roswell

PROFESSOR MOORE - 6/8/94 13
A: No, we didn't.
Q: Not a letter or a number?
A: Wait a minute. The answer is, I don't know.
Q: If you did give it a letter or a number would it be
on ... There are some of these flights that appeared to have no
sequence number and they were talking in terms of being service
flights and the impression that we got was that the service
flights were either test flights just to check the balloons out
or they were the highly classified flights where the information
was not being logged into essentially an unclassified document.
A: You notice that Flight 1 was made from Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania.
Q: The football field there?
A: LeHigh, exactly. That's where we did it, from the
football field. And we did this because a professor at NYU had
just gone to head up the physics department at LeHigh and he
invited us over. His name was Frank, Butler keeps coming to
mind, but I'm not sure that's the right name. Anyway, we went
there and that was for an early, early attempt for Helgoland. I
think the Helgoland explosion got scrubbed, but we had balloons
in the air from this and we were woefully not ready. We had all
sorts of problems. We adopted the balloon technique that a
cosmic ray investigator at NYU, a fellow named Sergei Korf, we
adopted his technique and we had a lot to learn. We got our
hands torn up with nylon line being pulled through it as we
couldn't hold the balloons down in the wind ...
Q: Speaking of nylon line, were these braided type lines
or were they monofilament type lines?
A: Neither.- I think initially we used either parachute
cord, which was braided. I don't remember the details of what we
used, but we rapidly used that the radiosonde cord we used was
not strong enough at all to hold the forces that came, so we went
to what was called lobster twine. We used a lot of lobster twine
that was twisted, a laid line that was used in lobster nets.
Q: Do you recall there ever having been some sort of
monofilament similar to the monofilament fishing line in any of
the projects?
A: I think there was none available at that time. My
memory, the answer is yes, we've used an awful lot of
monofilament and we use it now all the time.
Q: But at that time you don't think it was available?
A: I think it was not available.