I will point out that Americans often have a bad reputation in the rest of the world. I believe that we should be respectful in our communications with those in other countries. I thought we all should act as good will ambassadors, and if we disagreed, we could word our responses in a diplomatic fashion.
Not so Todd. He was an arrogant man who hammered at everyone who disagreed with him no matter what their location. His was not the image we should embrace when communicating with our colleagues in foreign nations.
One of his letters was so nasty that I sent an apology to the man, letting him know that not all Americans were that vulgar. Some of us could act civilized.
Todd deserves no respect, and if I offended anyone by saying the above, sorry, but it is the truth and you know it. It shouldn’t matter that he held up your end of the debate. You should recognize him for what he was.
Karl, on the other hand, was a colleague and when he died, I was asked to provide an obituary for him. We had also worked on a couple of projects together, including a suggestion that Barney Barnett hadn’t been a part of the Roswell events and his description of seeing the crashed saucer had more to do with Aztec than it did with Roswell. The only tie we could find was that of Fleck Danley, Barnett’s boss who wasn’t sure when Barnett had told him about the crash. A diary kept by Barnett’s wife seemed to eliminate July 1947 as the proper time frame.
Karl and I disagreed on a number of things, but I believed him to be intellectually honest about most, something I can’t say about Todd. Karl and I had planned another project together, but his illness prevented it.
I don’t think I said anything particularly negative about Karl, other than suggesting that his interpretation of the Pratt interview with Marcel wasn’t black and white, but shades of gray, which is the point about the comma makes.
For those who are interested, here is what I mean. Karl interpreted various unclear parts, and once again, I have pointed this out to others. Marcel was talking about having been shot down and that he bailed out. Pratt asked, "Everyone survive," and Marcel said, "All but one crashed into a mountain," which suggests that only he and one other survived. However, if I insert a comma, Marcel said, "All, but one crashed into a mountain," which could mean all survived but one who crashed into a mountain.
Here’s where we are. I believe that Charles Moore was playing a little “catch up” with the Army by suggesting that they couldn’t tell the difference between a balloon and an alien spacecraft. His thinking was colored by his treatment back in 1947. But I don’t think he was lying about anything and the discrepancies between what he said in the 1990s and the records of the 1940s say more about the human memory than it does about Moore’s truthfulness.
Todd, on the other hand, wasn’t above name calling and distortion and I can think of no reason to defend him now. His record speaks for itself and it isn’t a good one. He clearly didn’t understand interpersonal relationships and if he did, he simply didn’t care.
Karl, I count as a friend and if we disagreed on some points UFOlogical, we agreed on many more. He made mistakes in his Roswell book and I see no reason not to say that just because he’s no longer with us. We all make mistakes, we all believe people we shouldn’t and we all have our opinions colored by our own beliefs. (Yes, one of those Karl believed was the witness he named reluctant who was Walt Whitmore, Jr. who radically altered his story over time.)
So, I don’t really understand the venom directed at me about this. I don’t understand why it is necessary to resort to personal attacks rather than just state the facts. If I don’t believe in your pet case it is because, to me, the evidence isn’t as persuasive as it is to you. Doesn’t make me right or you wrong, it just means that on this point we disagree.
I have been on the receiving end of many of these attacks recently. I ignore most simply because they are borne of ignorance and mean little in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes I simply do not understand them, especially when I believe I have been fair in my assessments.
Anyway, this will suggest another side to the debate and maybe suggest that we can elevate our discourse to a civilized level. If not, well, I won’t be very surprised.
Mogul and OPSEC
You have to love the skeptics. No matter what evidence surfaces, they’ll find a way to spin it to their advantage. As many of you know, I have been suggesting for quite a while that the Project Mogul answer doesn’t work to explain the Roswell UFO crash because it just wasn’t as secret as everyone has been claiming. I mean, we’ve learned that the members of the Mogul team did know the name back in the 1940s, the equipment was bought off-the-shelf so that it did not present a new advance in balloon technology, and we know that the launches weren’t all that classified either. I’ve said as much.
Now I learn that one of the skeptics has decided that OPSEC applies to Mogul and this is the theory under which we can retreat to the idea that Mogul was the highly classified project that has been claimed.
OPSEC?
For those not familiar with the world of military secrecy, OPSEC stands for Operational Security which means that the operation, whatever it might by, has a need for security. A bomber flight from a base outside of the war zone to a target inside, has a need for OPSEC. You don’t want the enemy to know that you’re coming so that he will be ready to oppose the attack. You want to keep the details of the mission secret for the surprise.
But we need OPSEC for a balloon launch? A balloon launch which, I might add, had to be announced in the NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) so they would know that these aerial monstrosities known as balloon arrays would be floating through the New Mexico skies (or other skies as the winds and the project might dictate). A balloon launch which would have been known to the officers at the 509thBomb Group in Roswell because the project officers had been there to tell them about it.
OPSEC has nothing to do with this. The fact that there were people in New Mexico in June and July 1947 launching huge arrays of balloons had so little need for OPSEC, that newspapers around the country carried stories about the balloons. Not the ultimate purpose mind you, but that these arrays were being launched from Alamogordo for research purposes. So much for OPSEC.
The classified part of the mission was that they were attempting to create a constant level balloon so that they could float them over the Soviet Union, or close to it, and listen for atomic detonations. This was the big secret and this was the classified purpose. I’m not sure how highly classified this might have been, but it really is the only part of the project to be classified.
But the operation in New Mexico, the launches, had no need for OPSEC. Troop movements had a need for OPSEC. Missions into enemy territory had a need for OPSEC. The Normandy Invasion had a need for OPSEC, but not the launch of a bunch of balloons in New Mexico in an experiment to see if they would stay at the same level for a long period of time.
Here’s the problem for those who believe in the Mogul answer for the Roswell events. They have to explain the extraordinary effort to recover the debris, and all the interest generated when the debris was found. Mogul seemed to be tailor-made for that. A highly classified project that was so secret that even the participants didn’t know the real name.
But all that has fallen apart. Albert Crary, the project director, knew the name in 1946, as did Charles Moore, who would claim that he didn’t learn the name until the 1990s when Robert Todd told him. But Moore was wrong on that point just as a letter in his own files proved. Forgotten the name, maybe, but he had known it in the 1940s.