was also revived by Thomas Fowler in 1786 as part of his treatment (“cure” would be too strong a word) for syphilis, in the form of Fowler’s Solution (1% potassium arsenite [KAsO2] in water). This solution then fell out of favour, before being revived in 1931 by Forkner and Scott at Boston City Hospital for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia [CML] (see Jolliffe (1993), p.288). Until bulsuphan was introduced in 1953, Jolliffe says, Fowler’s Solution was (in combination with radiotherapy) the standard treatment for CML.

But look back at the above graph (which is time-reversed): the level of arsenic is linearly rising. Either the Somerton Man was being poisoned (remember that his death wasn’t found to be arsenic-related) or he was being treated with an arsenic-based medicine, which was slowly accumulating in his blood stream.

Splenomegaly

At his death, the Somerton Man was found to have an enlarged spleen (AKA “he was suffering from splenomegaly”). Circa 1948, the first sign of chronic myeloid leukemia was an enlarged spleen.

So I strongly suspect that, not long before his death, the Somerton Man had seen a doctor, who had had noted his enlarged spleen, (mis-)diagnosed CML, and started him on a course of Fowler’s Solution. Now, I’m not saying that was the actual cause of his enlarged spleen, just that a doctor thought it was the cause. Given his lead graph, I think it’s actually far more likely that this was enlarged due to lead poisoning, but the doctor got it wrong. Given the systematic medical abuse of workers by mining and smelting companies detailed in Richard Gillespie’s (1990) article (which I discussed previously), I can’t help but suspect that this was not a provincial doctor making a mistake, but a sophisticated “conservative” company doctor passing the corporate buck by diagnosing anything – anything at all – but lead poisoning.

Moving the lead incident back two more weeks

Also: given the linear (time-reversed) rise in the arsenic graph, I believe we can also extrapolate that whole time series backwards. This would predict that the Somerton Man saw a doctor about 1-2 weeks before the hair data starts, i.e. some three or four (possibly even five) weeks before his actual death. So I also suspect that the spectroscopic time series captured in his (single) hair would, had the hair been longer, have yielded a much higher lead peak some four weeks before his death.

However, I’d flag that it’s also possible that there might have not actually been an accident: the drop in lead levels might simply be because he had been forced to give up his shitty job at the smelters because of his enlarged (and misdiagnosed) spleen. His raised lead blood levels might simply have been because he had been working in the baghouse at the smelters for some time.

Raised Strontium levels

The Somerton Man’s strontium levels also raised in the last four or five days of his life, which I suspect may well point to a change in his environment.

Received wisdom circa 1948 was that if you worked with lead, you should drink plenty of milk. I believe that this is actually true, but only if you drink milk before you are exposed to lead, not after (which wasn’t really appreciated back in 1948). So I’m wondering if perhaps the Somerton Man carried on drinking milk, but this rise in strontium might be from a change in milk supplier? (As I understand it, strontium is a congener of calcium, but please feel free to slap my schoolboy chemistry down.) There must surely be GIS maps showing strontium concentration / bioavailability etc, but that’s a task for another day.

Regardless, I wonder whether the upward lurch in strontium was triggered by a change in dairy: so for example, if he had been in Pirie Hospital, but then moved somewhere else in the last few days of his life.

Port Pirie smelting, and the politics of lead poisoning…

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Following on from my last post, I’ve been digging further into Broken Hill miners (such as BHP) and Port Pirie smelting (BHAS, basically). Expect a lot of spoil and a small amount of shock and ore.

BHP at Port Pirie and Whyalla

I found this article on Trove from 28th August 1948 (from the BHP AGM the previous day) that I think sheds light on what was going on in Port Pirie and the port at Whyalla (just across the gulf) at the time. The section I found most interesting was this:

In co-operation with the Department of Immigration, we are endeavouring to recruit skilled tradesmen in the United Kingdom. This additional labour will be employed at Whyalla in the shipyard and on home building, and at Port Kembla on plant construction.

Suitable accommodation near to the place of employment is essential in attracting additional employees. Under normal conditions, the building of new homes might reasonably have been expected to have kept pace with the needs of a growing population, but because of the intervention of the war and existing conditions, the acute shortage of accommodation still prevails.

To assist in meeting the situation, hostels are being established at Whyalla, Port Kembla, and Newcastle to house the men who will be recruited from within the Commonwealth and from overseas for employment in our works at those centres. We are co-operating with the Federal and respective State Governments on these projects.

