Category Archives: Roswell Incident

Would it surprise me if I’m currently the only person in the world who genuinely wants to know exactly what Thomas Greenhow Williams (‘Tex’) Settle’s US Navy timeline was? No, of course it wouldn’t. So why inflict it on the world as a blog post? Too late, here it is!

Naval History Division

Settle’s US Navy biography was compiled by the Navy Office of Information Internal Relations division (OI-430), 1st April 1969. Putting all the balloon races and free-ballooning stuff (and everything that happened on the USS Portland in WWII) to one side:

• 6 Jun 1918 – commissioned Ensign with the class of 1919, having graduated with distinction
• Jan 1920 – reported for duty in connection with fitting out the USS Whipple (in Philadelphia)
• 23 Apr 1920 – served as Engineer Officer on the USS Whipple, then as Navigator, then as Executive Officer
• April 1922 – Postgraduate School, Annapolis, MD for aviation radio engineering, before continuing the course at Harvard University (gained Master of Science degree in June 1924)
• Jul 1924 – reported for duty at NAS Lakehurst, NJ on board the airship USS Shenandoah, and then on the airship J-3
• Oct 1924 – served on airship USS Los Angeles as Communications Officer, Engineering Officer, Navigator, and Executive Officer.
• Feb 1929 – assigned to the Bureau of Aeronatics, Navy Department, Washington DC
• Jul 1929 – served at the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation, Akron OH as Inspector of Naval Aircraft during construction of USS Akron and USS Macon.
• Jan 1934 – served as Training Officer as NAS Lakehurst, NJ
• Jun 1934 – assumed command of the USS Palos (ship) in the Yangtze Patrol of the Asiatic Fleet
• Winter 1934 – Senior Naval Officer and Acting Consul at Chungking
• Jun 1935 – assumed command of the USS Whipple (ship)
• Feb 1937 – became Fleet Communications Officer on the Staff of the Commander in Chief, Asiatic Fleet
• Jun 1938 to Jun 1939 – served as Executive Officer of NAS Lakehurst
• 1939 to May 1940 – on senior course at the Naval War College, Newport RI
• May 1940 to Apr 1941 – served on the Staff of the Naval War College, Newport RI
• May 1941 – Chief of Staff and Operations Officer for Commander Cruiser Division TWO, Atlantic Fleet
• Aug 1941 – Chief of Staff and Operations Officer for Commander Cruiser Division EIGHT and for Commander Cruisers, Atlantic
• May 1942 – worked in the Bureau of Aeronautics and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department, Washington DC.
• Sep 1943 – in command of Fleet Airships, Pacific, and then of Fleet Airship Wing THREE
• 3 Mar 1944 – assumed command of USS Portland at Eniwetok. For this command, he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Legion of Merit with Combat “V”, and the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V”.
• Jul 1945 – temporary duty at Headquarters of Commander in Chief, US Fleet, Washington DC
• Aug 1945 – reported to Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet.
• Sep 1945 – a task force under his command evacuated ~1500 POWs and internees from the Japanese Mukden camps. He then took the surrender of Japanese naval forces in Tsingtao, China.
• Nov 1945 – Task Force Commander of Commander Cruiser Division SIZ, and then Commander North China Naval Forces.
• Jan 1946 – took command of the Yangtze Patrol Force
• May 1946 – assumed command of Amphibious Group THREE.
• Aug 1946 – reported as Chief of Naval Airship Training and Experimention (CNATE) at NAS Lakehurst, NJ
• Sep 1947 – became Chief, Naval Group, American Mission for Aid to Turkey (arrived in Turkey in Jan 1948)
• 16 Oct 1949 – returned to Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department
• 6 Feb 1950 – designated Vice Chief of Naval Material, Navy Department
• Jan 1951 – took command of a Joint Army, Navy, Air Force Task Force for a classified project
• Aug 1951 – Commandant of the Eighth Naval District (in New Orleans, LA)
• 8 Mar 1954 – Commander Amphibious Force, US Pacific Fleet
• 20 Aug 1956 – Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Oslo, Norway
• Oct 1957 – ordered to Third Naval District for temporary duty prior to retirement
• 1 Dec 1957 – transferred to the Retired List of the US Navy, rank of Vice Admiral
• 12 Feb 1962 – ordered to return to active Naval service, joined a Defense Study Group on Military Compensation, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington DC
• Oct 1962 – assigned to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Navy Department.
• 1 Jul 1963 – released from active duty
• 26 Aug 1963 – headed the board on Warrant Officer, Limited Duty Officer, and Senior Chief Petty Officer Policies in the Bureau of Naval Personnel

