User:Feoffer/sandbox Roswell incident

Japanese balloon sources roundup
Encyclopedia.com:
 * "Veteran UFO researcher John A. Keel completely discounts the allegations that an alien craft crashed near Roswell in July 1947. In his opinion rancher Mac Brazel found the remains of a Japanese Fugo balloon. The strange "metal fragments," Keel asserts, were bits of polished rice paper. The strange alien "hieroglyphics" were simple Japanese instructions, such as "insert in slot B." Remains of the more than 9,000 Fugo balloons launched by the Japanese during the closing days of World War II were found in more than 300 sites throughout the western states from 1945 onward through the next 20 years. According to Keel, Major Jesse Marcel would have had no trouble identifying the debris as anything other than the pieces of a Japanese balloon bomb." ... "Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman firmly believes that a UFO exploded in the area in early July 1947 and that the retrieved pieces were shipped off to Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton, Ohio. He denies the official pronouncement that Major Marcel and his crew found only a downed weather balloon at the crash site. He also dismisses the theory that the debris was that of a crashed Japanese Fugo balloon bomb."  source: Gale Encyclopedia TERTIARY


 * Conspiracy Theories: The Roots, Themes and Propagation of Paranoid Political and Cultural Narratives  Ch. 3 'They Came from Outer Space', Aaron John Gulyas
 * Numerous explanations have arisen, ranging from Japanese "Fugo" Balloons to the suspicion that what became known as the Roswell Incident actually involved illegal U.S. experimentation on Japanese prisoners of war." source: Dolan, The Best of Roswell,  Not In-Depth.


 * The Chaos Conundrum: Essays on UFOs, Ghosts & Other High Strangeness in Our Non-Rational and Atemporal World, Aaron John Gulyas


 * In 2005, Fate magazine, long a stalwart in the paranormal publishing world, published The Best of Roswell, a collection of significant articles on the incident. Unsurprisingly, most of these were by well-known proponents of the standard ET saucer crash retrieval narrative like Kevin Randle and Stanton Friedman.
 * Other views, however, also appeared, from John Keel, who advocated a solution to the Roswell question which credited Japanese Fugo balloons as the "mysterious craft," to Nick Redfern, whose Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story asserted that the Roswell crash was the result of a failed high altitude balloon experiment.14


 * Swamp Gas Times Ch. 24 "Blaming the Japanese for Roswell
 * "We return here to the matter of context. Often it's impossible to establish the actual context of an event until many years later. The now ridiculously famous Roswell event (Hey, it appeared on the cover of TIME, for goodness's sake!) provides a case in point. In the past decade or so, numerous explanations have been put forth for that event. But regardless of what you think of the one suggested here by John Keel-who covered the UFO beat as no other during the sixties-the crashed saucer explanation remains probably the worst of the lot."...
 * "UFO researcher John Keel believes that the most famous UFO incident of all time is just a lot of hot air. According to Keel, the infamous wreckage reported near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was not a flying saucer, as UFO buffs claim. Nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. Air Force says. Rather, says Keel, the debris found in the New Mexico desert came from a Fu-Go balloon, a type of Japanese bomber used during World War II.
 * Though it's not well known, the Japanese did launch an aerial attack on the continental United States during World War II. For a period of six months, beginning on November 3, 1944, the Japanese sent aloft 9,300 unmanned balloons, each armed with a payload of 50 pounds or so, from several sites in Japan. Hundreds of these balloons were carried by the upper atmospheric air currents of the jet stream over the 6,500-mile-wide Pacific Ocean and into North America.
 * The Fu-Go balloon bombs caused 285 incidents on this side of the Pacific between November 4, 1944, and August 8, 1945, accord- ing to a report prepared by the Smithsonian Institution in 1973. The balloons peppered 18 states, from Hawaii and California in the West to Michigan in the East. Remarkably, however, they caused very little damage. Only one incident resulted in casualties: five children and a woman picnicking near Lakeview, Oregon, were killed when a balloon bomb they were dragging out of the woods exploded.
 * As for the Japanese, they listened eagerly for news of widespread destruction in the United States. But the U.S. Office of Censorship had asked the media to withhold all reports of balloon incidents. Because newspaper editors and radio broadcasters largely complied, the Japanese assumed their Fu-Gos had failed.
 * "But one of the places a Fu-Go landed was in Roswell, New Mexico." Keel declares. "The witnesses to it and there were only a couple described in detail what Fu-Go debris looked like: a lot of paper, twisted little pieces of metal, and pieces of plastic. Like a lot of people who found these things, they thought it might be from outer space."
 * Keel believes that upper atmospheric air currents had kept this one balloon airborne longer than most. Then, when the rubber cement holding the balloon panels together fell apart, the whole thing came crashing down in the New Mexico desert. Debris from the bal- loon and its instrumentation would later be discovered by a rancher thinking he had come across the crashed remains of one of the flying discs, which, at the time, were just beginning to make the news.
 * Edward Doty, a meteorologist who established the Air Force's Balloon Branch at nearby Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico beginning in 1948, calls the Japanese Fu-Go balloons "a very fine technical job with limited resources." But "no way could one of these balloons explain the Roswell episode," says Doty, "because they could not possibly have stayed aloft for two years."
 * Kevin Randle, who is co-author with Donald Schmitt of UFO Crash at Roswell: The Military Cover-up, also dismisses Keel's Fu-Go explanation. "His entire hypothesis hinges on the fact that the balloon bombs were secret in 1947," he says. "And that's simply not true."
 * New York attorney Peter Gersten is also investigating the Roswell incident and, like Keel, is convinced of a terrestrial explanation. "It seems to me that Keel's explanation has to be closer to the truth," he says, "than those who believe in alien spaceships."


