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

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Q: We have [concluded] independently from several other researchers the fact that MOGUL is probably responsible for the so-called Roswell incident... The Air Force position on that is that it was a misidentified balloon. The balloon was not a weather balloon, but was then a classified project, Project MOGUL, which has since been declassified.

What we have not found is any documented evidence that there was a planned cover story related to Project MOGUL. Jim has culled through literally millions of pages in various archives and repositories trying to find some sort of documented evidence where somebody at some level has stated that a cover story of weather research or weather-related activities would be used for Project MOGUL, the real purpose of which was nuclear detection...

(Pause)

A: ...All of that is to say that I know these people, and I know of what their involvement was, so I can at least give credibility and corroboration to what it was they did and where they fit in the picture.

There have been several writers who have been interested in this story, and they have been in touch with me. I have given them a lot of words, and in some cases documents that I had in my personal files. They were at first a Charles [Robert] Todd, from Ardmore, Pennsylvania, who was writing a story, and I never quite could determine whether he was on the side of the believers in UFOs or was writing to refute the believers. That I really was unsure of. One thing, he did appear to be sincere in getting the facts that surrounded the matter.

Another was a Charles Ziegler, a professor of physics at Brandeis University who was writing a monograph or perhaps a book on the history of nuclear weapons detection. It figured, of course, that Project MOGUL would come into view. So he had done a great deal of documentary searching and had found some documents that I did not have. For example, the original letter from Maurice Ewing to Carl Spaatz, then Chief of Staff of the Air Force. And some of the original letters of General Spaatz directing the establishment of Project MOGUL. All of this Charles Ziegler apparently found, and I did not have them at all.

Another fellow recently came into view, a Carl Pflock from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He appeared to want to substantiate the existence of the UFO incident as a UFO. I have a tape here, a onesided tape, my half of the conversation only, with him. You're welcome to listen to that.

Charlie Moore has been in it since the beginning. Charlie was not a general project scientist or engineer on Project MOGUL. His efforts were confined to the development of the constant level balloons which were the instrument carriers for the devices that we hoped would pick up the sound waves operating in the sound channel in the stratosphere. The constant level balloon was the lifting mechanism, and Charlie was the principal in the development of that.

All of these things I have recorded on this tape to Mr. Pflock and also on the tapes that I made for Ruth Liebowitz, the historian at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center.