Category Archives: Roswell Incident

Seeing an advert on the side of a bus for the film “Nuremberg” yesterday reminded me of an aspect of Nick Redfern’s “Body Snatchers in the Desert”. There, Redfern put forward an (occasionally) sketchy but (definitely) alien-free account of the Roswell Incident. In 2017, he described his book as “the Roswell-themed story that UFOlogy hates and which, back in 2005, made [him] public enemy number one“.

For Redfern, 1947 was a key moment in history, not so much because of the main Nuremberg trials (which had finished in late 1946), but because of the Doctors’ Trial, which ran from December 1946 to August 1947. Twenty physicians and three SS officials were charged for their involvement in:

• Aktion T4 – ‘involuntary euthanasia’ [i.e. mass murder] of disabled and mentally handicapped people
• Nazi human experimentation – 15,000 documented victims, though the real total was much higher

Seven were hanged, five got life imprisonment, four got prison sentences, and seven were acquitted.

Redfern, thanks to his informant “The Black Widow”, built up an account of Roswell where the ‘little aliens‘ in the aluminium capsule were in fact handicapped Japanese people (with progeria, etc). And so in mid-1947, the shadow of Nuremberg’s Doctors’ Trial hung heavily (he believed) over all the people involved in these human experiments that were all too similar to that which those Nazi doctors were very publicly on trial for.

Radiation Exposure and Cosmic Rays

The obvious question: what on earth was so important about balloon experiments circa 1947 that American biophysics researchers would even consider Nazi-style human experimentation as an option, let alone actually doing it? For the Black Widow, this was all about Oak Ridge’s “research into understanding high-altitude flight and exposure on the human body for the military [and] how that tied into plans NEPA would have to one day build nuclear aircraft that would be able to fly at [very] high altitudes […] for long periods.” (Body Snatchers, p.7)

One of the US military’s key strategic fears 1945-1950 was to do with cosmic rays: the concern (which we now know to be hugely exaggerated) was that people working in the stratosphere for extended periods might just suddently die from exposure to (what were thought to be) violently powerful cosmic rays. And so – the argument runs – there were medical committees in 1946-1947 who were trying to get an answer to this problem by any means possible. And if that involved what we would consider unethical means? They apparently didn’t care. Until the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial forced them to care.

Redfern (and indeed the Black Widow) frames this in terms of Operation Paperclip, i.e. that it was all the fault of those nasty German and Japanese scientists swooshed into America in the post-WWII mayhem, bringing their unethical research values in with them. But to be fair, I’m currently looking at the lists of people on medical committees (e.g. the AEC’s ABRC), and I’m honestly not seeing any Paperclippers there. The uncomfortable truth? Back then, it wasn’t necessary to be a Nazi or a member of Unit 731 to have extraordinarily suspect ethical values, if you thought that would ‘get the job done‘.

David DeVorkin and Project Helios

With this whole highly politicised (I nearly typed “highly charged“) cosmic ray situation in mind, I’m now re-reading David DeVorkin’s “The Race to the Stratosphere”: this covers high-altitude scientific ballooning either side of WWII, and (archivally) is exceptionally strong on the bodies and committees that collectively defined what science would get funded (and so what Science would become) post-WWII.

To my mind, these committees had perceived Project Helios as the knight in shining armour that would help get the stratospheric data they needed to resolve their issues and strategic fears. So it was extremely awkward for them all when that project stumbled, faltered, and got cancelled in the first few months of 1947. Jean Piccard had proved to be a terrible project principal, and his Great Big Plan to get people (to be honest, mainly him and his wife) to the stratosphere using his plastic balloon clusters had been exposed as just a little bit too hopeful for the ONR. So the US Navy kicked Piccard out, and subsequently split Project Helios into an unmanned half (Skyhook) and a manned half (Project Manhigh with Otto Winzen).

More generally, DeVorkin’s big idea is that manned scientific ballooning in the 1930s was a lot like manned rocket flight in the 1960s: and I think there’s a lot to like about this conceptual framework. But… to be honest, I’m now far from sure that the situation in the 1930s (for example, with cosmic rays) is an accurate guide to the situation in the later 1940s. Which is why I’m now going to re-read his book really carefully, and then move onto his “Science with a Vengeance” (which I only found out about a few days ago).