BuAer / NAS Lakehurst / Office of the Chief of Naval Operations

The specific reason I compiled this timeline was so that I could see exactly when Tex Settle was working at BuAer and NAS Lakehurst:

• Jul 1924 to Jan 1929: NAS Lakehurst
• Feb 1929 to Dec 1933: Bureau of Aeronautics
• Jan 1934 to May 1934: NAS Lakehurst
• (…gap…)
• Jun 1938 to Jun 1939: NAS Lakehurst
• (…gap…)
• May 1942 to Sep 1943: Bureau of Aeronautics and Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
• (…gap…)
• Aug 1946 to Sep 1947: NAS Lakehurst
• (…gap…)
• Oct 1949 to Dec 1950: Office of the Chief of Naval Operation

Nick Redfern’s provocative and interesting Roswell book “Body Snatchers in the Desert” (2005) starts with a chapter outlining a conversation he had with a lady (born 1922): while working at Oak Ridge in 1947, she claimed to have seen the ‘aliens’ found at Roswell. However, she said, these were not extra-terrestrials, but were instead Chinese or Japanese people suffering from disabling genetic conditions (e.g. progeria) being used as US military test subjects.

It’s a great story, one that Redfern gamely grapples with throughout his book (and indeed its sequel): but did he actually manage to land any evidential punches linking Roswell to Oak Ridge? Is there any documentary evidence linking the two, even indirectly?

I decided to have a look in NARA…

“The Secret City of Oak Ridge”

The scientific history of Oak Ridge (“The City Behind The Fence”) began with the Manhattan Project, which carried out the research and engineering to build the first atomic bomb. This required the construction of three immense technical facilities:

• “K-25” was a gaseous diffusion plant (“covering a larger area than any structure ever built up to that time”, p.2) operated by 12,000 workers.
• “Y-12” separated Uranium-235 from Uranium-238, and had 22,000 workers.
• “X-10” was a graphite reactor plant, located roughly 10 miles from Y-12.

Founded in 1943, this huge complex was initially called Clinton Laboratories, but was renamed in 1948 to (the now much more familiar) Oak Ridge National Laboratories, by the site’s postwar owners, the Atomic Energy Commission. (AKA “the old A.E.C.” from Tom Lehrer’s “The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be”.)

With all that as background, we can fast-forward to the (2012) NARA document, “Atomic Energy Commission and the Secret City of Oak Ridge“. This lists some of the document sets relating to Oak Ridge in Record Group 326 (mostly at or just below the box level), and mainly covers the period 1943-1946.

The bulk of the records are in the 182 boxes contained in “Series 8505 Formerly Classified Correspondence Files” (ARC number 1518690), which (annoyingly) I haven’t yet found in NARA itself. 🙁 Do any of the descriptions suggest a link with Roswell? Certainly, it would be hard not to notice that Box 104 contains (though without explanation):

List of personnel with clearance, Roswell, New Mexico, 1947

Similarly, Box 130 implies that there was some sustained correspondence between Clinton Laboratories and the Navy’s BuAer (and I’d certainly like to know who was involved at both ends):

Bureau of aeronautics correspondence, 1943-46

The monthly reports in Box 142 might be useful in looking for possible biological / biophysical projects being run at Clinton:

Monthly reports from research division, 1945-47

My understanding is that Monsanto had employees working at Clinton, so it should be no surprise that Box 62 contains:

Technical reports for Monsanto, July 1946

The Archival Limits?

Most of the records listed in the “Secret City” document seem to run no further than 1946, with just a small handful running into 1947. Hence I suspect that the files documented in “Secret City” don’t fully reflect the overall range of Oak Ridge files: perhaps it only reflects the ones held at NARA Atlanta?

More broadly, there are plenty of other record sets in RG326 that could be looked at, such as medical test records: it would take a much deeper trawl to map out these archives in an even remotely satisfactory way. So this is as far as it goes for now… 🙁

Thanks to a response I received from Jason Atkinson at History Hub, I’ve managed to find Project Mogul R&D files at NARA – though these aren’t (yet) online, they do at least exist, which is a good starting point.

Oh, and I thought I’d include a quick log here of the other NARA files I’ve managed to find. Feel free to ignore this, it’s mainly for my own benefit. 😉

For Bureau of Aeronautics records (Record Group 72), I also found its LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) file (1916 – 1945), containing records that “were collected by a variety of individuals and organizations, including Charles P. Burgess, an expert in airship design within the Lighter Than Air Design Branch“. The downside is that it is “78 linear feet, 7 linear inches” long (comprising “63 Letter Archives Box, Standard; 70 Legal Archives Box, Standard; 2 Custom Box A1”).

