'Project Blue Book' Season 2 Episode 1: The true story of Project Mogul from the Roswell incident explained
This article contains spoilers for Season 2 Episode 1: 'The Roswell Incident - Part I'.
The second season of 'Project Blue Book' finally addresses the inevitable right at the end of the first episode. We see Dr J Allen Hynek and Captain Michael Quinn dragged out into the mysterious town of Roswell, New Mexico, where dwellers claim sightings of multiple UFO crash-landings and allege that the government is covering them up.
So, after multiple eye witness accounts where Hynek and Quinn finally approach Harding about this 'cover-up', the general calls it 'Project Mogul' — an operation that he claims was carried out to get information on nuclear neurotransmitters. But was that all that went on in real life?
It all started in Roswell back in the summer of 1947, when a giant balloon shaped structure crashed in the desert near the town.
The military's swift attempts at covering up the incident is what had led to conspiracy theorists believing that this was actually an alien aircraft — a UFO, if you will — causing such major uproar in the air force to keep the matter hushed because that's what happened.
The government officials — people like Harding and Hughes from the History show - were alleged to have heavily invested in keeping the matter hushed. The fact that town dwellers were already claiming they had seen crashed 'spaceships' in the area also attributed to the widespread fear and panic that was inevitable.
So the government did what they could, and labeled it just your normal weather balloon in the area for the longest time. But the people in the area were obviously too smart. They weren't going to rest with that information when this balloon-shaped structure looked nothing like a regular weather balloon.
According to research conducted by The New York Times, the paraphernalia of this 'balloon' contained "...squadrons of big balloons... It was like having an elephant in your backyard and hoping that no one would notice it. To the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil... photographs of it, taken in 1947 and published in newspapers, show bits and pieces of what are obviously collapsed balloons and radar reflectors."
To everyone's relief when the air force finally disclosed the high security files of the real-life titular investigation aimed at debunking alien and UFO sightings, it was revealed that this Project, or Operation Mogul, was a top-secret 'spy-balloon' program undertaken by the US Army Air Forces, that involved microphones flown on high-altitude balloons to detect sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests from a much larger distance.
Continuing from 1947 until early 1949, the operation is said to be a classified portion of an unclassified project by New York University (NYU) atmospheric researchers.
Conceived by Maurice Ewing, the operation involved balloons carrying disc microphones and radio transmitters to relay sound signals from the nuclear tests to the ground. It was supervised by James Peoples and assisted by Albert P Crary.
The success rate of the project maintains a moderate level output — primarily due to how expensive it went on to be. With the advent of a network of seismic detectors and air sampling for fallout — which were far cheaper, reliable and easier to orchestrate — the project soon lost its significance. Initially, the Mogul balloons were clusters of rubber meteorological balloons, that were soon replaced by the giant polyethylene plastic ones that we see in the first episode of the show.
'Project Blue Book' Season 2 airs on Tuesdays at 10pm/9c only on History.