To move this whole research thread forward, The Only Way Is Ethics…

As has probably been abundantly clear for some time, I’m in the (dwindlingly small, possibly even only one member strong) group of people who suspect that the metallic debris in the Roswell Incident debris field (site 1) that looked like exploded metallic balloon envelope debris was in fact exploded metallic balloon envelope debris. I know, I know, it sounds crazy but that’s how it looks from here.

To be clear, the only people making metallic floaty envelopes at all was the US Navy. Its ZMC-2 metal-clad airship flew 752 flights between its launch in 1929 and retirement in 1941. So by 1947, the Navy hadn’t actually built or commissioned a metal-clad airship in nearly twenty years. Hence, viewing the Roswell debris as a metal-clad balloon blowing up might possibly seem a little stretched.

However, people had been calling for more metalclads for many years. Even after WWII, airship-obsessed Vice Admiral Charles “Rosy” Rosendahl was again calling for metalclad airships (SNAFU p.173 “The third phase should be revival of investigation into the very promising “metalclad” design […]”). Others still had proposed building even bigger metalclads, operating more like flying aircraft carriers than airships. All the same, without grinding through the (immense) Rosendahl archive, it’s hard to know exactly what was going on back then (he retired on 1st November 1946). A nice piece of Rosendahl trivia is that he was a member of ye Anciente and Secret Order of Quiet Birdmen.

If the exploding metallic balloon at Roswell was a US Navy exploding metallic balloon, then what happened to the US Navy balloonist? That is a question I’ve tackled in several other posts here, and there willI be more in posts to come. But today’s related question is: what was the balloonist wearing?

My belief is that the balloon was originally intended to fly high up, though this plan was scuppered by a series of miscalculations of the kind people make when they’re trying to do stuff covertly (and so don’t check their workings with people who would be able to point out the obvious errors).

As such, I believe the US Navy balloonist would have needed to be wearing some kind of pressure suit. But what was the state of the art in pressure suits back then?

WWII full-pressure suits

Between 1941 and 1943, John D. Akerman at the Strato Equipment Company of Minneapolis made a series of pressure suits for the US Army (remember that the Air Force was still part of the US Army then). However, early models were unpromising (“[…] suits were cumbersome to don and doff, it was nearly impossible to bend at the waist when the suits were inflated, and the helmets were uncomfortable to wear for long periods.” (“Dressing for Altitude“, pp. 46-47). Other suits were submitted by Goodyear and US Rubber as part of the same project.

One of the more promising ones was the Goodrich XH-5: “The suit was made of laminated rubberized fabric, and ball-bearing joints facilitated mobility at the elbows and knees. A Goodrich-designed self-sealing zipper ran from the crotch to the neck ring. Large, rounded bellows formed the arms and legs to improve mobility, leading to it being called the tomato-worm suit.” (DfA, p.56).

Interestingly, “[d]uring the summer of 1943, the U.S. Navy tested several of the Army pressure suits at the Naval Air Crew Equipment Laboratory in Philadelphia. LCDR Donald W. Gressly was the flight surgeon in charge, assisted by mechanical engineer L.W. Meakin ” (DfA p.60). One of these was an Akerman BABM suit, which seems to have been the BABM-18 (DfA p.62):

The suit was made of two layers of rubberized fabric, operated at 1.5 psi, and consisted of five pieces: an upper torso, trousers, a pair of gloves, and a helmet. Metal connecting rings at the neck, waist, and wrists secured the pieces together. There were leather straps running from the waist ring over the shoulders to
prevent rising and from the waist to the crotch to prevent elongation. A pocket under each armpit creased by thin wire aided mobility for the arms. Straps across the stomach and thighs provide breaking points in the inflated fabric for forward bending and sitting. Three clamps attached the gloves to a rubber gasket, and a standard Army harness and parachute was worn over the suit. There were five zippers on each suit: one 11-inch zipper on each side, one 11-inch zipper on the trouser at the waistline, one 11-inch zipper on the chest of the torso, and one 11-inch zipper on the back of the torso. In theory, flaps on the inner side of each zipper provided an airtight seal.

Ultimately, the US Army didn’t think that any of the suits that had been submitted were good enough to use. Similarly, the US Navy researchers concluded that they were “too heavy, uncomfortable, and not sufficiently ventilated to remove perspiration. Seemingly ignoring the state of the art in airtight fabrics, the Navy researchers believed any pressure suit should be made of a lightweight fabric, although they noted that the General Electric and Akerman suits, which used such fabric, tore too easily under pressure.” (DfA, pp. 67-68).

