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The Roswell incident predates Angel/Blackbird by decades. Regardless, the incident at Roswell has long since been declassified. It was a crash of flight number
by maaku 14y ago
The Roswell incident predates Angel/Blackbird by decades.
Regardless, the incident at Roswell has long since been declassified. It was a crash of flight number 4 of Project Mogul, a use of high-altitude weather balloons to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
If you read the original written reports of what was found, it describes very clearly a prototype Project Mogul payload: a circular array of microphones and radar transponders attached using sticks, rubber strands, and scotch tape, and wrapped up in aluminium foil (for EFI shielding and radar reflectance).
- ZoFreX 14y ago> The Roswell incident predates Angel/Blackbird by decades. Ugh, I've made a huge number of mistakes in my comment. Should have looked it up first. Angel is the U-2, not the A-12 like I thought, U-2 flew from 1955, already too late, A-12 even later obviously. Thanks for the info on project mogul!
- maaku 14y agoIIRC I think George Dyson wrote a book or article on Project Mogul at some point... or at least he researched it in depth enough to talk in detail about it for 30 minutes at a lecture of his I went to. My google-fu can't seem to find a citation to him though. It's actually a very interesting history linked to the U-2, A-12/SR-71, etc. Seismography and atmospheric radioisotopes ended up being an easier and more precise way to detect Soviet nuclear testing. But the balloons developed were then used to spy on and map Soviet installations in Siberia, dropping their camera payloads in the sea of Japan. Of course the same sort of overflights would later be done by the U-2 and then SR-71 until the early Keyhole satellites made the very concept of atmospheric overflight obsolete.