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Jimmy Akin : Roswell 事件の謎と仮説の検証

· 92 min read

前置き​

Jimmy Akin はプロの「カトリックの弁証家 : Catholic apologist」キリスト教を 30年以上続けているガチガチのカトリック信者だが、彼の

  • 緻密で徹底的な調査能力
  • 明快な論理性、
  • バランス感覚

は、大半の UFO 研究者や否定論者より優っている。

その Jimmy Akin が Roswell 事件の謎と、従来の仮説について詳しく検証している。

AI(NotebookLM plus) で整理した。DeepL のヘボな和訳は介在させていない。

音声対話

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d81526bf-0525-43ae-9f98-8ea14846a085/audio

概要

ロズウェル事件：謎と仮説の検証

この文章は、ジミー・エイキンの「ミステリアス・ワールド」というポッドキャストのエピソード49からの抜粋で、ロズウェル事件について信仰と理性の両面から考察しています。

このエピソードでは、1947年7月8日にニューメキシコ州ロズウェル近郊で墜落したと報じられた**「空飛ぶ円盤」に関する事件を詳細に議論しています。当初、軍が空飛ぶ円盤の回収を発表したものの、すぐに気球の破片であったと撤回した経緯が説明されています。

ポッドキャストでは、プロジェクト・モグル（ソ連の核実験を検出するための極秘気球計画）の残骸であったという空軍の公式説明を中心に、エイリアンの遭遇、ロシアの侵入、そして医療実験の失敗といった他の仮説も検討しています。また、地元のロズウェル経済がUFO現象に依存**していることや、目撃者の証言の信頼性についても触れられています。

情報源 : 動画(1:07:52)​

The Roswell UFO Crash (Overview) - Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4OLPtoTpVA

要旨

ロズウェル事件の再検討：信仰と理性の視点

「ジミー・エイキンズ・ミステリアス・ワールド」のエピソード49は、信仰と理性の二つの視点から、未解決の謎であるロズウェルUFO墜落事件を深く掘り下げています。このブリーフィングでは、事件の主要なテーマ、重要な事実、そして提示された様々な仮説について詳述します。

  1. ロズウェル事件の概要と経緯

1947年7月8日、米陸軍航空隊はニューメキシコ州ロズウェル近郊の牧場に「墜落した空飛ぶ円盤」を回収したと発表し、アメリカ国民を驚かせました。しかし、発表の翌日にはこの話は「気象観測気球だった」とされ、すぐに撤回されました。

その後数十年間にわたり、この話は隠蔽されていましたが、1980年代にUFO研究者によって再浮上し、UFO史上で最も有名な事件となりました。1990年代には世論の圧力により、空軍は以前の撤回が嘘であったことを認め、「1947年のロズウェルで奇妙なことが本当に起こった」と発表しました。(0:01:06, 0:01:29)

ロズウェルは、現代UFO時代の幕開けとなったケネス・アーノルドのUFO目撃事件のわずか2週間後に発生しており、当時の「空飛ぶ円盤」ブームの中で多くの関心を集めました。(0:04:29)

  1. 空軍の公式見解とその変遷

  • 最初の発表（1947年7月8日）: 「空飛ぶ円盤」を回収したと発表。(0:04:47)

  • 最初の撤回（1947年7月9日）: 「気象観測気球であった」と訂正。(0:06:36)

  • 1994年報告書「ロズウェル報告書：ニューメキシコ砂漠の事実と虚構」: 墜落した残骸は極秘の「プロジェクト・モーグル」の飛行4号機のものである可能性が高いと結論付けました。プロジェクト・モーグルはソ連の核実験を低周波音波で探知するための気球ベースの計画でした。(0:11:09, 0:12:18)

    • プロジェクト・モーグル: 「ソ連の核兵器研究を特定することを目的とした、当時極秘の機密プロジェクト」であり、「長距離の気球による低周波音波探知が潜在的な解決策として提案された」ものでした。(0:13:28) これらは、気球と、レーダーで追跡するためのレーダー反射板、そして特別な音響機器から構成されていました。(0:14:20) 1947年6月4日に打ち上げられた第4回実験飛行は回収されませんでした。(0:15:21)

  • 1997年報告書「ロズウェル報告書：事件終結」: 異星人の遺体に関する報告について説明を加えました。目撃された遺体は、1950年代に行われた「オペレーション・ハイ・ダイブ」という高高度脱出システム試験で使われた「人体型ダミー」である可能性が高いと示唆しました。(0:11:43)

    • オペレーション・ハイ・ダイブ: パイロットや宇宙飛行士が極めて高い高度から脱出し、生還する方法を設計するための射出システム試験プログラム。使用されたダミーは通常の人間よりも背が低かった。(0:15:46)

  • 日付の矛盾に対する反論:

    • モーグルと残骸発見の日付のずれ: モーグル気球は長期間空中にとどまるよう設計されており、6月4日に打ち上げられた飛行4号機は6月7日まで空中にとどまっていました。牧場主のマック・ブラゼルが残骸を発見したのは6月中旬であり、リモートな場所で電話もなく、発見から報告までに時間がかかったとしてもおかしくありません。(0:17:12)
    • ダミーと事件発生の日付のずれ: オペレーション・ハイ・ダイブは1950年代に実施されたのに対し、ロズウェル事件は1947年です。空軍はこれを「人々の記憶の時間圧縮」と説明しましたが、懐疑的な見方も存在します。(0:18:29)
  1. ロズウェル事件を取り巻く仮説

公式見解以外にも、ロズウェル事件については様々な仮説が提唱されています。

  • 地球外生命体仮説 (ETI hypothesis): 墜落したのが異星の宇宙船であり、異星人の遺体も回収されたという最も有名な仮説。報告された残骸の異常な特性（例えば、破れない、しわにならない箔のような素材）がこの仮説を支持する証拠として挙げられることがあります。(0:28:06)

    • 材料の特性: 目撃者の一部は、バルサ材のような木質で「削るのが難しい」、モノフィラメントの釣り糸のようなもので「光を通す」、そして「金属箔」のような素材は「破れず、しわにならず、平らに戻る」と証言しています。(0:28:54, 0:29:16)
    • 反論: これらの証言は事件から数十年後になされており、記憶の歪みやUFOストーリーの影響を受けた可能性があります。また、報告された材料は1940年代の技術でも製造可能であったり、政府の極秘プロジェクトで使われていた可能性も指摘されています。マック・ブラゼル自身は、最初の発表から24時間以内に、残骸を「普通の錫箔、紙、テープ、棒きれ」と表現していました。(0:30:22, 0:35:22) エンジンなど大型の動力源の痕跡が見られなかったことも、地球外生命体仮説に対する疑問符となっています。(0:35:51)

  • ジェイコブソン仮説（ロシアの侵入）: アン・ジェイコブソンは、彼女の著書『エリア51』の中で、ロズウェルの墜落はソ連によるアメリカ領空への侵入の結果であると主張しています。ヨシフ・スターリンが、オーソン・ウェルズの『宇宙戦争』の放送に触発され、アメリカに異星人の侵略と思わせるパニックを引き起こすために、ロシア製の空飛ぶ円盤を送り込んだというものです。そして、遺体はナチスの医師ヨーゼフ・メンゲレが人体実験を行った子供たちだったとされています。(0:22:15)

    • 反論: この計画の不確実性が高く、実行可能性が低いとされ、信頼性のある証拠も不足しています。また、もしロシア製の飛行機であれば、残骸に識別可能なロシア語の表示などがあったはずだという指摘もあります。(0:26:36, 0:26:59)

  • レッドファーン仮説（医療実験の失敗）: ニック・レッドファーンは、墜落した機体はアメリカ政府の管理下にあった気球か別の飛行体であり、遺体は高高度生存実験の被験者、おそらく日本の捕虜や先天性欠損症の子供たちであったと主張しています。(0:23:29)

    • 評価: この仮説は、もし遺体が存在したとすれば、その存在を説明できる可能性があります。政府が非倫理的な人体実験を行っていた事実も存在するが、現時点では遺体の存在自体が不確かである。(0:27:37)
  1. プロジェクト・モーグル仮説を支持する証拠

