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It appears that there has been some argument about what Professor Moore wrote about how neoprene balloons would react to sunlight. In an effort to clear up the matter, I decided to run some tests of my own in conjunction with other Roswell skeptics. I had previously conducted a similar test using a weather balloon I had purchased from Edmund Scientific. However, after looking at some pictures of Professor Moore’s balloons, I realized the type I had probably was not neoprene. Therefore, I put out some money for a neoprene weather balloon from a scientific company in Toronto.
When it arrived, I discovered it was an old KAYSAM corporation balloon which had been designated ML-635. There appears to be a manufacturing date of 3/80. After unpacking the materials and photographing the pristine balloon, I promptly cut it up into sections and sealed them all into zip lock backs to minimize exposure to the air. I then mailed these sections off to my fellow skeptics to perform their own tests.
I ran several tests to help prove/disprove the claims made in the past by Roswell proponents. They ran in the following order:
I first exposed the balloon for six hours on a bright sunny day in NH. I took photographs every half-hour between 10 AM and 4 1. PM on May 27th. Except for a bit of light high clouds, the sun was not obscured.
The second test was a duration test from New Hampshire. On May 28th I placed a test strip out into the sun. I photographed the 2. test strip regularly for over three weeks. I also recorded the sky conditions for the days in question (clear, partly cloudy, mostly cloudy, cloudy, rainfall etc.).
The third test was to repeat test 1 while I was on vacation in St. Augustine, Florida. At roughly 30 degrees latitude, it would be 3. a reasonable simulation for the New Mexico sun. I realize that Florida is a bit wetter/more humid than New Mexico but it would be adequate for testing the degree of sunlight exposure.
The fourth and final test was to perform another duration test in St. Augustine. It would only be a seven day duration test but 4. it could be used to compare the first seven days of my test in NH.
In order to simulate that parts of the balloon material would be hidden by layers above, I made sure there was a strip of balloon material beneath the top layer. This would give a good feel for how the material would behave in a shielded and unshielded modes.
Test #1
The first test was informative. In an effort to maximize the sunlight exposing the material, I tilted the platform the balloon material was mounted on about 50-60 degrees and rotated it every two hours to keep it facing towards the sun. The four images to the right show the initial balloon material followed by the balloon as it appeared six hours later. The bottom left shows what the underneath layers looked like and the bottom right shows the material as it is unfolded and one can look inside. The balloon changed color from tan to a light gray. However, the material was still very pliable and soft. It did not flake off or become brittle. Meanwhile, the material underneath retained its original color and texture. This is consistent with what Professor Moore wrote:
As I remember, these early sounding balloons became dirty-gray or brown after stretching and exposure to solar ultraviolet light during their ascent to high altitudes..1
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Test #2
This test started off with a sunny day that gave the same gray color to the balloon I obtained in test #1. However, the next two days were rainy and cloudy. The balloon did not change much during those two days. This was followed by a day and a half of sun. The balloon darkened somewhat but was still elastic in nature. We then had some poor weather with hardly any bright sunlight and quite a bit of rain. I had to take the material out of the rain and wait for the sun to return. When it did return, I continued to monitor the balloon material. By day 13, the balloon began to lose elasticity and could tear. By day 19, the top part of the balloon material had become pretty dark/black in nature. It could tear with little effort. However, the material underneath was still tannish and elastic (see image above right). The upper layers had shielded the material underneath as Professor Moore had stated:
After several weeks of additional exposure to sunlight, the upper surfaces of the fragments on the ground turned black with a gray sheen....The layers of film that were shielded from direct sunlight darkened more slowly, so the debris recovered after a few weeks often was mottled in appearance..2
I terminated the exercise on July 4th, which was 38 days after the material was put out. Based on my weather log, I would consider the exposure to be equivalent to about three weeks of full sun. It is interesting to note that when using the hourly observations for Roswell in June-July of 1947, I arrived at a similar value of “full sun” time for the period of 4 June to 4 July. This does not even consider the fact that NH has more sun time (sunrise to sunset) during the day than New Mexico. This may compensate for the difference in latitude. The material began to flake on top and deteriorate by the time I saw it on day 38 (I was out of town on vacation for 12 days). However, the material underneath still had some elasticity to it and did not change color significantly (see image top left). The description that Professor Moore gave was an accurate assessment of my test material.
