Recently Mike Shinabery, education specialist at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, contacted me for comments about an article he was writing about the Mogul Balloon controversy related to the 1947 Roswell Incident. His article was published in the Alamogordo Daily News newspaper on Sunday, August 30, 2009, and is shown here in its entirety.
“Of the several dozen ‘Project Mogul’ balloon flights from 1947-1950 – with a majority of them launched from the Tularosa Basin – three lifted aloft this week in 1948.”
One launched Aug. 31 and tested an automatic ballast valve, then landed at Fort Stockton, Texas. A Sept. 1 flight was recovered at Neuvas Casas Grandes,
Chihuahua, Mexico, and a Sept. 3 flight-tested a neoprene coated nylon balloon that touched down at Villa Ahumada, Chihuahua.
The Roswell Report: Case Closed” (USAF/1997) reported Mogul had military and scientific purposes, but the foremost was listening for launches of Soviet nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. A monograph, “Cold War Balloon Flights 1945-1965” (on the Web site vectorsite.net), said microphones attached to the balloons listened for “sound waves.”
Mogul sought to “maintain America’s technological superiority, especially with respect to guarding against … a devastating surprise attack” the Soviet Union might launch, said “The Roswell Report” Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert” (USAF/1994).
