As per my last post, I’ve been trying to dig up all the Project Mogul reports to get a more detailed (and less curated) look not only at how it worked, but also how it interworked (e.g. with Project Helios, etc). These appear to be in the unhelpful state where they have been declassified but not digitised or indexed. Anyway, I at least now have a long list of reports that I know I don’t have, so maybe this is progress.

Holloman AFB

I did find a helpful cache of documents on the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). For researchers with a suitable clearance (including “select [but unnamed] academic institutions“), this provides close to five million records, of which a million or so are accessible to the rest of us.

As far as balloon-related documents, there were a good number from Holloman SFB there, many written by (or with sections written by) Duke Gildenberg. For example, “Contributions of balloon operations to Research and Development at the Air Force Missile Development Center Holloman Air Force Base, N. Mex 1947 – 1958” covers the early development of balloon launches at Holloman AFB. This mentions (on p.108) that “After visiting Holloman Air Force Base for the first time with a New York University balloon team in 1948, [Duke Gildenberg]* joined the Balloon Branch itself on a permanent basis in 1951.*” This confirmed my suspicion that Gildenberg wasn’t with the NYU team in New Mexico in 1947.

But the most interesting document I’ve found so far is this: “The beginnings of research in space biology at the Air Force Missile Development Center Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico 1946 – 1952“. This gives a history of the first various space biology experiments they tried to carry out using balloons, which I haven’t seen covered in other space biology references. So I thought I’d summarise them here.

Early Space Biology at Holloman AFB

• 17 December 1946 – National Institute of Health

• Fungus spores (though the lucite containers containing them were never recovered)

• 1947

• Fruit flies carried up to 106 miles (was this a typo?)

• 18 June 1948 – Albert(I) Project – Wright-Patterson Aero Medical Lab

• Anaesthetised rhesus monkey (“Albert”)

• Probably died before V-2 launch

• 14 June 1949 – Albert(II) Project – Wright-Patterson Aero Medical Lab

• Anaesthetised rhesus monkey carried up to ~83 miles

• Died on impact (on return to earth), after parachute failure

• ???? – Albert(III) – Wright-Patterson Aero Medical Lab

• Anaesthetised rhesus monkey

• Early V-2 rocket failure

• 1950

• Unanaesthetised mouse on a V-2

• Died on impact

• 29 August 1950 – Wright-Patterson Aero Medical Lab

• “1st of the balloon flights for the Aero Medical Lab” (Wikipedia)

• 28 September 1950 – Project MX-1450R, “Physiology of Rocket Flight”

• Eight white mice carried to 97,000 feet on a balloon

• “[This and] other balloon experiments in the same series were primarily intended to determine the effects of cosmic rays upon biological specimens“

• 18 April 1951

• Rhesus monkey in an Aerobee rocket

• Died on impact (after parachute failure)

• 20 September 1951

• Rhesus monkey, nine mice, plus two other mice in a drum

• Even though the parachute worked OK, the monkey and two mice died two hours after impact (probably from the heat of the midday New Mexico sun, after the retrieval was delayed slightly)

• 21 May 1951

• Two monkeys and two mice, carried up to 36 miles on an Aerobee rocket

• All animals survived, both monkeys were then given to the National Zoological Park of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.

Holloman – Frontier of the Future

Incidentally, film of the “two mice in a drum” from the 20th September 1951 flight can be seen edited into the following film at 2:43, which also includes reasonably well-made footage of a lot of things I’ve been describing here – balloons, Project Manhigh, etc – along with a detailed description of Holloman AFB:

Introducing Project MX-1450

As Cipher Mysteries readers probably know (or at least those few who read my Roswell-related posts), I’ve been searching for a while for a human physiology project from 1945-1950 focused on the effects of cosmic rays on human physiology. So, what then of the Project “MX-1450R” mentioned above?

MX stood for “Materiel, Experimental” (an early R&D project numbering system used by the U.S. Army Air Corps, then U.S. Army Air Forces, and early U.S. Air Force), where “Materiel” referred to Air Materiel Command. For example, Project Moby Dick (that Duke Gildenberg worked on) was actually “Project MX-1498”. There’s a list of MX projects here, that says MX-1450 was from Wright Field AeroMedical Laboratory, and involved “Research into the physiology of rocket flight (high-altitude animal experiments using ballons and rockets)”. Similarly, another MX project listing describes it as: “Wright Field, high altitude balloon and rocket tests with animals on board“.

A balloon launch listing (presumably supplied to Project Blue Book by Holloman AFB) shows lots of MX-1450 flights from 29th August 1950 onwards. These are interleaved with MX-1277 (“Fundamental properties of the atmosphere”), MX-1011 (“Aerojet”), MX-1498 (“Project Moby Dick”), MX-1594 (“Project Gopher”), and “AFCRC” (which I expect was Air Force Cambridge Research Center, i.e. Cambridge Massachusetts).

Furthermore, while MX-1450 was the name of the *overall *funded project, it seems that the “-R” suffix would have indicated a specific subpart of the project. The first “MX-1450-R” balloon launch in the Holloman Blue Book listing is 12th February 1953, but flights before that were just marked up as “MX-1450”. These start right after Holloman AFB began keeping systematic records in summer 1950, so were probably flying General Mills and Winzen Research polyethylene balloons even before then.

So… might MX-1450 be the missing cosmic ray biophysiology programme I’ve been hoping to find?

MX-1450B in the Roswell Report

“The Roswell Report” mentioned “MX-1450B” in three places, but only in respect of the much later (anthropomorphic test dummies) Roswell cover story. Firstly the footnote 44 on p.129:

High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops Part I, and High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops Part II, and Holloman Air Development Center, Weekly Test Status Reports, Project MX-1450B (Manned Balloon), National Archives and Records Administration, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, MO, Accession No. 342-62A-A-641, box 115/248, folder; R-695-61D, “High Altitude Escape Studies, Gen B-l, Manned Balloon Flights.”

Footnote 152 on p. 136 says:

Memorandum, subject: Balloon Tracking and Recovery Equipment, ad., National Archives and Records Administration, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo., Accession No. 342-67B-2133, box 65/249, file 2, “Biophysics Branch-Escape Section, High Altitude Escape Studies, 7218-71719,” and High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops, Part 1,17, and “Weekly Test Status Report on Project 7218, Manned Balloon Flights, (MX-1450B)”, for Week Ending 28 February 1955, National Archives and Records Administration, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Mo., Accession No. 342-66A-181, Box 14/18.

And finally, the bibliography on p.223:

Holloman Air Development Center, Weekly Test Status Reports, Project MX-1450B/7218 (HIGH DIVE), June 1954 to January 1956. ADA323823

The Missing Project

Of course, you have to ask the basic question: if Project MX-1450 ran from at least as early as 1950 and to much later in the decade, and was an Air Materiel Command Experimental R&D project, why do my searches of DTIC and NARA for it all return, ummm, nada?

With DTIC, it’s entirely possible that MX-1450 hasn’t been declassified: and so I can only ask any Cipher Mysteries readers who just happen to have access to the full (five million document) DTIC archive to – please! – search there for MX-1450 on my behalf. There may be tons of files or nothing, I don’t know.

But really: when did Project MX-1450 start? Who funded it? Has it been declassified? Where are all its documents? Who were its principals? Was it run out of Wright Field’s Aero Medical Labs? Even though I have a lot of questions, hopefully they will prove specific enough to answer…