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

Maybe the best thing to do before plowing over all this old ground would be to consider some specific questions you may have. In the course of that, the history may come out.

Q: Were there any documents, or were there any directions either from yourself or from someone else up the chain to develop a cover story for MOGUL?

A: Not to my knowledge, no. I have never seen such a document nor have I ever heard of any effort to develop a cover story for MOGUL. The security of MOGUL was a great concern of mine from the very beginning, because it was like trying to hide an elephant in an open farmyard—almost ludicrous.

Q: Both Dr. Spilhaus and Professor Moore have indicated that they did use weather research as essentially a cover story when asked questions about what they were doing.

A: Correct. That we did. I'm aware of that. But it was not a policy. It was, if anything, a lash-up idea on the spur of the moment. And indeed, it was obvious. I may have been involved in using such a story myself, but to the best of my recollection there was no official stimulation [sic] or documentation of doing that. If you find such a document I, indeed, would be surprised.

Q: In the course of the research projects you worked on, in that time frame—the postwar period—would they give you a cover story on any particular project, even other than this one? Would they say, this is what you do, say this? Or would they kind of leave it to you, that it was a classified project and you just didn't discuss it and you just avoided questions?

A: The latter. I have no recollection of a cover story being used on any project that I was involved in, nor that a prefabricated cover story existed. No. I never encountered any such thing. We simply treated the security classification straight and did all we could to adhere to it.

Q: So you, as the project officer, you knew that MOGUL was a Top Secret...

A: Did I know that? There was no way to avoid it. I was the project officer, succeeding Colonel Duffy, and all that history is in the tapes that I made for Ruth Liebowitz. I came into being as the project officer on Project MOGUL about November of 1946. I had considerable background in nuclear weapons detection, using devices that I had developed in the Signal Corps. I was an Air Force officer assigned to the Signal Corps as part of Colonel Duffy's office. Much to the chagrin of the Signal Corps hierarchy, I was appointed a laboratory chief in the Signal Corps for purposes of developing instrumentation that the Air Force required, and I did that. In connection with that instrumentation, I conceived of an application of that instrumentation for use in detection of nuclear weapons. We conducted field experiments which at best were controversial, and at worst showed no positive result.

So my studies took me into the nuclear weapons problem. I had a background in physics—in nuclear physics and high-energy physics and modern physics—so I had some understanding of what was going on. I then took over the development of the original weather radar prototypes that the Air Force required in 1946. I did that in 1946. From that position, I was transferred to Colonel Duffy's new position as project officer for Project MOGUL in the Air Force, Watson Laboratories. I took up that task, I believe, around November. Those dates I think are specific in the tapes I made for Ruth Liebowitz—November of 1946. Colonel Duffy was reassigned to Wright Field, and I was the project officer. I was Top Secret control officer in addition to other duties, it being the only Top Secret project at Watson Laboratories at