Note: DfA gives two references that I’ll need to track down:

• James V. Correale, “The Lightweight Full-Pressure Suit System of the U.S. Navy”, Air Crew Equipment Branch, Naval Air Material Center Philadelphia, 1959.
• “Navy’s Space Suit” Naval Aviation News, NavAer No. 00-75R-3, April 1953; “Developmental History of the Aviator’s Full-Pressure Suit in the U.S. Navy.”

The Strato Model 7

In 1947, the only US Navy full-pressure suit was the Strato Model 7, commissioned in 1946 from John D. Akerman under contract NOa(s)-8192. (DfA p.179) “The one-piece, tight-fitting garment covered the entire body except the face, which was covered by a detachable “goggle-mask.” [..] Two layers of nylon cloth provided protection for the neoprene sandwiched between them against local abrasions.” (DfA pp.179-180)

Five-finger gloves (as opposed to mittens) had zippers along the top to permit donning and doffing. The Model 7 glove used a custom zipper that was “tedious to close,” [..]. There was a neoprene diaphragm at the intersection of the glove and sleeve that allowed the suit to remain pressurized when the glove was removed. The gloves had separate ventilation and pressurization channels to provide comfort even when the suit was not pressurized.

The narrow-neck, close-fitting helmet covered the entire head and ears and was fabricated of the same material as the suit. Ventilation and pressurization of the helmet was through three flat, noncollapsible conduits that discharged air just above the ears and into the goggles. “Donuts” made of soft sponge rubber and chamois cloth protected the ears. The goggle-mask consisted of standard Navy goggles and
a pressure-breathing mask integrated into a single unit.

However, only a single Strato Model 7 was ever delivered to the US Navy, to fit “a very large man”.

It’s possible that the US Navy’s (single) Strato Model 7 was used, but all the same, I’d have to concede that the timing was extremely tight for this to have been used in July 1947. I’ll have to dig up the report from Akerman dated November 1947 and read more:

• Vernon G. Townsend, Vice President and John D. Akerman, Consultant, “Report on U.S. Navy Pressure Suit, Model 7, on Contract NOa(s) 8192,” November 15, 1947.

Note also that NARA has a record in Record Group 342 called “Flying Clothing – Strato Equipment Co.“, which I believe probably covers 1946-1947 US Navy correspondence with Strato (even though that’s an Air Force archival reference). I also suspect that David Clark Company may have more details.

Everyone and their alien dog has heard of the first Roswell site, the ‘thin metallic debris’ field. Many have also heard of the second Roswell site, the ‘metallic alien craft’ / ‘tiny dead aliens’ site. But who knows about the alleged third Roswell site, the “Dee Proctor site”? What evidence is there that this third site was a genuine thing, and not just something concocted by mad-eyed alien conspiracy theorists to sell books?

Timothy “Dee” Proctor

I’ve recently been reading “The Children of Roswell” (2016) by Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt, two prolific (and non-mad-eyed) Roswell researchers who frequently focus on witness testimony. The book’s Chapter One (“This Is Where Mack Found Something“) focuses on the young boy who accompanied Mack Brazel on his rounds of the J. B. Foster Ranch early on 3rd July 1947. This boy was not (as is often reported) Brazel’s 8-year-old son Vernon, but was instead 7-year-old Timothy “Dee” Proctor, the third son of Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel’s nearest neighbours. (Carey and Schmitt say that “the little Proctor boy eagerly worked for a mere 25 cents per day“, basically living the ‘cowboy dream’ while school was out for the summer.)

For decades (Carey and Schmitt say), Dee refused to talk about what he had seen that day, until finally in 1994 he took his mother Loretta to show her something… interesting. Initially, Dee drove her towards the Foster Ranch along the old Hines Draw Road, roughly three miles from the famous first site. But Dee then carried on past the road that led to the old windmill (by the first ‘Roswell Incident’ site): and, at the fork at the end where the left road leads off to the ranch, he instead turned right towards the “twin (wind)mills”.

Carey and Schmitt: “Dee headed towards the sheep pen, stepped from the truck, unwrapped the chain securing the gate […]. After proceeding on seldom-used trails almost too faint to see, and 10 minutes more […], they came to another gate. From there, they drove into the next pasture and past the first of two bluffs, before swinging around and up and over before coming to a stop above the second bluff.“

This was the location where Dee Proctor reportedly said: “Mom, this is where Mack found something else.” (Carey and Schmitt’s italics). C&S continue: “Peering off to the west along the horizon, they both could see the single windmill on the eastern edge of the debris field, a couple of miles away.”