「ジミー・エイキンズ・ミステリアス・ワールド」は、プロジェクト・モーグル仮説を最も有力視しています。

  • FBI電報（1947年7月8日）: 最初の発表から数時間後にダラスのFBI支局からワシントンD.C.の本部に送られた電報には、「空飛ぶ円盤」とされる物体は「六角形」で、「直径約20フィートの気球からケーブルで吊り下げられていた」と記載されています。これは「高高度気象観測気球とレーダー反射板に似ている」とも記されており、事件の初期段階で軍が「気球関連のもの」と認識していたことを示唆しています。(0:40:48)
  • ジェームズ・マハフィーの証言: ジェームズ・マハフィーの著書『Atomic Adventures』では、1989年に元物理学者であるクラレンス・エリソン判事と出会った話が語られています。エリソン判事は、ロズウェルの墜落はプロジェクト・モーグルの気球の残骸であり、「空飛ぶ円盤」という言葉はエリソンが開発した特殊なマイクロフォンのコードネームであったと主張しています。(0:44:46, 0:48:14) この情報は、空軍がモーグル説を発表する5年前に得られたものであり、その信憑性を高めています。(0:49:07)
    • モーグル気球の特性: 「寒冷な温度でゴム気球が脆くなり、低気圧下でヘリウムが膨張し、冷たいゴムが弾性の限界に達すると、気球は破裂する」と説明されており、残骸がばらばらになった理由を説明しています。(0:45:49)
    • レーダー反射板: 気球の位置を追跡するために「アルミニウムコーティングされた紙と棒でできたレーダー反射板」が使用されており、これが「カイト」と呼ばれていました。(0:47:05)
  • 残骸の性質: 墜落したものが「非常に脆かった」という印象は、モーグル仮説を裏付けています。残骸は細かく粉砕されており、壊れやすい気球や凧の構成要素を示唆しています。目撃された材料の多くは、薄いシート状の物質（紙、錫箔、ゴム）、棒状のもの、紐状のものから構成されており、これらはレーダー反射板の構造と一致します。(0:49:37)
  • エンジンの不在: 墜落現場からエンジンや大型の動力源が見つかっていないことも、高度な異星の宇宙船ではなく、気球のような構造物であった可能性を示唆しています。(0:35:51, 0:50:27)
  • 政府の関心の低さ: もし本当に異星の宇宙船が回収されたのであれば、政府はUFOプログラムに莫大な資金を投入しているはずですが、実際にはそうではないように見えることも、モーグル仮説の傍証となっています。(0:51:12)
  1. ケネス・アーノルドの目撃談とモーグル仮説

ジェームズ・マハフィーの著書には、ケネス・アーノルドの「空飛ぶ円盤」目撃談もモーグル計画で説明できるという脚注があります。1947年5月29日に打ち上げられ、行方不明になったモーグル飛行3号機が、高高度のジェット気流に乗って遠く離れたワシントン州レーニア山まで運ばれ、アーノルドが目撃した「9つの光る物体が中国の凧の尾のように連なって飛んでいる」様子は、分離した気球の連なりだった可能性があるというものです。(0:53:02)

  • 課題: 気球が26日間も空中にとどまり、何百マイルも移動したのかという疑問。また、アーノルドが報告した「金属製の物体からの閃光が航空機の機内を照らすほど明るかった」という点は、遠くの銀色の気球では説明が難しいという反論も提示されています。(0:55:03, 0:55:55)

結論​

現時点での研究に基づくと、ジミー・エイキンは「プロジェクト・モーグル」の仮説がロズウェル事件の最も可能性の高い説明であると結論付けています。

しかし、彼は代替の可能性を完全に排除しておらず、読者には複数の視点から情報源を検討することを推奨しています。(0:52:32, 0:52:44) 事件の複雑さと証拠の多様性は、今後もロズウェル事件が議論され続けることを示唆しています。

timeline と 主要関係者

ロズウェル事件のタイムライン​

  • 1938年：オーソン・ウェルズの「宇宙戦争」ラジオ放送が放映され、アメリカ社会にパニックを引き起こす。

  • 1939年：モノフィラメント釣り糸が市場に出回り始める。

  • 1945年：

    • 第二次世界大戦が終結し、アメリカが最初の原子爆弾を投下。
    • モーリス・ユーイング博士が、ソ連の核実験を探知するための長距離気球による低周波音響探知をスパッツ将軍に提案する。

  • 1947年：

    • 5月29日：プロジェクト・モーグル飛行3号が発射されるが、高高度の高速風によりレーダーから消え、回収されない。この気球の一部が、後にケネス・アーノルドの目撃談の元になった可能性が示唆される。
    • 6月4日：プロジェクト・モーグル飛行4号がニューメキシコ州アラモゴルドから発射されるが、回収されない。
    • 6月7日：プロジェクト・モーグル飛行4号が飛行中に問題発生。
    • 6月14日頃：牧場主のマック・ブラゼルと8歳の息子ヴァーノンが、J.B.フォスター牧場の近くで、ゴム片、ブリキ箔、丈夫な紙、棒からなる広範囲の残骸を発見する。ブラゼルはその時は急いでいたため、あまり注意を払わない。
    • 7月4日：マック・ブラゼル、妻、息子ヴァーノン、娘ベティ（14歳）が残骸の現場に戻り、かなりの量の破片を回収する。
    • 7月5日：ブラゼルが初めて「空飛ぶ円盤（flying disc）」という言葉を聞き、自身が発見したものもそれかもしれないと考える。
    • 7月7日（月曜日）：ブラゼルがロズウェル市内のジョージ・ウィルコックス保安官に「空飛ぶ円盤」を発見したかもしれないと内緒で伝える。ウィルコックス保安官はロズウェル陸軍航空基地に連絡。

  • 7月8日（火曜日）：

    • ロズウェル陸軍航空基地がプレスリリースを発表し、「空飛ぶ円盤」を回収したと公表する。この発表は、ロズウェル近郊の牧場で墜落した「空飛ぶ物体」を、第509爆撃航空団情報局のジェシー・A・マーセル少佐が回収したと述べる。
    • ダラスのFBI支局がワシントンD.C.の本部に対し、回収された物体が六角形の円盤で、直径約20フィートの気球にケーブルで吊るされていたという電報を送る。この電報では、物体が高高度気象観測用気球とレーダー反射板に似ていると述べられている。
    • メディアがロズウェルでの「空飛ぶ円盤」回収のニュースを大々的に報じる。

  • 7月9日（水曜日）：

    • 陸軍が前日の発表を撤回し、フォートワース陸軍航空基地の気象担当官であるイヴリング・ニュートン准尉が、回収された物体は「レーダー風目標（radar wind target）」、つまり高高度の風向と風速を測定するために使用される気象観測用気球であると特定したと発表する。
    • 多くの新聞が撤回記事を掲載し、ロジャー・レイミー准将とジェシー・マーセル少佐が気象観測用気球の残骸を持ってポーズをとる写真も掲載される。
    • ロズウェル・デイリー・レコード紙に、マック・ブラゼルが回収した物体を「通常の物」として描写する記事が掲載される（ブリキ箔、紙、テープ、棒）。

  • 1949年：ソ連が原子爆弾の実験に成功する。

  • 1950年代：オペレーション・ハイダイブ計画が実施され、高高度からのパイロットおよび宇宙飛行士の緊急脱出システムを試験するため、人型ダミーが使用される。

  • 1980年：チャールズ・バーリッツとウィリアム・ムーアによる書籍『ロズウェル事件』が出版され、事件が再び広く知られるようになる。

  • 1989年：

    • テレビ番組『未解決事件（Unsolved Mysteries）』がロズウェル事件の有名な特集を放送する。
    • ジェームズ・マハフィーが、核物理学者のクラレンス・H・“ジャッジ”・エリソンからプロジェクト・モーグルに関する詳細な証言を聞く。エリソンは、回収された「空飛ぶ円盤」が彼らの特殊なマイクのコードネームであったと主張する。

  • 1991年：ケヴィン・ランドルとドン・シュミットによる書籍『UFO Crash at Roswell』が出版される。

  • 1992年：スタントン・フリードマンによる書籍『Crash at Corona』が出版される。

  • 1994年：

    • 世論の圧力を受け、空軍が「ロズウェル・レポート：ニューメキシコ砂漠の事実対フィクション」と題する報告書を発表。この報告書では、回収された残骸はプロジェクト・モーグルの飛行4号のものである可能性が高いと主張される。
    • 空軍は、初期の撤回発表が虚偽であったことを認める。

  • 1997年：

    • 空軍が別の報告書「ロズウェル・レポート：ケース・クローズド」を発表。この報告書では、目撃されたとされる「異星人の遺体」は、1950年代のオペレーション・ハイダイブ計画で使用された衝突試験用ダミーである可能性が示唆される。
    • フィリップ・J・コルソ中佐とウィリアム・バーンズによる書籍『The Day After Roswell』が出版される。

