In the 1950s balloons were being extensively used by the Air Force – not just as weather measurement platforms, as prominently advertised, and radar reflectors, as acknowledged, but also, secretly, as robotic espionage craft, with high-resolution cameras and signal intelligence devices. While the balloons themselves were not very secret, the reconnaissance packages they carried were. High-altitude balloons can seem saucer-shaped when seen from the ground. If you misestimate how far away they are, you can easily imagine them going absurdly fast. Occasionally, propelled by a gust of wind, they make abrupt changes in direction, uncharacteristic of aircraft and in seeming defiance of the conservation of momentum – if you don’t realize they’re hollow and weigh almost nothing.
The most famous of these military balloon systems, widely tested over the United States in the early 1950s, was called ‘Skyhook’. Other balloon systems and projects were designated ‘Mogul’, ‘Moby Dick’, ‘Grandson’ and ‘Genetrix’. Urner Lidell, who had some responsibility for these missions at the Naval Research Laboratory, and who was later a NASA official, once told me he thought all UFO reports were due to military balloons. While ‘all’ is going too far, their role has, I think, been insufficiently appreciated. So far as I know there has never been a systematic and intentional control experiment, in which high-altitude balloons were secretly released and tracked, and UFO reports from visual and radar observers noted.
In 1956, overflights of the Soviet Union by US reconnaissance balloons began. At their peak there were dozens of balloon launches a day. Balloon overflights were then replaced by high-altitude aircraft, such as the U-2, which in turn were largely replaced by reconnaissance satellites. Many UFOs dating from this period were clearly scientific balloons, as are some since. High-altitude balloons are still being launched, including platforms carrying cosmic ray sensors, optical and infrared telescopes, radio receivers probing the cosmic background radiation, and other instruments above most of the Earth’s atmosphere.
A great to-do has been made of one or more alleged crashed flying saucers near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Some initial reports and newspaper photographs of the incident are entirely consistent with the idea that the debris was a crashed high-altitude balloon. But other residents of the region – especially decades later – remember more exotic materials, enigmatic hieroglyphics, threats by military personnel to witnesses if they didn’t keep what they knew to themselves, and the canonical story that alien machinery and body parts were packed into an airplane and flown to the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Some, but not all, of the recovered alien body stories are associated with this incident.
Philip Klass, a long-time and dedicated UFO sceptic, has uncovered a subsequently declassified letter dated 27 July 1948, a year after the Roswell ‘incident’, from Major General C.B. Cabell, then Director of Intelligence for the US Air Force (and later, as a CIA official, a major figure in the abortive US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs). Cabell was inquiring of those who reported to him on what UFOs might be. He hadn’t a clue. In an 11 October 1948 summary response, explicitly including information in the possession of the Air Materiel Command, we find the Director of Intelligence being told that nobody else in the Air Force had a clue either. This makes it unlikely that UFO fragments and occupants had made their way to Wright-Patterson the year before.
What the Air Force was mostly worried about was that UFOs were Russian. Why Russians would be testing flying saucers over the United States was a puzzle to which the following four answers were proposed: ‘(1) To negate US confidence in the atom bomb as the most advanced and decisive weapon in warfare. (2) To perform photographic reconnaissance missions. (3) To test US air defenses. (4) To conduct familiarization flights [for strategic bombers] over US territory.’ We now know that UFOs neither were nor are Russian, and however dedicated the Soviet interest may have been to objectives (1) through (4), flying saucers weren’t how they pursued these objectives.
Much of the evidence regarding the Roswell ‘incident’ seems to point to a cluster of high-altitude classified balloons, perhaps launched from nearby Almagordo Army Air Field or White Sands Proving Ground, that crashed near Roswell, the debris of secret instruments hurriedly collected by earnest military personnel, early press reports announcing that it was a spaceship from another planet (‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region’), diverse recollections simmering over the years, and memories refreshed by the opportunity for a little fame and fortune. (Two UFO museums in Roswell are leading tourist stops.)
A 1994 report ordered by the Secretary of the Air Force and the Department of Defense in response to prodding from a New Mexico Congressman identifies the Roswell debris as remnants of a long-range, highly secret, balloon-borne low-frequency acoustic detection system called ‘Project Mogul’ – an attempt to sense Soviet nuclear weapons explosions at tropopause altitudes. The Air Force investigators, rummaging comprehensively through the secret files of 1947, found no evidence of heightened message traffic:
There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a higher tempo of operational activity reported that would be logically generated if an alien craft, whose intentions were unknown, entered U.S. territory . . . The records indicate that none of this happened (or if it did, it was controlled by a security system so efficient and tight that no one, U.S. or otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system had been in effect at the time, it would have also been used to protect our atomic secrets from the Soviets, which history has shown obviously was not the case.)
The radar targets carried by the balloons were partly manufactured by novelty and toy companies in New York, whose inventory of decorative icons seems to have been remembered many years later as alien hieroglyphics.
The heyday of UFOs corresponds to the time when the main delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons was being switched from aircraft to missiles. An early and important technical problem concerned re-entry – returning a nuclear-armed nosecone through the bulk of the Earth’s atmosphere without burning it up in the process (as small asteroids and comets are destroyed in their passage through the upper air). Certain materials, nosecone geometries, and angles of entry are better than others. Observations of re-entry (or the more spectacular launches) could very well reveal US progress in this vital strategic technology or, worse, inefficiencies in the design; such observations might suggest what defensive measures an adversary should take. Understandably, the subject was considered highly sensitive.
Inevitably there must have been cases in which military personnel were told not to talk about what they had seen, or where seemingly innocuous sightings were suddenly classified top secret with severely constrained need-to-know criteria. Air Force officers and civilian scientists thinking back about it in later years might very well conclude that the government had engineered a UFO cover-up. If nosecones are judged UFOs, the charge is a fair one.
Consider spoofing. In the strategic confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the adequacy of air defences was a vital issue. It was item (3) on General Cabell’s list. If you could find a weakness, it might be the key to ‘victory’ in an all-out nuclear war. The only sure way to test your adversary’s defences is to fly an aircraft over their borders and see how long it takes for them to notice. The United States did this routinely to test Soviet air defences.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had state-of-the-art radar defence systems covering its west and east coasts, and especially its northern approaches (over which a Soviet bomber or missile attack would most likely come). But there was a soft underbelly – no significant early warning system to detect the geographically much more taxing southern approach. This is of course information vital for a potential adversary. It immediately suggests a spoof: one or more of the adversary’s high-performance aircraft zoom out of the Caribbean, let’s say, into US airspace, penetrating, let’s say, a few hundred miles up the Mississippi River until a US air defence radar locks on. Then the intruders hightail it out of there. (Or, as a control experiment, a unit of US high-performance aircraft is sequestered and sent in unannounced sorties to determine how porous American air defences are.) In such a case, there may be combined visual and radar sigh tings by military and civilian observers and large numbers of independent reports. What is reported corresponds to no known aircraft. The Air Force and civilian aviation authorities truthfully state that none of their aircraft was responsible. Even if they’ve been urging Congress to fund a southern Early Warning System, the Air Force is unlikely to admit that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to New Orleans, much less Memphis, before anybody caught on.
Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level technical investigating team, Air Force and civilian observers told to keep their mouths shut, and not just the appearance but the reality of suppression of the data. Again, this conspiracy of silence need have nothing to do with alien spacecraft. Even decades later, there are bureaucratic reasons for the Department of Defense to be close-mouthed about such embarrassments. There is a potential conflict of interest between parochial concerns of the Department of Defense and the solution of the UFO enigma.