Review of the Skeptical Literature on the Roswell Incident

Here’s the summary of a podcast with the legendary Kevin Randle, the world’s foremost authority on the Roswell Incident. (A little off-season content for you.)

I’ve written extensively on this forum under another username, but am keeping that side of me anonymous for now.

Kevin and I took a different approach to Roswell, approaching the incident through the skeptics. I think some folks on this forum have been afraid to examine the skeptical literature, most of which is easily accessible on the internet. (Links to all sources below.)

But fear not!

The podcast is All Across America. (No, it’s not another UFO podcast.) All episodes are on the homepage(and wherever you get your podcasts). Just scroll down past the episode with the cloistered nun. My Substacktoo.

Kevin has interviewed over 600 Roswell witnesses and published extensively on the incident. He is in fact the most widely published UFO author with 37 books to his name. (And many more as a science fiction writer.)

He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, an intelligence officer in the Iraq War, and retired from the Iowa National Guard in 2009. In other words, a very reputable person.

Roswell Background: Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release approved by the base commander, Colonel Blanchard, stating that a flying disc had been found. Hours later this was retracted in favor of the weather balloon story.

Blanchard was no ordinary officer. He was later promoted four times, achieving the rank of four-star general before his career was cut short from a heart attack.

In 1994, the Air Force issued new findings saying that the weather balloon story was a cover (a lie) for a top-secret project called Mogul.

Project Mogul was another balloon device, instead of weather instrumentation being held aloft by balloons, it was sound instrumentation to detect Russian Atomic bomb blasts.

The fourth story was released in 1995 through the Air Force publication The Roswell Report: Case Closed. It is surely one of the strangest documents ever issued by the United States government.

The book-length report attempts to address the witness stories of alien beings recovered at Roswell, with an unbelievable premise that the alien bodies seen in 1947 were crash test dummies used 10 years later to test parachute functionality in the post-Korean War era.

The report glosses over the many pictures within its own pages showing that these dummies were wearing standard issue U.S. military uniforms and were attached to a parachute.

As the dummies were human sized (6’ and 175 pounds) the authors conclude that possibly the legs had fallen off some of the dummies, accounting for the 4’ size of the alien bodies noted by some Roswell witnesses.

You following?

Kevin did not find any indication that the project itself was top secret and the lay scientists working on project were academics without top secrets clearances. Only the name, Project Mogul was classified.

Moreover, Kevin does not believe that the 4th Project Mogul flight—the supposed crash at Roswell—even occurred. My research indicates that each of the proceeding and subsequent Mogul launches were recovered with 12 balloons intact. (Mogul flights were giant balloon trains with up to 28 balloons.)

How could a debris field that consisted of a dozen balloons with accompanying radar reflectors and sound equipment be mistaken for a flying saucer?

Karl Pflock

Kevin discusses his friendship with Karl Pflock who wrote the book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will To Believe. Kevin and Pflock attended many UFO conferences together and were friendly.

Pflock noticed how many books had already been written favoring the UFO crash theory, so he decided to write a skeptical book instead. Kevin shared that Pflock received feedback from the publisher that the first draft wasn’t skeptical enough. He had to formulate a stronger case than what he originally presented.

Sticks, paper, and tape

Much of the skeptical literature focuses on the witness descriptions of those that had handled the materials and how their descriptions seem to match the radar reflectors on the Mogul balloon payload. Think of a kite: mylar and wooden ribs to give it structure.

I have watched many Roswell witness testimonies, and many are available courtesy of the U.S. National Archives. But it wasn’t until I watched the Unsolved Mysteries episode on the event, from 1989 that I understood what they were referring to.

Loretta Proctor was Mac Brazel’s neighbor and she handled parts of the debris that Brazel brought over from his ranch.

Here’s what she said: “He brought a little sliver of wood-looking stuff and him and my husband tried to cut it and burn it, but it wouldn’t whittle, and it wouldn’t burn. Now, I would say that it looked like plastic, but back then we didn’t have plastic.”

The witnesses didn’t handle wood, just something they described as wood-like because they didn’t have a better descriptor of this exotic material in 1947.

The Second Crash

Kevin does not believe in the second crash story, often referred to as the Plains of San Augustin crash. This site was supposedly 75 miles northwest of Roswell.

There are two witnesses to this event: Barney Barnet, a surveyor, whose story was told second hand to his friend, Vern Maltais. The second witness was a five-year-old boy named Gerald Anderson.

Kevin spent most of the time detailing the many untruths he found in Anderson’s story, ranging from altered phone records to substituting his high school archeology teacher for the name of the archeologist who was supposedly on site with Anderson and their family at the time of the incident.

Some researchers, most notably Stanton Friedman, believed differently.

Sheridan Cavitt

Cavitt is the only military witness from 1947 that has refuted the flying saucer story. The skeptics trot out a few witnesses, but he is the only person who served at the Roswell Army Airfield in 1947.

(The Roswell Report quotes a serviceman who says emphatically that a UFO crash didn’t happen. The text goes on to note that he was stationed at Roswell in 1960! 13 years and one war later.)

Kevin details in his blog that Cavitt gave conflicting information in the three times that he interviewed him in person. Cavitt once claimed that he wasn’t stationed in Roswell in July 1947 at the time of crash. Other witnesses paint a different picture, so does Cavitt in his own follow-up interviews. He is quoted in the Roswell Report saying that not only had he been in Roswell at the time, but that he had indeed gone out to the debris field.

Cavitt can’t keep track of his own story.

Conclusion

Given some of the untruths that Kevin has revealed in his decades of researching the incident, he is less certain than he once was. However, he is convinced that it wasn’t a balloon (Mogul or otherwise) that crashed in Roswell in July 1947.

On Disclosure

I now have a better understanding of why the old heads on this forum are so down on disclosure. I’m relatively new to Ufology, as of 2020. Kevin has been at this since the 1980’s and has seen promises of disclosure come and go, again and again.

I said to Kevin: “You’re not a UFO skeptic, but a disclosure skeptic.”

He agreed.

References:

*All Across America – Episode #15 – Lt. Col. Kevin D. Randle (Ret.) Roswell, New Mexico and Cedar Rapids, Iowa