I also found a file for “Balloons, Darex Sounding” – I was looking for this because David DeVorkin (p.286) mentions “the modified Dewey and Almy Darex J-2000 and Darex J-1100 balloon production samples”, which were being tested in 1947.

There’s also “Balloon Envelopes” in RG 342 (no additional information given, but it’s one of the R&D topics I’m specifically interested in).

Project Helios (which was run by NATEC at Lakehurst) has a list online of changes to project personnel from 3rd May 1947 to 2nd July 1947. This starts with Robert E. Bass, and then adds [name, id, rating]:

• BASTEDO Raymond W – 513 24 90 – AR1
• BLANCHARD Earl H – 206 25 96 – AERM1
• CLARK John E Jr – 250 56 41 – AR3
• COVELLA Robert L – 798 21 68 – AERM3
• EWING Jerry D – 224 77 19 – AERM3
• GLICKMAN William F – 238 80 71 – AR2
• HART Francis J – 201 62 62 AR3
• IAIN Sebastian (n) – 382 80 61 – AR1
• MAC MILLIAN Henry J – 224 49 51 – CAR
• WODZIENSKI Edward (n) – 202 56 04 – AMM1

All certified correct by W. A. Cockell, Capt, USN

Then 25 Aug 1947:

• CHAMBLISS Herbert – P26657599 – CETM
• BASS Robt E – 2742805 – CAERM

(Both moved to Ottumwa, Iowa)

Project Helios disestablished: Auth ChNavRes cer 12523 dated 23 May 1947 and suPers ltr.
Pers 21452-jah ser 16719 dated 25 June 1947.

Certified to be correct: W. A. Cockell, Capt. USN (11 Jul 1947)

There’s also this Project Helios record: A15-2 Project Helios SP Event. (I have no idea what this is, alas).

As far as Fort Dix goes, I found some files in RG 342 (though I don’t hold out a lot of hope for these):

• Fort Dix – Materiel Command Test Station
• 686 Fort Dix – 1 January 1947 to
  • (686 = Army air bases and aviation fields)
• 600.1 Fort Dix – 1 January 1947 to
  • (600.1 = “Building and grounds — Construction and installation”?)
• Fort Dix Army Air Base
• 333 Fort Dix – 1 January 1947 to 31 Dec 47
  • (333 = Inspections and investigations by inspectors general and other officers, and reports.)

Even though I’ve covered Project Helios’ fall to Earth [sorry!] in previous posts (much supported by David DeVorkin’s detailed account in “Race to the Stratosphere”), because of its close links to Project Mogul there are also external mentions of Helios in (for example) Albert Crary’s journal.

Recapping: even though Project Helios’ maiden manned balloon flight to the stratosphere was planned for the 21st June 1947 (the summer solstice), the overall administration of the project collapsed during the Spring, before finally being canned in May 1947. Part of the challenge was that Helios was intended to be a military-scientific platform, and the collaborating groups (who hoped to run their experiments on Helios) all had different practical needs and political priorities.

In this post, I’ll try to look at Project Helios through a Project Mogul lens (if that makes sense).

Project Mogul

Project Mogul, a top secret Army-funded project to put devices high up in the atmosphere to listen for the sound of Russian atomic tests, was one of these collaborating parties: and, as of February 1947, was still expecting Helios to run. And so we see Crary’s journal entry for 4-5-6 Feb 1947 in Oakhurst:

Went over possible experiments in ‘Helios’ balloon June with [Dr Jim] Peoples.

The NYU team’s “Technical Report No. 1” (Appendix 13 in the Roswell Report) mentions that Project Mogul moved from serial balloon linkage (which gave balloon chains taller than the Seattle Space Needle) to the Project Helios parallel cluster (introduced by Jean Piccard, though not actually invented by him):

Figures 31 and 36 show the two methods used to group the balloons in clusters. Figure 31 shows the linear array borrowed from cosmic ray flight techniques; figure 36 shows the modified “Helios Cluster” in which lines from the balloons are joined at a central ring at the top of the load line.

The Helios cluster was by far the easier to handle because of the simpler rigging and the reduced launching strains.