Juanita Sultemeier, other ranchers and Jeff Wells

Even though they call this site “The Dee Proctor site”, Carey and Schmitt tell how it was already known to them from their interview with Juanita Sultemeier, who had described bright-headlighted army trucks driving down the “twin mills” trail back in 1947. Other ranchers described having gone through the same two gates, and how Mack Brazel had discovered some kind of crash remains there. Jeff Wells, who had been the ranch supervisor back then, had additionally taken C&S to the same location.

Subsequently, when filming a BBC documentary with producer John Purdy in 1994, they also asked Loretta Proctor to direct them to the location she had previously described having gone to with Dee, and it was indeed the same place. Its location? “[Two and a half] miles east-southeast from the original site […]“, they say. C&S’s Chapter Fourteen mentions that other “little ranchers” visited this site with Dee Proctor: Mack Brazel’s son Vernon, and “boys with the last name of Edington and Wright”.

So, where exactly is it? Is the above enough information to help us do something sensible, you know, like actually find it on a map?

The location of the first site (the debris field)

Wikipedia gives the coordinates of the Roswell Incident debris field (site 1) as 33°57’01.0″N 105°18’51.0″W. On July 5th 2003, the Sci Fi Channel placed a stone marker on the site to commemorate the Roswell Incident (photo by Tom Carey): “In July of the year 1947 a craft of unknown origin spread debris over this site / Witnesses would report materials of an unearthly nature […]“

According to Reddit poster samarkhannor, the stone marker is located here, at 33°57’05.8″N 105°19’08.8″W. Additionally, the Bureau of Land Management gives the site coordinates as 33.952189, -105.331214, and says:

To visit the alleged UFO skip site, park at the Bureau of Land Management’s parking lot off Lincoln County Road B007, or Transwestern Road. The parking lot is about 78 miles from the BLM Roswell Field Office at 2909 W. 2nd St., Roswell. From the parking lot, hike about a mile to the east on BLM land. There is no signage to mark the site, but BLM personnel plan to install signs this fiscal year. There are no plans to make a road to the site, and visitors will have to hike. There is a road to the site, but private land blocks both the northern and southern entrances.

(They also offer a downloadable hiking map to help you get there, which I think is pretty cool.) To be fair, the BLM coordinates seem to be right beside the B007 road running North-South (so perhaps these are the coordinates of the Bureau’s “parking lot”?), and the other stone marker coordinates point to a location about a mile to the east from there, so I guess everything ties together pretty well here.

The location of the third site

Note that the Hines Draw Rd that appears on modern maps (e.g. for Richards Ranch LLC at 951 Hines Draw Rd, outside Capitan NM) seems somewhat shorter than “the old Hines Draw Road”. There’s a short section here, where the road running from East to West is the B024, which quickly turns into the B012:

And I also stumbled across a road section labelled “Hines Draw Rd” further west of there, at the other end of the B012:

From this, my best guess is that the old Hines Draw Road basically ran where the modern B012 road is, from just around Richards Ranch LLC to the bottom right of that sort-of four-way junction, before continuing North along the modern B014.

At the same time, given that that the third site is described as being roughly two and a half miles east-southeast from the debris field, we now have a reasonably good (though inexact) idea of where it is: 33.9365 N, 105.2744 W (or thereabouts). And even from this, we can see the B010 running less than a kilometre away:

And no, I don’t know what the thing on the left is, but it’s about 100m lengthways:

If all of this is basically correct, then I believe that Dee Proctor was (in modern terms) initially driving South along the B014 (there’s a small set of buildings along there marked “627”, was that where they lived?) towards the four-way junction. He then could have taken the first right onto the B001 to go East towards the first crash site (in a roundabout way); or he could have taken the first left to go towards (what is now the Richards) ranch; but he instead took the second right onto the B010, heading South. Go three miles along the B010 and you’re almost certainly fairly close to the site, though where the two bluffs and the two old mills are, I have no idea.

So this is by no means the last word on the matter, because there’s still plenty of guesswork in there, and I might easily have got some (or indeed all) of the above wrong. Please feel free to take the baton and see how far you can run with it!

