Charles Moore told Kevin Randle, the veteran Roswell investigator and author, that Flight #4 — a full balloon array assembled the night of June 3, 1947 — was launched around three in the morning, in violation of operating rules, and was configured identically to Flight #5, which flew successfully the following day. Moore said it performed as well as Flight #5, if not better.
There is one problem with that account. Flight #4 left no data. It is not listed as a numbered Mogul flight in the project documentation. And Albert Crary's contemporaneous diary, one of the few primary records from the New York University balloon project in New Mexico, indicates it was cancelled.
Randle himself, writing on his blog in January 2026, makes the contradiction explicit: "Charles Moore said that Flight #4 was configured the same way as #5, and that it performed as well as #5, if not better. That makes no sense, since there was no data recovered because it was cancelled… and if it was cancelled, then it couldn't have dropped debris on the ranch."
That sentence is the thesis of an argument Randle has been prosecuting for decades — and the axis around which a sprawling, sometimes vitriolic public debate has been turning for the past several months.
The Flight That May Not Have Happened
The Project Mogul hypothesis, the U.S. Air Force's official explanation for the Roswell debris, holds that what rancher Mack Brazel found scattered across his property near Corona, New Mexico in the summer of 1947 was the wreckage of a classified high-altitude balloon array. The Air Force pointed to Flight #4 as the likely culprit — a conclusion that required the flight to have actually occurred and traveled far enough northwest to reach the Brazel ranch.
Both conditions are disputed.
On the question of whether Flight #4 flew at all, Randle's position rests on documentation released by the Air Force itself in its 1994 Roswell report. The NYU balloon project records identify Flight #5 as the first successful flight in New Mexico. A cluster of balloons was launched on June 4 — that much seems agreed upon — but Randle argues that cluster was a separate, unnumbered event, not the full Mogul array. Moore's later insistence that a full array also went up that morning, he says, is unsupported by any written record.
Moore's explanation for why the full array left no data despite supposedly flying successfully: "You can't put the helium back in the bottles." Meaning they launched it because they had to do something with the gas. That's plausible as an operational anecdote. It is not documentation.
"You can't put the helium back in the bottles."
On the question of distance, Randle notes that independent calculations of Flight #4's trajectory, based on winds-aloft data and the multiple, conflicting launch times Moore has provided over the years, suggest the flight would not have come within seventeen miles of the debris field — and seventeen miles, Randle points out, is itself a significant distance from where the material was actually recovered.
Moore has given more than one launch time for Flight #4. That inconsistency matters because the winds-aloft calculations are sensitive to starting conditions. Change the launch time, and the projected landing zone shifts. The open question of what time Flight #4 was launched — if it was launched — has never been resolved with primary documentation.
The Evidentiary Double Standard
The most revealing thread in Randle's recent blog posts is not the balloon physics. It is the argument about whose word gets counted.
Randle's interlocutor, a French researcher named Gilles, has pressed him on several fronts: the degraded state of the balloon envelope photographed in General Ramey's Fort Worth office, the classification status of the Alamogordo experiments, and — most pointedly — the statements of Brigadier General Thomas Dubose regarding whether the material shown to the press in Ramey's office was switched.
Gilles, drawing on material in researcher Karl Pflock's book, cites statements attributed to Dubose by Jaime Shandera suggesting the debris displayed to the press was not the real material. Randle's response is direct: Shandera did not record his interview with Dubose and took no notes. The claim rests entirely on Shandera's unverified recollection.
But Randle also acknowledges, in the same exchange, that Gilles rejects Randle's account of what filmmaker Johnny Mann told him — because that conversation was also not recorded. Mann, who had filmed Jesse Marcel in the early 1980s, told Randle that he had saved the broadcast tape of Marcel's interview; the raw footage, however, was reused because Mann believed the Pascagoula abduction case was the more significant story at the time.
Randle's challenge to Gilles is blunt: "You reject my statements about what Mann said to me, which is your right, but then quote from Jamie Shandera's statements about what DuBose said to him without any tape."
The double standard is real, and Randle is right to name it. But it also applies in the other direction. Randle dismisses Shandera's Dubose account as debunked, in part because it contradicts what J. Bond Johnson — the Fort Worth photographer who took six pictures of the material in Ramey's office — told Randle on tape: that what he photographed was a weather balloon. The problem, as Randle himself recounts, is that after Shandera and Bill Moore interviewed Johnson, Johnson's story changed. The material in the photos became, in Johnson's revised account, the real debris.
Randle holds the taped version of Johnson's account as authoritative. That is a defensible methodological position. But it means the evidentiary hierarchy here — tape beats no tape, contemporaneous beats retrospective — is being applied selectively by multiple parties, not just one.
Dubose did sign an affidavit, which Randle cites as supporting his version of events. The affidavit confirms, in Randle's telling, that the material was switched before the press saw it. What the affidavit says in full, and how it squares with Shandera's undocumented account, is a question the available record does not cleanly answer.
What the 1947 Newspapers Actually Show
In February 2026, Randle reported that researcher David Rudiak had found a July 9, 1947 item in the Dayton Herald under the headline "Field Test 'Out' On 'Flying Disc.'" The article states that Wright Field would not receive the weather device because it had already been positively identified. The Army Air Forces message quoted in the piece reads: "In view of positive identification of this object as a Rawin high altitude sounding device (radar target) it appears unnecessary to forward it to you."
This is a documented, contemporaneous newspaper account. It suggests — though does not prove — that the material identified in General Ramey's office never made the trip to Wright Field at all.
That finding cuts against part of the Mogul narrative: several retired officers interviewed by the Air Force in 1994 described, however vaguely, debris making its way to Wright-Patterson. Albert Trakowski recalled Colonel Marcellus Duffy calling him to say that someone had brought debris to him at Wright Field and that it "sure looked like some of the stuff that you launched from Alamogordo." Athelstan Spilhaus offered a similar secondhand account.
Both are secondhand. The Dayton Herald item is a same-day account from a named wire source. Randle is careful not to overstate what it proves — he acknowledges it comes down to which witnesses you credit — but he notes the logical problem plainly: if Ramey and his weather officer Irving Newton had already identified the material and handed that identification to the press, what purpose would be served by shipping it to Wright Field?
The deeper tension here is one that Randle states without fully resolving: eyewitness testimony from the 1994 Air Force interviews suggests more than a few scraps were transported — crates had been built to house the debris for the trip out of Roswell. That detail does not fit neatly with a same-day newspaper article saying the flight to Wright Field was cancelled. One of those accounts is wrong, or they are describing different things.
Randle concludes his February post with a position that is notable precisely because of its restraint. He writes that there is currently no viable explanation for the material recovered by Brazel on the ranch, and that the evidence does not take the case directly to an extraterrestrial conclusion — but that he is not willing to endorse the balloon explanation when the documentation argues against it.
That is not a conclusion. It is an honest accounting of where the evidence sits.
The document that would change the picture most directly is Crary's original diary, fully and publicly transcribed, alongside whatever flight logs the NYU balloon project produced for the days surrounding June 4, 1947. If those records exist in accessible archives, no one in this debate appears to have produced them in their entirety. Until they do, the argument about Flight #4 will keep flying — which is more than can be said for the flight itself.