登場人物リスト​

  • ジミー・エイキン（Jimmy Akin）：ポッドキャスト「ジミー・エイキンズ・ミステリアス・ワールド」のホストの一人。信仰と理性の観点からミステリーを考察する。ロズウェル事件を熱心に研究し、ポッドキャストで紹介。
  • ドム・ベンティネッリ（Dom Bentinelli）：ポッドキャスト「ジミー・エイキンズ・ミステリアス・ワールド」のもう一人のホスト。UFO談義に非常に興奮している。
  • マック・ブラゼル（Mac Brazel）：ロズウェル近郊の牧場主。1947年6月に「空飛ぶ円盤」の残骸とされるものを最初に発見した人物。発見当初はそれを通常の材料と認識していたが、後に「空飛ぶ円盤」の噂を聞き、保安官に通報した。
  • ジェシー・A・マーセル少佐（Major Jesse A. Marcel）：第509爆撃航空団情報局の将校。ロズウェルで回収された物体を最初に検査し、「空飛ぶ円盤」として公表するプレスリリースに関与した。後に気象観測用気球の残骸とポーズをとる写真に登場する。
  • イヴリング・ニュートン准尉（Warrant Officer Irving Newton）：フォートワース陸軍航空基地の気象担当官。ロズウェルで回収された物体を気象観測用気球とレーダー反射板であると特定した人物として、陸軍の撤回発表で登場する。
  • ロジャー・レイミー准将（Brigadier General Roger Ramey）：フォートワース陸軍航空基地の司令官。気象観測用気球の残骸とポーズをとる写真に登場し、陸軍の撤回発表を主導した。
  • チャールズ・バーリッツ（Charles Berlitz）：ウィリアム・ムーアと共に1980年の書籍『ロズウェル事件』を執筆し、事件を再普及させた作家。
  • ウィリアム・ムーア（William Moore）：チャールズ・バーリッツと共に1980年の書籍『ロズウェル事件』を執筆し、事件を再普及させた作家。
  • ケヴィン・ランドル（Kevin Randall）：UFO研究者、作家。ドン・シュミットと共に1991年の書籍『UFO Crash at Roswell』を執筆。また、目撃証言の問題点を公平に分析した『Roswell in the 21st Century』の著者でもあり、地球外生命体仮説を支持しながらもデータの限界について率直である。
  • ドン・シュミット（Don Schmidt）：ケヴィン・ランドルと共に1991年の書籍『UFO Crash at Roswell』を執筆した作家。
  • スタントン・フリードマン（Stanton Friedman）：UFO研究者、作家。1992年の書籍『Crash at Corona』の著者。
  • フィリップ・J・コルソ中佐（Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso）：ウィリアム・バーンズと共に1997年の書籍『The Day After Roswell』を執筆した軍人。ロズウェルで回収された技術をアメリカの産業界に広め、リバースエンジニアリングを促したと主張した。
  • ウィリアム・バーンズ（William Burns）：フィリップ・J・コルソ中佐と共に1997年の書籍『The Day After Roswell』を執筆した作家。
  • ジョージ・ウィルコックス保安官（Sheriff George Wilcox）：チャベス郡の保安官。マック・ブラゼルがロズウェルで発見した残骸について最初に報告を受けた人物。
  • アニー・ジェイコブソン（Annie Jacobson）：レポーター、作家。著書『Area 51』の中で、ロズウェル事件はソ連の謀略であり、ジョセフ・メンゲレ博士がヨシフ・スターリンのために医療実験を行った子供たちを「異星人」に見せかけたものであるという、匿名の情報源からの主張を紹介した。
  • ヨシフ・スターリン（Joseph Stalin）：ソ連の最高指導者。ジェイコブソンの仮説では、オーソン・ウェルズの「宇宙戦争」放送に触発され、アメリカでパニックを引き起こすために「異星人」を装ったロシアの侵入を企てた人物とされる。
  • ジョセフ・メンゲレ博士（Dr. Joseph Mengele）：ナチスの医師。ジェイコブソンの仮説では、第二次世界大戦後、ヨシフ・スターリンのために働き、ロズウェルで発見されたとされる「異星人の遺体」の元になった医療実験を行ったとされる。
  • ニック・レッドファーン（Nick Redfern）：作家。著書『Body Snatchers in the Desert』と『The Roswell UFO Conspiracy』の中で、ロズウェル事件はアメリカ政府の医療実験が失敗した結果であり、遺体は高高度生存実験の被験者（捕虜や出生異常のある子供など）であったという仮説を提唱した。
  • ジェームズ・マハフィー（James Mahaffey）：核物理学者、作家。著書『Atomic Adventures』の中で、1989年に元プロジェクト・モーグル関係者である「ジャッジ」エリソンから、ロズウェル事件がプロジェクト・モーグルに関連するものであり、回収された「フライングディスク」が特殊なマイクのコードネームであったという証言を得たことを明らかにした。
  • クラレンス・H・“ジャッジ”・エリソン（Clarence H. "Judge" Ellison）：退役した実業家で物理学者。ジェームズ・マハフィーに、自身がプロジェクト・モーグルに関与しており、ロズウェル事件の回収物の一部がモーグル計画の機器であったこと、そして「フライングディスク」が特殊なマイクのコードネームであったことを証言したとされる。
  • ケネス・アーノルド（Kenneth Arnold）：1947年6月に「空飛ぶ円盤」という言葉を生み出したUFO目撃者。プロジェクト・モーグル飛行3号の残骸を目撃した可能性があるとマハフィーは示唆している。
  • ブルース・マカビー（Bruce McAbee）：ケネス・アーノルドの目撃談を詳細に分析した著書を持つ人物。アーノルドの目撃談に関するマハフィーの仮説に対し、距離と速度の判断、および光の反射に関する異論を唱えることが予想される。

ケネス・アーノルドの目撃情報へのサイドバー のより大きな文脈において、これらのソースが マハフィーのモーグル関連説明: 飛行3（飛行4と同じ構成）がアーノルドの目撃対象の可能性 について何を言おうとしているのかを議論してください。

AI

ケネス・アーノルドの目撃情報に関するサイドバーでは、ジェームズ・マハフィーの著書「Atomic Adventures」からのモーグル計画に関連する説明が提示されています。この説明は、アーノルドが目撃したものが、1947年5月29日に打ち上げられたモーグル計画の3号機であった可能性を示唆しています。

3号機は4号機と全く同じ構成をしており、打ち上げ後、高高度で高速の風に遭遇し、レーダーから北に向かって消え、その後回収されることはありませんでした。ケネス・アーノルドの目撃情報は、その26日後の1947年6月24日に発生しました。

マハフィーの説明によると、アーノルドが目撃した「9つの光る物体が、まるで中国の凧の尾のように繋がっているかのように飛んでいる様子」は、モーグル気球の最上部が、高高度ジェット気流に乗ってレーニア山まで運ばれた状態を記述している可能性があります。この車両の最上部セグメントは、45,000フィートに達した際に電気的に作動する爆発性火工品によって残りの紐から分離していました。

このセグメントは、非常に反射性が高く金属のように見える9つのポリエチレン気球で構成されていたとされます。上部の2つは大きな1キログラムの気球で、36フィートの編み込みナイロンロープ（ロブスターロープとして知られる）で区切られていました。さらに79フィートのロープの後に、7つの小さな350グラムの気球が続き、それぞれ20フィート間隔で配置されていたとのことです。

もしこの説が正しければ、アーノルドが報告した物体の速度と距離の判断は誤っていたことになります。この気球の連なりは、ロープを介して互いに引っ張り合うことで「円盤のようなスキップする動き」を生み出し、空を移動する際に上下に跳ねているように見えた可能性があり、また先頭の物体が続く物体とは異なって見えた理由も説明できます。

しかし、この説明にはいくつかの疑問点が提示されています。まず、3号機が26日間も空中に留まり、数百マイル離れたワシントン州まで辿り着くことが本当にあり得るのかという疑問です。

また、マカビーの分析によれば、アーノルドは山や時計を背景にして物体の位置を正確に把握しており、速度や距離を誤判断したというマハフィーの主張と矛盾するとされます。さらに、アーノルドは金属製の物体からの閃光が航空機の客室を照らすほど明るかったと報告しましたが、遠く離れた銀色の気球ではそのようなことは起こり得ないだろうという点も指摘されています。

Me:

timeline にある

  • ジェームズ・マハフィーが、核物理学者のクラレンス・H・“ジャッジ”・エリソンからプロジェクト・モーグルに関する詳細な証言を聞く。エリソンは、回収された「空飛ぶ円盤」が彼らの特殊なマイクのコードネームであったと主張する。

についてできる限り詳しく敷衍して。

AI

ジェームズ・マハフィーが核物理学者のクラレンス・H・“ジャッジ”・エリソンからプロジェクト・モーグルに関する詳細な証言を聞いたという出来事は、ロズウェル事件の公式説明であるモーグル計画説を補強する重要な要素として挙げられています。

この証言は1989年4月30日に、マハフィーがジョージア工科大学研究所でエリソンと出会った際に得られました。当時、マハフィーは卓上型常温核融合の再現実験に失敗し、科学者として不遇の時期にありました。エリソンは当初、常温核融合についてマハフィーと話しに来たものの、まず自身がプロジェクト・モーグルに関わっていたことについて語り始めました。

エリソンはマハフィーに対し、モーグル計画の目標は、第二次世界大戦後まもなく、ソ連の秘密核爆弾実験を遠距離から探知することであったと説明しました。ソ連が核兵器開発で米国に追いつこうと必死になっている時期であり、西側文明の命運がかかっていると認識されていたため、秘密裏に核爆発の空中での発生を把握することが極めて重要でした。ソ連に監視されていることを知られないよう、計画は極秘にされ、関係者は徹底的に身元調査され、24時間監視される体制が敷かれ、何重もの隠蔽工作（カバー・ストーリー）が用意されていました。

モーグル計画では、海軍が潜水艦探知のために開発したハイドロフォン（ソノブイ）を空気中で機能するように改造し、これを搭載した気球を打ち上げて、数千マイル離れた場所で発生する原子爆弾の低周波音波を聴取しました。エリソンの役割は、このハイドロフォンを再設計し、人間の聴覚の閾値以下の周波数で薄い空気中を伝播する超低周波信号に感度を持たせることでした。

