My regard for Dr. Moore aside, I find myself unsure as to whether the flowered tape actually existed on the materials shown to photographers. In all of the photographs of the Rawin targets that were used in Project Mogul, not one of them shows anything resembling the decorative tape he has described.
The picture of Dr. Moore shows one of the ML-307 Rawin radar targets used in Mogul flights. Though it is difficult to see due to the age and poor quality of the photograph, there is no flowered tape, and the white strip is the paper backing folded over one of the structural members. If you look closely, you can even make out the buttons on his shirt, so you would think there should be some evidence of flowers along the taped edge if they were there.
One would also think that, as well-documented and — photographed as the Mogul tests were, some photographs should exist that show the decorative tape described in the government's story, but no such photographs have ever been made public. This is just another example of how the Mogul balloon didn't fit the description of what my father and I saw, and how, in my opinion, truth has been supplanted with disinformation.
I realize that it might seem that I am belaboring the significance of the tape-or, rather, the lack of the tape-but the official story has relied so heavily upon this as a plausible explanation for the symbols that adorned the I-beams in the original debris, that I feel it represents a significant flaw in what I firmly believe to be the government's cover-up.
As I have noted previously, the foil in the debris my father showed me was very similar in appearance to modern-day heavy-duty aluminum foil, except that it was much lighter, and had a dull, burnished appearance, rather than the highly reflective finish of aluminum foil. As I also noted earlier, the material on the Rawin target Dr. Moore showed me had an appearance very similar to that of a candy bar wrapper-shiny on one side, and paper on the other. I asked Dr. Moore if any of the radar targets they had used had been foil without the paper backing. He responded that all of the targets used in the Mogul device used paper-backed foil, but that he thought the Navy may have used foil without the paper backing in their radar targets. Such foil, however, would not possess the resiliency and strength of the foil I had handled in the original debris.
The wood sticks that made up the structure of the Rawin target were obviously lightweight balsa wood, quite fragile, and identical to what I used in building stick models as a child. The I-beams I examined in the wreckage, however, were made of some lightweight metal that had an appearance similar to titanium. My father had, on numerous occasions, made note of the fact that these members were unbelievably strong-strong enough that even a sledge hammer would not dent them. If you were to take a sledge hammer to one of the balsa wood sticks used on the Rawin targets, all you would end up with is a handful of shattered splinters.
During our conversation, I asked Dr. Moore if any of the electronic components in the Rawin or Mogul devices had been housed in black plastic similar to the material I had seen in the debris. He responded that the radiosonde devices that contained the electronic components were housed in cardboard boxes, rather than plastic. I asked him for his explanation of the fact that there were no electronic components in the debris, because if what we had examined had been sonobuoys or radiosondes, as he claimed, components such as transmitters and batteries would have been found somewhere in or around the crash site. I also asked him to explain why no weather balloons were found in the wreckage, when each of the flights he had conducted had been carried aloft by such balloons, and at least some remnants of the balloon material should have remained with the other material. He admitted that he could offer no explanation for either discrepancy.
In the end, we parted with a handshake. Though Dr. Moore had done his best to convince me that what I had seen had been a Mogul balloon, I think he realized that my description, which had never changed, was not going to change then either.
The conversation with Dr. Moore only served to further convince me that what my father had brought into our kitchen that night had not been a Mogul device. The discrepancies between what I had seen in Roswell and a Rawin radar target were too numerous, and too clear. Dr. Moore, however, remained convinced that what I saw was a radar target, and assumed that I was mistaken in my memories of what I had seen. I am just as convinced that what I saw was not part of a radar target, nor could any of the debris I saw and handled have come from a Mogul device. I know what I saw, and I know that there are people within the government who know as well, but who remain in the shadows. It is perhaps these people about whom I was cautioned when asked if I had ever gotten any threatening phone calls (I'll go into this in the next chapter).
A few years before I had my meeting with Dr. Moore, I received a call from the Air Force. Because I was a colonel in the Montana National Guard, he began the conversation with, "Colonel, we need your help." I was not sure at first who it was that needed my help. As it turned out, the Air Force wanted to feel me out as to what I thought the debris from Roswell really was. I began by describing what I had seen, in as much detail as my memory would allow. At the end of my description, the caller said that he believed that I had seen parts of a Mogul balloon device, namely the radar reflector that was a part of the Mogul balloon train. I then pointed out the discrepancies between what I had seen and handled in Roswell and the radar target. He was not impressed. I then asked him, just as I would later ask Dr. Moore, if the plastic Bakelite-esque material I had felt could have been part of the housing for the radio transmitter carried aloft with the radar targets. He said that he did not think so, because the radio was housed in either a cardboard or aluminum container. As we reached the end of our conversation, he said something to the effect that he was not sure what I had seen, but that it had obviously not been part of the Mogul project.
I later learned that he had been tasked with gathering pertinent information for inclusion in the official Air Force document I mentioned previously, The Roswell Report: Case Closed. When that document was published, it concluded that what my father and I had seen had indeed been a radar target. Inasmuch as the points made in my conversation with the Air Force were contrary to such a conclusionI'd held firmly to my opinion that it was not a radar target, and the Air Force official had admitted he couldn't say for sure what I had seenI realized, once and for all, that the government was either too inept to relay a factual account, or was participating in a well-choreographed cover-up.
As did my late father, I have no doubt that what I saw in Roswell was unearthly in origin. The only questions that continue to nag at me are, first of alclass="underline" from where did it come? Secondly, what does the government I have joyfully served for all these years have to gain from hiding the truth? And lastly-though just as worrisome as the other questions-to what lengths will it go to perpetuate the falsehood?
Chapter 6
A Government Official's Admission
It was a bright summer day in the early 1990s, and I had just returned home from my annual two-week training session for the Montana National Guard. To say that it had been a grueling two weeks would he a gross understatement. Between routine medical duties and the constant helicopter support training sessions, it was much more stressful than the time spent in our civilian occupations, and I was looking forward to returning home and taking it easy for a while.