Figure 36 shows the Helios cluster arrangement the Mogul team introduced with Flight #7 (2nd July 1947) (note that I’ve only included the topmost section of the payload):

Here you can see two Helios clusters, with the top (“lifter assembly”) 4-balloon cluster separated from the main 16-balloon cluster. When the balloon reached a specified height (35,000 feet), a switch in the separator would blow a small charge, splitting the lifter balloons off from the main body. Using small charges to release balloons within a cluster was one of Jean Piccard’s innovations – initially, this horrified other balloonists, but many changed their minds once they saw it working successfully for Piccard.

Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR

It seems hugely likely to me that the person who introduced the Helios cluster mechanism to the NYU Project Mogul team was Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR, of NAS Lakehurst, NJ. A Princeton graduate and very skilled free balloonist (according to J. Gordon Vaeth, “They Sailed the Skies”, Epilogue), Smith had been working for Tex Settle on Project Helios at General Mills in Minnesota, and then in the May 1947 reorganisation had been made Scientific Coordinator by Capt Hutchinson (“The Navy still wished to perform missile drops from unmanned clusters, so to this end – and only because of this end – Helios remained an active project” – DeVorkin, p.286).

It therefore seems hugely likely to me that the “Lt Smith NYU” mentioned in Crary’s journal as arriving in Alamogordo for Project Mogul’s “Alamogordo II” balloon expedition phase was indeed Lt. Harris F. Smith.

I also found evidence that at least one unmanned missile drop from Helios clusters was carried out in September 1947 (from an interview with George Hoover).

The C-54 Flights

According to Capt. Albert Trakowski, the Project Mogul team had access to a Douglas C-54 Skymaster in Fort Dix, New Jersey: this was not too far from where most of the (NYU) project team was based.

Hence it seems likely to me that Smith travelled down with the rest of the Mogul team on 28th June 1947 on the team’s allocated C-54 (their research was funded by the US Army).

We also know (from various interviews with Charles Moore) that the Alamogordo II phase closed with 23 members of the team flying back to New Jersey on the 8th July 1947. For example, in this interview with Moore in the Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 19 No. 4 (Jul / Aug 1995), the writer notes:

“Several UFO authors claim that the wreckage, and possibly alien bodies as well, were secretly flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio for analysis. By coincidence, Moore says he and the rest of the NYU balloon crew stayed over at Wright Field the evening of July 8, 1947, en route back to New Jersey, just as the Roswell story was breaking. Moore says they first learned of the incident while in Dayton, and figured that it was probably caused by one of their recent polyethylene balloon flights.”

I really wish I had access to the passenger manifests for these C-54 flights, particularly the 28th June 1947 flight. However, given the US Army’s record retention policies, it seems – unless you know better? – highly unlikely that these passenger manifests survived even ten years.

Where next?

As always, a perfectly reasonable question is now: where should I be looking next? In the same way that Project Helios was funded by the US Navy’s Office for Naval Research (ONR), Project Mogul was funded by the US Army’s Air Materiel Command (AMC). AMC was formed in 9th March 1946 out of various predecessor commands (e.g. AAF Technical Service Command (ATSC), 1st July 1945), and was largely run out of Wright Field (Dayton, Ohio).

The specific part of AMC associated with Project Mogul was the Engineering Division: and indeed the archives do have records produced by the AMC’s Engineering Division (342.3 “Records of the Engineering Division and its Predecessors, 1916-1951”), made up of three major series:

• Central decimal correspondence, 1916-49 (1,774 ft.).
• Research and development project contract files, 1921-51 (3,438 ft.).
• Microfilm copy of research and development technical reports, 1928-51 (400 rolls)

However, for Project Mogul’s constant-level balloon R&D we already know the contract number (W28-099-ac-241), as well as its Technical Report #1 (which amply covers the time period we’re interested in). So unless there’s something unexpected in “Central decimal correspondence, 1916-1949”, I’m not hugely optimistic that there will be anything useful in these Air Force files.

Note that there is some Project Mogul archival film footage relating to inflating balloons at Roswell in 1947, which is part of a series of 16 archival films relating to Roswell, though none of this is available online. There are also 18 archival sound recordings relating to Roswell there across 22 cassettes (which are also unavailable online). I’m not sure if these are on Spotify yet (but maybe they will be soon).

Given the close links between Project Helios (US Navy stratospheric balloon platform for scientific experiments) and Project Mogul (US Army long-duration high-altitude sound monitoring experiments), I wanted a list of all the Project Mogul people in Alamogordo in June-July 1947, but didn’t have one.

So here’s my first attempt at drawing one up. It’s not complete, but it’s a decent enough starting point.