エリソンによると、1947年6月4日に実験飛行4号機が打ち上げられましたが、すぐに視界から消え、回収されることはありませんでした 。その3日後の6月7日には、アラモゴードの打ち上げ地点から60マイル離れたロズウェル陸軍航空基地で事態が急展開しました。報告によると、気球の紐がサクラメント山脈の東の平原に落下し、まだ浮揚能力があった気球が何マイルも紐を引きずり、壊れやすいレーダー反射板を粉々にしながら、広範囲に破片を撒き散らしたとのことです。

特に重要なのは、エリソンがマハフィーに、ロズウェルで回収された「空飛ぶ円盤（flying disc）」が、彼の開発した特殊なマイクのコードネームであったと明かしたことです。軍関係者は、そのマイク、すなわち「空飛ぶ円盤」とその他の分類されていない残骸を回収するために派遣されました。エリソンはこの「空飛ぶ円盤」というコードネームが報道に紛れ込んだ可能性を示唆しており、モーグル計画に詳しい人物がそのニックネームを知っていて、それがプレスリリースに組み込まれた可能性があるとしています。

マハフィーにとって、このエリソンの証言は非常に重要でした。なぜなら、エリソンがこの話をしたのは1989年であり、米国空軍が1994年にロズウェル事件の残骸がプロジェクト・モーグル4号機のものである可能性が高いと結論付ける報告書を発表するより、5年も前のことだったからです 。この時間差は、エリソンの証言が空軍の公式見解に影響されたものではなく、独立した情報源から得られたものである可能性を示しており、モーグル計画説の信頼性を高める根拠の一つとされています。

エリソンはまた、気球が低温で脆くなり、低気圧でヘリウムが膨張することで破裂する一般的な気象気球の特性にも言及しました。モーグル気球には高度制御機構が備わっていましたが、4号機は故障により高高度に達し、これが破裂の原因となり、破片となって地上に散乱した可能性を示唆しています。

文字起こし

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is brought to you by the StarQuest Production Network and is made possible by our many generous patrons. If you'd like to support the podcast, please visit sqpn.com slash give. You're listening to episode 49 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. In this episode, we're talking about, get ready for it folks, the Roswell UFO crash. (0:00:36)

I'm really excited about this, can you tell? I'm Dom Bentinelli and joining me today is Jimmy Akin. Hi Jimmy. Howdy Dom. So, I make no bones about that, I'm very excited, I love talking about UFOs, I'm very excited about that, and of course Roswell is the thing. So let's get into talking about what it is Roswell is. On July 8th, 1947, 72 years ago this week, Americans were startled when the Army Air Force announced that they had taken possession of a crashed flying saucer. (0:01:06)

Now, the Air Force said that the saucer had crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. But the public then suffered whiplash when the Air Force quickly retracted the story and said it wasn't true. And then for years the story was hidden, but decades later it was revived by UFO researchers. And the story of the Roswell crash has become the single most famous incident in UFO history. (0:01:29)

And then in the 1990s, public pressure forced the Air Force to admit that they had lied when retracting the story, and something strange really did happen at Roswell in 1947. And that's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. So Jimmy, let's be honest, was Roswell really Quark and Rom traveling through time from Star Trek's Deep Space Nine? (0:01:51)

Dom, you can't just blurt out the truth at the beginning of the episode, it doesn't fit the narrative. You've got to build towards that. I guess I got so excited I forgot and jumped right to the end. Okay, no, so seriously, so how much of the whole Roswell phenomena will we be talking about on this episode? There's so much to talk about this. (0:02:11)

There's so much research that has been done that we're really only going to be able to cover a fraction of at this time. I'd love to be able to just go into all the stories that people have told about Roswell, all the different things that people who lived in the area have said. Unfortunately, that would make this a book-length podcast and actually several book-length podcasts because many books have been written on this subject. (0:02:33)

So we'll really only be able to talk about kind of an overview of the situation this time, but we'll look at it more in some future episodes and be able to get further into some of the stories. Okay, so I understand that you took a trip to Roswell a few years ago. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, it was very interesting. (0:02:53)

It was really clear that the UFO crash story was incredibly important to the local economy. It seemed like every business on the main strip in town was selling alien stuff and there were alien decorations all over everything. Even the streetlights had alien faces painted on them that I guess the town council had done. The Chamber of Commerce had a sign on its front door in allegedly alien writing, which was actually just gibberish in a Greek font. (0:03:21)

I got to visit the Roswell UFO Museum, which was fun, and I drove out to near one of the crash sites. And I also went through an alien-themed haunted house that they had there, which was kind of scary in parts. They had guys, these teenage guys running the haunted house, like sneaking up on you in the dark and stuff. It sounds fun and very campy. (0:03:41)

Yeah. Set the stage for us then. What was happening in 1947 when the story from Roswell broke? You'll recall just a couple of weeks ago here on the show, we covered the Kenneth Arnold UFO sightings that kicked off the modern UFO era and that introduced the term flying saucer. That was part of a wave of sightings in 1947. And over the next two weeks, the press was just filled with accounts of flying saucers as the wave played out. (0:04:07)

People were fascinated by the story. And I wanted to do this episode, since we'd just done the Kenneth Arnold ones, time to coincide with the anniversary of that. I wanted to follow up with Roswell timed for this anniversary. I wanted to do them both in the same year so you could see just how close those two events were to each other. So they're in very close proximity. (0:04:29)

Just a couple of weeks later when Roswell happened. And early on Tuesday, July 8th, the Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release. Yeah. And here's what it said. The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force, Roswell Army Airfield, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. (0:05:04)

Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group intelligence office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Airfield and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters. (0:05:28)

Yeah. I love how they say loaned to higher headquarters. That's almost as good as surrendered to high command. Yeah. Some general called up, hey, Major Marcel, can I borrow that from you? Yeah. I'm not sure that's how it happened. (0:05:42)

But imagine what it would have been like to read that in the newspaper, just the Army got a flying saucer. I mean, just coming out and saying it, how dramatic that would have been. When I went to Roswell, I got a copy of the paper. They have reproductions of it for sale. I got a copy of it and was reading it and it's like, wow, this is just so dramatic to just have the military come out and say we've got a flying saucer. (0:06:10)

I have to say, it's almost like when the New York Times reported on the A-Tip gun camera videos from a few years ago. That's interesting. Yeah. Only even more dramatic because it's like we have this physical object. Right. Right. Then what happened was the Army retracted the story. Is that right? Within 24 hours, they dialed back the story. And on July 9th, many papers carried the retraction to this is the next day. (0:06:36)

One of them was the Fort Worth Star Telegram. And here's what it said. An object found near Roswell, New Mexico, was stripped of its glamour by a Fort Worth Army Airfield weather officer who late Tuesday identified it as weather balloon. Warrant Officer Irving Newton of Medford, Wisconsin, a forecaster at the base weather station said the object was a radar wind target used to determine the direction and velocity of winds at high altitudes. (0:07:04)

Newton said there were some 80 weather stations in the United States using this type of balloon, and it could have come from any one of them. We use them because they can go so much higher than the eye can see, Newton explained. A radar set is employed to follow the balloon and through a process of triangulation, the winds aloft are charted, he added. (0:07:23)

Yeah, the story and a lot of the press stories also carried pictures of Brigadier General Roger Ramey and Major Jesse Marcel, who you already mentioned, posing with debris from a weather balloon and a radar detector. So it wasn't just a weather balloon, it had like a radar target on it as well to keep track of the balloon. And so that basically just killed the story? (0:07:46)

Yeah, after that, the story died down for several decades. There were a few brief and often inaccurate mentions of it in UFO literature, but it was basically a dormant story at that point. So then how did it come back into popular consciousness? In 1980, a book called The Roswell Incident was published by Charles Berlitz. That's the language guy, you know, if you've seen those Berlitz language books to like learn French or German or whatever, that's the guy. (0:08:13)

He and another guy named William Moore wrote this Roswell Incident book, and that repopularized it. Then in 1989, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries aired a famous segment, dramatizing the subject. Other books followed, including UFO Crash at Roswell, which was released in 1991 by Kevin Randall and Don Schmidt. And then in 1992, Crash at Corona by Stanton Friedman, who just recently passed on. (0:08:41)

And in 1997, the day after Roswell, by Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso and William Burns was released. And Philip Corso was a military guy who claimed to have been given technology from Roswell that he then seeded in industry here in America to be reverse engineered. And so very interesting book. We'll definitely talk about that one in the future. One of the things that characterized this new wave of interest was the claim that in addition to the crash debris, which, you know, there had been no doubt existed, there were also several small crash victims, according to the stories, one or two of which may have survived at least temporarily. (0:09:27)

So people were saying there were bodies of small people and one or two of them may have lived at least temporarily. Another thing that characterized the new wave of interest was a lot of really unreliable witnesses came out of the woodwork. Subsequent deliberation and investigation showed that many of them were either misremembering or deliberately hoaxing in some cases. For a really balanced look at the problems with a lot of these newer witnesses, I would recommend you get Kevin Randall's book, Roswell in the 21st Century. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. (0:10:04)

