ROSWELL: THE SKEPTICS EXPLAIN
By 1993, New Mexico Representative Steven Schiff, under pressure from his constituency, requested information from the Pentagon about the Roswell crash. The response was not exactly expeditious. Schiff accused the Pentagon of “stonewalling,” called its lack of response “astounding,” and said he was “clearly getting the runaround.” As a result, he asked the General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigative arm, to prepare a report on the status of government records related to the Roswell incident. In July 1995, the GAO issued its report, “Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New Mexico.” The GAO reported that, incredibly, all administrative records of Roswell Army Air Field from March 1945 through December 1949 were inexplicably destroyed, as were all outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949. These were permanent records that should not have been destroyed. In the words of the report, “our search of government records was complicated by the fact that some records we wanted to review were missing and there was not always an explanation.” As Schiff put it, “documents that should have provided more information were destroyed. The military cannot explain who destroyed them or why.” No explanation or follow-up ever occurred.27
For nearly fifty years, the air force had maintained that the crash at Roswell had been nothing other than a downed weather balloon. In July 1995, it released “The Roswell Report: Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” The air force now modified its weather balloon explanation. A balloon did cause the crash, but this was no ordinary balloon. “Its real purpose was to carry classified payloads for a top secret U.S. Army Air Forces project. The project’s classified code name was Mogul.” Mogul was designed to assist the U.S. military in detecting signs of Soviet nuclear explosions—in other words, to learn when Russia got the bomb. It had a 1A priority classification, the highest available.28
The report introduced Charles Moore, a scientist who worked on Mogul in 1947, as its key witness. Moore explained that Mogul involved launching trains of balloons that carried acoustical equipment designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. The balloons were equipped with corner reflectors to track them more easily by radar. The reflectors were put together with beams made of balsa wood and coated with Elmer’s-type glue to strengthen them. A toy company that manufactured the reflectors had reinforced the seams with leftover tape that Moore recalled had “pinkish-purple, abstract, flower-like designs,” markings, according to the report, that Major Marcel could have misinterpreted as hieroglyphics.
The air force report claimed “with a great degree of certainty,” that Mogul flight Number 4, launched on June 4, 1947, was the actual debris mistaken for a flying saucer. The report gave three reasons for this conclusion.
1. Descriptions of the debris provided by Brazel, Cavitt, and Mogul scientist Dr. Albert Crary (who kept a diary of the launches), as well as the photos of the debris in Ramey’s office, “were consistent with the components of a Mogul service flight....”
2. Brazel’s statement of July 8, 1947, that he found debris on June 14, “obviously eliminating any balloons launched in July.”
3. Only two flights launched in June were unaccounted for, Numbers 3 and 4. Of these, Number 3 did not have unorthodox corner reflectors. Flight #4, launched on June 4, was tracked to within twenty miles of the Foster ranch before it disappeared from the radar scopes in mid-June.
Of these three reasons, only the first is an actual reason, as the other two work entirely within the structure provided by the first. That is, the entire air force Mogul explanation rests upon accounts by Brazel (as reported on July 8), Cavitt (a loyal CIC officer known to be hostile to the UFO explanation), and Crary’s diary. All other evidence—and there is a lot of it—was ignored. If one does not accept the June 14 crash date, as many do not, the air force explanation falls.
