Documents / Document

Black Vault compilation, pp. 91-93

The Black Vault · 134 pages · text from the file's own layer

This Black Vault compilation contains a September 1997 reply from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense to John Greenewald's FOIA request, enclosing its UFO records. The enclosures include a Navy information sheet dismissing the Philadelphia Experiment and an Air Force UFO fact sheet listing 12,618 Project Blue Book sightings, 701 of them unidentified. They also include the National Academy of Sciences review endorsing the University of Colorado report and the concluding pages of a 1994 Air Force Roswell report attributing the wreckage to Project MOGUL.

  • p. 114 …The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in…
  • p. 124 …a thick, foil like metallic gray substance; a brittle, brownish-black plastic- like material, like Bakelite…
  • p. 129 …the ruptured and shredded neoprene would "almost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes…
The interview with Colonel Trakowski (Atchs ~24) also proved valuable
information. Trakowski provided specific details on Project MOGUL and described
how the security for.the program was set up, as he was formerly the Top Secret
Control Officer for the program. He further related that many of the original
radar targets that were produced around the end of World Warn were fabricated
by toy or novelty companies using a purplish~pink tape with flower and heart
symbols on it. Trakowski also recounted a conversation that he had with his
friend, and superior military officer in his chain of command, Colonel Marcellus
Duffy, in July, 1947. Duffy, formerly had Trakowski's position on MOGUL, but had
subsequently been transferred to Wright Field. He stated: ". . . Colonel Duffy
called me on the telephone from Wright Field and gave me a story about a fellow
that had come in from New Mexico, woke him up in the middle of the night or
some such thing with a handful of debris, and wanted him, Colonel Duffy, to
identify it. . . . He just said 'it sure looks like some of the stuff you've been
launching at Alamogordo' and he described it, and I said ~yes, I think it is.'
Certainly Colonel Duffy knew enough about radar targets, radiosondes, balloon-
borne weather devices. He was intimately familiar with all that apparatus."
Attempts were made to locate Colonel Duffy but it was ascertained that he had
died. His widow explained that, although he had amassed a large amount of
personal papers relating to his Air Force activities, she had recently disposed of
these items. Likewise, it was learned that A.P. Crary was also deceased; however
his surviving spouse had a number of his papers from his balloon testing days,
including his professional journal from the period in question. She provided the
Air Force researchers with this material. It is discussed in more detail within Atch
32. Overall, it helps fill in gaps of the MOGUL story.
. During the period the Air Force conducted this research, it was discovered that
several others had also discovered the possibility that the "Roswell Incident" may
have been generated by the recovery of a Project MOGUL balloon device. These
persons included Professor Charles B. Moore, Robert Todd, and coincidentally,
Karl Pflock, a researcher who is married to a staffer who works for Congressman
Schiff. Some of these persons provided suggestions as to where documentation
might be located in various archives, histories and libraries. A review of FOIA
requests revealed that Robert Todd, particularly, had become aware of Project
MOGUL several years ago and had doggedly obtained from the Air Force, through
the FOIA, a large amount of material pertaining to it; long before the AAZD
researchers independently seized on the same possibility.
Most interestingly, as this report was being written, Pflock published his own
report of this matter under the auspices of FUFOR, entitled Roswell in Perspective
(1994). Pflock concluded from his research that the Brazel Ranch debris originally
reported as a "flying disc" was probably debris from a MOGUL balloon; however,
there was a simultaneous incident that occurred not far away, which caused an
alien craft to crash and which the AAF subsequently recovered three alien bodies
therefrom. Air Force research did not locate any information to corroborate that
this incredible coincidence occurred, however.
28
r
•
(
.
I
'r
.
r
!
I
I.
I
''.
•
I
•
•
!
t
•
I

Cases discussed

About this file

Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 134 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.