It's one of the recommended resources for this episode. And Randall favors the extraterrestrial hypothesis. He, I mean, that's his preferred solution. He wants to say it was a flying saucer from another planet, but he's a very fair and balanced investigator. In fact, I would say of all the people actively working in American ufology today, he is the most fair and balanced person who favors the extraterrestrial hypothesis. (0:10:32)

And he's really frank about the limitations of the data and the problems with some of the witnesses. Now, I recall being of a certain age and having certain interests. I recall there being lots of interests like this that grew. There were TV movies. I remember one, the X-Files was talking about Roswell. So eventually public interest grew so strong that I understand the government had to issue a couple of reports at what happened at Roswell. So what did they say? (0:10:57)

Yeah, there were some queries that were underway in the government by New Mexico politicians. And so in 1994, the Air Force issued a document called the Roswell Report, Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. And it claimed that the crash debris was likely from flight four of something called Project Mogul, which we'll talk about. It didn't offer a single definite explanation for the reports of the alien bodies. (0:11:29)

But since Project Mogul didn't have any passengers, it just said there weren't any bodies. In 1997, the Air Force then issued another document called the Roswell Report, Case Closed, which did provide an explanation for the reports of the bodies. And it suggested that the bodies people remembered seeing were likely crash test dummies from another program called Operation High Dive, which we'll also talk about. (0:11:57)

Well, if the report was titled Case Closed, I'm sure nobody wanted to talk about it after that, right? (0:12:02)

Didn't really close the case in a lot of people's minds. So what was this Project Mogul that they mentioned? Basically, it was a balloon-based project to detect Soviet nuclear tests. You know, this is right after World War II. We dropped the first bombs in 1945. And we knew the Soviets were having this, you know, desperate program to try to get their own bombs. (0:12:26)

They were successful in 1949. So it took them like four years after the war before they detonated a bomb. But we were already monitoring what was going on to try to, you know, track their progress. And Mogul was one of the ways we were trying to do that. Basically, you sent up balloons and they had special sound gear on them that would listen for low frequency sound waves that travel through the atmosphere for thousands of miles. (0:12:56)

So the idea was basically with these special microphones, you could hear the bang of an atomic bomb going off from thousands of miles away. And that would tell us if it's not one of ours, it would be one of the Soviets. Because we didn't have satellites to do what we do now, to see it from space. So they had to find another way. (0:13:14)

Okay. Exactly. And so the Roswell report that the Air Force released in 1994 has a pretty good explanation of Project Mogul. Why don't you read that for us? All right. Project Mogul was a then-sensitive classified project whose purpose was to determine the Soviet nuclear weapons research. This was the early Cold War period, and there was serious concern within the U.S. government about the Soviets developing a weaponized atomic device. (0:13:41)

Because the Soviet Union's borders were closed, the U.S. government sought to develop a long-range nuclear explosion detection capability. Long-range, balloon-borne, low-frequency acoustic detection was posed to General Spatz in 1945 by Dr. Maurice Ewing of Columbia University as a potential solution. Yeah. So what they would do, because you not only want to hear the bang, you also want to know where it was. So they would need to triangulate, and they would send up multiple balloon trains in different locations, and they needed to map where the balloon trains were when they would hear the bang. (0:14:20)

So they would have this trail of... in addition to the balloon, which provides the lift you want, it would have the acoustic equipment, and then it would also have tethered to the balloon radar reflectors, so you could track the balloons on radar and use that for triangulation. And they had specially modified the microphones they were using. They were based on sonobuoys that the Navy had developed for listening to, like, submarines and stuff like that, but they modified them to work with air instead of water. (0:14:55)

And sent them up, and in 1947, a team from New York University was conducting experimental launches with this system out of Alamogordo, New Mexico, which is just 60 miles from Roswell. And according to the records, their fourth experimental flight, which was launched on June 4th, 1947, was never recovered by the Project Mogul team. (0:15:21)

It was lost. And the Air Force, in 1994, concluded that that's probably what the crash debris was from. It was from Flight 4 of Project Mogul. Okay. And then they also mentioned this other project called Operation High Dive. What was that? High Dive was an attempt in the 1950s to design a way to allow pilots and astronauts to eject at extremely high altitudes and survive. (0:15:46)

So it was basically an ejection system testing program. And the tests involved anthropomorphic dummies, you know, as you would expect. You want to eject the dummy and then see what the damage is to get an idea of what would happen to a man. The dummies they used were somewhat shorter than a normal person. I'm not entirely sure why. It may be, I don't know, if pilots in this age tended to be shorter than normal, kind of like jockeys, so they could fit in the smaller aircraft, or I'm not sure. (0:16:15)

I think the higher altitude planes were more cramped cockpits, and they recruited shorter pilots. Yeah. Also, weight was a big concern back then. And so they probably wanted lighter guys. In any event, these crash test dummies were shorter than a normal person. And in 1997, the Air Force suggested that their efforts to recover these dummies, because, you know, you got to, after they've ejected and hit the ground, you got to go get them to see what happened with them. (0:16:41)

That the efforts of military personnel to go recover the dummies was what produced reports of military personnel recovering tiny people in the desert. So one thing we noticed is in both of these cases, we have some discrepancies in dates. The Mogul balloon went missing on June 4th, but the debris at Roswell wasn't reported in the newspaper until July 8th. And then the alien bodies were reported in 1947, but Operation High Dive wasn't until the 1950s. So what gives here? (0:17:12)

I don't think the first one is really much of a problem. Mogul balloons were designed to stay in the air for extended periods. You didn't just send them up and haul them back down the same day. You had to have them up there listening for whenever the Soviets might set off a nuke. And so they were meant to stay up there for a long period of time. (0:17:31)

Apparently, Flight 4, which was, you know, launched on June 4th, was in the air until June 7th. And that's when things started to go wrong for it. Also, some records indicate, some early records indicate that Mack Brazel, he was the rancher that found the debris, that he found the debris three weeks before it was reported to the authorities. He found it in mid-June. So we know Flight 4 was still up in the air until the 7th. And then he finds the debris like a week later. (0:18:04)

He was on a remote ranch with no telephone or radio. He didn't go into town very often. (0:18:09)

And we don't know that he even found the debris right after the crash. It could have been laying there all week before he ran across it. So I don't see a fundamental problem with the date of the Mogul launch relative to the time the newspapers announced the story. Okay, and then what about the date problem with the crash test dummy? Well, I think there's more of a problem here. (0:18:29)

At the press conference in 1997, where they announced this solution, it was asked, well, okay, Operation High Dive wasn't until the 50s, but Roswell was 47. So why the discrepancy in years? And the Air Force official who was speaking suggested it was time compression in people's memories, which got some laughs. I think it's possible, you know, that people could misremember the year. I say that from my own experience. (0:18:59)

People seem to think that I have a good memory, but I often don't remember the year something happened after it's been a few years. For example, I don't remember the exact year of my trip to Roswell. I think it was around 2007, about 12 years ago, but I could be off by, you know, a few years. It could have been, I don't think it was later than that, but it could have been earlier than that. (0:19:21)

I have to say, I think people's memories will often sometimes, in fact, do the opposite, which is lock onto a memorable thing and misremember it because they tie it to that thing that wasn't the same time. So, like, if I remember something that actually happened in, say, 1988, but for some reason seems like it might be connected to, I don't know, the space shuttle in the Challenger disaster, I could misremember it as 1986. So I see what you're saying there. (0:19:50)

Yeah, and we'll definitely be talking about the problems with human memory in upcoming episodes because it's a fascinating subject. That's good. But the discrepancy in years is enough that I think there's at least something of a problem here, because if you would think that if people remembered seeing alien bodies, that they would also remember, oh, yeah, it was at the same time Roswell was in the news, that the crash was in the news. (0:20:14)

But I should also say there are problems with the reports of the bodies. They weren't there in the original 1947 reportage. This is from the second wave in the 1980s. And read, for example, Kevin Randall's discussion of the bodies. There are reasons to question whether any of these reports are reliable or not. And so I'm not, at the present state of my research, I'm not sure there were bodies, although we'll definitely talk about that in another episode. (0:20:43)

But if there were, I'm not sure there were alien bodies. I'm going to guess that when we talk about this again, we'll talk about purported video or film footage and all that sort of stuff. (0:20:52)

Oh, like the alien autopsy? Yeah. Yeah, that was a hoax, but we can talk about it. I kind of guess it's a hoax, but it would be fun to talk about. I love the X-Files episode where they riff on that by showing alien autopsy footage to Scully and she's so embarrassed that she's the masked doctor in the fake alien autopsy. That's right, that's right. (0:21:12)

So that's the background. So let's talk about the theories about what happened at Roswell. What are the theories about the Roswell incident? Okay, so there are loads of theories about this, but to keep it manageable in this episode, we're going to look at six. The first one we're going to call Air Force Hypothesis One, because it's the first one the Air Force proposed. (0:21:34)

Namely, it was a flying disc that they got. So flying saucer, presumably of extraterrestrial origin. Air Force Hypothesis Two was what they came out with the next day, that it was just a weather balloon. Air Force Hypothesis Three, which they came out with in 1994, was that it was a Project Mogul flight wreckage. And then Air Force Hypothesis Four was that the bodies are to be explained by the Operation High Dive crash test dummies. (0:22:03)