Crary’s Log

Albert Paddock Crary (1911-1987) was a pioneering geophysicist and glaciologist, and also the Field Operations Director of Project Mogul. His Mogul field log was later used (somewhat dubiously, if you ask me) to try to explain away the Roswell Incident as simply a lost Mogul balloon (when it plainly wasn’t).

Usefully for us, Crary’s log lists who arrived at Alamogordo on 28th June 1947, the starting day of “Alamogordo II” (i.e. the second phase of the expedition, which finished on 8th July 1947):

Balloon expedition personnel arrived Saturday evening – Peoples, Trakowski, Mears, Ireland, Olsen, Moulton, Alden from AMS and Moore, Schneider, Hackman, Smith, Hazzard, 2 others and a Lt Smith from Navy NYU.

Interestingly, even though B. D. (“Bruce”) Gildenburg – who wrote the scathing (if somewhat scattershot) 2003 takedown “A Requiem to Roswell” in Skeptic magazine – worked on Project Mogul (and later ran Holloman AFB’s balloon recovery section for many years), I believe he was not actually at Alamogordo in June-July 1947.

Staff in Alamogordo

Though his report’s overall findings didn’t make a lot of sense to me, James McAndrew’s Synopsis of Balloon Research Findings did actually try to summarize Project Mogul’s technical reports fairly well.

For example, it notes that “three of Crary’s staff […] resided permanently in Alamogordo”:

• Don Reynolds
• Sol Olivia
• Bill Edmonson (“Edmondson”? “Edmondston”?)

But there was also Vivian and Eileen, that Crary was working very closely with. Was “Vivian” Vivian Bushnell? Was “Eileen” Eileen Ulrich Farnochi?

AMS People

• Dr James W. (“Jim”) Peoples, the “Primary Scientist”
• Capt. Albert C. Trakowski (“Chief” of the project from January 1947 to May 1949)
• A. H. Mears
• Charles (“Charlie”) Ireland
• (Joseph?) Olsen
• Moulton
• John Alden

NYU People

McAndrew’s Appendix 16 includes a copy of the NYU team’s “Special Report #1”, which gives more details of the NYU project personnel’s names (as mentioned by Crary) and roles:

• Charles B. Moore – Research Engineer
• Charles S. Schneider – Asst. Proj. Director
• Murry Hackman – in charge of the Electronic Weather Equipment
• James Smith – Weather Observer and Draftsman
  • Is this “J. Richard Smith”, the full-time Meteorologist hired in May 1947? [Appendix 15]
• Richard Hassard – Chief of Flight Detail
• “2 others”
  • Possibly Henry Kammenzind, Ralph Morrell, William Kneer [Appendix 16]
  • Possibly William O. Davis, Fred Barker [Appendix 15]

The story of what happened at Roswell is usually told in terms of two primary sites – the Foster Ranch site near Corona (where Mack Brazel and Dee Proctor found unearthly debris), and a site north of Roswell (where passing field archaeologists found a metallic ‘pod’ with four strange bodies, one still alive).

However, geographically between these two sites sits a third site, that Carey and Schmitt (in their “Witness to Roswell” book) call the “Dee Proctor site” or the “Dee Proctor body site”. By way of background, I’ve been looking for any additional sources on this (still somewhat mysterious) third site.

Hence I thought I’d summarise what I’ve found so far below. Which should pretty much double the amount of information on the Web. 😁

The Bluff

In 1947, Timothy William “Dee” Proctor (b. 07 Feb 1940, Corona, Lincoln County, NM) was just seven years old, and being paid 25 cents a day by Mack Brazel to ride along with him on the ranch for the summer. It was famously the two of them who found the first ‘crash’ site full of strange lightweight metallic debris.

But Dee seemed to have subsequently had a troubled life (described throughout Chapter 1 of “Children of Roswell”), keeping other things he had seen that fateful summer to himself. It wasn’t until 1994 that he drove his mother down rickety back roads to a specific bluff (“about 2.5 miles east of the Corona debris site”, WtR p.47), telling her “Here is where Mack found something else”. This was clearly The Big Secret (or at least part of it) that had been eating away at him for nearly fifty years.

What exactly was this “something else”? Carey and Schmitt say that this was “where several dead aliens were found who had been blown out of their crippled ship when it exploded” (CoR, Ch.1), though without giving a source. While Nick Redfern (via Anthony Bragalia in 2012) says that it was “body parts”, his source being a regretful retired intelligence agent (though unnamed).

But let’s not get too carried away, eh?