 * UFO crash at Roswell : the genesis of a modern myth
 * "Second, the idea that the sightings were of a novel Soviet aircraft had its precedent in the wartime military intelligence experience with Japa- nese balloon bombers. Little more than two years separated the reports of unusual flying objects that alerted authorities to the Japanese balloon bomber offensive in 1944-1945, and the wave of reports in 1947 that were triggered by Arnold’s sightings. In 1945, intelligence analysts had not ignored reports from people throughout the western United States who said they had sighted mysterious objects in the sky, and prompt in- vestigation had revealed that the nation was being attacked with a hith- erto unsuspected enemy weapon."
 * "Therefore, from the military standpoint, the wave of such sightings in 1947 could not be dismissed without first eliminating the possibility that they were due to some secret domestic project and then ascertaining whether or not they were caused by a new type of Soviet aircraft. The key to unveiling the Japanese threat in 1945 had been the recovery of the remains of crashed aircraft. That previous experience ensured that any reported finding of wreckage attributed to flying disks would receive the prompt attention of military intelligence officers."
 * "It is unclear whether Cavitt was interviewed prior to the appearance of Version 1, but in any case no statements in that version are attributed to him. Version 2 appeared in the MJ-12 document, which is only a few pages long and contains no “testimony” of any kind. Cavitt was inter- viewed by the literary traditors who produced Versions 3, 4, and 5, but again no statements are attributed to Cavitt in Versions 3 and 4, and in Version 5 the only comments of Cavitt’s that are cited are those in which he indicates that the wreckage he saw on the Foster ranch was not that of a Japanese balloon bomb or the remains of a German V-2 rocket (Randle and Schmitt 1994:140, 148)."
 * "At the outset of the NYU effort, we recognized the need for light- weight, constant-volume balloons with envelopes made of transparent films (to minimize absorption of sunlight) and equipped with some device for dropping expendable ballast to reduce the load whenever the balloon descended below the desired floating altitude. The Japanese had flown paper and silk balloons with expendable ballast across the Pacific late in the war (see note 3 for Chapter 1, and Spilhaus, Schneider, and Moore 1948), but we rejected the Japanese approach because their balloons were opaque and very heavy. We concluded that they would require ex- cessive amounts of ballasting to maintain a constant level."
 * "In World War I the United States developed the first unmanned “balloon bombers”—small, cheap, wind-driven balloons carrying incendiary bbmbs— designed to be launched in enormous numbers from bases in France to de- stroy forests and croplands in Germany (see Ziegler 1994). The armistice in- tervened before they could be deployed, but in World War II they were used by the British to bomb German-occupied Europe and by the Japanese to set forest fires in the western United States. More than 9,000 transpacific bal- loons were launched from bases in Japan to drop incendiaries on North America (see Peebles 1991:51-82)."