In addition, we're going to talk at least somewhat about a couple of additional hypotheses that have been proposed recently by authors. The first one, you could call the Jacobson Hypothesis. And basically, this holds that the Roswell crash was a Russian incursion into American airspace. In her book, Area 51, which is really a fun read, reporter Annie Jacobson notes that one of her sources for the book, retired official who worked with one of the agencies out at Area 51, claimed that the Roswell crash was the product of a Russian incursion, that Joseph Stalin apparently was trying to one-up Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast and cause panic in the United States by making us think we were being invaded by aliens. (0:22:55)

The flying disc was a Russian craft designed to fool us into thinking it was an alien vehicle. And according to Jacobson's source, the alien bodies were children that had been subjected to medical experiments by the Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele, who, according to this source, had worked for Joseph Stalin for a while after the war. So that's what Jacobson was told. Another one is by, you could call it the Redfern hypothesis, says that basically we had some medical experiments go awry. (0:23:29)

And in a couple of his books, Body Snatchers in the Desert and the Roswell UFO Conspiracy, Nick Redfern proposes that this was a government, a U.S. government experiment gone wrong. The crashed vehicle was either a balloon or another craft under our control. And the bodies were people we were doing high altitude survival experiments on, possibly including Japanese prisoners of war because, you know, the war just ended two years earlier, possibly other prisoners and possibly children with birth defects. (0:24:01)

As usual, we'll push this from both faith perspective and reason perspective. (0:24:05)

What can we say about this from the faith perspective? Not a lot. Obviously, if aliens exist, it raises theological questions, which, yes, we will be devoting a future episode to for everyone who has asked. But nothing about this incident in particular really raises its own faith questions. So then what can we say about this from the reason perspective? What about the first one, the extraterrestrial hypothesis? (0:24:27)

Here, we kind of have to apply the standard Sherlock Holmes principle. Once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth. So in order to argue for aliens, we'd need to strike down all of the alternative, more mundane hypotheses. So then let's approach the other ones one by one. What about the simple weather balloon hypothesis? Well, we can strike that off our list because the Air Force admitted it was false in 1994. While balloons may have been involved, it wasn't just an ordinary weather balloon. (0:25:01)

And then what about this? As we talked about the crash test dummies hypothesis? I can't rule that out. I also, you know, don't find it particularly plausible. It's possible, but the discrepancy in the dating is significant. And also at this point in my studies, I'm not sure there were bodies. So I'm just going to kind of set that one aside. So now we have the Amy Jacobson's Russian incursion hypothesis, which has an interesting parallel to a present day, which is people accusing the Russians of meddling in American society and trying to cause uproar through social media in the present day. (0:25:37)

But yeah, just like we do with them. Right. But in this case, they think it's alien fever. So what about that one? Jacobson received a lot of criticism for this after her book. And it's a little unfortunate that she had it in the book because a lot of the rest of the book is very good. And I can't blame her for saying, well, this is what my source said. (0:25:56)

It's not like she's claiming independent knowledge of this. But personally, I don't really buy this one. I don't think we have good evidence or certainly I don't have good evidence that Stalin was even aware of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast. And for him to construct this scheme afterwards, or at least approve this scheme afterwards, where we're going to build something that looks like a flying saucer and we're going to fly it into America and we're going to have these medical experiment children get out of it and cause panic in the United States. As Jeeves from Jeeves and Worcester would say, there are just too many imponderables with this plan. Too many things that could go wrong. (0:26:36)

And in fact, it didn't work. So I find this one implausible. And again, I'm not sure that there even were bodies. Yeah. I mean, even the fact that, you know, you'd have to construct this ship, this flying saucer to fly, a flying saucer, no one had a flying saucer at the time, and that it would have to be plausibly something that could travel through space. (0:26:59)

That would be... Yeah. And I mean, once we had the device, we'd take it apart, obviously, or it's wreckage apart. And it's like, oh, guess what? There's this Cyrillic alphabet right here. And it's stamped into this metal beam. It says made in Stalingrad on this here. (0:27:13)

Okay. All right. So that's the Russian Incursion Hypothesis. What about the Medical Experiment Hypothesis? I think this one is more possible. If there were bodies, this would be a possible way of explaining that the US government has definitely experimented on people in unethical ways. And we'll talk about that in some future episodes. It's also apologized for doing so. (0:27:42)

This would explain why they would want the weather balloon cover story, because they'd want to keep the medical experiments classified. And we'll definitely talk about this more in the future. But for now, I'm not sure there were bodies. So that leaves us with the hypothesis we're going to consider today, the Project Mogul and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. How can we decide between them? There are several lines of argument. One concerns the materials that were found at the crash site. (0:28:06)

If you read the literature or watch the Unsolved Mysteries segment that we'll have a link to, a lot of the eyewitnesses will talk about the materials that the crash debris were made out of and describe them as having unusual properties. At least some of the witnesses say this. For example, here's what Mac Brazel's son Bill, who handled the material, had to say. (0:28:30)

Dom, could you read that for us? There were only three items involved, something on the order of balsa wood and something on the order of heavy gauge monofilament fishing line and a little piece of... it wasn't really aluminum foil and it wasn't really lead foil, but it was on that order. A piece about the size of my fingers with ragged edges. Yeah, and he goes on to say the wood-like substance was allegedly difficult to whittle. (0:28:54)

You couldn't just whittle off bits of it with your knife. The fishing line, he said, you could shine a light in one end of it and it would be visible out the other, which has led some people to say it's fiber optic technology. And then concerning the foil-like material, Bill Brazel had this to say. I couldn't tear it. It didn't take pliers or anything. I just used my fingers. (0:29:16)

I didn't try to cut it with my knife. It was pliable, real pliable. I would bend it over, increase it, and if you straighten back up, there wouldn't be a crinkle in it. Nothing. It would flatten out. It was just as smooth as ever. Not a crinkle or anything. Yeah, and this is one that gets a lot of attention because it sounds like... sometimes people will call it memory metal, but it also sounds like metallic colored plastic that we would have today that you could like crumple up in your hand and then let go of it and it would just expand back into a flat surface. (0:29:51)

So the issue really comes down to whether this material exhibited properties that 1940s material science could not produce. If it couldn't produce materials that displayed these properties, then that would be evidence that we were dealing with an extraterrestrial craft. (0:30:05)

Okay, so then what does the evidence suggest? Well, we have a problem with the fact that the reports of these strange properties in the material were made decades later. So people's memories had had a chance to drift. And also, these claims were made after the UFO story was out there. And so it could have shaped... the UFO story itself could have shaped people's memories of what exactly the properties were. (0:30:33)

I mean, if you handled, for example, some of the claims, and we'll get into this a little more, but some of the claims will say things like, well, it was a silvered weather balloon. So that was rubbery, it was this plastic substance, but it had silvering on one side. So yeah, you could take a piece of that and crumple it in your hand and let it expand back to what it looked like before. But after 40 years, how easy is it going to be to distinguish silvered rubber from a weather balloon with fantastic memory metal? So your memory after 40 years, that could be hard to distinguish. So given the fact that people's memories distort over time, it's hard to be sure they're reliable. (0:31:21)

Also, the people who made the reports like this indicated that the materials were very similar to things they were familiar with, to other materials they did know about, and were maybe just subtly different. It's thus hard to think that it was really impossible for 1940s material science to produce this stuff. Like the supposed fiber optic thing, which Bill Brazel said looked like monofilament fishing line. (0:31:45)

Well, you can shine a light in one end of monofilament fishing line, and it'll come out the other end. And monofilament fishing line began to be marketed in 1939. It had already been around for 12 years, I checked. Balsa wood, which he also said this was like balsa wood, but some people said it was hard to whittle. Well, balsa wood, if you cover it in glue to reinforce it, or making a kite out of it or something that you're going to send up on one of these things, that would be hard to whittle. (0:32:13)

The glue would keep you from just shaving off pieces of it. Also, some people have reported it was like bamboo. And I know from when I was a kid, it is not easy to whittle bamboo. It has a very tough outer surface. You really need to use a saw if you're going to try to get through bamboo. A pocket knife won't do it. (0:32:36)

Rubber that had been painted or covered in foil on one side could crumple and unfold again. And even if one of these substances wasn't in common use by ordinary people in New Mexico, in rural New Mexico, that doesn't mean it wasn't being used in government projects. Also, other people reported the materials being simply ordinary. They didn't report any of these weird properties. (0:33:01)

They just described them as if they were ordinary materials. For example, within 24 hours of the initial announcement, Mac Brazel described the materials as just ordinary. (0:33:08)

There was a story carried in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9th, that's the day after the initial announcement, that dealt with this. And why don't you read part of that for us? They picked up the rest of the pieces of the disc and went to his home to try to reconstruct it. According to Brazel, they simply could not reconstruct it at all. (0:33:27)

They tried to make a kite out of it but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it could fit. Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell and that was the last he heard of it until the story broke that he had found a flying disc. (0:33:41)