The Roswell Children

Other Roswell children claimed to have been to this “other location” (WtR, p.47): in 1998, Sidney “Jack” Wright said that he, Thomas Edington’s two sons and one of Truman Pierce’s daughters also saw what was there. None of these Roswell children has yet spoken of what they saw. But who exactly were they?

Sidney Jack Wright (b. 01 Jun 1934, d. 08 Aug 2019) was the son of Albert Sidney Wright and Celia Geneva (Clark) Wright: he was succeeded by his wife Wilene Wright of Odessa; his daughter Brenda Garvin (and husband Tim) of Waco, TX; and his son David Wright of Riverdale, CA. His memoirs are online (but with no mention of Roswell).

The Edington rancher family I have had no luck with. Any suggestions?

As far as the children (I’ve seen one son and four daughters reported on the Internet) of Edward Truman Pierce (1922-2001) and Wanda (McBride) Pierce (1922-1995) go: Suzanne “Suzie” Cox (nee Pierce) b. 12 Nov 1945, d. 25 Jan 2021, wouldn’t even have been two years old in August 1947, while Jean Hamill (husband Steve Hamill) and Joan Key (husband Collins Key) were even younger (I believe), so I’m possibly still missing a son and a daughter here, alas.

Oddly, the 1950 US Census only lists Truman (27), Wanda (27), and Suzanne (4).

Hines House & the Cattle Shed

Though it’s not completely clear, what seems to have happened next was that Mack Brazel took something (or maybe everything?) from this site to the cattle shed close to Hines House. (WtR p.50) Another account says that this was four feet by three feet by one feet, but the wires may be getting crossed here, it’s hard to say.

Given that Brazel later reportedly exclaimed “I should have buried that thing” (WtR p.80), my current guess is that that “that thing” was from the Dee Proctor site, and may possibly have been a bigger issue than the Foster Ranch site debris.

Carey and Schmitt report that Sheridan Cavitt went to the cattle shed (WtR p.206), but it’s not clear to me whether Jesse Marcel went there too.

What’s Missing Here?

Even though I’ve now read a ton of Roswell-related books etc, it still feels like I’m missing a ton of stuff. To me, it’s as though the key to the whole mystery is woven into the events that happened at this third site, but the accounts of it I’ve read are all fairly sketchy (at best).

Might Roswell researchers have over-focused on the two ‘glamorous’ sites (the Foster Ranch debris field and the ‘pod’ site), and not put the time and effort into the third site?

Or is there a huge bibliography on the third site I’m completely unaware of?

Not much news here, though I have finally managed to make contact with Charles Hansford Kendall’s family, who very kindly answered my questions about him. From what they told me, it now seems highly unlikely to me that Kendall was the Navy balloonist I’ve been seeking, so my search continues.

Robert Henry (“Bob”) Howe USNR

Kendall aside, the only other NAS Lakehurst Navy man I’ve found who died around the period of interest was Robert Henry Howe. The Princeton Alumni Weekly reported:

ROBERT H. HOWE ’23

It seems almost unbelievable that we are reporting the death of Bob Howe who was killed in an automobile crash August 24 [1947]. The accident happened near Utica, N.Y. while Bob with his wife and son, Richard, were on the way to the Adirondacks for their vacation.

Bob was commissioned in the Naval Air Corps in June 1942 as a lieutenant. He had served as a navigation instructor in Norfolk and at the time of his death was a Lt. Comdr. at Lakehurst, where he was instructing.

Prior to his entry into the service, he was in the jewelry and wholesale silver business. During the war his son, Robert H., Jr. died in the service when his Marine Corps plane crashed at Jacksonville, Florida.

Bob could be found at all reunions and those who were back last June will always remember his ready smile. Reunions just won’t seem the same without Bob and the class has lost a most loyal classmate.

He is survived by his widow, Priscilla M.; two sons, Charles M. and Richard B.; his father, Charles H.; a sister, Mrs Carol H. Newell; and his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Carrie W. Ostrander.

The class extends its sincere sympathy to the family in their great sorrow.

For the Class of 1923

H. GATES LLOYD, President

JOHN E. SPENCE, Secretary

If anyone has paywalled access to old newspaper sites, can I please ask if you would have a quick look to see if Howe’s death on 24th August 1947 was reported there? I looked on NYS Historic Newspapers (one of my favourite free newspaper sites), but it seemed to have nothing from Oneida County for that month, alas.

