Project MOGUL

Thank you for taking my call. I worked on Project MOGUL. Not many people left who can say that. I was a balloon engineer with the New York University research team, contracted by the Army Air Forces in 1947. When people ask me about Roswell, I tell them the truth. It was us. It was our balloon. But nobody believes me because the truth sounds more like a cover story than the cover story did. I am calling because the declassification happened in 1994, but people still do not understand what MOGUL actually was. They think weather balloon, they think simple. MOGUL was not simple. It was one of the most sophisticated detection programs of the early Cold War, and we were pioneers in constant altitude balloon technology. That is the thing, what crashed near Roswell was not some flimsy weather balloon. It was a massive, complex balloon train carrying classified equipment.

Let me explain what Project MOGUL was. The project started in 1946, conceived by Dr. Robert Eastman from Columbia University. During World War II, he had studied the deep sound channel in the ocean, how underwater explosions could be detected thousands of miles away. He theorized the same principle applied to the upper atmosphere. There was a specific altitude where temperature and pressure created a sound channel, and acoustic waves would travel enormous distances through it. The application was obvious. The Soviet Union had closed borders. We needed to detect when they tested their first atomic bomb. Seismic detectors were not reliable enough at that distance. Eastman proposed using microphones suspended at high altitude to listen for the pressure waves from nuclear detonations. General Carl Morrison, Army Air Forces Chief of Staff, approved it in 1945. By early 1947, we were flying operational tests from Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico. The project was classified Top Secret with a priority rating of 1A. That is the same classification level as the Manhattan Project. Most of us working on the balloon side did not even know the project name was MOGUL. We were told we were doing meteorological research. The compartmentalization was strict.

Our job at NYU was developing constant altitude balloons. Standard weather balloons would rise and fall, completely useless for what we needed. We had to maintain precise altitude within the acoustic duct for extended periods. That required innovation. We used clusters of neoprene balloons, sometimes twenty or more, linked together in a train configuration. We developed automatic ballast release systems using pressure sensors. Later we switched to polyethylene balloons, which were more durable and maintained altitude better. But here is what made our balloon trains look so strange. For tracking, we attached multiple radar reflectors, what we called corner reflectors. They looked like box kites made of balsa wood and metallicized paper. We needed several of them to get a good radar return at high altitude. The strange part? They were made by a toy company because of postwar material shortages. The company used whatever tape they had, which happened to have pink and purple flowers and geometric designs printed on it. That detail becomes important later. company materials on classified projects is interesting - Sarah' We also carried sonobuoys, cylindrical devices about three feet long containing hydrophones and FM transmitters. The whole assembly could be thirty to fifty feet long when fully deployed. When it crashed, the wreckage would scatter across a huge area. Nothing like a simple weather balloon.