Russell said that he did not see it fall from the sky and did not see it before it was torn up, so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he thought it might have been about as large as a tabletop. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. (0:33:59)

The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tin foil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about 3 feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe 5 pounds. (0:34:19)

There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine, and no sign of any propellers of any kind, although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tin foil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument, although there were letters on some of the parts. (0:34:37)

Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No strings or wire were to be found, but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used. Brassell said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. (0:34:57)

I'm sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon, he said, but if we find anything else beside a bomb, they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it. Right, because he didn't like all the negative attention he had received from reporting this. So he described the materials apparently to the paper as just being ordinary stuff, tin foil, paper, tape, sticks. (0:35:22)

Now, you can argue he did this because he was being threatened by the Army Air Force or something as part of the cover-up, but the fact is, we have the discoverer of the material describing it as ordinary stuff within 24 hours of the first public report, not 40 years later. (0:35:40)

Now, he did say it wasn't a weather balloon, and that's true, it wasn't. He's describing the stuff that would have been hanging from the weather balloon, the radar-reflective kites that it carried. And in fact, they tried to make a kite out of it. (0:35:51)

They probably, if on the Mogul theory, they probably had more than one kite here, which is why they couldn't fit it together properly. But their first thought was, oh, this is stuff you'd make a kite out of. Let's try to make a kite out of it. Also, notice the absence of anything bulky enough to be an engine. The whole thing allegedly weighs like five pounds, all of the debris that he brought in. (0:36:13)

And this really sounds more like a fragile balloon train than any kind of alien spaceship. So then how did the idea of it being a flying disc get started? It's a key question. And at first, you'd think there would be two possibilities. The first possibility is it really was a flying disc, and the Army Air Force naively said so before realizing what a horrible mistake that was. (0:36:37)

And so they had to come up with a weather balloon story because they didn't realize how nuts people were going to go if they said they had a flying saucer. The alternative explanation would be, well, they realized real fast it was Project Mogul, but they didn't want to let the public or the Soviets know that we had Project Mogul and that we were watching. (0:36:59)

And so they thought, well, let's just cash in on the flying saucer craze that's going on right now by saying we got a flying saucer. And then they realized that was a horrible mistake, and they came up with a weather balloon story. So you'd think it was one of those two. But actually, there are additional explanations for how the term flying disc may have entered the topic. (0:37:22)

You'll remember this term was very new. It had only been coined in the last two weeks. It didn't have an established meaning, and it wasn't automatically associated with extraterrestrials. Lots of people thought the flying discs that were being reported were a secret government project. I mean, if you go back and listen to our Kenneth Arnold episode, we play a radio broadcast from that time, and they're going, oh, yeah, we've contacted the army. (0:37:50)

We hope to have word back from them that this is just one of our projects. So people didn't think extraterrestrial when they thought flying disc. They could easily and often did think U.S. government. And then Mac Brazel, you know, he lived on a remote ranch with no phone or radio. So this term is entirely new to him. And with that in mind, there's another passage in that same July 9th story from the Roswell Daily Record that has a bearing on this. Could you read that passage for us? (0:38:18)

Brazel related that on June 14th, he and an eight-year-old son, Vernon, were about seven or eight miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster Ranch, which he operates. When they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks. (0:38:36)

At the time, Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made, and he did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what he had seen, and on July 4th, he, his wife, Vernon, and a daughter, Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris. The next day, he first heard about the flying discs, and he wondered if what he had found might be the remnants of one of these. (0:39:04)

Monday, he came to town to sell some wool, and while there, while here, he went to see Sheriff George Wilcox, and whispered, kind of confidential-like, that he might have found a flying disc. Wilcox got in touch with the Roswell Army Airfield, and Major Jesse A. Marcel, and a man in plain clothes, accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the pieces of the disc, and went to his home to try to reconstruct it. (0:39:24)

Right, so here, Brazel finds the debris on June 14th, and then three weeks later, he sees the debris again on July 4th, and the next day, July 5th, he hears about flying discs for the first time. And he thinks, well, maybe that's what I found. He's not necessarily thinking aliens, he's just, like other people, he may think this is a government thing. (0:39:49)

So he goes into town when he's selling his wool, and he reports it to the sheriff, and the army gets involved. And so it may have been Brazel who introduced the term flying disc into this story. It didn't have an established meaning, but that's what he told the sheriff and the army officials he thought he might have found. (0:40:10)

They then go out and get this kite-like material, and try to build a kite out of it. And it may have just been his use of the term flying disc may have just kind of taken on a life of its own, and gotten into the initial press release. So yeah, he found a flying disc, and that didn't mean to people then that it was necessarily an extraterrestrial flying saucer. (0:40:28)

So is there any evidence that would tend to confirm this interpretation? Well, I can think of two significant pieces of evidence. The first one is an internal FBI telegram that was sent from the Dallas field office to the headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was sent at 6 17 p.m central time on July 8, just a few hours after the initial announcement that a flying disc had been discovered. (0:40:58)

And maybe you could read that for us, Tom. Major Curtin, headquarters 8th Air Force, telephonically advised this office that an object purporting to be a flying disc was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico this date, July 8, 1947. The disc was hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a balloon by cable, which balloon was approximately 20 feet in diameter. (0:41:18)

Major Curtin further advised that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and right field had not borne out this belief. Disc and balloon being transported to right field by special plane for examination. (0:41:33)

Information provided this office because of national interest in case and fact that national broadcasting company, Associated Press, and others attempting to break the story of location of the disc today. Major Curtin advised would request right field to advise Cincinnati office results of examination. No further investigation being conducted. Yeah, and the telegram is a little choppy in its syntax because of the way they compress things for telegrams. (0:42:05)

But basically, according to this telegram, so this is the government talking to itself. Okay, this is what the Air Force told the FBI that day, that it was a balloon related thing. They said there was a hexagonal disc that was suspended from a 20 foot diameter balloon. So it was part of the balloon train. (0:42:27)

And if you've got this hexagonal disc as part of the balloon train, then that might be why Mac Brazel said he found a flying disc, because there was this hexagonal thing. And then the Air Force tells the FBI about that just a few hours later. And so I think that's significant evidence favoring the Project Mogul theory. Right. If you've ever seen a radar reflector, you can probably Google it. (0:42:53)

It sort of has these angular foil metallic shape and things. So I see what you're saying there. So you said there was a second piece of evidence. What was that? Yeah, this is in a book called Atomic Adventures by James Mahaffey. And I've mentioned James Mahaffey previously on the podcast. In particular, I mentioned his book Atomic Accidents, which is a really great read. (0:43:18)

But so is Atomic Adventures. He talks about how in 1989, he encountered a piece of evidence. And this is five years before the Air Force did its study and concluded it was probably Mogul. But he encountered a guy who had a really important piece of information about this. In 1989, Mahaffey was kind of at an unhappy point in his career as a nuclear physicist, because that was the year some scientists in Utah announced they had achieved tabletop cold fusion. And Mahaffey's team was one of the groups trying to replicate their results. (0:43:51)

And their initial results were promising. It looked like they'd replicated what the Utah scientists found. And so everyone was all excited about cold fusion. And then it turned out there was a problem in their equipment that produced unreliable results. And so Mahaffey's team in Georgia just had egg all over their faces. They really wanted this story to go away. And Mahaffey himself was sick of answering calls about cold fusion. (0:44:19)

Then on April 30, 1989, a visitor came to see him at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The visitor was a guy named Judge Clarence or Clarence H, quote unquote, Judge Ellison, that was his nickname. And he was a retired industrialist and physicist who was living in the area. (0:44:46)

He was there to discuss cold fusion with Mahaffey. But first he told Mahaffey about his work on Project Mogul. This is what he said in the book. The goal of Mogul was to detect Soviet A-bomb tests from a great distance. The Soviet Union was thought to be involved in a crash program or a crash program to come to parity with the United States in nuclear weapons. (0:45:03)

And the fate of Western civilization was at stake. Knowing when secret nuclear airbursts occurred was part of the counter strategy. It was vitally important that the Soviets not know that we were developing methods to secretly monitor their progress toward making atomic bombs. (0:45:19)

They had to think that their secrets were still secret. And unfortunately, it had been proven during the last war that our most sensitive activities were riddled with Soviet spies and an impressive intelligence gathering system. Mogul would have to be as contained and secure as could be managed. All personnel would be thoroughly vetted and monitored 24 hours a day. And there would be cover stories on top of cover stories. (0:45:49)

Mahaffey then goes on to describe in great detail how the Mogul balloon trains worked and how they adapted the Navy hydrophones to work in the atmosphere. He also provides this comment. Weather balloons, which were by 1948 being used to find the temperature, air pressure, and humidity in the unmeasured regions of the upper atmosphere, would typically rise until the balloon burst. (0:46:11)

The below freezing temperatures would make the rubber balloon brittle, and in the low air pressure, the helium filling the balloon would expand until the cold rubber reached the end of its elasticity. Right, so that is a possible explanation for why the balloon would burst and end up all over the ground in these pieces. Because it's up there, it's brittle because of the cold, and then it bursts, and that's why you get bunches of pieces of at least one of the balloons, explaining the rubber strips that they said they found. (0:46:40)

