including the boiling of balloons before launch (which he personally developed during World War II) and a stepladder used to launch balloons, could not all have coincidentally been used by other organizations.⁴⁵
The details may have been provided to the radar officers by Crary, Project MOGUL Field Operations Director, who did not depart by C-54 with the rest of the NYU/Watson Laboratory group on July 8, but who later left by car on July 9, the day the staged launch took place. Additionally, three of Crary’s staff, Don Reynolds, Sol Oliva, and Bill Edmonston, resided permanently in Alamogordo. It was apparent from Crary’s diary that he had worked very closely with Major Pritchard and reported to him on occasion (twelve documented meetings from December 1946–April 1947). One instance, on April 7, 1947, Crary gave Pritchard a “progress report for MOGUL project to date,” indicating that Major Pritchard had access to MOGUL information.⁴⁶ Another statement which appeared to confirm a cover story appeared in the caption below the balloon picture and described a typewritten tag stapled to the target identifying it as having come from Alamogordo AAF. Moore believed this not to be true because any equipment found was not to be associated with the USAAF, only with NYU; therefore flights carried “return to” tags identifying NYU as the responsible agency.⁴⁷
CONCLUSION
Many of the claims surrounding the events of July 1947 could be neither proved nor disproved. Attempts were not made to investigate every allegation, but rather to start with what was known and work toward the unknown. To complicate the situation, events described here took place nearly 50 years ago and were highly classified. This Top Secret project appeared to have utilized the concept of compartmentalization very well. Interviews with individuals and review of documents of organizations revealed that the ultimate objective of the work, or even the name of the project, in many instances was not known. It was unlikely, therefore, that personnel from Roswell AAF, even though they possessed the appropriate clearances, would have known about project MOGUL. In fact, when the NYU/AMC group returned to Alamogordo in September, their first trip since the “incident” occurred, one of the first activities of the project scientists, Peoples and Crary, who were accompanied by Major Pritchard and Captain Dyvad, was to brief the commanding officer of Alamogordo AAF and the 509th Bomb Group Operations Officer, Lt Col Joseph Briley, on MOGUL.⁴⁸
---
⁴⁵. Moore intvw, Jun 8, 1994.
⁴⁶. Crary personal journal, p. 10.
⁴⁷. Moore intvw, Jun 8, 1994; Research Division, College of Engineering, NYU, Technical Report No. 93.02, Constant Level Balloons, Sect 2, Operations, Jan 31, 1949, pp. 36–38.
⁴⁸. Combined Hist, 509th Bomb Grp and Roswell AAF, Sep 1–30, 1947, p. 79; Untranscribed journal of Albert P. Crary, p. 64.