 * The Best of Roswell: From the Files of FATE Magazine Richard Dolan, “Introduction,” (Lakeville, MN: Galde Press, 2007)


 * Fate Magazine: John Keel "Beyond the Known", March 1990  . PRIMARY

NFRINGE sources

 * UFO crash at Roswell Randle & Schmitt 1991, p. 43, 118, 153, 183, 188-192;  NFRINGE cited throughout article
 * "Tommy Tyree said Brazel told him that it had been one of the Japanese Balloon Bombs launched during World War II."
 * "I am sure what I found was not any weather obser- vation balloon," Brazel told reporters to end their new article.
 * And there are those researchers who think Brazel was right about that. It wasn't a weather observation device. But it was something else. John Keel said he believed he had come up with an explanation for Roswell twenty years ago and recently published an article about that. In his attempt to explain Roswell with the mundane he didn't even review the current state of the investigation except to quote from Majestic, a work of fiction.
 * Keel's theory is that Mac Brazel came across a rice paper Japanese Balloon Bomb some two years after the war had ended. He concluded that the object was kept aloft by freakish winds and that government embarrassment about the Japanese project kept the officers of the 509th Bomb Group from revealing the real nature of Brazel's find. Keel suggests that Army Air Force officers at Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth substituted a weather balloon for the balloon bomb to keep the myth of American invulnerability alive.
 * To make his theory work, he has to accept the idea that in post-war America, there was a reason to keep this a secret. He quotes from Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America by Robert C. Mikesh, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1973. It was part of their multi-volume Annals of Flight series. In that quote, dated January 4, 1945, it explains how the Office of Censorship asked newspaper editors and radio broad- casters to give no publicity whatsoever to the balloon incidents.
 * That same publication also points out the reason for the request. The government feared that spies for the Japanese would read the stories and report to their head- quarters that the Balloon Bombs were reaching the United States. Documents secured after the war told of Japanese plans to use biological warfare against the United States if the bombing was successful. But the Japanese aban- doned the plan when they could confirm no reports of any of their balloons reaching the North American con- tinent. They assumed, falsely, that all the Balloon Bombs had fallen harmlessly into the ocean.
 * The plan of censorship was abandoned in the summer of the 1945 when six (not four, as Keel writes) picnickers (not campers, as Keel claimed) were killed by a Balloon Bomb in Oregon (not Montana, as Keel suggested). Ac- cording to the Reverend Archie Mitchell, he was on a picnic with his wife and several children. While he was parking the car his wife and the kids found the balloon in the woods. Tugging on it, they triggered one of the bombs, causing an explosion that killed Elsie Mitchell, Jay Gifford, Eddie Engen, Sherman Shoemaker, Joan Patzke, and Dick Patzke, 15. These six deaths were the only casualties recorded in the continental United States resulting from enemy ac- tion during World War II. In 1949, a Senate committee approved a House bill to pay $20,000 to the families of those killed.
 * The deaths caused one other action. The War Depart- ment began a "whispering campaign" to alert the gen- eral public about the dangers from the Balloon Bombs. Programs were presented in schools, in public halls, and through various civilian agencies so that the public would be aware of the danger. They felt that a well planned, well coordinated, low key program could inform the public without letting the Japanese know the balloons were reaching the United States. 16
 * And when the war ended, the secrecy was lifted. Grace Maurer of Laurens, Iowa, remembered the balloon bombs. She had written an article for a local newspaper telling of the discovery of a balloon bomb on February 2, 1945. Other balloons fell near Holstein and Pochahon- tas, Iowa, and Civil Defense Director George Buckwalter carried the debris away.
 * Those finds are relatively unimportant except that Maurer was visited by the FBI in February, 1945, who asked that she file her story. They explained the situation and Maurer complied, waiting until August 16, 1945, after the end of the war, to publish her article, a full account of the Japanese bombing of Iowa.
 * Maurer's story wasn't the only one published right af- ter the war. The Washington Post on January 16, 1946 carried a report that "Nine Thousand Balloon Bombs were used against the United States." The New York Times of February 9, 1946 reported "Raids by Japanese Balloons."
 * There were also magazine articles about them. The Engineering Journal of September, 1945 reported on "Japanese Paper Balloons," and George E. Weider in an unclassified report for the U.S. Army wrote about "Japanese Bombing Balloons" in January, 1946.
 * These, plus other stories carried in local newspapers, told the public about the Balloon Bombs. The secrecy imposed was only for the time of war and did not extend beyond the signing of the Japanese surrender in 1945. After the war was won, there was no reason for secrecy, no reason to deny that the bombs had been launched and had reached the United States, and more importantly, no evidence that the topic was still classified.
 * Keel claimed that Mac Brazel found a pile of rice pa- per in his field, which was in keeping with his Balloon Bomb theory and that "the myth goes marching on." But Keel never bothers with descriptions of the crash site. He dismisses the testimony of more than a half dozen witnesses who said the debris was scattered over a wide area. That was too much debris for one of the Japanese Balloon Bombs, which were about thirty feet in diameter. In fact, in the very beginning of Mikesh's Jap- anese Balloon Bomb report there is a picture of about a dozen military and government officials inspecting one of the balloons. It did not come apart, did not scatter debris over a large area, and it is easily identifiable as a balloon.
 * Marcel said in many recorded interviews that they had tried to burn some of the material found on the ranch but could not. Rice paper would have burned easily. They tried to dent some of the larger pieces with a sixteen pound sledgehammer and could not. Rice paper would have torn and if the material was some of the rubberized stuff used on a few of the balloons, it certainly would have shown the effects of the hammer.
 * Marcel had no idea what the material was and loaded as much as he could into the back of his Buick. A counter-intelligence agent with him filled the jeep car- ryall and they drove the wreckage to the Roswell Army Air Field.
 * Bill Brazel later reported that he had found some ad- ditional pieces that the military had failed to pick up. He described a slender strand that he called monofilament fishing line but that sounded suspiciously like fiber op- tics. He also had a small piece that he tried to whittle with his Buck Knife (which he had used in the past to cut barbed wire) but that would not cut. And finally Bra- zel described the lead-foil-like material that when wad- ded into a ball would unfold itself with no sign of a crease.
 * As mentioned earlier, Pappy Henderson said that he had flown some of the wreckage from Roswell to Wright Field. He described it as something he had never seen before: dull colored metal that was very thin and very lightweight. Certainly not the remains of a paper and rubber balloon launched by the Japanese during the war.
 * It is interesting that in Keel's list of articles about the Balloon Bombs there is nothing earlier than 1953. In ad- dition to the newspaper and journal articles mentioned earlier (selected only because they pre-dated the July, 1947 find by Brazel), there is a Reader's Digest article from August, 1950, and an article by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz from Collier's on January 17, 1953. There are also un- published histories of several military units from 1945, 1946, and 1947 that make reference to the Balloon Bombs.
 * In 1947, there was no reason for secrecy if what was found was in fact of Japanese manufacture. The story of the Balloon Bombs had already been released. Stories had appeared in major newspapers throughout the coun- try and in many of the smaller, local papers. The Balloon Bombs were no longer a secret.


