San Francisco Examiner Saturday July 22, 1995
PHYSICIST ENDS MYSTERY OF UFO Debris came from research balloon by Lawrence Spohn, Albuquerque Tribune
ALBURQUERQUE, N.M. –
It didn’t come from outer space.
It came from Alamagordo N.M.
That’s the conclusion of a New Mexico physicist who says the strange object that crashed near Roswell in 1947 was not an alien craft, as many “X-Files” fans believe, but an Air Force research balloon that he launched.
Charles Moore says the description of debris from Roswell fits perfectly with a balloon he launched a few days earlier as part of a secret program in the summer of 1947.
The Roswell notoriety grew out of an official press release written and released July 8, 1947, by Walter Haut, now a proponent for the alien crash explanation.
The release reported the recovery of a flying disc and made it’s way into various news media around the world before it was withdrawn by the Air Force.
Several books and two Roswell museums are devoted to it.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
Now, Moore and other scientist say enough’s enough.
He says the debris was form the 600-foot-long balloon he launched back when he was a 26-year old graduate student at New York University.
There he built and launched balloons for the government in a classified project aimed at monitoring nuclear developments in the Soviet Union. Most were put aloft from the then-Alamagordo Army Air Field.
The Air Force draft report, an 800 page document investigating the incident, is expected to be released in it’s final version later this summer, said Lt. James McAndrew, who was assigned the job of searching out the documents related to the incident.
“I’m a hundred percent sure it was the (Moore) balloon,” McAndrew said.
The Air Force report also says that its document search – prompted by New Mexico Republican Rep. Steve Schiff’s request – uncovered “no records (that) indicated or even hinted at the recovery of ‘alien’ bodies or extraterrestrial materials.”
SOME CLAIM AN ONGOING COVER UP
The flying-saucer proponents have discounted the Air Force report as the latest evidence of a massive coverup. Some insist that alien bodies and materials were spirited away.
Two proponents said that they don’t believe Moore’s explanation either.
“The closer we’re getting to to getting actual materials, the stronger the case is becoming that it was something extraterrestrial,” said Haut, now president of the International UFO Museum in Roswell.
He says Moore can’t explain away eyewitnesses who insist that what was recovered “was not of this world.”
Clifford Stone, director of research at the UFO Enigma Museum in Roswell, agrees. “The material seemed to represent strange properties.” he says. “I firmly do not believe it was Charlie Moore’s balloon. Isn’t it strange? This is the only one they didn’t recover.”
Not really, says Moore, the 76-year old physicist and professor emeritus who directed the Langmuir Lightning Laboratory at eh New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
‘NO REAL VALUE’
Moore says that his balloon, Flight No. r4, was tracked as far as Arabella, 17 miles from Roswell crash site, and then was lost.
Because it was only the first in a series of craft assembled to test various principles, Moore says, it “had no real value and no effort was made to locate or recover it.”
Flight No. R4 was the predecessor of balloons designed to keep tabs on the status of the Soviet Union’s nuclear-weapon development.
In an era of no spy planes of satellites, the project aimed to develop a way to detect anticipated Soviet atmospheric nuclear blasts by the sound waves propagated through the upper atmosphere. The balloon payloads were low frequency acoustic microphones.
An Albaquerque scientist, David Thomas, has written about Moore’s balloon in the current issue of the “Skeptical Inquirer” journal. He is almost as certain as McAndrew.
“I’m 99.9 percent sure that what was recovered was what was left of Charlie Moore’s balloon.” Thomas said recently.
Thomas said Moore has provided details that make powerful direct links between his evidence and actual Roswell reports.
These include:
The timing of the balloon launch on June 4, 1947, and the recovery of the alleged saucer debris on the ranch 10 days later.
The balloon’s construction material and it’s radar reflector payload – which included wooded sticks, metallic paper, metal rings, and strangely marked tape – are identical to the debris recovered at the Roswell site. This is based on eyewitness accounts and photographs taken of the debris.
The tape with strange “flower-like” designs suggested to be alien hieroglyphics, sounds exactly like the tape made by a toy factory for the Air Force project, Moore said.
The debris also included smoky rubberized material, which Moore says is exactly the kind of material used in the early Project Mogul balloons.
Another independent scientist who has investigated the Roswell reports for years, Phillip Klass, says Moore’s details fit all the pertinent facts.
Klass, considered the world expert in independent investigations of UFOs, said “This should put the nail in the coffin of the so-called Roswell incident.
“But I predict that neither you nor I will live long enough to see the last nail in the Roswell coffin.”
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Well, I’m certainly glad THAT is settled. I guess that our vigilance paid off, seeing as the Russians didn’t detonate their first nuclear weapon until 1949, some two years later, and to the complete surprise of the U.S. “intelligence” services. So, there you have it; maybe now you’ll start believing your government.
MARUT: The Dark Angel