To combat that kind of accident, mogul balloons were equipped with an altitude control mechanism, so they didn't get that high, but flight four went awry, and so it could have gotten up that high. Multiple balloons had to be sent to different places so they could triangulate the location of the nuclear test. This required knowing the locations of the balloons, so they were fitted with these radar reflectors made of aluminum coated paper and sticks, which were called the kite. (0:47:05)

And then the electronics package consisted of a Navy ERSB, that's Expendable Radio Sonobuoy, model AN-CRT1. So Mahaffey claims his source even told him the model number of the electronics package they were using, and this is what would detect the blast. And this is further Mahaffey. Judge Ellison's job was to figure out how to re-engineer a hydrophone and make it sensitive to infrasound signals transmitted in thin air at frequencies below the threshold of human hearing. (0:47:44)

On June 4th, 1947, they released test flight number four and quickly lost sight of it as it climbed away. On June 7th, events began to unravel at the Roswell Army Airfield, 60 miles from the launch point at Alamogordo. It was reported that the balloon string had come down on the plains east of the Sacramento Mountains. The balloons, still having some lift capability, had dragged the string for miles, shredding the fragile radar corner reflectors, and spreading debris over a long stretch of ground. (0:48:14)

Personnel from Roswell were sent immediately to recover the sonobuoy and especially the flying disc, which was the codename of Ellison's special microphone, before anybody stumbled over and Brazel then found the rest of the debris. They recovered the microphone, which they called the flying disc, according to Mahaffey's source, Judge Ellison. That's another way the term flying disc could have gotten into the reportage. (0:48:42)

Someone familiar with Project Mogul could have known that nickname and talked about it. Yeah, we recovered the flying disc and that got into the press release that way, possibly. Then Brazel found all the non-classified stuff and the rest of the story got set in motion. Notice Mahaffey is being told this five years before the Air Force comes out with the Mogul explanation. (0:49:07)

So it seems to me that that's a significant point of evidence in favor of the Mogul explanation. You have this source claiming that's what it was before the Air Force did. Are there other reasons to think that Project Mogul theory may be correct? There are certain impressions that lead me in that direction. The first one is it seems like whatever crashed at Roswell was pretty fragile, despite the properties that are sometimes attributed to the wreckage. (0:49:37)

It obviously wasn't all that tough because the wreckage was in small pieces. I mean, maybe you had a hard time puncturing the rubber with your tear in the rubber with your fingers or something, but something caused it to shred. Same thing with maybe you have trouble whittling these sticks, but they broke. So it doesn't seem to have been that tough. And it wasn't like there was a big flying saucer, you know, sitting on the ground or half of a flying saucer, whatever it was just disintegrate. (0:50:03)

Also, by all accounts, the debris were flimsy. They were made out of torn sheets of something, paper or tinfoil or rubber with stick like things and string like things. And if you think about sheets and sticks and strings, that sounds like what you build a radar reflective kite out of, not what you build a flying saucer out of. (0:50:27)

There was no apparent engine or anything large enough and heavy enough to provide a power source that witnesses reported seeing. And so that's kind of one impression. It also seems to me that an advanced alien craft ought to be tougher than this. If it's made of advanced materials, why would it just shred like this? Some have said, well, it was hit by lightning and a thunderstorm. But our own 20th century aircraft get hit by lightning all the time and are just fine. My aunt was a stewardess in the 1970s, and she was on planes that got hit by lightning. (0:51:00)

That's a normal thing. Passengers, unless they see the flash, won't even notice that the plane has been hit by lightning. So why would an advanced flying saucer crash if it's hit by lightning? (0:51:12)

Also, third impression, if we really got a flying saucer in 1947, why would the government take as little interest in the subject as it seems to have done? With modern UFO programs like AATIP having to struggle for funding, you'd think they would take it a lot more seriously if they really got a flying saucer in 1947. Even if it was secret, they'd still be funding these UFO programs like crazy. (0:51:44)

Now there are counter arguments to those impressions, which is why I just say they're impressions. Unfortunately, we don't have time in this episode to go into all the counter arguments, but I would suggest that people who are interested read books from multiple perspectives on this. I've given you the perspective that based on the current state of my research, I tend to lean I would love this to be extraterrestrial. (0:52:05)

I would love to have proof of alien life. I would also love us to have a craft we could reverse engineer. But based on all the evidence in TOTO, it seems to me like the Mogul explanation is more likely to be true. But I'm going to have multiple books to recommend from different perspectives, read the different perspectives, see the arguments that people are using, or just wait for us to cover them on the podcast because we will be coming back to this. (0:52:32)

This is kind of like the Kennedy assassination. It's a wellspring that we need to revisit more than once. So Jimmy, what's your bottom line on Roswell? Well, I can't 100% eliminate alternative explanations, including the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But at the present state of my research, if I had to bet, my money would be on the Project Mogul explanation. Before we close, I'd like to have a brief sidebar that touches back on the Kenneth Arnold sightings that occurred two weeks before. (0:53:02)

Because in Mahaffey's book, Atomic Adventures, he's got a footnote. So you have to look at the footnotes to notice this. But he's got a footnote where he has a Mogul-related explanation for what Kenneth Arnold saw. So if you could read that for us. On May 29, 1947, Mogul flight number three was released. It was a configuration duplicate of flight number four. (0:53:25)

The balloons apparently ran into high-speed wind at altitude and disappeared from radar heading north. Flight number three was never recovered. Kenneth Arnold's sighting, 26 days later on June 24, 1947, of a string of nine shiny objects flying as if they were tied together, like a Chinese kyte tail, may be a description of the top segment of the Mogul balloon vehicle blown all the way up to Mount Rainier in the high-altitude jet stream. (0:53:49)

The top segment was separated from the rest of the string by an electrically-activated explosive squib as it reached 45,000 feet. The portion of the vehicle string would have been nine polyethylene balloons looking highly reflective and metallic at a distance. The top two would have been big, one-kilogram balloons separated by 36 feet of braided nylon rope, known as lobster twine. After another 79 feet of rope, a series of seven smaller 350-gram balloons would have followed, each spaced at 20-foot intervals. (0:54:24)

If so, then Arnold's description of the speed and distance of the objects would have been misjudged. Right, so I find that interesting. You have this train of balloons all tied by cord, and if that's what Arnold saw, it would explain the saucer-like skipping motion that he saw as they're pulling on each other through the lobster twine, and that's what's causing them to seem to bounce up and down as they're traveling through the sky. (0:54:47)

It would also explain why the lead object looked different than the objects following it. So I think that's an interesting explanation of the Kenneth Arnold sighting personally, and I'd love to see it analyzed by someone like Bruce McAbee. I can kind of anticipate part of what he's going to say. (0:55:03)

What I don't know is, is it really plausible that flight number three would stay in the air lost for 26 days and end up hundreds of miles away in Washington state? So that I don't know, but based on what McAbee said in his book, A Length Analysis of the Kenneth Arnold Sighting, he would at least make a couple of points. (0:55:33)

One of them is that Arnold had good sighting fixture. He had a good fix on the locations of these because he was measuring them against a background of mountains with a clock. Mahaffey says, well, Arnold would have had to have misjudged the speed in the distance. But McAbee would say, yeah, but he was using mountains and a clock to judge this. (0:55:55)

The other thing that I'm sure that McAbee would say is Arnold reported the flash off the metallic objects he saw as bright enough to illuminate his aircraft cabin. And that would not happen with silvered balloons in the distance. Right, right. They'd have to be really close to that. So, Jimmy, what further resources can we offer our listeners on Roswell? First one is the Air Force's reports on Roswell. They're bound in a single edition that you can get offering both the Project Mogul and the Crash Test Dummies explanations. Then there's James Mahaffey's book, Atomic Adventures, which provides the pre-Air Force Mogul confirmation we talked about. (0:56:36)

There's a summary of the Air Force Crash Test Dummy theory that's online that you can read for free. We've got Kevin Randall's book, Roswell in the 21st Century, which supports the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but is a very good analysis. It's very frank about problems in the data. Nick Redfern's book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, where he talks about his medical experiment hypothesis. (0:57:00)

Also his book, Body Snatchers in the Desert, which is where he first introduced the medical experiment hypothesis. Annie Jacobson's book, Area 51, which has the Russian infiltration hypothesis. And even if you don't buy that, it's still a really good read. Say, if you become a $10 patron of the StarQuest Network, we could send you that one as a gift to thank you for your patronage. (0:57:23)

Yeah. Also there's a critique of Jacobson's book that we'll have a link to so you can get the other side of the story. Wikipedia's article on the Roswell UFO incident will have also links to the July 8th 1947 FBI telegram, the July 9th story from the Roswell Daily Record, the July 9th retraction article from the Fort Worth Star Telegram, and images from the July 9th press conference, where you can see General Ramey and Major Marcel posing with some of the debris that they claimed to have been recovered. We'll also have a link to the Unsolved Mysteries segment that you can watch on YouTube, and also Wikipedia's article on Project Mogul. And I look forward to coming back to revisit Roswell in the future. (0:58:15)

(2025-06-19)