 * Crash at Corona Friedman & Berliner, 1992.  NFRINGE cited in article
 * JAPANESE BOMB-CARRYING BALLOON
 * This is the most recently concocted explanation for the Corona crash, and makes no more sense than does the V-2 rocket explanation, and for some of the same reasons.
 * From November 1944, through April 1945, the Japanesd launched more than nine thousand crude, gas-filled balloons, each carrying fifty to seventy-five pounds of incendiary or high-explosive bombs. As many as a thousand of them may have ridden the prevailing winds all the way to North America. Damage from the bombs was limited to a few small fires and the deaths of six overly inquisitive people on an outing who came across one in the woods.
 * The balloons were thirty-three feet in diameter, made of laminated paper or rubberized silk, and carried a payload of more than three hundred pounds, most of which was the mech- anism which controlled the balloon's altitude as it drifted. along. In order to frustrate the Japanese in their efforts to learn how effective the novel weapon was, the U.S. clamped down on news coverage and thus kept locations of the landings secret. until the tragedy of May 1945. By then, launches had ceased due to the impact of American bombing raids on the manufac- turing and launching facilities in Japan.
 * That the materials found on Foster Ranch could have been from such a balloon and its payload is very hard to swallow. The last launch from Japan was in early April 1945, more than two years before the discovery of the wreckage. Where had the balloon been in the meantime? Not on the ranch, or Mac Brazel would surely have seen it many times. Could it somehow have been in flight all that time? At the average speed these balloons traveled, it would have made thirty-three trips around the world! With an altitude-controlling mechanism designed for, at most, one week of descending, dropping one or two sandbags, and then climbing back up to its cruising altitude, the balloon would have needed divine intervention to remain in flight until July 1947.
 * Moreover, the wreckage, according to those who saw it, did not include a single scrap of anything similar to the remains of a Japanese balloon, many of which had been recovered by the military and civilians in the final months of World War II and thereafter. The payload section, for instance, was quite ordi- nary in appearance, being composed of conventionally shaped bits of inexpensive metal. While its purpose might not have been immediately obvious, its Japanese origin would have been revealed quickly. Hundreds of others had been rapidly identified... why not this one!
 * The balloon bombs had not been a matter of military security since the May 22, 1945, joint announcement by the War and Navy departments that let the American people in on the scheme.