Dennis Gilliam, pressure suit historian

I’ve also found myself stymied looking for contact details for the pressure suit historian Dennis Gilliam. He used to work for “Orbital Outfitters” (surely a play on Urban Outfitters, right?), the spacesuit company whose contract with Elon Musk famously specified that the space suits should look “badass”.

I’d like to talk with Gilliam about the US Navy’s Strato Model 7 full pressure suit (designed by John D. Akerman at his Strato Equipment Company in Minneapolis). There’s a load of stuff in the John D. Akerman Collection at the University of Minneapolis, which I’m sure Gilliam will have gone through.

However, now that OO is defunct, Dennis Gilliam also seems to have disappeared from view. Can I please ask anyone with better online sleuthing skills than me to please try to find his contact details and pass them to me? Thanks!

I’ve been going through yet more of the (digitised) papers in the Smithsonian’s Captain George Henry Mills Collection, and have more to share about Captain Charles Kendall and NAS Lakehurst history.

The CNATE Succession

At the start of the period in question (1945-1950), the base commander at NAS Lakehurst was Vice Admiral Charles (‘Rosey’) Rosendahl. However, when ill health forced Rosendahl to retire early, the base was temporarily run by Captain William Arthur (‘Art’) Cockell, who then handed over to Rear Admiral Thomas (‘Tex’) Settle. Settle was in turn replaced by George (‘Shorty’) Mills, who held the post of CNATE to mid-1949.

We can see much of this from a clipping from “The Bag Vet” (Number 1, Vol 1, 1st September 1946, p.1), an airship “News Sheet For All Vets of Blimpron 14”, which, along with all its where-are-they-now and would-you-like-a-job-flying-a-Howard-Hughes-blimp articles, also included airship-related news from various NAS bases such as Lakehurst:

(By way of explanation: a “blimpron” was a “blimp squadron”, Blimpron 14 was also known as “ZP-14”).

Captain Kendall updates

Even though Charles Kendall seems (unlike Rosendahl and Mills) not to have subscribed to The Bag Vet, a few news items relating to him do appear there. For example, in The Bag Vet, Jan 15th 1947:

Decoding the Navy acronyms, “C.O. ZP12” was “Commanding Officer of Blimpron ZP-12”: this was the blimp squadron that covering the Atlantic during WWII. “X.O” was “Executive Officer”, who was normally the Number Two on a given base. So it seems from this that Kendall started as Executive Officer under Tex Settle, but then became Experimental Officer at the start of 1947.

Incidentally, there’s a nice picture of Kendall as C.O. ZP-12 in “United States Naval Air Station Lakehurst New Jersey – A Photographic Essay”, a copy of which is in the George Mills Collection:

The Bag Vet (Vol. 1, Number 5, 1st Nov 1947) mentions the demise of Project Helios (note that Commander Henry Calvin Spicer Jr was for a while the designated pilot for Project Helios):

So, at some point in 1947, Captain Art Cockell was SDO NAS Lakehurst, Captain Charles Kendall was Experimental Officer, and Lt. Commander Alcide Theriault was Assistant Experimental Officer beneath Kendall. However, we can date this organisational change to before 24th August 1947, because that sadly was when Lt. Commander Howe (“Training Officer” above) died in an automobile accident:

Incidentally, in a US Navy context, a “Flag Officer” means a commissioned officer senior enough that they are entitled to fly a flag at the place they exercise their command. While this normally applies to rear admirals or higher, it can also apply to someone who has commanded a squadron of vessels. Yet in such cases, this normally only applies for up to a couple of years until a suitable promotion (normally to rear admiral) can be put in place.

So it would seem that in 1947, Captain Charles Hansford Kendall was very close to becoming an Admiral in the US Navy, a rank his older brother Henry Samuel Kendall had previously reached. It therefore seems likely to me that Kendall would have taken on the role of Experimental Officer at NAS Lakehurst only on a temporary basis: at that time, he was surely headed for a bigger role within the Navy before too long.

Where next in the archives?

While it has been helpful going through the (fully-digitised) George Mills Collection at the Smithsonian, and frustrating looking at the finding aid for its (entirely undigitised) J. Gordon Vaeth Collection (boo), it left me wondering if I was even looking in the right place.

I think it fair to say that George Mills was more of an administrator who liked LTA, while Vaeth was an airship enthusiast (if not actually a bit of an LTA history obsessive). But both of them were left firmly in the shade by Vice Admiral Charles Rosendahl: following his early retirement, Rosendahl seems to have spent the next 30-odd years writing constantly about airships – from the archives, there seem to be few newspapers or magazines or journals to which he didn’t submit pieces or articles concerning LTA.