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Test #3
Because of commitments for the day, my six hour test in Florida was actually a five hour test. However, it was a mirror image to my six hour test in NH. The material did not turn dark black and just turned grayish (see image to the left). The material underneath did not change much.
Test #4
The seven day test in Florida was a wash before I could start it. Tropical storm Debbie happened to dump rain on my vacation for the entire week with only a few days of sunlight so I could nottest the material. As a result, I only tested for two days. The material did not change much from the five hour test even though I had very nice clear skies (see image bottom right on previous page). It still was very soft and elastic even though the color had darkened. I would have to wait for a fellow skeptic at a southern location to confirm my duration test in NH.
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Preliminary Conclusions
Lance Moody provided me with this high resolution scan of the balloon material in Ramey’s office. The scan was provided to him by David Rudiak. What Moody noticed was that there are bits and pieces of black flakes that have come off this balloon material and the edges are shredded. When examining the results I obtained from my tests and comparing them to these images, I can state the following:
The material in these photographs are not from a balloon that has been set out in the sun for a few hours as some have sug1. gested. The material appears too brittle and is flaking. At no point did any of my tests show that brittleness/flaking occurred or the material turned black within a few hours of sunlight exposure.
The portions in the photographs that appear to be fresh balloon material is probably due to the material being shield from 2. sunlight by material that was on top of it. Even after several weeks of sunlight exposure, parts of the shielded balloon material in my test maintained this fresh color/appearance. This confirms the observations of Professor Charles Moore, who stated that the balloon material in the photographs had a ‘mottled’ appearance similar to materials set out in the sun for several weeks.
The balloons do not turn to “ash” after a few weeks as some Roswell proponents have suggested. My tests have shown that Pro3. fessor Moore’s statements in his chapter of the book, UFO crash at Roswell: Genesis of a modern myth, are pretty accurate.
After a month, some of the material on top began to take on the appearance of “parchment” and did not resemble balloon 4. material. It was porous, which is a description Jesse Marcel had for some of the materials he found thirty years later. Other parts of the balloon looked and felt like rubber, which is what Bessie and Mack Brazel described.
Next issue, I will compare my efforts with the results obtained by other skeptics.
Notes and References
Saler, Benson, Charles Ziegler, and Charles Moore. UFO Crash at Roswell: Genesis of a Modern Myth. Washington D.C.: Smithso1. nian Institution, 1997. P.109
ibid.2.
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The ignored testimonies of Roswell
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While many testimonies concerning the Roswell incident are promoted by the various investigators, it is the forgotten/ignored testimonies that are most revealing. The authors of the various UFO books attempt to downplay these testimonies or not even mention them for obvious reasons.
Bessie Brazel
Bill’s younger sister, Bessie, is more consistent in her recollections of the events than her brother, who’s story appeared to change over the years. It is documented, in the Roswell Daily Record, that Bessie was present when Mack recovered the debris and Bessie’s story should carry weight. According to Bessie, her father was afraid that the sheep would not water at the nearby water tank because of the debris field and he got his family to help him pick up the material. Bessie describes the debris as follows:
There was what appeared to be pieces of heavily waxed paper and a sort of aluminum-like foil. Some of these pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but there were no words that we were able to make out. Some of the metal-foil like pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them, and when these were held to the light they showed what looked like pastel flowers or designs. Even though the stuff looked like tape it could not be peeled off or removed at all. It was very light in weight but there sure was a lot of it...it was definitely not a balloon. We had seen weather balloons quite a lot--both on the ground and in the air. We had even found a couple of Japanese-style balloons that had come down in the area once. We had also picked up a couple of those thin rubber weather balloons with instrument packages. This was nothing like that.1
Bessie’s affidavit also describes the debris:
(8) The debris looked like pieces of a LARGE BALLOON WHICH HAD BURST (Emphasis added by me). The pieces were small, the largest I remember measuring was about the same as the diameter of a basketball. Most of it was a kind of double-sided material, foil-like on one side and rubber-like on the other. Both sides were grayish silver in color, the foil more silvery than the rubber. Sticks, like kite sticks, were attached to some of the pieces with a whitish tape. The tape was about two or three inches wide and had flower-like designs on it. The flowers were faint, a variety of pastel colors, and reminded me of Japanese paintings in which the flowers are not all connected. I do not recall any other types of material or markings, nor do I remember seeing any gouges in the ground or any other signs that anything may have hit the ground hard.