Quick digression: I went into several second hand bookshops a couple of weekends ago, and while I found a few nice historical books to keep me occupied, what struck me was the complete lack of the usual breathless UFO books. In the olden days (i.e. five years ago), these used to fill the shelves, so why are they now so few and far between? Might conspiracy theorists have moved on from UFOs to (who knows?) vaccine, woke, Brexit, Russian political funding, MAGA, Trump, Jewish space lasers, American democracy, doomscrolling? Is Roswell too distant a memory for anyone but me to give a stuff about?

Anyway… one of the big ‘traditional’ focuses of UFO conspiracy theorists is Major Jesse Marcel. It was he who famously went to Mac Brazel’s ranch in Corona NM (near Roswell) where pieces of strange metal foil and curious beam fragments (some with odd writing on) were found. Plenty of books and documentaries have been made featuring Marcel, mainly because he combined a credible straight-down-the-line military career with his firm belief that what crashed near Roswell was, ummm, extra-terrestrial.

Yet another very similar military man went to Brazel’s ranch that day: Counter Intelligence officer Captain Sheridan Cavitt. Relatively little UFOlogical ink has been spilt on Cavitt, perhaps because he combined a credible straight-down-the-line military career with his firm belief that what crashed near Roswell was… ummm, just a balloon. Which would, of course, make for far less juicy books and tabloid headlines.

Still, it’s time to take a look at Sheridan Cavitt, the other well-known military Roswell responder…

Captain Sheridan Cavitt

Perhaps the best place to start is Nick Redfern’s two-part article on Sheridan Cavitt: here’s part one, and here’s part two. The most ‘horse’s mouth’ thing Cavitt said about Roswell was in a May 24, 1994 interview with Colonel Richard L. Weaver, USAF:

“There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil, something of that type. And we gathered up some of it.”

As to how large that debris field was, Cavitt asserted that it was “Maybe as long as this room is wide.” And he was sure (he said) that it was “a weather balloon”.

UFO researcher Kevin Randle interviewed Cavitt in 1990: Cavitt told Randle that because in 1947 he was working for the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps), any report he made would have gone to Washington (there’s a persistent rumour Cavitt wrote a report that has since disappeared). As far as the Roswell incident goes, Randle was sure Cavitt was lying (which he was), and Cavitt was pretty sure Marcel was lying (he probably was). At the same time, Randle pointed out that “Cavitt doesn’t even agree with Cavitt“, so we have to exercise caution when trying to make sense of all this.

But there was in fact a third Army early responder, Bill Rickett. And according to Rickett’s later testimony, it was Rickett and Cavitt who got to Brazel’s ranch first, with Rickett coming back later with Marcel. And that kind of broadly squares with Cavitt saying that he took the stuff he collected from the site with Rickett back to the base at Roswell and handed it to Marcel; and that he thought Marcel claiming that he’d gone to the site first with Cavitt was wrong, and had caused Cavitt a load of problems.

So… what did happen?

On balance, I think that the actual first Roswell responders were probably Sheridan Cavitt and Bill Rickett; and that Jesse Marcel, having been handed debris from the site by Cavitt back at the base, had then gone to the site with Bill Rickett a little later that day. Generally, even though Cavitt wasn’t a particularly reliable witness, I’m a little more comfortable with parts (though, again, not all) of Rickett’s account.

Does that mean that I think Jesse Marcel embiggened his role up in the whole affair, and should really have been recorded as third or fourth or fifth responder? Yes, probably. Really, my guess is that Marcel had told his family stories for several decades about what happened that day, and in the end wasn’t really comfortable untangling that whole knot if that meant reducing his heroic role in the story.

At the same time, Marcel was sure what had been in the field wasn’t a weather balloon, even if Cavitt was: yet if the debris resembled aluminium foil and bamboo, it can’t have had anything to do with Project Mogul, as Cavitt and others later (incorrectly) claimed. I believe they all tried to frame what they saw in terms of what they knew: but what they saw it wasn’t anything that they knew. By which I mean to imply not that it was some kind of ‘alien technology’ (because I’m sure it wasn’t): but rather non-Army technology sufficiently advanced to confuse the heck out of them both (while still not being magic).

Finally, on the matter of the mysterious “bodies” at the other site close to Roswell, Cavitt kept resolutely schtum: but that’s definitely a topic for another day (i.e. not today).

PS: here’s a nice video of Project Mogul balloons being launched, courtesy of the Black Vault. Might one of these have come down on Mac Brazel’s ranch? I really don’t think so, sorry.

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]