And so it is that Charles Emery Rosendahl’s voluminous collection of LTA material at the Special Collections Department, Eugene McDermott Library (at the University of Texas at Dallas) has ended up, without much doubt, as the best place to look for answers to historical questions about airships and US Navy LTA history in general. This contains over 330 boxes of material: there’s a finding aid here.

Why is this so good? For example, whereas the George Mills Collection has a few cherry-picked issues of “The Airship” from NAS Lakehurst, the Rosendahl Collection holds (I believe) every issue from 1944 right through to 1958. Similarly, Rosendahl has Vol. 2 Number 6 of The Bag Vet (Mills only goes up to Number 5), along with a whole load of rare LTA newsletters that it would seem nobody else has ever heard of.

Even though I think I have already unpicked much of the raw history I was hoping to find, the answer to the thorny question of what actually happened to Charles Kendall still evades me. Yet there seems a good chance that the answer will be found in the Charles Rosendahl Collection, either in “The Airship” or The Bag Vet (Vol. 2 Number 6), if only I could find a way to look there…

A few days ago, I wondered whether I might find any clues to what happened to Captain Charles Hansford Kendall not when Rear Admiral Tex Settle was base commander of NAS Lakehurst (1946 – September 1947), but when Captain George Henry Mills was (October 1947 to June 1949). Helpfully, Captain Mills’ family made a substantial donation of his papers and notes to the Smithsonian Archives not too long ago: and – amazingly – almost all of the George H. Mills Collection is digitised and available online. So there is plenty to work with…

11th March 1947

There’s a brief mention of Captain Kendall here, in a memorandum from Tex Settle (it’s in one of the files holding correspondence between Mills and Settle):

16th August 1947

Close to the end of his time at NAS Lakehurst, Tex Settle sent out a fairly robust letter summarising the difficulties he had experienced as base commander. Kendall’s name was on a list of addressees, but unfortunately it’s not clear (to my eyes, at least) what was marked against his name:

I tried zooming in but it’s no clearer, the punched holes went straight through the interesting bit, alas:

10th October 1947 – Lakehurst Org Chart

This organisational chart of the base dated 10th October 1947 was something I found interesting: this was in Memos – Naval Airship Training and Experimental Command (CNATE) personnel, 1947-1949. You can see that the Chief Staff Officer position (immediately below CNATE, the base commander) was a hugely important position (page 4):

Page 2 includes a list of the major roles under CNATE at Lakehurst, including the Experimental Officer role (which was essentially head of the Experimental Section):

Oddly, Charles Kendall’s newspaper obituaries gave conflicting accounts of his position at Lakehurst: the Associated Press version was that he was Chief of Staff (CSO) to the base commander, while the reporter who talked to his widow noted that he was NAS Lakehurst’s Experimental Officer.

However, page 1 of the same document shows that it was Captain William Arthur (“Art”) Cockell who was the CSO as of October 1947:

November 1947 – List of Lakehurst Personnel

The following document gives a list of NAS Lakehurst personnel as of November 1947. This starts with RADM Tex Settle (who had just left), and you can see Captain George Mills as CNATE just below:

At the end of the section listing all the Captains, we see Captain Art Cockell and Captain Charles Kendall, who were both noted as being base Staff:

And yes, you can see that Captain Kendall’s entry was clearly marked as “SICK”.

January 1948 – Visitors to Base

A different series of document give CNATE News Memoranda, which are a lot like cut-down versions of NAS Lakehurst’s “The Airship” newsletter, but much more tightly focused on the NATEC part of Lakehurst, rather than its (numerically larger) training section.

Here we can see visitors such as airship designer C. P. Burgess coming over from BuAer visiting the base:

15th June 1948 – XZPN Design Visit

Here we get to see the first active mention of Charles Kendall I found from George Mills’ time as CNATE:

Hence it would seem that Associated Press (later) got it wrong: Kendall was not Lakehurst’s CSO, but NATEC’s Experimental Officer.

25th April 1949 – Naval Hospital, Philadelphia

This, alas, is the last mention I was able to find of Charles Kendall in the George Mills Collection, and signals Kendall’s impending transfer to the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia:

Because Captain George Mills left Lakehurst (and indeed retired from the Navy) in June 1949, the series of CNATE memoranda the Smithsonian has finishes just before Captain Kendall’s death (in the Naval Hospital) in August 1949. Hence – unless further CNATE memoranda appear – this report may also prove to be the end of the line for this particular archival trawl.