This fits neatly with the situations vacant listed in the Adelaide Advertiser for November 1948 that I listed previously.

History of BHP

I also found a history of mining at Broken Hill that said that BHP had stopped mining there in 1939:

In 1939 BHP ceased all mining operations at Broken Hill. The company planned to concentrate on iron and steel manufacturing at Newcastle and Whyalla. The same year the Sulphide Corporation closed the Central Mine. For the remaining companies on the lode, wartime metal prices again financed development. Much of the central lode remained silent, but in 1943 Broken Hill South took over BHP’s Blocks 10-13 and in 1945 re-opened the Kintore shaft. The old South company now owned the centre of the lode, and the Zinc Corporation was the new South.

Hence I think I need to get a better source of information for what the actual situation was in 1948. In fact, it turns out that there’s a book written in 1948 discussing BHP: “Australia’s iron & steel industry : The Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd“. However, this seems just about as rare as hen’s teeth (there’s a copy in the NLA and another in the SLQ). I’d get a copy by Copies Direct but I have no idea what’s actually in it.

“Accounting for Lead Poisoning, the Medical Politics of Occupational Health”

I’ve now received a copy of Richard Gillespie’s fascinating 1990 article on lead poisoning in Port Pirie (thanks Jo!!!!), and – my goodness! – it paints a pretty bleak picture. Lead poisoning itself wasn’t a recognised condition until 1917, by which time the smelting workforce in Port Pirie had been comprehensively poisoned. Any payments before then for (what we would now think of as) lead poisoning were framed as ‘charitable assistance’ by the company, without accepting any actual responsibility. Workers were also terrorized into thinking that reporting any illness would get them instantly laid off, rather than actually helped: unsurprisingly, reporting rates were extremely low.

It was only in the early 1920s that workers were given solid assurances that they could report health issues without being kicked out: but then BHAS moved on to corrupting the medical evaluation process, with in-house doctors (only the most “conservative” were chosen, by which they meant “pro-company” and “anti-worker”) disallowing most claims via one blatant ruse or another.

There was then a Royal Commission: but this process too was quickly controlled by the companies, and the fundamental imbalance favouring the mining companies’ profits over workers’ health remained in place. All that really changed was the “sophisticat[ion]” (p.316) of the managers’ arguments, which by the end were no more than a crafty casserole of victim blaming and outright lying. Basically, the central conceit was to distinguish “between lead absorption and lead poisoning” (p.330), which in my opinion is just a rhetorical device for somehow blaming people for ‘allowing themselves to be poisoned’ (how?).

And before you write all this off as ancient history, the same specious arguments devised by BHAS were eagerly recycled by the gas companies in America in the 1920s to somehow justify why they should be allowed to add lead tetraethyl to petrol. So BHAS didn’t just give its workers lead poisoning, it helped the gasoline giants expose all of us to environmental lead for the century since. Eat lead, suckers.

Anyway, 1925/1926 is essentially where Gillespie’s account stops, though it is easy to see that with (metaphorically) toxic management running a (literally) toxic industry, nothing much was likely to change quickly. So I think we can easily see exactly how much support someone with dangerously high levels of lead exposure would get in 1948 from the Port Pirie managers at BHAS. Which is basically none.

Levels of lead exposure

Gillespie also mentions (p.322) typical levels of worker lead exposure (via inhalation) in the roasting plant, that were released a year after the Royal Commission:

  • 2.2 mg of lead at the top of the A section
  • 3.6 mg at the top of the mixing bin
  • 19.8 mg at the discharge end of the secondary rolls
  • 52.8 mg above the conveyors.

This should be compared to Chapman’s estimation that 1—2 mg of lead per day could cause lead poisoning, and that a hygiene standard should be set at 0.2 mg to ensure that no lead poisoning would occur.

Note that after improvements made to the conveyors (from tray to belt) in the couple of years following, “lead levels fell from 37 mg to 1.44 mg”. (p.326) But one of the worst (as far as lead exposure goes) places in the plant was “the baghouse“. Gillespie notes that “workers periodically had to enter the dusty chambers to clean and recondition the bags; cases of lead poisoning continued to occur, and this became one of
the jobs reserved for foreign workers.” (Gillespie’s footnote 51 says: see [Frank A. Green, The Port Pirie Smelters (Melbourne, 1977)], p.110).

[Yes, I’d happily order the copy of Green’s book that’s on sale in Germany, but 40 euros for shipping to the UK? Really? What has gone wrong with bookselling recently?]

