This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 15, Issue 3, from 2002.
Deep in the Nevada Desert is a military base so secret that it does not officially exist. This is the fabled Area 51, a place where the US Air Force allegedly keeps its flying saucers, which have been built using technology from crashed alien spacecraft. It has been featured in the X-Files and the film Independence Day and is a standard fixture in UFO mythology and in conspiracy theories of the New World Order variety.
The Area 51 itself is real enough. It is a test centre for secret aircraft and hosted the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes as well as the F-117 stealth fighter, and has recently attracted attention because of a strike by civilian security guards. When we look closely at the myth we can tell that although strange things may be afoot — and in the air — they do not necessarily involve aliens or weird science.
The latest twist on the Area 51 story comes from Nick Cook’s book Zero Point. Cook is an experienced aerospace journalist with the prestigious Jane’s, which lends the story some weight. According to his version, the secret technology comes from Nazis rather than aliens, but otherwise the story is the same, including the assertion that the US government is suppressing technology which could provide unlimited free energy for the world.
One of Cook’s key pieces of evidence is a secret 1947 memorandum by Lt General Twining, listing six traits for the flying discs sighted in UFO encounters:
- metallic or light reflecting
- no trail
- circular or elliptical
- formation flying
- no associated sound
- level speed above 300 knots.
Twining states that “it is within the present US knowledge… to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles at subsonic speeds.” At this point Cook was so astonished that he spilled his coffee, convinced that he had found proof that the military was hiding something big. And so it was.
Project Skyhook
In 1947 the US Navy started Skyhook, a secret project which involved lifting scientific instrument packages to the edge of space using giant balloons. Traditional materials were unsuitable, so the balloon envelopes were made from a new plastic called “high-density polyethylene” — as in the ubiquitous polythene bag. The balloons were over a hundred feet across and the height of a twenty-storey building. These were zero-pressure balloons which changed shape with altitude. At maximum height the balloon adopted a teardrop shape; at lower levels it could look like a saucer or a giant jellyfish.
Under some lighting conditions they were highly visible when the plastic caught the sun and shone like metal. This led to a string of UFO sightings; on occasion missing Skyhook balloons were tracked by following flying saucer reports in local media. The official cover was that they were weather balloons, but since these are usually about 20 feet in diameter it was an unconvincing lie.
On January 7th 1948, Godman Air Force Base in Kentucky received reports of a UFO. A Sgt Blackwell spotted it himself from the control tower, describing it as “an ice cream cone topped with red”. Four F-51D Mustangs en route from another base were directed to investigate. One did not have sufficient fuel and broke off. The Mustang is not pressurised, so the pilot needs bottled oxygen; two of the others also broke off when they ran low while climbing to approach the object.
The fourth pilot, Capt. Mantell, believed he had enough oxygen and continued the pursuit.
“It’s above me and I’m gaining on it. I’m going to 20,000 feet.” These were his last recorded words. Shortly afterwards contact was lost and his plane went into a dive and crashed.
“F-51 and Capt. Mantell Destroyed Chasing Flying Saucer” was the Louisville Courier headline.
An official report on the crash stated that Mantell
…lost consciousness due to oxygen starvation … the aircraft then began a turn to the left due to torque and as the wing drooped so did the nose until the aircraft was in a tight diving spiral. The uncontrolled descent resulted in excessive speed causing the aircraft to disintegrate.
It was suggested that Mantell had been chasing Venus or another astronomical object, in spite of the fact that the two other pilots thought the target looked like a balloon. Some two months after the crash the first public announcement was made of the existence of Skyhook, but it was only years afterwards that flight records were released that showed that a Skyhook balloon had indeed been in the area on January 7th. Needless to say, some still maintain that this was a cover-up of an alien craft shooting down a US fighter.
Even after Skyhook went public, other projects remained top secret. These included the balloon spying program, which was given a priority rating equivalent to that of the atomic weapons projects.
Project Genetrix
While Russian agents could roam America freely, the USSR remained an enigma to US intelligence. Before spy satellites there was no way of finding out what lurked in the Russian wastes. How many missile silos were being built, how many airfields, submarine bases, nuclear processing plants? Everything was concealed behind the impenetrable Iron Curtain.
A few reconnaissance overflights were made in stripped-down RB-47 bombers, but these could not venture too far across the border during these “accidental” incursions.
Balloons offered an alternative. In 1947, the RAND think-tank suggested that jetstreams, narrow ribbons of air moving at high speed in the upper atmosphere, could carry a balloon clear across the USSR — and it could take pictures as it went. (There was a precedent for long-distance balloons in the Fugo, incendiary balloons launched against the US by the Japanese during WWII). The idea seemed feasible and the Genetrix balloon spying programme was born. Technical problems meant it did not become operational until 1956.
The Genetrix gondola was the size of a refrigerator and weighed almost 200 kg, so it required a balloon almost the size of Skyhook. Most of the weight was taken up with a set of cameras which photographed a broad swathe of countryside on either side of the balloon. A photocell ensured that the device started taking pictures at dawn and continued until sunset.
