The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert

strings from these four corners. Obviously, trying to take something that's almost a meter in cross section, a meter on a side, take it sideways up through, gave a lot of drag, and it took a lot of lift to make the balloons rise very rapidly.

So instead, somebody came up with this smart idea of this other arrangement of a corner reflector that had much less drag. These, according to Tibbetts, weren't distributed until something like November of 1945. As far as I know, as you will see in the various correspondence, there were no SCR-584s which were required to track them, issued to the weather services here in New Mexico. Obviously, after the Trinity shot, there was no bit military operation that required wind determination in New Mexico.

Q: So essentially you'd say there were no radar reflectors in New Mexico until 1947 until this appeared?

A: That's my opinion.

Q: Was Major Pritchard doing any kind of balloon project?

A: No. He and Dyvad and others were at Watson Laboratories. I understand from Trakowski that Alamagordo Army Air Field was about to be closed down as surplus. The people at Watson Laboratories seized on it and were able to keep it on active status for two projects -- one, the radar project from Watson Laboratories that was set to track the V-2 being flown from the proving ground across the Tulerosa Valley; and Project Mogul.

I joined the NYU group in January of '47, and while I was finishing up at Georgia Tech I had talked to my chemical engineering professors, I'd already been recruited by Duffy and Spilhaus, and I asked if you wanted to make a balloon of nonextensible material, what plastic would you use. My professor named Grubb told me you ought to consider polyethylene. It's a new plastic just now becoming available. You can heat seal it. It has a lot of desirable properties.

So as soon as I got to NYU, I began talking to everybody I could find in Manhattan -- DuPont, all the sales offices...

Q: We saw your listing.

A: I was concerned with where we could get the plastic and who we could get to manufacture the balloons. I was in my 20's, just a recent graduate. I knew nothing about manufacturing. But we did try to get a manufacturing company that would fabricate balloons for us.

During that period we heard of the Navy project that was going on at General Mills where Jean Get was planning to make a flight to 100,000 feet. General Mills at that time was making