All in all, I can’t help but wonder whether what we would now consider catastrophically high levels of lead might simply have been the expected level for someone – a migrant worker, or perhaps even Carl Webb? – working in BHAS’ baghouse in November 1948.

Situations Vacant in Port Pirie, November 1948

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When writing up my Trove search notes for “instrument maker”, it struck me that I should hunt for lead-related jobs in the Adelaide Advertiser’s Situations Vacant listings for the first part of November 1948. Researchers have typically assumed that Carl Webb was living far away from Adelaide, but what if he had been working in Port Pirie when he suffered his lead poisoning event some two weeks before his death?

In 1948, Port Pirie was one of the largest lead smelting areas in the world, and where lead mined in Broken Hill was typically taken to for smelting. And remember that there’s a suspected (vague) connection between Carl Webb’s death and the motorbike stolen from Broken Hill by Freddie Pruszinski.

Mining companies linked to Port Pirie

The main lead-related company in Port Pirie was Broken Hill Associated Smelters (BHAS): this did smelting and refining, for lead, silver, zinc etc. It was co-owned by these Broken Hill mining companies:

  • The Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd. (BHP)
    • The biggest mining company in Broken Hill, and a major shareholder in BHAS
  • Broken Hill South Ltd.
    • Operated the South mine in Broken Hill
  • North Broken Hill Ltd.
    • Operated the North mine in Broken Hill
  • The Zinc Corporation Ltd. & New Broken Hill Consolidated Ltd.
    • Mined lead-zinc concentrates from the Central mines at Broken Hill.

Note also that the Electrolytic Zinc Company of Australia (EZ Co) also sent material to BHAS for refining. Elephant-memoried Cipher Mysteries readers may recall posts here (from 2014 to 2015) relating to EZ Co topics, such as the Risdon roaster, a job advert from 6th November 1948, and another post on industrial difficulties at Risdon.

With all that in mind, let’s dive into the ‘Tiser’s November 1948 sits vac pages…

Situations Vacant – BHP

  • Fri 05 Nov 1948
    • EXPER. machineman for Rapid Bay works; house available, approx. March. B.H.P, 28 Franklin st.
  • Thu 11 Nov 1948
    • CARPENTERS, single men. for Yampi Sound, W-A. Full particulars from B.H.P. 28 Franklin st.
  • Sat 13 Nov 1948
    • APPLICATIONS invited from young men. age group 17-25 years of age. for positions as commercial trainees at our Whyalla works. applicants must hold Intermediate and preferably Leaving certificate, and if selected be prepared to follow the company’s staff training scheme to secure diplomas of Accountancy and Secretarial Institute. Single accommodation provided and after probationary period those selected will be admitted to the company’s provident fund. Further particulars obtainable from the B.H.P. Co. Ltd.. 28 Franklin st.
  • Sat 20 Nov 1948
    • UNSKILLED labor to assist shipyard tradesmen. Apply by letter or on job to Registrar. B.H.P. Co.. Whyalla
  • Sat 20 Nov 1948
    • DOMESTIC help at supt’s. residence at Whyalla, accom. provided. Write to Registrar, B.H.P. Co, Whyalla.

Situations Vacant – everything else

  • Sat 06 Nov 1948 (BHAS)
    • ASSISTANT fuel technologist, salary £450-£550: bonus £182. Apply Broken Hill Assoc. Smelters, Port Pirie

OK, it’s not a lot but it’s not nothing

The two most obviously applicable job openings were (1) the “unskilled labour to assist shipyard tradesmen” for BHP, and (2) the “assistant fuel technologist” for BHAS.

BHP’s (now BHP Billiton) historical archives still exist, so perhaps these could be checked. Similarly, BHAS has 249 linear shelf metres of archives at the University of Melbourne.

Finally: Shipyard Accidents in November 1948

I also found these news story during my searches:

  • Fri 12 Nov 1948 (Whyalla News)
    • PATTERN MAKER BADLY INJURED – May Lose an Eye
    • Mr. Percy Combes, a patternmaker employed in the joiners shop at the shipyard, may lose an eye as the result of an accident which occurred on Monday afternoon. A pattern which Mr. Combes was turning in a lathe broke into two pieces, one of which struck him a violent blow on the face. Dr. Zimmett took Mr. Combes to Adelaide yesterday by plane for treatment by an eye specialist. Mr. Combes is a most careful and methodical tradesman and had never been involved in an accident at Whyalla. He belongs to Whyalla Bowling Club and is extremely popular with members.
  • Fri 19 Nov 1948 (Whyalla News)
    • Dr. Zimmet has returned to Whyalla after accompanying Mr. P. Combes to the city. Mr. Combes lost an eye in an accident at the Shipyard.
  • Fri 26 Nov 1948 (Port Pirie Recorder)
    • Waterside Worker Injured
    • Mr. H. Oxlade, a local waterside worker, had bones in a hand broken when jammed by bars of lead at Smelters Wharf yesterday. He was engaged in loading operations at the steamer Corio at the time of the accident.