The Genetrix balloons should have been nearly invisible to radar, and their cruising height of 55,000
feet should have kept them out of the reach of Russian fighters. Once clear of Russia and out over the Pacific, the balloon would to be met by a modified transport aircraft. This would send a radio signal to release the gondola, which would parachute down from the balloon and be caught in mid-air.
However, things did not quite go to plan. By sheer chance, the balloon rigging included a steel rod which was 91 cm long, a length which corresponded with the wavelength of a Russian early warning radar called Token. The steel rod resonated at this frequency, and, in radar terms, it lit up like a beacon. The Russians tracked the balloons easily. A zero-pressure balloon rises during the daytime as it is warmed by the sun, and sinks at night as it cools. At first light the Genetrix balloons were well below their maximum altitude, and MiG fighters were ready for them.
By observing the Russian response, US analysts located new Token radar sites, and gained some intelligence about the capabilities of the radar network. Also, some balloons did get through. Out of five hundred balloons released, forty yielded usable photographs and over 1.4 million square miles of Soviet territory was pictured. These became the baseline for future missions. Later satellite photographs could be compared with the 1956 Genetrix pictures and checked for evidence of new constructions.
However, the balloons caused a diplomatic furore. Captured gondolas were displayed to the world press in Moscow, and the story that they were weather balloons photographing cloud formations was ridiculed. President Eisenhower decided that the balloons were more trouble than they were worth. Ironically enough, he decided that the main effort should go toward perfecting the U2 spyplane. This was the aircraft which caused one of the most serious embarrassments of the Cold War when pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia.
Whatever their impact on the Cold War, the balloons had a lasting effect on the UFO community. Many prototype balloons came down in the US during testing (under projects Gopher, Grandson and Moby Dick), some within a few miles of their launch site. This was due to a safety device which automatically separated the gondola if it dropped below 15,000 feet to prevent it from becoming a hazard to air traffic. Military units would immediately seal off the area and a recovery crew would retrieve every last piece of debris, while insisting that the subject of all this attention was “just a weather balloon”.
The balloons match the description in the 1947 memo very closely. They were circular, appeared metallic, flew silently leaving no trail and flew in formation. Their level speed was not quite 300 knots, though in the jetstream they could shift at a respectable 250 mph.
However, the biggest clue is the fact that the man in charge of the balloon spying program was one General Nathan Twining — the same Twining who wrote the original memo.
Project Mogul
One notable discrepancy is that the memorandum talks about a “manned craft”, whereas the balloon programmes we know about were unmanned. There may be a reason for this.
Project Mogul was a secret 1947 programme to detect Russian atomic tests using balloons. It was known that sound could travel for vast distances under the ocean in “sound channels” caused by undersea currents. Scientists theorised that a similar effect could occur in the jetstreams of the upper atmosphere, so that a colossal explosion — an atomic bomb — might literally echo around the world. Before Skyhook, there was no single balloon large enough to carry the instruments for this, so a cluster of smaller balloons was used.
By accident a Mogul balloon cluster came down near a town called Roswell. A rancher found the wreckage and called in the military, who announced that they had found the remains of a “flying disc”. (This was 11 days before the first use of the term “flying saucer”). They later switched to the weather balloon story, but the damage was done, and Roswell has been a sacred place for alien conspiracy theorists ever since.
In later versions of the Roswell story there are accounts of alien bodies being recovered from the wreckage. If a manned balloon lost pressure at high altitude, the unfortunate crew would rapidly die from the lack of oxygen. Their bodies would be freeze-dried by the effects of extreme cold and very low pressure. How these shrunken, frozen mummies would appear is anyone’s guess. Someone who believed they had come from a flying saucer might very well identify them as space aliens.
Any fatalities would probably have led to the termination of a secret manned balloon program. The US under Eisenhower was not Nazi Germany, and the death of test pilots is a serious matter. There is also the question of security: a downed balloon may be explained away, but dead bodies demand inquests, investigations and public reports. Any bodies recovered from Roswell or elsewhere, if there ever were any, were more likely to be unlucky victims of the Cold War than beings from another world.
Conclusions
The projects described above are not the only secret balloon programmes undertaken, but they are among the ones that we know about. An examination of the numbering system used for defence projects shows that there are still numerous gaps in the record.
An article in Popular Mechanics describes a contender for one of the missing projects, the Lenticular Re-entry Vehicle. This unusual device was a nuclear-armed rocket plane which was hoisted to high altitude by a balloon before being released for its attack run.
Of course, there is far more to UFOs than just balloons. But it is easy to see how the secret balloon projects contributed to the flying saucer myth. They combined the twin elements of seemingly inexplicable sightings with obvious government cover-ups, elements which are now inseparable from UFOlogy.
It seems that practically since the start, balloons have been identified as flying saucers. Once the identification is made, people are very reluctant to give it up; since the government has proved itself unreliable with the weather balloon story, its credibility is not enough to overturn other opinions.
The truth is that people would much rather see flying saucers than balloons. And as Nick Cook has shown, it is still an idea which can sell books.
Further reading
- Peebles, C. (1991). The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons Over Russia. Prentice Hall & IBD.
- Peebles, C. (2002). Shadow Flights: America’s Secret Air War Against the Soviet Union. Presidio Press.