(9) The foil-rubber material could not be torn like ordinary aluminum foil can be torn. I do not recall anything else about the strength or other properties of what we picked up.2
While Bessie is quoted in The Roswell Incident, she is barely mentioned in UFO crash at Roswell and The truth about the UFO crash at Roswell even though the books said they interviewed her twice! In Crash at Corona, she isn’t even listed in the index. It’s as if nobody wanted to acknowledge what she stated or did not want her testimony to appear in print.
Lorenzo Kimball
Lorenzo Kimball was the base medical supply officer at Roswell and passed away in 1999. He told a completely different story about Roswell Army Air Field activities and did maintain a web site about it for a few years. One can find the page at the Roswellfiles web site (www.roswellfiles.com). He reported that all the medical officers spent more time at the Base pool and officer’s club after hours instead of dissecting alien bodies or preparing them for shipment. Kimball also stated that he had personally talked to Major Jack Comstock and that Comstock told him that there was no unusual activity at the base hospital that July. Kimball finally added that the biggest thing that had occurred on the base that summer and fall, besides winning the bombing trophy, was the formation of a football team.
Jack Ingrahm and the other pilots/navigators interviewed by Kent Jeffrey.
Kent Jeffrey interviewed members of the 509th bomb group, including a very vocal pilot by the name of Jack Ingham. He, according to Jeffrey, was rather blunt about what he thought about the alien crashed spaceship story. He felt it was all a bunch of nonsense. Jeffrey seemed to get this impression from all the pilots and navigators he interviewed:
The men who were at Roswell during July 1947 feel very strongly that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened and that the whole matter is patently ridiculous. The 509th was the only atomic bomb group in the world in 1947 and was composed of a very elite group of individuals, most of whom still feel a definite sense of pride in their former outfit. To them, the crashed-saucer nonsense, along with all the hullabaloo and conspiracy theories surrounding it, makes a mockery of and is an insult of the 509th Bomb Group and its men...Since last September, I have spoken with a total of 15 B-29 pilots and 2 B-29 navigators, all of whom were stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947. Most of them heard nothing about the supposed crashed-saucer incident until years later, after all the publicity started. The few men who did recall hearing something about the incident at the time of its occurrence said that the inside word was that the debris was from a downed balloon of some kind and that there was no more than “one wheelbarrow full.” Not one single man had any direct knowledge of a crashed saucer or of any kind of unusual material. Even more significantly, in all of their collective years with the 509th Bomb Group, not one of these men had ever encountered any other individual who had such knowledge. As Jack Ingham and others pointed out, the 509th was a very close-knit group and there was no way an event as spectacular as the recovery of a crashed-alien spaceship from another world could have happened at their base without their having known about it...3
The common explanation presented is that these men had no need to know, that they were just repeating what they were told to say over the years, or made these comments for fear of losing their pensions. If it were so secret that death threats were made, why was Jesse Marcel Sr. allowed to speak without fear of retribution?
If you aren’t with us...
When it comes to these types of witnesses, the Roswell crashed spaceship proponents either demonize them for covering up the truth or their responses are twisted to give the impression they are withholding critical information. They are unfairly portrayed, without good evidence, in order to perpetuate a belief in a crashed alien spaceship recovery.
Notes and References
Berlitz, Charles and William Moore. 1. The Roswell Incident. New York: Berkley, 1988. P. 96-7.
Pflock, Karl. 2. Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Amherst: Prometheus, 2001.P. 277.
Randle, Kevin. 3. The Roswell encyclopedia. New York:Harper-Collins. 2000. P. 173-174
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Where are the private records?
Amateur photography has always been popular ever since cameras became affordable. There are quite a number of photographs from the time period that exist and are widely published. In the book, UFO crash at Roswell, Juanita Sultemeier is credited with contemporary photographs of various key individuals involved in the events.
With this in mind, I wonder about how important the debris found at the Foster Ranch really was. According to Roswell legend, as it is told in the books, there was intense military activity in town and the surrounding area. Bill Brazel stated that the gouge that existed at the Foster Ranch was visible for over a year. However, there is not one photograph of this huge mark even though I am sure somebody in the area probably did own a camera (like Juanita Sultemeier). The same can be said for all the military activity that supposedly occurred in and outside the town of Roswell. Newspaper reporters were unable to record anything related to what must have been a huge military operation that involved dozens, if not hundreds of troops. While photographs of Mack Brazel were taken, nobody bothered to take a picture of the various trucks, checkpoints, or military policemen patrolling the town.
