Description

People with an interest in UFOs should be aware of the following timeline:

* On July 8, 1947, Roswell Daily Record prints headline the headline "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region."
* On July 9, 1947, the Senate voted to pass the National Security Act of 1947.
* This formally established the Air Force, the CIA, the National Security Counsel, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as part of an overall "National Military Establishment."
* One might say it was the single most consequential piece of legislation in American history, as it created the $1T/year military-intelligence apparatus that controls the world to this day.
* The same day, a retraction was published, with pictures showing off some paperbacked aluminum foil.

Max Brazel's daughter was 14 when her father discovered the wreckage and reported it to the RAAF. She gave a sworn statement as an adult that the "debris looked like pieces of a large balloon which had burst."

She also said it was "a kind of double-sided material, foil-like on one side and rubber-like on the other," adding that "[t]he foil-rubber material could not be torn like ordinary aluminum foil can be torn...”

In May 1948, DuPont filed a patent titled "Production of polyethylene terephthalate." Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), when biaxially oriented (boPET), can be aluminized to make Mylar.

By 1950s, we had developed a way to create Mylar in commercial quantities, and NASA began incorporating it into satellite balloons.

LBJ with the first NASA administrator, holding a piece of Mylar, and seeming shady about it. (https://preview.redd.it/na67sdxi855e1.png?width=1041&format=png&auto=…)

Project Echo - known as a satelloon, this was part-balloon, part-satellite. It was inflated in orbit and circled the planet until it burned up (https://preview.redd.it/jyeypsql855e1.png?width=455&format=png&auto=w…)

Wait...was Roswell *actually* about *balloons?*

According to a Smithsonian aerospace historian (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cold-war-balloon-surveillance), Curtis Peebles, “the reconnaissance balloon had the *highest national priority of 1-A*. The only other project to share this priority was the hydrogen bomb. Knowledge is power.”

One of NRO's first missions was catching falling spy satellite film cannisters as it parachuted down from low-Earth orbit. The first successful retrieval brought back more film than all of the U2 spy plane missions combined. As we'll see below, this same method was used to collect reconnaissance balloons.

C-119 Flying Boxcar shown with a special modification allowing it to capture the film by scooping up the falling parachute. (https://preview.redd.it/0ocjkq01a55e1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=…)

Between 1953-1955, the US experimented with the use of high-altitude balloons for aerial reconnaissance (Weapon System 119L (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-119L) aka Project Moby Dick). "The spy balloons would photograph sensitive Soviet sites and either hang in the air or land in the Sea of Japan until either a crew flying the C-119 Flying Boxcar or a naval vessel retrieved them."

What does this have to do with Roswell and Mylar? The advantage of Mylar over other synthetic plastics is that the aluminization process reduced its permeability, allowing it to hold gasses for longer periods of time. This is why nylon balloons will only last 24-48 hours, but a Mylar party balloon can stay afloat for weeks.

The discovery of this "double-sided material, foil-like on one side and rubber-like on the other" at Roswell may have led to this insight. The ability to keep reconnaissance balloons in the air for longer would have been of extreme interest to the US Air Air Corp.

Project Moby Dick "caused a row between the U.S. and Soviet forces when the Soviets discovered the remnants of a U.S. spy camera in February 1956,"

During this time period, the US also experimented with the delivery of nuclear weapons (Weapon System 124A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-124A_Flying_Cloud) codename Flying Cloud) via high-altitude balloons.

Project Flying Cloud was scrapped because it was "unfeasible from the standpoint of accuracy." Perhaps it's not feasible to drop a nuke from a high-altitude weather balloon, but Russia is showing us that it is now feasible to drop one from a drone... Hope you enjoyed.