BHAS also had an Accident and Sickness fund in the 1910s and 1920s, though it’s not clear to me whether it was still active in 1948. Occupational lead poisoning at Port Pirie has also been picked up by Richard Gillespie in his (1990) article “Accounting for Lead Poisoning: The Medical Politics of Occupational Health” on JSTOR (though that’s not available for free online reading, boo).

Plenty to think about!

“Instrument maker with ability and experience”…

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For me, searching small ads in Trove is like perfidiously picking people’s past pockets: so much of their life is embedded in their ads, by which I mean not just their property but their hopes and their dreams too. Back in 2022, I looked at Carl Webb’s small ads, the last of which seems to have appeared on 31st May 1947 (“TOOLS. Hand, Engineer’s, Carpenter’s chance. Before 11. Flat 2, 63 Bromby st, South Yarra“).

According to the divorce paperwork, Dorothy Jean had not seen Carl since September 1946, and she believed that he had left the Bromby Street flat at some time during April 1947. She thought he had been working for a machine shop in Prahran [Red Point Tool Co.], a job which he had left by the time of the 1951 divorce paperwork (according to her solicitor).

Hence, I’ve been searching 1947-1948 Australian newspapers in Trove for the rest of his small ad footprint. Of course, I’m not expecting anything as straightforward as “hey, it’s me, ya boi Carl Webb, here I am in Riverina“: but maybe we can – with a bit of keyword cunning – find something there.

I’ve used the following as his general profile (please feel free to disagree with any or indeed all of it):

  • Webb was an electrical engineer, an electrician, and an instrument maker (which was highly skilled)
  • Webb was far from well off, and was trying to make a living while staying well off his wife’s radar
  • I also believe that Webb felt somewhat cheated by Fate, i.e. how come he was smarter than the average bear but never got a lucky break?

To my mind, this really ought to make him just the kind of person who would try to hustle his way through that part of his life via the small ads.

“Instrument maker with ability and experience”

I started by searching for small ads where an instrument maker was looking for a job. I also started with the Adelaide Advertiser, because we know that he was in Adelaide at least twice. I immediately found two pairs of ads:

  • Fri 17 Jan 1947 and Sat 18 Jan 1947
    • INSTRUMENT maker with ability and experience desires position, research or scientific work preferred. V358. Advertiser.
  • Wed 26 Feb 1947 and Sat 1 Mar 1947
    • INSTRUMENT-MAKER OF ABILITY AND EXPERIENCE DESIRES POSITION INVOLVING RESEARCH OR OTHER HIGH CLASS WORK. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION APPLY P275. ADVERTISER

However, cross-referencing the two box numbers (V358 and P275) yielded one other small ad, wedged tightly between the second pair:

  • Fri 28 Feb 1947
    • EX-SERVICEMAN, two years experience N.T. would like opportunity returning N.T. Driving, attending disposals sales, or other capacity. P275. Advertiser

If this was true, it surely wasn’t Carl Webb: but might it have been a lie? I did find one similar ad in Melbourne:

  • Sat 17 May 1947
    • INSTRUMENTS.
    • EX-R.A.A.F. INSTRUMENT MAKER SEEKS EMPLOYMENT where he can apply his knowledge and experience in Instrument Making and Repairs, Including Cameras.
    • N.R.A., O.P.O. BOX 770G.

Cross-referencing “770G” yielded these two small ads from a month later, so perhaps this particular Melbourne instrument maker found the job he wanted, but in Sydney:

  • Sat 21 Jun 1947
    • EXCHANGE Melbourne-Sydney. Modern 2 bedroom House, all convs, Camberwell, for similar, 3 bedrooms, Sydney. Rental only. Write Transfer. G.P.O. BOX 770G. Melb.
  • Sat 28 Jun 1947
    • EXCHANGE. – Melbourne – Sydnev. – Attractive Modem Home. Camberwell, in exchange similar, Sydney, rental basis, owner’s consent. Transfer. G.P.O. Box 770G. Melb.