Then there is the strange behavior of the Marcel family. One can assume they had no camera (or no film for their camera) the night Jesse Sr. brought the flying saucer pieces home. However, why didn’t the Marcel’s retain news clippings of the big event that involved Jesse? As a young boy, one would think that Jesse Jr. would retain the newspaper from this event. After all, it is not every day that your dad does something famous enough to have his picture/name appear nationwide in the papers.
Another bit of documentation that might exist are letters and diaries from the time period. Certainly, some townspeople and servicemen might send a letter to relatives or write in a diary about these earth shattering events that had happened in their little town. Those diaries and letters are nonexistent. No such records have ever been produced. About the only record that was retained were the teletypes by Frank Joyce. They shed very little in the way of evidence for an alien spaceship recovery. The lack of any personal records to confirm any of the Roswell story, as it is told by the proponents, indicates that what transpired is more mundane than exotic.
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The omission and editing of documents in Roswell books
One of the most interesting thing one sees in the early Roswell books is the representation of certain documents by the authors. It is almost as if the authors chose only to tell you what they wanted the reader to see. I think it is important to list these “omissions/editing” in the books.
The Roswell Incident
The Twining memo of September 23, 1947 is shown on pages 154-155 of my copy. However, it stops after 2.e. The remainder of the memo is edited out. Missing is this critical section:
h. Due consideration must be given the following:-
(1) The possibility that these objects are of domestic origin - the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this Command.
(2) The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these subjects.
(3) The possibility that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge. 1
In addition to the Twining memo, the FBI Telex is also represented...in edited form, on pages 151-152. The part that was edited out was the following:
THE DISC IS HEXAGONAL IN SHAPE AND WAS SUSPENDED FROM A BALLON BY CABLE, WHICH BALLON WAS APPROXIMATELY TWENTY FEET IN DIAMETER.2
UFO Crash at Roswell
The Twining memo does not appear but it is described briefly (page 108 of my copy), where they only give his conclusion that the “flying disks” were “real”. Missing is the mention of the lack of physical evidence in the same memo. The FBI Telex is also mentioned on page 75. Once again, the section about the balloon is not presented.
The truth about the UFO crash at Roswell
The Twining memo appears on pages 104 through 107. After a few years, the authors came up with their explanation for the section that had been omitted in the previous book. The explanation is that Twining was “out of the loop” and did not have a need to know. The book also finally lists the FBI memo in full form (p. 60) but decides not to discuss the implications of what was written.
Crash at Corona
This book briefly mentions the Twining memo but, like The Roswell Incident, makes not mention of the lack of physical evidence. The FBI telex is not mentioned. The book does spend some pages discussing the Schulgen memo. Unfortunately for the authors, the memo they present is not the authentic one but the hoaxed memo.
Additionally, an October 7, 1948 memo from Colonel McCoy is mentioned. Missing from that group of memos is the 8 November 1948 memo from Colonel McCoy to the Chief of Staff USAF, where he states:
The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another planet has not been ignored. However, tangible evidence to support conclusions about such a possibility are completely lacking...There is as yet no conclusive proof that unidentified flying objects, other than those which are known to be balloons, are real aircraft...the exact nature of these objects cannot be established until physical evidence, such as that which would result from a crash...3
McCoy’s letter suggests that he either knew nothing about Roswell, Roswell did not involve a crashed alien spaceship, or he was lying to a superior officer in an official correspondence. The more likely choice is that Roswell did not involve an alien spaceship crash. The other choices involve a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence except for the usual wild speculation.
More of the same
As with many of the other items that were omitted in these books, the failure to mention these documents or omitting pertinent sections demonstrates an intent to deceive the reader. It is the UFOlogists (including Stanton Friedman himself) who are violating Stanton Friedman’s rule for debunkers of “What the public doesn’t know, I am not going to tell them”.
Notes and References
“The Twining memo”. 1. The Roswell files. Available WWW: http://www.roswellfiles.com/FOIA/twining.htm
Pflock, Karl. 2. Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Amherst: Prometheus, 2001. P 240
“UFO FOIA Documents - 1948”. 3. Project 1947. Available WWW: http://www.project1947.com/fig/1948c.htm
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Quelle: SUNlite 4/2012