A weather baloon can be very secret. Freedom of Information Act searches have revealed (and quite a while ago, too) that the United States Army Air Force (the Air Force as a separate service was not established until later in the year) was conducting experiments with weather baloons carrying radar reflective arrays in the attempt to determine if such baloons could be used to spot radar installations. The idea was that is the weather baloons were towing a radar reflective array which reflected sufficient radar radiation for someone to detect it if they were looking for it, but low enough to be taken simply as "scatter" from the baloon by someone who were not suspicious, then maybe such baloons could be used to identify the location of Soviet radar installations (through triangulation). I do not recall the name of the project, but it was active at that time. If one of the baloons from the project came down, the USAAF would want to scoop up the wreckage, and then stonewall questions about the wreckage which had been found. There might not really have been anything to have been feared by such a discovery, but that is not how the minds of security-conscious officers work. They'd have hushed things up as quickly as possible. The Roswell newspaper published a report of the discovery, in which the reported made a tongue in cheek reference to "flying saucers." Other news agencies jumped all over it, in the slow news season, also known as the silly season. Then the matter rested for just over 30 years.
Then in 1978, an author who makes a living from scamming the credulous unearthed the event, and started the whole "Roswell incident" cottage industry. People of this type make a good living writing books which will appeal to those who long to believe in conspiracy theories and tales of extraterrestrial visitations. The man who originally found the wreckage was a caretaker on that "ranch" (where no one lived) and several other properties. He had found and turned in the wreckage of baloons in the past, and said at the time that that was what it looked like to him. But those who want to separate you from your hard-earned dollars for such stories are nothing if not resourceful. Children of and other relatives of the principle players in the event were brought forward with vague and ominous stories of nameless and faceless men coming in the night to threaten people to keep them silent. Ask yourself, if you were a middle-aged woman living in a remote rural area of New Mexico and someone showed up waving cash and an artistic waiver under your nose, wouldn't you take the money and sign the form?
It has also been suggested that the baloon project (Project Mogul--i just searched for it online) was an attempt to detect Soviet nuclear tests. My recollection about radar installation discovery seems to be incorrect.
Quote:Charles Moore, one of the original Project Mogul balloon engineers, started out as a fairly objective party when it came to the Roswell incident, dating back to original interviews around 1980 (perhaps because like many other Mogul balloon people, he had had his own UFO sightings). But sometime in the 1990s, he cast his lot with the debunkers. Moore seems to have become firmly convinced that the lost Project Mogul Flight #4 balloon train, launched June 4, 1947 from Alamogordo Army Air Field, must have been what rancher Mack Brazel found crashed on his ranch about 85 miles NNE of the launch site and reported as a crashed flying disk. Thus Flight #4, in Moore's mind, is definitely the solution to the Roswell mystery.
In 1995, prompted by weather records supplied to him by Roswell researcher Kevin Randle, Moore attempted to recreate a possible trajectory for Flight #4. N.M. skeptic Dave Thomas in the July 1995 Skeptical Inquirer stated triumphantly:
Moore's analysis indicates that after Flight 4 lifted off from Alamogordo, it probably ascended while traveling northeast (toward Arabela), then turned toward the northwest during its passage through the stratosphere, and then descended back to earth in a generally northeast direction. Moore's calculated balloon path is quite consistent with a landing at the Foster ranch, approximately 85 miles northeast of the Alamogordo launch site and 60 miles northwest of Roswell.
Source for the quote given above.
I am also willing to note that one can find lots of web sites which purport that the Roswell "alien spacecraft crash" actually occured. Personally, i don't believe them.
You can read the Wikipedia article on Roswell at this linked page. The Wikipedia page carries the warning that the information presented has been challenged on neutrality--i.e., that it is contested as being inaccurate and biased.
The Wikipedia article refers to and links a page on the "alien autopsy" video. I've seen the video, and knew it was false immediately. At the beginning of the video, before they even showed the thoroughly unbelievalbe "alien corpses," the camera pans the room in which the autopsies were alleged to have occured. In the image, there is a wall-mounted telephone, and the handset is connected to the receiver by a spiral coiled cord. Spiral coiled cords did not exist in the late 1940s. They did not appear in the United States until the late 1950s, and were not common until the 1960s. When i saw that, i knew the video was a hoax at the very beginning.
People may believe what they wish. I suggest, though, that if you actually buy, for cash, any of the books or videos on the subject, that the warning about a fool and his money applies.
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