It seems that Trove led me to someone in an almost identical situation (same skills, same time, same place), albeit on the other side of the Yarra. Was he Carl Webb? Probably not. But a good try, nonetheless.

Some not so good matches

Here’s the next instrument maker I found, this time in Sydney:

  • Wed 5 Nov 1947
    • INSTRUMENT MAKER will do Contract Work or any Repairs Auto Aero Ship etc No 7501 Herald

This lead went nowhere, alas. So here’s the next one:

  • Sat 6 Mar 1948
    • ENGINEER seeks position, 6 years’ experience production, control, and planning metal pressings and assemblies, holder of engineering diploma and competent tool and instrument maker. B247. Argus.

Nope. And the next (in the Queensland Courier-Mail):

  • Thu 3 Jun 1948
    • SCIENTIFIC instrument maker, 17 years’ exper., including study U.S.A., returned serviceman, requires posn. respon. Apply CT94, C-Mail.

Still nope. And the next:

  • Wed 21 Jul 1948
    • Engineer and Instrument Maker requires work for small well-equipped workshop. Machining (turning and drilling) and fitting of small precision parts; also quantities of small component parts. 84385. Age.

The reference doesn’t appear to link to any other ads, so nope once again (probably).

Doesn’t sound like our man. Next!

  • Mon 6 Sep 1948
    • OPTICAL Instrument Maker, returned soldier, requires perm. position, several yrs.’ exper. on all types optical & service instruments. Excel. refs. G599 Argus.

Nope. And we’re done (finally).

Final thoughts

Note that I was only able to do this because “instrument maker” was a fairly reasonable search term: “electrical engineer” yields far too many. So I’m not sure what to grind through next.

The one thing I did think was interesting was that I don’t recall anyone trawling Trove for lead-industry-related job openings in the month prior to the Somerton Man’s death, and the lead signature in his hair still strikes me as a bit of a clue that has never really given us anything beyond idle speculation. Maybe that’s something to aim for next.

Saying farewell to the Roswell pantomime…

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Almost since the day it happened, the Roswell Incident has been presented as pantomime rather than history. The pro-UFO camp cheer whenever a vaguely plausible alien explanation pops up; while the skeptic camp get their kicks from booing stupid theories. Aliens? They’re behind you! Oh, no they’re not!

Well, I’ve had enough. And since nobody else on this whole stupid planet seems able to, I’m now standing up to say: the panto’s over. There were no Roswell aliens. The real story was a bunch of people so scared of losing a Cold War that they would do inhumane things to other people. And should their whole disgusting plan go bad, they believed that a combination of plausible deniability and burning the goddamn evidence would save them from being hanged until dead.

And guess what? It turned out that they were right. But only thanks to a stupid modern fairy story, one that had been playing out in the press for the whole of the previous week.

‘Aliens’

And that in turn was only because one bunch of idiots really, really believed in that fairy story. And that bunch of idiots wasn’t even MUFON.

It was the US Army.

The reaction of Colonel Blanchard (commanding officer of Roswell Army Air Field) was surely typical of many in the US Army. He initially suspected the ‘cipher mystery’ writing on the I-beams in the Roswell debris field was Russian, and that the whole thing was therefore some crazy Russian plot. But… when that writing quickly proved not to be Russian, what was he to believe? Maybe… it… was… aliens… after… all?

So, what did the Army do? They covered it up. And then covered it up again. And when that became too hard to sustain, they covered it up again. The dumbest thing? They almost certainly didn’t even know what it actually was that they were covering up (or whose asses they were saving), but they covered it up anyway. And they probably still don’t know, even today.

What a bunch of colossal idiots.

So, here we are, more than seventy-five years later, and they’re still at it. Everyone in the Roswell pantomime continues playing their traditional parts. It’s the same old stupidity. Nothing has changed.

The pinnacle of academic coverage of Roswell has become metacommentary about how it is some kind of ‘modern fable’. And if there’s a history of the Roswell Incident that has any substance beyond a thin patchwork of fragmentary witness statements, I’ve yet to find it. (Please don’t ask me to reflect on how many miserable non-books I’ve had to trawl through to reach that opinion, that would be cruel.)

It’s 2025, so can we please shut this whole miserable pantomime down now? Aliens didn’t do Roswell, people did Roswell, and it’s blindingly, pathetically obvious that they did. This needs forensic historians with scalpels, not sociologists.

Roswell: reconstructing the Roswell experiment…

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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.